THE ODD COUPLE

O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason. William Shakespeare

“One-Hand” Dan, a.k.a. “the old bishop,” writes a weekly weather report and potluck food blog for his cult center. Most of the time, it’s just a string of purple-prose patches, cloying pieties, dainty observations to his Dear Vacation Diary, and school girlish self-pity. In one post a couple weeks back, however, his stream-of-consciousness twaddling sounded a more ominous note when he threatened, “signs of good American vocations are appearing.”

Let’s hope this is just one of Danny’s many poetic flights of fancy aimed at getting his cult members to cough up a few hard-earned dollars for the rector to waste on interior decoration. With enough mental reservation, we can see how the birth of a few male children in Butler County, Ohio, might be interpreted as “signs” of vocations. And the present-progressive “are appearing” is really a fine way to stay just this side of science fiction, isn’t it?

We’ll rely on our knowledge of “One-Hand” Dan’s transparent fund-raising tricks to set aside any worries about young men in danger of being committed to MHT. (But we’ll keep our ears to the ground in the unlikely event that there’s some truth in the remark.) The “signs” we see and smell are of the decomposition of MHT. The rector cannot be too happy. Recall that “One-Hand” Dan’s and the blunderer’s behavior in the infamous St. Gertrude the Great School scandal resulted in the loss of thousands of dollars annually to the pesthouse.

“One-Hand” could easily have ended the crisis, but he miscalculated the just anger of Catholics and so collapsed his own house of cards. Inasmuch as the rector hitched his rickety wagon to “One-Hand” Dan’s plummeting star, this wayward little experiment in clerical vocational training is just about over. Gone forever are the heady days filled with “One-Hand’s” boasting about becoming the new Lefebvre and the "World's Bishop": nowadays he must vainly shill for MHT.

There’s a lesson here somewhere if we remember that the rector and “One-Hand” Dan were never really bosom buddies. The anecdotes are legion: a September 1990 ad-cautelam letter about someone’s “dubious” ordination; private Masses in Michigan at the homes of adversaries; a very peevish tantrum as a result of an unforeseen (and unwelcome) episcopal consecration; something about prancing around in pontificals; a heartbreaking, party-pooping RSVP over what to wear to a jubilee.

When the shocking scandal at SGG School came to light, why, then, didn’t the rector react with what he himself has recently called “proportionate intolerance and outrage”? Why did he attempt to defend “One-Hand” Dan? Why did he judge softly the clergy who brought the traditional community to the precipice? Where was his firm sense of right and wrong? Where were his vaunted hardness and rigidity? From a purely practical point, the notorious SGG crisis should have been a welcome opportunity to sever any remaining ties to one who for years had been more a rival than a colleague.

We won’t descend into the meretricious pop psychological or political analysis the rector favors in his monthly screeds. Perhaps he thought he needed “One-Hand’s” chapels to house and feed his ill-trained and inept completers. Perhaps he hoped to retain access to the pocketbooks of the faithful at SGG and its satellite cults. Perhaps he was afraid that he’d have to spend more time in the classroom if the blunderer were no longer allowed to “teach” at MHT. Whatever the reason, the rector’s continued alliance with “One-Hand” Dan attests to a catastrophic failure of judgment.

STARVE THE BEAST. DO NOT CONTRIBUTE TO MHT. SEND YOUR SONS TO LAW SCHOOL. AT LEAST THEY’LL BE FREE MEN AFTER THEY PAY OFF THEIR STUDENT LOANS.