“How about Bellwood?”

Barney Crowley had a list in front of him, with a check next to St. Luke’s in Bellwood, a blue-collar integrated suburb on the county’s western edge. Not a plum but interesting.

“I’m interested,” said Devlin, sitting on the client side of Barney’s desk in the archdiocesan personnel office in a cemetery.

“0.K, I’ll put you down as one of their candidates, No promises, but you’re a front-runner,”

“Really?”

“What’d I say?”

“It’s hard to believe that. I’ve got a reputation,” Devlin said.

“That you do, but the post is not the pinnacle of the average priest’s ambition, and damn few are asking for it. It’s not a crowded field.”

“I shouldn’t have given that newspaper interview.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. You should have left town or checked into a hospital or asked the guy in for coffee and politely declined. You weren’t indicted or running for office or anything. You didn’t have to say anything.”

“It was a woman,” Devlin corrected him.

“What difference did that make?”

“A young, beautiful woman.”

Crowley, sixty and rarely surprised, sat back. Devlin gave a pained smirk. ”Oh hell,” Crowley said quietly.

“Nothing happened,” Devlin said emphatically. “I just was a pushover for the interview, that’s all. I’m a pushover where good-looking women are concerned.”

“How far do you let yourself get pushed?”

“Well not overboard, if that’s what you mean,” said Devlin.

“That’s exactly what I mean. I got a nice spot for you in New Mexico if that’s what you mean,” said Crowley, referring to the R&R center for wandering priests, where they relaxed and thought things over, having removed their celibate heads out of the lion’s mouth.

“No, I just get tense about it. I don’t unwind.”

“Well damn it, Dev, we all get tense about it.”

“I know, I know. I’m just telling you how I got roped into the interview.”

“The article didn’t go into that stuff at all. Did the interview?” asked Crowley.

“No. The article reflected the interview. It was about my sermons. She asked questions about my theology, not my morality.”

“She sure did, and the story splashed big, [ can see that headline now. ‘Priest preaches atheism.’ Bad enough you were suspended and had one bad session already with Houlihan under your belt. Then the newspaper story.”

“Water over the damn,” said Devlin.

“Still seeping through, I’m afraid,” said Crowley, looking back to his list of open parishes. “How about Markham?” he asked, naming a distant south black suburb.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

The newspaper article had featured Devlin as something of a hero. He naturally appealed to the young reporter, who believed in independent thinking if nothing else; and her city editor, distracted by a North Side ax murder when she suggested it and then bemused by the piece when she had written it and let it go trough. Then the editor was embarrassed by it and ordered it killed after the first edition. But a presidential candidate was blowing through town and the makeup man was distracted, so the thing made another edition, and more damage was done.

Devlin, 49-year-old Catholic pastor, was depicted as a latter-day Martin Luther, chafing at the egregious thought control of a domineering church. Yes, he had preached the sermons the reporter had heard about. Indeed, he had copies of them to show her. And out of Devlin’s files came the finely honed (in his opinion), carefully nuanced appeal to the unbelieving in the midst of his flock (and to himself, he observed to the reporter in a devastating burst of candor).

He later was lectured by Dolan on the inadvisability of giving anything nuanced to a reporter, much less a sermon for atheists that read half the time like a call to atheism. “They are trained to simplify things, which is important, considering their audience. You and me, for instance, when it comes to city government. But they are not trained to catch your nuances, Dev. Maybe as you delivered your sermon, but not reading it later, cold.”

In any event, Devlin became a celebrity. He turned down two talk-show appearances and a write-up in a community newspaper, but now, much later, he was still approached now and then, most recently by the National Enquirer, whose clip service had just caught up with him and whose editor decided Devlin was indeed a live one.

“We’d like to do an article about you, Father Devlin,” said the friendly voice over the phone one Saturday morning. “We’re very interested in the important social implications of your stand.”

“My stand?” said Devlin.

“Yes, for freedom of conscience in the church.”

Telling Dolan about that conversation later was one of the light moments of a very heavy period in Devlin’s life.

“Freedom of conscience in the church? Is that what he said, Devi?” Dolan was laughing and had trouble getting the words out. “In the church? Free conscience? Oh my. Don’t they teach those guys anything at journalism school? Oh my.” He laughed until tears came.

Devlin laughed too, but not as hard. “He was interested in the social implications,” he offered during a lull in Dolan’s laughter, and Dolan went off again, pointing and nodding and bending his head in uncontrollable glee.

“Social implications, I mean.”

Dolan calmed down. “There might be some already,” he said. “But I wouldn’t worry about them, if I were you. Last thing you need at this point is to picture yourself another Martin Luther. Skip that one. There’s no market for it.”

“Well I did intend to accomplish something with my sermons, Terry.”

“What?”

“I wanted to reach the fence-sitters. With all our seriousness about some things, we don’t take atheism seriously. And until we do, how can the fence-sitters take us seriously?”

“Yes. Well, it’s an interesting point of view, Dev. Meanwhile, you reached the National Enquirer, if nothing else.”

“They redid the original story,” said Devlin.

“I know they did, and more power to ‘em,” said Dolan. “If the truth is known, you can’t complain about any of it. They did more to publicize your position than a thousand sermons ever could. Can you imagine implications of a National Enquirer audience as opposed to your journeyman Sunday sermon?”

“Taking it further,” said Devlin, “imagine a ministry through the pages of the National Enquirer. Consider the power of such a ministry.”

“No thanks. Consider the power of Jimmy Carter opening his dear Baptist heart in that Playboy interview. That sure did a lot of good. For that matter, the piquant comments by the pope, on the same general subject . . .”

“Lust,” interrupted Devlin.

“None other,” said Dolan. “Consider John Paul the Second’s comments on lust for one’s wife and what a salubrious splash they made,

“None other,” said Dolan. “Consider John Paul the Second’s comments on lust for one’s wife and what a salubrious splash they made. Score one for the papacy, not to be outdone by that Georgia cracker.”

