Warday

fumbling with the St. Joseph’s missals we have in the church, saying their prayers as best they can.

But it’s in the confessional that I hear the motives people have for returning to the Church. It isn’t piety or love of God, not among the older folks. People are coming back to the Church because they feel that their own indifference, just letting things happen, was a big part of what caused the war. Remember, back in those days it just seemed like there was nothing you personally could do. The solutions now to our problems then seem obvious.

But in those days we were all very different people. We were dulled by living under the Sword of Damocles for nearly half a century. We had done the worst possible thing—gotten used to an incredible and immediate danger. The nuclear mechanism was far more hazardous to each one of us individually than, say, pouring gasoline on our clothes would have been. But it didn’t feel that way, not in those sunny, treacherous days.

We understood how absolutely deadly the bomb was, but we did not understand how helpless we were in the face of the mechanism of war. The mechanism began to run quite mysteriously, and went on until it broke down. It could as easily have destroyed the world. Only faulty design prevented that. We thought that people dickering about arms control in Geneva mattered, when what we really needed all along was a massive change of heart. How absurdly outmoded the elaborate diplomacy of the prewar period now seems. There could have been a massive shift of heart, toward acceptance and understanding and away from hostile competitiveness and ideological obsession.

The whole business of the United States and the USSR squandering their resources on territorialism seems incredibly silly now.

Our prewar mistake was to believe in rubble. We visualized ourselves as crawling out of the basement and putting brick back on brick. Places don’t just cease to exist.

You know, they say that a person set down in the middle of the Washington Dead Zone would have died within hours. Just keeled over and died. Birds died flying across it. That was in the L.A. Times after the war. It’s a forty-square-mile desert of black glass dotted with the carcasses of sparrows and larks and the occasional duck.

Before the war there weren’t even intellectual references for such things. No comprehension. The message of Hiroshima wasn’t understood. We thought that it meant devastation. But ruins have to do with the past. Modern nuclear war means life being replaced by black, empty space. It means ancient seats of government evaporating in a second. The moral question is almost beyond asking.

What are we, that we can do this? What is evil, that it can speak with such a voice? We no longer know what we are, we of the Holocaust and Stalin and Warday. We unleashed hell on ourselves by pretending that diplomacy, of all things, could control its fires. The heart, and the heart alone, is more powerful than hell.

Am I preaching? Excuse me. I run so fast, give so much advice, quite frankly I think I’ve forgotten how to talk without a degree of pontification. Sometimes I wish I had a wife to have a private life with. Someone who would say, “You’re preaching, Mike,” or “You’re talking through your hat.” But I don’t have time for a wife. Or children. I couldn’t raise kids in a life that doesn’t have ten free minutes a day. So I’m no longer uptight about the celibacy rule.

Before Warday I was well on my way to losing my vocation. I wanted to get married. I think I might have become an Episcopalian. But then came Warday and, afterward, the Reunion with the Anglicans and the Episcopals. Then, most of all, the tremendous upsurge of need for my services. I got the feeling that Christ was very close to us religious people, full of forgiveness and need, asking for our help. I want to be Christ’s servant. Now when I’m feeling alone I take my soul to Mary, who is His mother and therefore the mother of all mankind. She’s what the witches call the Mother Goddess! I just kneel before her altar and say the rosary.

She never fails me, Mary. The rosary is far better for me than, say, meditation. It’s not only meditation, with all the repetition, it’s humble and it’s a request for help. She was once a human being.

She knows what we suffer. She is always there, anytime, for anybody. Mary doesn’t care a fig about the details. She loves and respects you because you exist.

