JUST AS THE TWIG IS BENT, PART 3

Then there is my noble and biographical friend who has added a new terror to death. Sir Charles Wetherell

In an e-mail, a charitable Catholic asked Pistrina whether the pressures of having to serve a previously neglected chapel might have caused the inexperienced and horribly trained Lethied Levite to forget the Consecration.

While it's true that his current chapel had been grossly ill served before his transfer there -- this post will show you precisely how dreadful his predecessor was -- you must know that the amnesic's problems started well before his current assignment. We have space for just one more anecdote before we go on to the case of his ill-starred forerunner.

When our unmindful minister was teaching religion at a shockingly troubled school in Ohio, he instructed his high-school-aged charges that riding on a roller coaster was a mortal sin. The skeptical pupils reported his precept to the lay principal (a man long at the center of an ongoing scandal). He promptly told the teens to ignore the priest. Now the real problem here is not simply ignorance and stupidity. The real problem is that the next unit of study was on dating, marriage, and sex. Ah, we can hear the youthful wheels whirring away even now: Why, if Father's wrong about the sinfulness of roller coasters, might not he also be in error about other adolescent fascinations? We Readers are not quite so old as to forget how we might have been tempted to answer the question, especially if prom night were approaching!

No, friends: this repellent priest arrived already broken to inherit the dire legacy bequeathed by his immediate predecessor. We only need to take a brief look at this predecessor to make our point about the woeful completers of the clerical industrial school that cluelessly boasts of being the "best" seminary in the world.

Like our absent-minded abbé, his predecessor was another student from abroad who has incapacitating troubles with the English language. When he was a toady at the clerical industrial school, he was known for accusing seminarians of "grave peccatum" if they didn't wield a mop correctly. But he really earned his spurs there in the infamous incident reported below:

Once, upon making his confession to this man, an earnest seminarian confided a concern. Thereupon, the confessor asked the seminarian whether he could consult another priest in this matter. The seminarian agreed, only to learn that the rector of the seminary had been informed. The rector subsequently expelled the seminarian.

When this wretched excuse for a Catholic priest was sent to the chapel in question, on one occasion he said a Requiem Mass--with relics on the altar!-- for a long-time parishioner who had died without the consolation of the Holy Viaticum. (The poor soul had the audacity to pass away before the priest's regularly scheduled sick call.) When the priest arrived at the cemetery, he discovered he didn't know how to conduct the graveside service (one of the simplest in the Rituale Romanum). Luckily, the deceased's family was spared further grief by the presence of other clergy who offered immediate on-the-job training.

Priests like these are death to the faith. A Catholic should prefer to be "home alone" rather than trust his or her immortal soul to their ministrations. To be sure, they are culpable, and deserve our utmost contempt; however, in justice we must reserve our fiercest criticism for the institution and men that formed them.