“Well now, Terry, the pope was making a point about how marriage should be founded on mutual respect, the wife should not be a sex object and so forth.”

“And so forth is right. His effort was doomed from the start. There he is in his white cassock and beanie popping off on something he’s supposed to have first-hand experience of. You know my position on that, Dev. As the world’s best known celibate, he’s the world’s best-known eschatological symbol, and he ought to let it go at that. It’s burden enough for any man.”

“He’s not a banker either, Terry, but do you want him to shut up about dishonest business practices?”

“I don’t want him to specialize in it, Dev. That’s my point. There are a lot of hard questions he can ask without setting himself up as having the last word on the subject. Why do celibate popes and bishops claim authority in matters of sex? It’s the one thing they ought to stand back at and at most ask hard questions about. He is too a banker anyhow, or he works closely with bankers. He moves a very big budget every year; so he can be expected to know something about money. But sex? What does he know?”

Devlin was at the point where he considered that to be the pope’s problem. He didn’t have time. Not that his priestly labors were such a burden. In fact, he was officially on the shelf, serving a cooling-off period until he could complete his rehabilitation and take a new parish, whatever came first. He was convinced the cooling off was to be by the archbishop.

If he, Devlin could lie low for a while, the archbishop would eventually be distracted and would cool down, so that Devlin could go back where he was before he drew down on himself the old man’s irritation. He wouldn’t call it anger, much less rage. There was something Olympian about rage, or might be, and something noble about anger. With Houlihan, who was not Devlin’s favorite prelate, it was more a matter of bitchy irritability. He couldn’t figure the man out.

As vain as the day was long, he dropped names right and reacted like a little kid to flattery or deference. In the middle of their conversation after Devlin was suspended because of his sermons, with Devlin playing the rum-dum role to the hilt as the little priest who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, Devil dropped a remark about how well the program for married deacons was going in the archdiocese. Next thing he knew, he was hearing a capsule history of the program from the horse’s mouth itself, or himself. The passing reference was all it took. For ten minutes, the case of Patrick Devlin, incipient atheist, was forgotten.

Being suspended meant Devlin couldn’t preach, of course. But neither could he say mass in public or hear confessions or do anything else except in danger of somebody’s death, in which case he could confess, absolve, bless and anoint the departing soul. But hell, so could an apostate or skid row bum or international roué, assuming he’d once been ordained.

Devlin had to laugh at the possibilities. The bum happens on an accident. It’s the city’s Irish mayor. Cops are all over. The bum staggers up, says he’s a priest and moves to bless the stricken chief executive. The cops move on him, and he ends up in a cell at the Chicago Avenue station, all punched out and achy.

Or: Story he’d heard from one of his Jesuit teachers at the seminary. The not yet ordained Jesuit commonly wears or used to wear black suit and collar black suit and collar on the street. One of them came on an accident in downtown Manhattan. Irish cop spots him and calls him over. Dying man in need of blessing and all that. Jesuit naif explains to the harried policeman, “I’m not a priest.” The cop responds, “Then what are you wearing the outfit for?” and slugs the imposter on the spot.

A million stories in the Naked City, to be sure. Devlin loved that one.

— — — — — — — — — —

“I go after the story, not a story,” Ginny Morgan explained.

“What’s the difference?” asked her escort, a sleek young man with a full mustache.

“There’s a lot of difference, a whole world of difference,” she said. “One kind of story is to titillate, the other is to stimulate.”

“What’s the difference?” repeated the young man, taking an ice cube in his mouth and swirling it around.

“Between titillate and stimulate? Are you kidding?”

“No. One way or the other, it’s a tickle. What’s the difference?”

“When I say titillate, I mean tickle. When I say stimulate, I mean the mind, the conscience, whatever there is out there that distinguishes the doers from the herd.”

“Dewar’s is my favorite scotch,” he said, smiling.

Ginny fumed. This beautiful face in front of her was driving her crazy. It was finally dawning on her that this guy making “thirty-K,” as the head hunters’ ads put it, was a dumbbell or was acting like one or was insulting her. All he had to do was say she was pretty when she got mad, and he’d get her drink in his lap.

“You know something,” he began.

“What?” she said, balancing her drink in her hand.

“You’re pretty when you’re mad.”

Ginny unbalanced the drink into the young man’s lap as he sat on the bar stool next to hers.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he squalled, jumping to his feet while the glass fell to the floor and broke.

Ginny smiled her nastiest Walter Jacobson smile, slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar — “For the drink, the glass and maybe part of your cleaning bill, if necessary” — gathered her raincoat from the back of her stool and stormed outside. She waved a cab down and was pulling away when her escort followed her outside to shout obscenities. The cabbie ignored him and her, except to get her destination (home) straight.

She settled into her cab seat to fume some more, but with a sense of achievement at the same time. That jerk, she thought. That know-nothing, stupid, self-assured, ignorant nothing. Still, she felt good about it. He had asked for it and got it, and she could count on seeing him no more. After her ass, pure and simple. Bored with issues, bored with discussion of anything that called for putting two sentences together in a row, he was ready for nothing but one-liners.

Very bright when it came to “the numbers,” as he flipped the word around, but damn it, even bored with that, it seemed. Proud of being “laid back,” he was in fact a basket case as far as humanity was concerned.

Ugh! She sat back and let the cabbie take her home. He was a no-nonsense black guy out to make a buck by giving good, fast service. She was at her door and tipping him well in twenty minutes. Upstairs and in her apartment, sitting with a book in ten minutes more. The evening could be saved yet. She would read up a storm.

Her telephone rang. City desk.

“Hi, Ginny, it’s Louie.” Louie on middle watch, looking for information. “Remember that priest you wrote about? The atheist?”

Louie had it not quite right, but it didn’t matter. “Yeah?” she said.

“What parish was he at?”

“St. Denis, on Austin Boulevard. Why?”

“I thought so. There’s a big fire across the street. I’m looking for some eyewitness. The rectory phone isn’t answering. Has he got a private line or something?”

