MAIL BAG #1

Ed. Note: While a few Readers take the next couple of weeks off for a well deserved vacation, Pistrina will post some of the many messages it has received from correspondents all over the world. From the U.S. comes this one:

I am sure you know that those three will never correct the errors you exposed. It has never been their style to acknowledge failure or incompetence. The triad's priests will go through life with those original error-stained ordination documents because the trio will never issue corrections. I suppose that no one, even in civil life, has a right to an error free certificate, and it's obvious that the triplets don't care about their reputation, or they wouldn't behave as they do. The ordinati are plain out of luck. You probably already realize that those simpletons wouldn't care anyhow.

Your stuff is very funny and very accurate, but it will have zero impact on their behavior. Your imaginary phone conversation may be quite close to reality. That said, I for one would love to read Pistrina's observations on "West Chester." I hope you'll print them some day.

The Reader replies: Yes, we're well aware that the Gang of Three won't alter a jot or a tittle of their mistakes. In fact, we're counting on it. For years their strategy has been to tell people that they were the best of all traditional Catholic groups. It's time that people know these three guys are definitely not what they claim to be. The Threesome's hard-headed persistence in error is just what their adversaries need to convince intelligent Catholic laymen to stay away from them.

As far as we're concerned, the triplets are welcome to the imbeciles who curently follow them. We don't want to have to sit next to such Neanderthals when we're in church, especially now that warm weather is upon us.

For Reader #1's comments on their pompously hilarious Latinization of West Chester, click here for "What's in a Name?"

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.

A FLY ON AN IMAGINARY WALL

Blanche DuBois: [telephone rings]

[rises out of seat]

Blanche DuBois: That's for me, I'm sure.

Stanley Kowalski: [pushes her back down roughly] Just keep your seat, I'm not so sure.

“A Streetcar Named Desire”

Ed. Note: Last week, we suggested that “One-Hand” Dan’s ordinati insist on getting a new certificate of ordination (Litteræ Ordinationis) free from the grammatical errors in Latin, which the original document contains. On second thought, that might be a problem. Here’s how such a ’phone call might go for a feckless MHT loser who dares to ask for justice:

“Hello, Your Excellency. You know, in the future, I may be working with priests and bishops who received a real formation in a good seminary, so I’d like you to correct the errors printed on my ordination certificate. Are you still there? Ahem! I...I...I don’t want them to think my ordination is...dubious, you know what I mean? Heh, heh. What errors? Well, uh, like Pistrina said, change Cincinnatensis to Cincinnatensi. All you have to do is delete a little s.

"And, while I’m on the subject, if you wouldn’t mind, it would also be rather nice if you used the better spelling archidiœcesi or even archidioecesi rather than the archidiocesi you guys printed. What the hey, since you claim we’re in the Sede Vacante, your cult center can’t be a canonically erected parish in Cinci, so why not just drop it altogether? A diocese or archdiocese is probably more about jurisdiction than about geography anyway. Hmmm? What did you say? No, Excellency, I’m not teaching my father how to make children. Just trying to help out, that’s all. No pressure, you understand. Of course you can say no. You're the boss.

“Come again? No, no, Excellency: Cincinnatensis is definitely wrong. I checked four Latin reference grammars, and the Reader is right, as usual. Well, then…why not check with the rector…you know, the Big Kahuna himself? (Your goofy buddy can ask, if you’re afraid to.) Pistrina gave the rector a private lesson last week. He’ll tell you it’s wrong. What’s that you say? The Kahuna doesn’t know his what from a what? Well, if that’s how you feel, then don’t call him! Ummmm, now that I think about it, you can leave the archidiocesi alone. That’s OK by me. Just fix the really bad grammar. No sweat, right? Right?

“Anything else, did you say? Well, why, uh, yes. Thanks for asking, because there is one other teeny, tiny request: Can you correct ad ordinem PRESBYTERATUM to ad ordinem PRESBYTERATUS… if you wouldn’t mind?

“What did you say? Whoa, Excellency! Now I know what they meant by the Ecône “Door-Mouse”! Forgive me, but I don’t think that last order is anatomically possible, do you? I mean, even if I could, my confessor wouldn’t believe me, would he? Besides, that’s one of the many topics we missed in moral theology at the rector's pesthouse. Class was probably canceled that day, I guess, or I couldn’t understand the prefect’s heavy accent.

