Ten days ago from the horse’s mouth:

Should people who aren’t sick be tested for Covid-19? In August the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention revised its guidance to suggest focusing on the elderly and patients with symptoms. One may be excused for thinking that more testing is always better, but that isn’t true. Anyone can be infected with the virus, but there is a thousandfold difference in the risk of death between the young and the old. Testing strategy should reflect that.

A diller and dollar, if not every day then rather often, Science changes her mind, or at least her “settled” focus. Ain’t she grand?

A word for our time, when the spectre fear stalks the land.

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

Jack Mack done nicely in S-T.

I popped into his Lawndale quarters in the summer of ’68, found him and Rollie Smith, another SJ scholastic, showing signs of being beaten up. One of the locals, whom they had befriended, had done it.

An older man, an ally, said he’d go home and get his “piece,” but Jack had said no. They had to stick by the assailant, a young man whom they had staying with them, Jack explained with a smile.

The assailant got over his outburst later. Jack and the others stayed with the work, needless to say.

I think we have here what a literary agent would call “an important book.”

David Pierre of Media Report has published an illuminating new book, The Greatest Fraud Never Told: False Accusations, Phony Grand Jury Reports, and the Assault on the Catholic Church. Pierre and his work are often ignored because he is unjustly accused of dismissing accusations of clergy sex abuse, en masse. That charge is not true. Instead, Pierre stresses an often-forgotten truth: “a false accusation is truly an affront to those who genuinely suffered as the result of their horrendous abuse.”

When the first hints of clergy sexual abuse began to surface in the late-80s, I served as an advisor to many of the good, new bishops being appointed. On this topic, I counseled the bishops:

• First, do not call this pedophilia – because, for the most part, it is same-sex activity between a cleric and a post-pubescent young man; that’s the truth and, the truth always sets us free. “Pedophilia” conjures up images of five- and six-year-old boys. Further, if the sinful activity had been properly labeled, ironically, the secular media wouldn’t have given it much coverage, since they always promote same-sex relations.

• Second, never settle any case out of court for a variety of reasons, not least that while a pastoral plea demands a pastoral response, a legal challenge demands a legal response. Moreover, when a financial settlement is made, that more than suggests guilt, thus damaging irreparably an innocent priest’s reputation. Regrettably, most bishops listened, instead, to diocesan attorneys and insurance companies.

Instead they listened to lawyers . . .