It was eleven o’clock. If Devlin had a private line, she didn’t know about it. She told Louie this, adding, “Why would I know about it anyway?”

“I just thought you might. You had that story on him where he told all, more or less. I’m trying everything to get something on this thing before deadline.”

“OK, Louie, I understand. Can’t help you.”

Louie hung up.

Ginny went back to her book, a blow by-blow account of the battle of Khe Sanh in the Vietnam war. Ancient history now, as newspapers reckoned it, but she wanted to know about the war that had torn apart the country before she was reading newspapers for more than movie reviews. She was figuring out troop movements and code names of military operations when she stopped in the middle of a sentence, almost with a jolt. She thought about Father Devlin.

The difference between talking to him when she’d done the story a while back — the story that Louie on rewrite at the time had remembered so well, as he remembered that might help him on deadline some day — and that infuriating conversation tonight with Joe Dumbbell from Continental Bank was the difference between heaven and purgatory. She read Dante once and knew something about purgatory.

Ginny had found herself asking Father Devlin questions she hadn’t planned at all. Here was this Catholic pastor willing to discuss recent sermons about atheism in which he apparently had identified with the atheist viewpoint. (Someone had tipped her to the sermons, and she’d called him to see if he’d talk about them.) And here was she, secular to her tippie toes, not caring anything about the question at issue, quizzing the Reverend Father.

She quizzed him, of course, but went beyond what she’d intended. They got into his beliefs and hers, and half she got she couldn’t use. She wouldn’t. They had hit it off. He was the first clergyman, of the few she had known, even the first person some years older than she (she wasn’t sure how many, fifteen or so) who hadn’t spoken condescendingly to her. At the same time, he was no kid. No young adult, whatever that is, either. He showed his years but didn’t wave them in front of her face, demanding respect.

A curious man. She sat with her book in her bachelorette apartment, the complete working woman, hustler after stories, spiller of drinks in men’s laps, reader of books, no help to Louie when he called for a telephone number. Her telephone rang.

“Hello.”

“Ginny?”

“Father Devlin!”

“You know my voice?”

“Those stentorian tones? Anywhere.”

“Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I knew you were up and just talked to your office. And I was up, and . . .”

“Did you do anything for Louie?”

“Louie? Oh, the guy who called. No, I was in the back of the house. I’d heard sirens but paid no attention. If I jumped at every siren, I’d be jumping too much. How you doin’?”

“QK. How you?”

“O.K. too. Listen, maybe you can help me with something.”

“What’s up?”

“A friend of mine is waiting to hear about something she sent to your paper. She and another woman. Months ago. She and another woman. Months ago. Columns, I think. You know, the guest column sort of thing. She was just mentioning it today. Not upset or anything, but thinking it’s time to rattle some cages. Louie called and I knew you were at your phone. I called on impulse to see if you had any ideas.”

“Qp-ed submission? That’s it, I bet. I can see about it. What’s her name?”

Devlin gave her Mimi Skelton’s and Carol Goodman’s names, explaining the pieces were submitted together and adding that the two had an idea for a regular column too.

“They sound like nice ladies,” said Ginny.

“They are. Very nice. Like you. You’re nice too, even if you did add to my troubles.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“That’s all right. Don’t worry. I have no regrets.”

“Good.”

There was a pause. Ginny thought it would be nice if he asked her out. Why not? Then he asked her out.

“I’ll be downtown Wednesday. Want to have lunch?”

“Good idea.”

They set up time and place, wished each other well, and ended their conversation. Ginny was amazed. From banker-on-the-make to father confessor in one night. He’s a nice man, she thought. He said she was a nice lady. Nice, nice. Lunch on Tuesday would be nice.

(end of chapter 5)

Patrick Devlin’s situation had changed since the day he called on Melissa Williams. He’d been caught with his hands in the theological cookie jar and had them slapped. Young Harold Williams was a sophomore now, and Devlin had been caught in what some of his peers considered sophomoric behavior.

1984 book, saved for now by its mostly reportage and commentarial author . . .

CHAPTER TWO

Tom Skelton, Ted and Mimi’s fifteen-year-old son, was a young man with a deep and abiding interest in the word “fuck.” At the public high school he attended, the black kids used it with abandon. Among the blacks were sharper social divisions than among the more pluralistic whites.

“If you’re black, stay back. If you’re brown, stick aroun’. If you’re white, all right” was the old Chicago saying. Shades made the difference. Things were different in the ‘80s. Black had become 0.K., if not beautiful, thanks partly to the slogans and racial cheerleading of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. But a West Side ghetto black was still not the same as the son of a professional.

The situation was compounded at the high school, where tracking reigned supreme. The school’s constituencies ranged from million-dollar mansion-dwellers to welfare recipients. The vast assortment included educationally ambitious people who weren’t about to see their children lumped with the proletariat.

Neither were the school’s staff and administration about to ignore talent. The best of them figured that if the school could cheer on its jocks and rigidly exclude the untalented from varsity performance, it could do the same for its academic hotshots.

It did, and more whites ended up proportionately in the upper echelons than blacks. And the blacks were usually of a middle or professional class. Black professionals far outnumbered black businessmen.

The problem was further compounded by the fact that the two historic villages which fed students into the high school lay next or almost next to the West Side of Chicago, where a huge segregated black population made its daily way against high odds.

Then consider the Chicago aspect of it taken by itself, apart from black-white differences. The “big shoulders” city epitomized American expansion. It had grown amazingly fast, from fifty people to a million, and competition reigned brutally. Chicago had its track system from the start.

Tom Skelton inherited all that, though he didn’t know it. His mother was one to pooh-pooh the whole business. Your grandparents and your surroundings made the difference. She was especially hard on ancestry as determining anything. “Just because you’re Irish doesn’t mean you’re a cop or a streetcar conductor, does it?” she’d say.

She was less certain about the importance of history itself.

“Chicago is what it has become,” Carol Goodman would tell her. “The more we know about how it got that way, the better.”