“Now please calm down! Sorry I brought up the past. Just chill out a little. Give me a chance to explain, won’t you? What you meant to express (I hope) was: “to the order of the priesthood (or ‘presbyterate’).” Well, begging Your Excellency’s pardon, but that requires a genitive, not an accusative. You remember, don’t you, that presbyteratus is fourth declension? Yes? You think you do? Fan-taass-TIC! So then, the genitive is presbyteratūs, right? Now you don’t have to print the macron; real Latinists will understand.

“Oh, what’s that, Your Excellency? You don’t believe me? What? You want to apologize to the faithful for ordaining me? I’m a liar? Wait! What’s that he said? No way! Tell him that I’m definitely not mentally ill! What? You’re going to call in the authentic interpreter of my perpetual agreement to indentured and inescapable clerical bondage, world without end?

“Listen, Excellency, please! I’m begging you: I want to get out of here in a few years. Those slobbering peasants are going to revolt, and I don’t intend to wind up on the sharp end of a pitchfork. No, Siree, Bob! So look here! I’ve got an idea. Do you have a Pontificale Romanum nearby? You do? Of course you do! Yes, you’re the best. Good! Turn to the first page of De Ordinatione Presbyteri. Now look where the Archdeacon calls the ordinands. See that? Accedant qui ordinandi sunt ad ordinem Presbyteratus.

“It’s the same phrase! Even you can see that, can’t you, Your Excellency? I’m not mentally ill, right? You just made a typo, that’s all. A little, widdle boo-boo. Sure, I understand: you can’t soar with the eagles with all the turkeys you’ve got down here. (They were my classmates and teacher, after all, so I know what you mean.)

“You see, all you have to do is change the M to an S. (We can even use the s we removed earlier so you can save some face. Heh! Heh!) Then it’ll all be copasetic. You won’t even have to put my name in the right Latin case. I can explain that (I think). I’ll say you did it to avoid confusion. Yes, that’s it! It’ll be our little secret. Just don’t call in the Big Kahuna to authentically interpret, all right?

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there? Hello? Hello? Say something? Please! EXXXXCCCCELLLLENNNNNCCCYYYYY!”

Ed. Note: Poor soul. Didn’t even get a chance to mention the moronic Latin name that Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber invented for suburban and upwardly-mobile West Chester, Ohio. Don’t worry. We’ll post a little note about that soon, for anyone interested. “One-Hand” Dan, like Blanche DuBois, is very used to depending upon the kindness of strangers. Maybe he’ll clean his act up for the Finnish seminarian he’ll ordain in the fall. The Finns have a real fetish for good Latin – Radio 1 Finland broadcasts a news program in the language, Nuntii Latini. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if the boy took home an ordination certificate full of errors, especially since the Finnish Lutherans in 2002 completed a Latin version of Martin Luther’s catechism?

SQUEAKING AND GIBBERING IN THE STREETS OF ROME

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events. Edward Gibbon

The want of genuine spiritual formation, the lethally incompetent pedagogy, the woefully under-prepared faculty, the heavy-handed reliance on chastisement, the unsettling whimsy of the rector, and the septic defects of the curriculum are sufficient reasons in themselves to condemn Most Holy Trinity Clerical Vocational Program. Nevertheless, the Reader would be remiss to pass over the absence of what Tertullian called Romanitas, the Roman manner, Roman-ness, and now the thorough coloring of Roman ecclesiastical culture, without which practitioners of the Latin rite are shrieking, gesticulating apes.

The virtue of Romanitas rests squarely on mastery of the Latin language. It’s not enough to get the gist or even be able to puzzle it out it with a fair amount of accuracy. The practitioner has to be thoroughly at home in its idiom. As the grossly stupid blunders in Work of Human Hands testify, Anthony Cekada (MHT’s liturgy and scripture “specialist,” LOL) is not at all at home in Latin. In this post, the Reader submits that Latin is also fundamentally alien to the rector, and hence to MHT.

We don’t intend to embark upon a head-spinning linguistic discussion. (If you’re interested, you may wish to read Pistrina Bids the Rector to School.) Indeed, we'll keep it simple. One very small example will be more than enough to make our point. You know, even the Readers have to take a deep breath when some of their colleagues enter the grammatical lists.