The witchcraft movement talks about taking personal, individual responsibility for the condition of planet Earth as if they invented the idea. But it’s also a Christian and very specifically Catholic notion. At least I think it is. My saddest, guiltiest parishioners say that they sinned terribly by not taking some kind of personal action on behalf of peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. They say they should have demonstrated against this or in favor of that. But I tell them no, the sin was that we did not accept one another in our hearts, neither side. Our leaders hardly even knew each other. The two greatest nations on earth, with almost total responsibility for the fate of planet and species, and they hardly even spoke! They should have made it their business to be close personal friends. And there should have been as much commonality of policymaking and government as possible.

Instead the two countries were separate islands, distant from, and mysterious to, each other. That was the sin of pride, doing that.

What a price has been paid for the pleasure of such indulgence.

When I think of what our generation did, I pray very, very hard that the future will somehow accept us and find in the Body of Christ the love and understanding that will enable them to say, “Our ancestors chose foolishness over wisdom and hostility over acceptance, but we understand and we forgive.”

Now I’m not your deep thinker. But I do try. I’ve read the Catholic philosophers, and the Greeks, and most of the moderns. I mean to say, I’ve read my Whitehead and my Hegel, my Aristotle and my Plotinus.

You know, throughout history, philosophy centered on the concept of being rather than the ethics. That was fine until recent years, when we began to try on some pretty bizarre concepts, and to hell with the ethics of it all. Nazism and so forth, I mean. And the concept of nationhood that allowed us to think we had the right to build such things as nuclear bombs.

The American and Russian peoples should never have allowed their leaders to play the game of overstating the threat to justify exorbitant military expenditures. We were supposed to be seeking a balance of terror, weren’t we? But the United States in fact got so far ahead of the Russians technologically that we were about to send up a satellite that would have made their missiles useless against us. And they had no similarly effective weapon. So they were forced to start the war. They were backed up against the wall.

I’m just a priest in a medium-sized parish. Nobody on high would ever have listened to me. Before the war I had eight hundred in my parish. Now I’ve got close to ten thousand frightened and suffering people. In some ways I’d rather have had eight hundred and the old world than ten thousand and the new.

Let’s see now, you asked me for an idea about how my day goes. What I do. Well, I get up at five-thirty and I run like a madman until midnight, then I sleep like the dead until five-thirty the next morning. I’ve got my schedule for last Wednesday. I’ll read it into the record:

5:30 A.M. Arose and said breviary.

5:45 A.M. Breakfast of corn soup and milk.

6:00 A.M. Said Mass. Gave out communion to 230 people.

6:30 A.M. Meeting with my staff. Discussed the reroofing project. Looked over Father Moore’s report to the bishop on the feasibility of splitting St. Francis into two parishes. I hope that this is done!

7:00 A.M. Met a parishioner who has just been diagnosed as having stage-three Hodgkin’s and has been triaged. Has a wife and three teenage children. Is fifty-two. We prayed together and he cried. He paced like a trapped lion. Prayed for him and put him in the Mass list for Sunday.

7:20 A.M. CCD leaders met in my office to plan a bake sale.

They have thirty pounds of flour, six pounds of sugar, some apples, some molasses, and so we are very excited. Thank God they also have Sister Euphrasia, who is one good baker.

7:45 A.M. Had coffee and listened to the Vatican U.S. Service on the shortwave.

8:00 A.M. Went to Holy Cross Hospital for my visitations. I’m glad I took Father Moore, as my list was sixty names long! I had an hour there, and because he took half my people, I was able to spend two minutes with each patient. I blessed, I prayed, I heard eighteen confessions and gave out thirty Holy Communions. I gave the Last Rites to twelve patients on the critical list.

9:15 A.M. Returned to the rectory. Did youth counseling until noon. We have seventy young people who are converting, and an active Sodality and CYO. But these were all special cases. I gave each kid half an hour. Saw six troubled kids. A girl who is pregnant. A boy who is in love with a younger boy. A girl who says she sees visions of the Virgin, and indeed may. Another girl who has beaten her mother and father so badly that they want her out of the house. Where does a petite girl of sixteen get such titanic anger? Two boys who steal. I warned them very