“True, Carol, but I can’t get around the here-and-now problems, and I don’t want to get wound up in irrelevancies.”

“I do, of course. I love irrelevancies.”

“Carol, you know what I mean.”

“I do and I don’t.”

This sort of conversation Tom Skelton would overhear now and then while waiting for the two women to finish talking so he could hit his mother for a few dollars or find out what she wanted at the store.

He had only vague notions of it all. At the high school, he had discovered what he considered black bastards and white bastards. As soon as he was ready to write off blacks (or whites, though less often), he’d run into a good one who taught him a thing or two.

His friend Alex McGee, whose father had shot himself some months before when he’d been indicted for bribe-taking in the assessor’s office. “Don’t talk to me about it,” he’d tell Tom. “I don’t want to hear.”

His friend would casually drop “nigger” or “coon” when he knew he could get away with it. This included when talking to Tom, who overlooked it. He was, after all, attending an integrated (or at least desegregated) school.

But the distinction between field and house niggers — Tom had encountered the shocking terminology in reading about slavery days — escaped Alex. “Niggers are niggers,” he told Tom, calling on all his 15-plus years experience in the world.

Tom had overheard that expression from a friend of his father’s who had grown up in the South and had the sweetest, friendliest disposition of all his father’s friends. This Irishman, Andy Moran by name, showed Tom something else about history and ancestry.

He had a gentle, quiet manner, one that Tom was not used to. Tom puzzled about this until his father pointed out that Andy was from Memphis, where the style was different. The Irish whom Tom knew were from Chicago, Tom’s father pointed out.

But it was Andy who had said in his quiet way, “Niggers are niggers.” Tom, puzzling that too, had told Alex the phrase. It was just what Alex was looking for. It gave him his philosophical underpinning, one with to counter Tom’s black bastard-white bastard theme.

“They’ll get you every time,” he told Tom without emotion. “Those that don’t are just waiting for the chance.”

“You think Harold Williams is waiting for the chance to get you?” Tom asked.

“Harold Williams I’m suspicious of, to be truthful,” Alex said. “He’s exactly what I had in mind when I talked about waiting for the chance.”

“Alex, that’s dumb.”

“No it isn’t,” said Alex, sticking to his guns.

Harold Williams was the least objectionable person Tom Skelton knew.

They weren’t close friends; so Tom had to allow the possibility that down deep Harold was a bastard. But there was nothing to produce that that Tom knew of that would condemn the guy.

“Alex, you’re a bigot. You know that, don’t you?”

“So what?” said Alex.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The high school was tracked, and Harold Williams was in the top track. His father was a systems planner for a Cook County-federal board of some sort whose exact nature escaped Harold*s understanding. His mother was a school teacher. He had a younger brother and a younger sister who were packed off each day to the neighborhood elementary school while their mother got herself off to the school where she taught. The kids ate lunch at school, then came home to find Harold waiting for them. Or they went to a friend’s or a neighbor’s to wait the half hour or so before their mother came home

Harold took his life for granted. The Williams family had lived on Chicago’s far South Side when he was in grade school, in a black neighborhood where the other kids’ parents were planners and teachers too. When high-school time approached for Harold, bright and eager to learn, the parents looked at the public school and at the cost of a private one and decided to integrate.

Having marched and sung and picketed for the cause in the ‘60s, they decided to do some mild pioneering in the ‘80s. They would move to a suburb where whites predominated, and they would see what had been going on among their pale-skinned fellow citizens since civil-rights days.

Off they moved to the village where the Skeltons lived, with its fair degree of integration and its big, good high school. Without marching, singing or picketing, they bought an eight-room frame Victorian house on a tree-shaded cul-de-sac block and moved in.

Harold didn’t catch the irony of his parents’ “Thank God almighty, free at last” on moving day. He didn’t think they meant it as it sounded, but he didn’t know why they said it, chuckling as they unloaded suitcases while the movers went back and forth from the van.

“What’d you say?” Harold’s mother asked his father, her eyes lighting up. “What? What?” She had a chuckle brewing in her throat. “Free at last, you say?” she said and burst out laughing.

She and Harold’s father then put down the clothes they were emptying into drawers in the bedroom and, both laughing now, shooed Harold downstairs to make sure the younger ones were not getting into anything, shutting the bedroom door behind him.

He had half an idea what was going on and didn’t ask to verify the other half. He was thirteen going on fourteen. It was the summer before high school, and sex was an item with him. He assumed they were having a roll on the newly delivered mattress, but his brother and sister were emptying boxes that were supposed to stay unemptied, and with his hands full, he forgot about his parents and their ironical sayings and need for privacy.

Melissa Williams was the same milk chocolate color as her husband Arthur. They came from the same South Side neighborhood and had gone to school together, including college at Loyola in Chicago. When they got married, she got pregnant with Harold and then said “whoa” for a few years.

As Catholics they weren’t supposed to use birth control, but they did, mainly the pill. (She used the pill; he took the normal male route and didn’t use anything.) Five years later, they planned and had little Arthur, known as Artie, and two years after that, going for a girl, they hatched Missie. Friends of theirs named their last child Finee, for the end, there ain’t no more. Another friend of the Williamses suggested Caboose but was hooted down.

As Catholics born and bred, they were loyal, but not to a fault. There were things they just assumed priests and the pope couldn’t know, or if they did, shouldn’t. In either case they figured, without giving the matter a lot of thought, that the pope could could be safely ignored when he went on about birth control.

Other friends of theirs had gotten angry about it and gone Unitarian, where they found other disillusioned Catholics. Indeed, there was a wonderful Unitarian church near their new suburban house that they visited now and then for intellectual stimulation. But in general they went to the Catholic church, where Father Devlin was pastor.

Father Devlin they found to be somewhat different. He didn’t seem to have the assurance they had come to expect from priests, especially the Jesuits they knew at Loyola.