As with all mastery, it’s the little things that count. Any vapid late-night comedian can mimic superficially salient features. We know it’s not real, for the essential details are missing. That’s why we laugh. (Otherwise we would marvel.) The obvious failure to model significant, subtle traits and mannerisms betrays the poseur, the impostor, the phony, the mountebank, the faker, the bunyip (for our chorus of Down Under reviewers). Getting right the characteristic and apparently insignificant marks takes years of living a culture authentically, of becoming fluent through assiduous study and practice. As the following note makes clear, the rector, like his shallow pal Anthony Cekada, didn’t sweat the small stuff that virtuous Romanitas demands:

The Reader recently came across a copy of an MHT certificate of ordination. It was all tricked out with polychrome print, an elaborate border, and fancy fonts. The text was virtually the same as the Reader has seen on old certificates issued by Archbishop Lefebvre (a vigorous promoter of Romanitas) and the SSPX. However, the rector’s amateur hand was plainly visible in one word (twice printed!): Brooksvillense (the swampland breeding ground for MHT pests).

He meant the word to mean “at Brooksville.” However, in Latin the suffix -ensis makes an adjective of locality, not a noun! The rector's word formation, then, is completely off base. Moreover, even if you could make Brooksville (the city) a Latin noun with that suffix (and you can’t), the case ending –se is wrong: in the locative, it would have been Brooksvillensi. (You wouldn't write that you spent the summer "at [or in] Bostonian," would you? Again, all this is explained in excruciating detail in Pistrina Bids the Rector to School.*)

The seemingly microscopic error—like the rector's ignorance of the right Latin word for ‘time’ when it refers to the time-slot cell on the class schedule (see the Jan. 30 post, footnote)—declares that neither the rector nor MHT is capable of transmitting the Church’s enduring Roman culture. All MHT can produce are impersonators of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

* Sanborn's buddies, "One-Hand" Dan Dolan and Blundering Tony Cekada also don't understand that the ending -ensis is an adjective, not a noun, for in one certificate issued from the SGG cult center, we find in archidiocesi Cincinnatensis. It looks as if those two pinheads think that Cincinnatensis means 'of Cincinnati.' The correct form is Cicinnatensi, an ablative so that the adjective agrees with the noun it modifies (viz., archidiocesi). Had they just copied the ending shown on their own ordination certificates from Archbishop Lefebvre (dioecesi Sedunensi), they wouldn't have made themselves so ridiculous. (BTW, the SGG certificate also contains a few other howlers as well; maybe we'll post them soon, if you'd like. Ordinati: demand corrected documents from those clowns!)

MATERNAL INSTINCTS

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success. Sigmund Freud

The rector’s February MHT Newsletter is a veritable downhill race of Freudian slips. He begins with a recent sighting of a miniature, remote-controlled helicopter photographing his pesthouse. We’ll wager that scene occasioned something like an acid flashback! Certainly he must have recalled the anxious reports he heard of that day in Michigan when the stuttering, resonant drone of slashing rotor blades announced a plague of media whirlybirds swarming like angry, metallic locusts over his Mary Help of Christians Academy. On that day long ago, an eager press corps had come looking for answers to hard questions. This time, in the swampland, a robot mechanically captured stark images of the sepulchral, white outlines of a dying enterprise.

Rattled (or addled) by those haunting memories, the rector next launches an attack against Catholic mothers and young men “excessively attached to their mothers.” According to his half-baked historico-sociological analysis, today’s moms don’t encourage their sons to live independently. They mollycoddle them; they smother them with their suffocating motherly attentions. As a result of the mommies’ refusal to let their pampered sons face life like men, the boys, in the rector’s amateur opinion, are nest-bound, ineffectual, emotionally stunted, unconfident, and indecisive. All these tight apron strings, so muses the rector, are obstacles that mothers put in their male offspring’s way to the priesthood.

Well... from our experience, the rector’s description of today’s youth sounds a lot like the feckless, undereducated, timid, unsure, crybaby, wimpy completers of Most Holy Trinity Clerical Vocational Program. When a real man from a loving family enters MHT—that is, someone with genuine schooling, a decent and normal background, informed courage, a healthy psyche, and a sense of independence—he usually faces expulsion!

History and personal experience confirm that a man’s success in life is very often the result of a nurturing mother, because, as we’ve said on these pages before: no one ever makes it alone. The Reader knows several devout Catholic mothers who love their sons so much that they would no sooner allow them to enter MHT than they would permit them to travel in a cholera-ravaged, third-world country in the midst of a bloody civil war. Each of us owes his or her life to a mother’s uncanny intuition when danger loomed; we are all now profoundly grateful for Mom's proactive intervention in behalf of our body and soul.