“Mrs. Williams, I presume,” he said as he came to the door on a weekday a week or so after they had arrived. He hadn’t been at the rectory when they had registered and so had come by to say hello.

He and she had hit it off, and he was to come for dinner the next week, meeting Arthur and having a grand old time.

“I welcome you city folks to the wilds of Oak Park,” he told her on the day of his visit.

“Well thank you,” said Melissa. She offered him coffee, which he drank with her in the dining room.

“Nice house,” he said.

“We mightily appreciate it,” she said, with a shadow of a grin.

He looked at her quickly, wondering if he was missing something, decided he was and lowered his head, looking up at her over his raised coffee cup.

She laughed in recognition. He’d caught the curve ball. Not bad for a white man.

He asked her what her husband did, she told him about his health systems planning work.

“Big hospital a few blocks over, as you surely know,” he said.

“Oh yes, Arthur helped them justify their latest expansion.”

“Counted sick people?”

“More or less,” she said, laughing.

“Well, the parish is a sort of hospital, when you get down to it,” he said.

“More a first-aid station?”

“No, no. Ambulatory care, emergency room, that sort of thing. Outpatient. That’s it, your neighborhood spiritual outpatient facility.”

“Drug store?” she said.

“My heavens,” he said. “What did those Jesuits teach you at Loyola, to make fun of your humble parish priest?”

She laughed. “No. Felt sorry for them. Working in the front lines and all that. Nothing malicious.”

“I hope not. For malice no absolution, you know. None at all. Dumb mistakes, even when frequently repeated, yes. But confession was not created to condone malice. People would begin to think they could get away with it.”

“Confession?” she said.

“Yes. You remember confession. The coffin-like, darkened compartment, swishing curtain, sliding panels, the voice from behind the little wooden trellis. Yes?”

“Of course,” she said, “and now it’s all gone. Very little confession, and what there is, is in an airy, well-lit room. What a mistake. Mystery all gone. Without mystery, where are you? Where are we?”

“Oak Park,” he said, smiling. “Safe from the mean city. It’s all been a bad dream, woken up in suburbia.” He waved an arm to take it all in.

“You don’t rush to defend your church,” she said laughing.

“My church? It needs no defense from the likes of me, a poor Irish hedge priest. What do I know anyway? Ask the holy and learned Jesuits to defend it, I mean her.”

He grinned and put down the coffee cup. “I must go.” He smiled. “I enjoyed it. You’re very smart.”

She relished the compliment. “I enjoyed it too. Come again.”

“Will do that. And will see you in church.” He left.

— end of chapter 2 —

“Father Devlin, I presume?”

“Barely.”

“You’re throwing in the towel.”

“More like being thrown out bodily, Barney. “It’s not my idea coming here today, as you know.”

The Reverend Bernard Crowley stood to greet his visitor, the Reverend Patrick Devlin, in the office of the archdiocesan personnel board located, some said fittingly, on the grounds of a cemetery. They both sat, Crowley a man in his early 60s behind his desk and Devlin, in his late 40s, in front of it.

“Being suspended was not your doing, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“But what about the sermons you kept preaching, even after you were suspended? There you were at St. Denis, preaching the benefits of atheism. Fairly provocative behavior, I’d say.”

“You have a jaundiced view,” said Devlin. “You priests are all alike,”

“Well come on now, Pat. What the hell were you thinking of?”

“I wish I knew.” Devlin sighed.

“Well I suggest you find out.”

“I do have some ideas on the matter, but they aren’t simple ones and they aren’t what I planned to discuss today with the personnel director, to be perfectly honest with you,” said Devlin.

Crowley looked at him a few seconds, then shrugged. “Whatever you say. But you get my drift.”

“I get it, Barney, and I don’t hold it against you for bringing it up. It gave me a chance to say my mind. Every little blurt helps. Let’s just say I’m working it out.”

“As long as you’re not throwing in the towel,” said Crowley. “Well then, down to business.”

Business was finding a new spot for Devlin, who was not leading a well organized life. As pastor of St. Denis the Areopagite in Oak Park, just over the city limits, he had a respectable, important job. Half his parish area was black, half white. The church, rectory and parish hall stood on the suburban side of the busy boulevard that divided city from village. He had black-ghetto and white-suburban parishioners to serve, contend with, placate, as the case may be. He had a big plant to keep up, dwindling numbers at Sunday mass and Uingo twice a week to keep everything going.

“Heavy responsibilities,” said his friend Terry Dolan, pastor of neighboring St. Emma’s, the next parish to the west, away from the city. “Especially the bingo. Have you ever considered the damage you would do to the church’s reputation if you ever made a mistake at bingo? Say your caller misread the little what’s-it he pulled out of the revolving basket? And then an elderly lady in tennis shoes caught the error? And then led an assault on the caller, who might even be you, Devlin, if you had run short of volunteers that week. The scandal would rock the archdiocese.”

“Well, you’d like that,” he told Dolan. “With your hostile attitudes that would suit you fine. When are you going to come to grips with your problems with authority, Terry? The archbishop is waiting for you to come around.”

“I have no trouble with authority, Dev. When it’s intelligently used.”

“Which is rarely if at all, right?”

Then there was Kelly. He used to drink but stopped, thanks to the Elk Grove Brothers and thanks remotely to Dolan, his friend, who had been there when Kelly needed him. Kelly was still an associate pastor at St. Emma’s. He was still not wholly rehabilitated. He needed something of a track record before Crowley and the rest of the personnel board would have a place for him.

“And then maybe I won’t want one,” Kelly told Dolan and Devlin. “If I take a pastorate, it won’t be for my sake anyhow. A pastor is to serve the people, not the other way around,”

“Right, Al,” said Devlin.

“I can go my way as a kindly associate pastor just as well, right?”

“Right, Al,” said Dolan.

“By the way, Pat,” said Kelly, turning to Devlin, “what was it Crowley said the other day about St. John’s in Bellwood being open?”

“It’s open. But you wouldn’t be interested. No room for a kindly associate there. The place needs a pastor, someone to take charge.”

“A tough mother,” said Dolan. “Geez, I’m getting to talk like Skelton.”

Jerry Skelton was an inner-city priest, serving St. Albert’s parish on the black West Side. He had succumbed to his environment just a bit by taking on some of the vocabulary he heard on the street — obscenities which often, he observed, seemed to lose their obscenity by repetition and casual use.

It was a tribute to the power of environment that Jerry Skelton had taken on even a little of what suburban white folks flinched at, because for all his dedication to “the work,” he was a very traditional man, full of traditional piety.

“He wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful,” his earthy father had said of him to the prep seminary teacher many years before. Even so, plunged day to day in Chicago’s toughest neighborhood, he let slip now and then. He managed to achieve a certain charm as he did so: the quiet, soft-spoken, humble priest casually mentioning in his brother’s living room “the mother-fucker who ripped off the corner grocer,” pistol-whipping the man, to which his sister-in-law Mimi asked, “What does ripped off’ mean?”

Mimi Skelton asked it as counterpoint. She had years ago been informed by Father Jerry what the white hecklers meant when they yelled from curbside at black marchers: “Mother is only half a word to you people.”

But counterpoint or not, Jerry had been embarrassed as he realized what had slipped out. “It means having things stolen from you,” he said.

Well I’ve had my innocence stolen from me,” said Mimi, mother of seven who had recently vowed to make that the three-oh mark for her life of childbearing and had plunged into newspaper column-writing as a way to keep the blues away.

“Who did that, after all these years?” asked her husband Ted, brother of Jerry the priest.

“The Sun-Times, that’s who,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Carol?”

Carol was Carol Goodman, Mimi’s friend with whom she was co-authoring a “Catholic-Jewish column” with a view to getting a lot off their chests and into the minds and hearts of their countrymen and women.

‘What happened, Carol?” Ted asked. “Did they say you are dizzy broads with space between your ears, or what?”

Carol shot a hard look at Ted. “They only said they want to think it over. Which is not bad, Mimi,” she said, turning to her friend.

“Not good either,” said Mimi, “Here we type and scribble our fingers to the bone over many weeks time and then give our stuff to the newspaper and presto! Nothing. Nothing for four weeks. Now that’s bad, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” said Nate Goodman, Carol’s husband. “You have to bug them. Remember, you’re one of hundreds who send them things. Have you called?”

“No,” said Mimi.

“I’d call,” said Nate.

Mimi looked thoughtful.

‘What are you writing about?” asked Father Jerry.

“The world’s problems,” said Mimi. “Carol wrote about pornography, I wrote about television. We go for the big ones, don’t we?”

“Have you thought about the inner city?” asked Father Skelton.

“Many times, Jerry,” said Mimi. “But I never come up with anything. Any ideas?”

“Sure, lots of ‘em. Come visit me at St. Albert’s.” he said. “You haven’t been there in a long time, have you? Come to think of it?”

Mimi looked at Carol, “What do you think?”

Carol shrugged. “Why not?”

“Don’t stop at stoplights,” said Ted Skelton. “You’ll get smashed and grabbed.”

“It’s the purse that gets grabbed,” said Mimi.

“Women have been known to be grabbed too, my dear,” said Ted. “Oops, sorry. I forget you don’t like me to call you that.”

“No ‘my dear’?” said Nata Goodman. “It’s one of the staples of our language. Frankly, my dear . . . “ he started.

“I don’t give a damn,” said Mimi, bristling. “Don’t give me that ‘staples of the language’ bit. The language needs reforming,” she said, adding, “My dear.”

“I agree,” said Nate. “Take fuck.”

“Nate!” said Carol, in a rare performance as shocked wife.

“No, really,” said Nate. “’Fuck’ is a word worth looking into. It’s a word that’s been overused and abused.”

“Would anybody like some more cheese and crackers?” said Mimi, standing up.

“Mimi,” said Ted, “when is the last time you stood up and asked people if they wanted more cheese and crackers? Just get them cheese and crackers. If they want it, they’ll eat it. If they don’t, we’ll put them back in the fridge. Sit down.”

Mimi went for more cheese and crackers.

“Fuck’ is Scandinavian in origin, you know,” continued Nate.

“How’d you find that out?” asked Father Jerry.

“Dictionary,” said Nate. “The newer ones tell all about it. I think it’s wonderful. Imagine if when you were a kid, Ted, and you too, Jerry, I presume, you could look ‘fuck’ up in the dictionary. Wouldn’t that have satisfied your curiosity? But as recently as 1966, if not more recently, you could not find ‘fuck’ in the college edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American language Language.”

“You couldn’t? That recently?’ asked Ted.

“No, you couldn’t. Honest truth.” Nate was enjoying himself immensely. Ted was laughing so hard he was almost unable to make his own comments. Jerry chuckled. Carol fumed and glared. Mimi returned with cheese and crackers.

“There.” She put them on the small table. “Eat up.”

“Thanks,” said Nate, giving his treatment of “fuck” a break for a while.

my”

“And thank you, Nate, my dear, for the news about, ah, ‘fuck,’” said Mimi, saying the word unflinchingly.

“You know, when I was a boy,” Nate said, turning to Ted, “women didn’t talk like that.”

“When you were a boy, ‘fuck’ wasn’t in the dictionary,” said Mimi.

“You were in the kitchen when I said that.”

“I heard you easily. You were loud and clear, We certainly are in an enlightened age, when you get down to it,” she said, sitting down.

“How’d we get on this subject?” asked Carol Goodman.

Mimi objected to being called ‘dear,’” said Nate.

“’My dear,’ Nate, and it’s how you say it,” said Mimi.

“Smile when you do? Wipe that grin off your face? Look goofily loving?” asked Nate.

“Nate, you are provoking me,” said Mimi, her eyes widening.

“Frankly, my dear… “ began Nate.