The truth is, MHT is disfigured by its notorious reputation. No mother wants to dissipate the family treasure or imperil her son’s future by paying tuition to a third-rate institution that mistreats young men to whom God may have given a priestly vocation. A mother’s resistance to MHT is not over protectiveness. It’s just Mom’s sound prudence. She doesn’t want her son bullied and harassed in an environment inimical to spiritual growth. She doesn’t want her boy to become one of those priests who fail to consecrate or can’t conduct easy ceremonies. She doesn’t want her son associating with all those comatose MHT underachievers and the program's inept faculty. Above all, she doesn’t want her son working for the likes of “One-Hand” Dan Dolan and blundering Tony Cekada.

Mothers, in the end, have but two wishes: (1) they want their sons to be successful in life and (2) they want to be proud of their sons as men. Any mother’s sixth sense screams that MHT will deny her both fundamental hopes.

The rector’s heartless savaging of Catholic motherhood perplexes us. Those of you who know his history are aware that he himself hasn’t snipped any apron strings. If nothing else, the rector is a model of filial piety – just ask the priest who had to vacate his quarters at MHT. We’re impressed. It’s obvious that maternal devotion didn’t stand in his way to an assertive, independent life. We ask, then: Why can’t other Catholic men be devoted to their mothers without suffering the rector’s vilification? Even more germane: Why can’t other Catholic mothers love their sons and want the best for them without being pilloried for thwarting a good?

Edna Ferber got it right when she titled a story “Mother Knows Best”: Mom knows that MHT is not a fit place for a son to become a holy priest – or a good man.

A DESERT PLACE

In this decayed hole among the mountains/In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing/Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel/There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home. T.S. Eliot

Ed. Note: Over the past two months, Pistrina has revealed that the Most Holy Trinity (MHT) Clerical Vocational Program is an intellectual and liturgical desert. This post exposes the pesthouse as a spiritual wasteland as well. The problem lies not simply in weak or inept spiritual formation. Rather, as the following pasticcio of anecdotes from MHT survivors suggests, the institution itself may be radically opposed to Catholic spirituality in any form.

By the rector’s misguided rule, MHT seminarians were forced to choose from a very limited number of priests as spiritual directors.* Accordingly, sacramental confession was infrequent. First-year seminarians were advised to take the clone (the “vice rector”) as their spiritual director, but the problem was that the clone only showed up about once monthly. Apart from the few occasions for confession, there were no other pious exercises. **⁽⁵⁾ Even thanksgiving after Mass was often restricted to a few brief minutes, as seminarians were fearful that lingering in prayer**⁽¹⁾ might result in a fierce scolding from the irascible prefect. The administration often canceled Vespers**^{(1), (3)} or the Rosary**⁽¹⁾ for more important and pressing matters -- like attending to household cleaning chores.

Seminary staff often irreverently reinforced the official MHT aversion to spiritual growth in every way possible. It was not uncommon to hear celebrants snarl sharp corrections duringMass! **⁽¹⁾ Once, Scut the Prefect, with the Blessed Sacrament in his hand, harshly ordered a seminarian to go to his proper place to receive communion.**⁽²⁾ On another occasion, when a seminarian sang the wrong note, the horn-mad prefect loudly interrupted the chanting of Vespers**⁽¹⁾ to discipline the offender sternly. In another instance of shocking behavior, as a seminarian silently prayed the Holy Rosary in the car during a drive, the prefect's toady assistant (a.k.a.Grover Dill) savagely barked: “Don’t pray in the car!” **⁽¹⁾ In addition, there were no annual retreats**⁽⁴⁾ other than the almost spontaneously scheduled ego-fests presided over by the discredited “One-Hand” Dan Dolan whenever he needed to escape the bleak Ohio weather or the wrath of former parishioners. (Dolan once publicly gushed how solicitously the seminarians attended to him and served his meals, so you can imagine that no retreat is ever held for the young men’s spiritual benefit.)

Bottom Line: The MHT pesthouse is dangerous to the interior life of young Catholic men with a vocation to the holy priesthood. The place is a spiritual frozen tundra, which decent young men must avoid or from which they must escape.

The laity must not support MHT, its clergy, or its rector in any form. The time is past. Starve the beast. Do not be a benefactor. Tell prospective seminarians you know to run for their spiritual lives. If you live in Europe, find out the names and email addresses s of the three young men in France whom the rector is recruiting: Warn them before it's too late.