“Nate!” said Carol, for the second time that night adopting the role of corrector, Both married men, Nate and Ted, broke into laughter. Jerry, the priest, smiled uncomfortably and looked like he wished he weren’t there.

— Coming: Chapter 2 —

. . . where permitted but some prefer on tongue, then what?

Of course, says Congreg. of Divine Worship in February.

Moreover,

. . . let all remember that the time-honored tradition is to receive the host on the tongue. The celebrant priest, if there is a present danger of sacrilege, should not give the faithful communion in the hand, and he should make them aware of the reason for way of proceeding. [Emphasis added]

Note the concern. Note also that this is the Vatican before Francis.

So it goes, so it went.

Weekdays at our parish in 2026, it’s common for communicants to take the host in the hand but also on the tongue and not infrequently while dropping to his or her knees. What’s common to all of it is our parish’s attentiveness to mass. Indeed, piety abounds, especially as always in weekday masses.

I wrote about this some time back, with a 2014 Crux mag post by Margery Eagan, “LET’S HEAR IT FOR WEEKDAY MASS”. . . where the worship is peaceful, quiet, and fruitful:

My mother, a musician, struggled to endure the off-key singers who led hymns, unfortunately for us all, at Sunday Mass in my hometown parish.

So sometimes she’d sneak out of Mass early Sunday and during the week, take me to daily Mass instead. No off-key singing there. No singing at all, actually. There was quiet, peacefulness, intimacy among the 20 or 30 communicants.

The lights were dim, the sermons short and to the point. “The apostle picked up his cross and followed Him,” the priest began one sermon I remember, then paused, then ended it: “Would that we would do the same.” [!]

More:

Barely a half-hour long, daily Mass felt to me mysterious and holy and sacred in a way a very busy Sunday Mass, with its ups and downs and all arounds, could not. All these years later, I still prefer it.

Try it, I tell lapsed Catholic friends who complain of no inspiration on Sundays.

It could change everything.

Deliver the body, I say. Show up.

More:

I’ve tried daily Mass at St. Anthony’s Shrine in downtown Boston, seven lightning-fast Masses per day for businesspeople on lunch hours, off-duty cops and firefighters, schoolteachers and bankers on their way to or from South Station’s buses and trains. Sometimes I’d see well-known locals, rich and powerful or politically wired, slip in and out of pews.

Like St. Peter’s in the Loop, Chicago, with its Regular Mass Times:

Monday – Friday: 6:15, 7:15, 8:15,
11:40 am, 12:15, 1:15, 5:00 pm

Saturday: 12 noon and 5:00 pm
Sunday: 9:00, 11:00 am, 12:30 and 6:00 pm

As I say, show up.

Finally, words of wisdom from a master of same who wrote of having trouble “devoutedly” hearing a “sung mass” in which “the choir makes so much noise that “I can’t hear myself pray”!

Thus spoke Ronald Knox, in his 1948 book The Mass in Slow Motion, which is to be highly recommended. And which shows that issues about mass attendance did not start with Vatican 2.

One more thing, no Ronald Max am I, but I recently attended a Sunday mass that was started with “Good morning” from the priest, sigh, but thenceforward featured the priest delivering the most seriousness I have run into in a long time.

I mean a delivery that with the utmost of appropriacy told this worshiper that he meant every word.

Not a matter of meaning it, about which I have no qualms in re the others of our parish, but a matter of communicating whole-hearted endorsement of what he was saying and even singing at several times.

Ages ago as a young Jesuit in training, I argued in a debate in favor of the vernacular language mass vs. my opponent who argued against it because too few priests can deliver it well in the native tongue.

I won, but if he was right, then he should have allowed for the good guy in this story about mass going.

Keep in mind that dates and events and commentary are left as they were. Go ahead, my friend, you might learn something.

It’s said we can’t be a color-blind society, because there are too many skeletons in our closet. We’re religion-blind, glossing over religious differences for the sake of religious peace. Where would we be if we drove home religious differences with the same zeal with which we drive home racial differences? Call it your revolutionary thought for the day.

For example . . .

Senatorial candidate Al Salvi’s law partner, a state rep from Wheaton, has a bill up to outlaw censorship of American history curriculum “based on religious preference.” It has the ACLU and American Jewish Committee up in arms, who say it opens the doors to special religious pleading in the classroom by creationists and other true believers.

But what about the authority higher than George III mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? What about the thinking behind the Mayflower Compact? the Sun-Times asks. But the bashful Pilgrim John Alden is not around to speak for himself regarding the latter, and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, so what does he know?

This can of worms the Wheaton man is opening was bound to be opened. Push long enough and hard enough for cultural and other awareness, and some are bound to say sauce for the secular goose is sauce for the religious gander. I hope I have that right. If I don’t, sue me.

Rally. Really?

A rally against ageism is set for May 1 at Spertus Institute on Michigan Avenue. Couldn’t believe my eyes. I’m all for it, at 60-something I have only 30 or 40 years to live. A panel of distinguished speakers will raise awareness. Limited seating. Several Oak Park and River Forest agencies sponsoring it. Sigh.

It solves a problem for many white males my age: how to gain identification as part of an oppressed group.

Right? Who among us has not yearned for the notoriety, the distinctiveness, the sense of being somebody that comes from belonging to such a group? We’re talking hype here, not the reality, which is no fun but has gained cachet. Thus hyped — or mau-maued, as Tom Wolfe put it — we wonder: Everyone else is, why not us?

A rally no less. No march?

Seneca again, on anger again . . .

The old Roman Seneca, Emperor Nero’s disappointed tutor, urges talking yourself out of the anger habit. Wants us “repeatedly (to) set before ourselves its many faults,” and thus head it off at the pass. “We must search out its evils and drag them into the open,” the better to see anger as “damnanda” — “to be condemned.”

Good Stoic that he is, he believes in mind over matter, that as human beings we can talk ourselves into things. We just (just?) have to concentrate, work our way through things, think a lot about it, review reasons. It’s called meditation by some.

Garbage in, garbage out again, in this case good things in, good things out. What you concentrate on, you can become. Like Jesse Jackson’s leading kids in saying, “I am somebody,” though that’s more autosuggestion or mantra-recital than reasoning. The Senecan practice is easily mocked and can be too glibly endorsed. Never mind that. Such objections don’t get to the heart of the matter.

More Seneca on anger: controlling it . . .

The best cure is to wait it out. “Dilatio” is the Latin word, related to our “dilatory.” Use delaying tactics. Do nothing until you hear from sweet reason. Plato caught himself in the act of bashing a slave and held the pose, looking silly. “I’m punishing an angry man,” he explained when someone asked him what the hell he was doing holding a stick in mid-air. The slave got off.

This is Seneca’s account, making the point that you are responsible for yourself. All your grand ideas about reforming the world? Great. But know yourself and reform yourself.

Jesus spotted him, well-known to his neighbors, blind from birth. His disciples asked who was guilty of the sin that caused it, the man or his parents?

Neither. It happened so that God’s work might be seen in him, Jesus explained.

Theirs was common enough thinking. We take Jesus’ answer for granted. But think on it. Everything he says is groundbreaking. He is God on earth, manifesting, even announcing himself to chosen individuals, as to the Samaritan woman at the well and as this episode unfolds, here as well.

He’s on a three-year tour, is he not? Breaking open the mixed-up, wayward thinking of his day. Thanks, I (we) needed that, they could say, as he slaps down prejudices, misgivings, pedestrian inadequacies, one after another.

He has a plan, explains it to his followers soon to be partners:

“While daylight lasts, I must work in the service of Him who sent me; the night is coming, when there is no working any more. As long as I am in the world, I am the world’s light”!

He has the moves:

With that, he spat on the ground, and made clay with the spittle, spread the clay on the man’s eyes and told him to go to the pool of Siloam. So the man went and washed there, and came back with his sight restored.

Glory be.

The man’s neighbors and others who had regularly seen him begging, began to say, Is not this the man who used to sit here and beg? Some said, This is the man, and others, No, but he looks like him.

And he told them, Yes, I am the man.

“How is it, then,” they ask, “that your eyes have been opened?

He told them.

A man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes with it and said to me, “Away with thee to the pool of Siloam and wash there.”

“So I went there and washed and recovered my sight.”

“Where is he?” they asked, and he said, “I cannot tell.”

They took him to the Pharisees, recognized judges in such matters, who asked him how he had recovered his sight.

“Why,” he said, “he put clay on my eyes and then I washed and now I can see.”

On the sabbath?

“He cannot be a messenger from God if he does not observe the sabbath,” some of them said.

Others questioned that, asking how a man could “do miracles like this and be a sinner?”

They questioned the man further. “What do you think happened?” And “How did he open your eyes?”

“He must be a prophet.” It’s what prophets do.

They thought that was coming.

They sent for his parents to confirm he’d been blind.

“Is this your son? Was he born blind? How now is he able to see?”

“We can tell you he’s our son and he was born blind. We cannot tell how he is able to see now. We have no way of knowing who opened his eyes for him. Ask the man himself. He is of age. Let him tell you his story.”

Cautious they were, knowing who was asking.

The Jews had by now come to an agreement that anyone who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ should be forbidden the synagogue.

The fix was in.

They called the man back, telling him to “give God praise. This man, to our knowledge, is a sinner.”

“Sinner or not, I cannot tell. All I know is that once I was blind, and now I can see.

Ball in their court.

They asked him again, “What was it he did to you? What did he do to open your eyes?”

They can’t give it up.

“I told you already, and you wouldn’t listen. Why do you have to hear it again? You want to become his disciples?”

Beautiful.

They didn’t like that, telling him, “Keep his discipleship for yourself, we are disciples of Moses.”

Their theme, their fallback point.

“We know God spoke to Moses,” one of them said. “We know nothing about this man, or where he comes from.”

And were not about to ask.

The once blind man was not going to let that go.

“Here is matter for astonishment; here is a man that comes you cannot tell whence, and he has opened my eyes.

“And yet we know for certain that God does not answer the prayers of sinners, it is only when a man is devout and does his will, that his prayer is answered.

“That a man should open the eyes of one born blind is something unheard of since the world began.

“No, if this man did not come from God, he would have no powers at all.”

Let’s hear it for this dude!

Seems he learned a lot in his years. Did a lot of listening, was not about to humor these double-talkers who had little to say to him, except to get lost.

“Are we to have lessons from you,” one of them asked, “all steeped in sin from birth?” mouthing the superstition of the day, what Jesus had explained away when his disciples had wondered about it.

They sent him away.

Jesus heard they had dismissed him, saught him out, and asked, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

“Tell me who he is, Lord,” he said “so I can believe in him.”

“It is I,” said Jesus.

Dropping to his knees, the man announced, “I believe, Lord.”

Jesus: “I have come into the world so that a [juridical] sentence may fall upon it, that those who are blind should see, and those who see should become blind.”

Some Pharisees who were in his company heard this, and they asked him, “Are we blind too?”

“If you were blind,” Jesus said, “you would not be guilty. It is because you say you can see, you are.”

Re-run here five years later as reminder and because I like it . . . the telling, that is . . .

Wow! Just discovered a major change in the replacement mass scheduled for December that no one has mentioned so far. It’s in “The Introductory Rites,” first thing:

1. When the people are gathered, the Priest approaches the altar with the ministers while the Entrance Chant is sung.

When he has arrived at the altar, after making a profound bow with the ministers, the Priest venerates the altar with a kiss and, if appropriate, incenses the cross and the altar. Then, with the ministers, he goes to the chair.

When the Entrance Chant is concluded, the Priest and the faithful, standing, sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross, while the Priest, facing the people, says:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The people reply:

Amen.

It’s a stunner, right? What? you don’t see the big change? Look closer. Read it again. Now get it? No? Come on, do I have to explain everything?

THERE’S NO “GOOD MORNING”!