* It’s instructive how the rector cannot adhere to authentic Catholic tradition. Here’s a quote from the canon-law commentary of Bouscaren, Ellis, and Korth regarding seminary confessors:

In addition to the ordinary confessors, others are to be designated to whom the students can freely go (c. 1361, §1). If these confessors live outside the seminary, and a student asks that one of them be called, the rector must call him without inquiring in any way into the reason for the request, or showing any displeasure; if the confessors live in the seminary, any student may freely go to them, without prejudice to the discipline of the house (c. 1361, §2). When there is a question of admitting any student to orders, or of expelling him from the seminary, the advice of the confessors is never to be asked (c. 1361, § 3).

** Compare to Bouscaren, Ellis, and Korth note on the exercises in piety required by canon law:

The Bishop is to see to it that the students: (1) every day, say morning and evening prayers in common, spend some time in mental prayer, attend Mass; (2) confess at least once a week; (3) receive communion frequently, with due devotion; (3) on Sundays and feast days, attend solemn Mass and Vespers, serve at the altar and practice sacred ceremonies…; (4) every year, make the spiritual exercises for several days continuously; (5) at least once a week, hear a spiritual instruction closing with a pious exhortation (c. 1367).

TABOOED BY ANXIETY

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision. William James

Ed. Note: One of the most straight-forward ceremonies of the Church is the Ordo Ad Faciendam Aquam Benedictam (rite for making holy water), printed in both the Roman Ritual and the Roman Missal. Outside Mass, the rite requires the bare minimum: a book, a dish of salt, some clean water, a loaded aspergil, a surplice, a violet stole. You don't even have to light a candle.

The ordo itself is a study in simplicity: a mere five prayers. You can bless both the water and the salt or the water alone, if exorcised salt is available. If you're just blessing water, skip the first two prayers and begin with the third. After the fourth, take salt in your closed hand, drop some into the water three times, tracing three crosses as you say the formula Commixtio salis etc. Then, recite the salutation Dominus vobiscum, and finish up with the final prayer. Voilà, l'eau lustrale! Should the priest lack sufficient training to understand and execute the brief rubrics, vernacular explanations may be found in readily available handbooks.

Easy, right? Not if you're a completer of the diseased swampland's MHT Clerical Vocational Program. Read on, and either weep or burst out laughing:

Our French priest (see Feb. 20 post) shares with his Mexican and Argentine classmates their abysmal ignorance of sound priestly praxis. They all learned at the feet of the infamously unable Anthony Cekada, so there should be no surprise here. Certainly the oppressive malformation at dysfunctional MHT has produced a soul racked by paralyzing self-doubt and crippling second-guesswork. His pathetic sermons are no more than labored "readings," not painstakingly crafted, heart-felt messages to the soul; his confessions are 20-30 minute marathons of aimless uncertainty. In sum, he is a man bereft of confidence, as you will read in the following report:

According to an overseas reporter, one Sunday after Mass, a French parishioner asked our MHT dunce to bless some holy water for home use. The knowledgeable layman understood the MHT alum had been crushed under the intellectual and moral burden of the priesthood, so he helpfully assembled all the basic materials: a Rituale Romanum, a bottle of water, and some already exorcised salt.

The MHT underachiever, with his customary affected gravitas, returned to the little sacristy to gather his surplice, stole, and another copy of the Roman Ritual. He came back looking somewhat embarrassed, behaving as though he were missing something. He hesitated. He gestured clumsily; his posture seemed uncertain while he readied--or steadied--himself to conduct what is one of the simplest of rituals. But just as he started to pronounce the opening versicle, he melted under the fervid heat of his torrid doubts and burning scruples.

He first fretted whether it was permitted to use salt that had already been exorcised. If so, he wondered aloud whether he could omit those prayers. Then, in irresolute self-torment, he debated exchanging the blessed salt for unblessed salt. Next, he agonized over the diameter of the neck of the water bottle: Was it so narrow that he might not be able to make the sign of the cross as he introduced the salt?

"It would have been easier," he lamented feebly to the astonished layman, "to have poured the water into a large bowl in order to make the sign of the cross while simultaneously commingling it!"

After this paroxysm of doubt had abated, he returned to the opening versicle and commenced, insecurely, fearfully, hesitatingly. His pace was numbingly slow. At length, after 15 long minutes (!), he removed his stole. With a look more of relief than of satisfaction, our shaken, malformed MHT simpleton gasped, "Voilà, it is finished!" Then, beset once more by a plague of refreshed uncertainties, he added waveringly: "I hope it's valid."

Sick! Sick! Sick! These guys don't know what they're doing.

Reverend Rector: Close that pesthouse down!