Fr. Simon back and our church got him! He had returned some months ago to his African homeland. Kenya, that is, whose missionaries to the U.S. are helping us get around our shortage of priests.
I’m still a priest, by the way, though not practicing since I left the Jesuits after 18 years in ‘68, later asking for laicization from the pope via Vatican officials, among thousands asking for it in those days of turmoil . . .
As such, “defrocked,” as the Daily News city hall man, the inimitable Jay McMullen, referred to me when introducing me to Mayor Daley’s spokesman later that year, when just before the presidential election I had hired on as religion reporter. The Daley man was taken aback and said nothing.
McMullen was a many-sided, outspoken, smart guy, later to marry Chicago’s mayor-to-be, with whom he settled in as a married man. Ran into him later on a Loop street, we chatted, he asked what I was doing in those early ex-Daily News days, suggested I get in touch, indicating I might have work with him. I didn’t.
Other day I bought new boots from Target, which had them sent from an out-of-state location and which at first I liked very much, trying them inside. Alas, the good in-house experience never got my approval in that a zipper on a boot’s side turned out unacceptably recalcitrant and I sent it back, got payment restored on the spot.
Have been going routinely to A-zon (A for Ama, of course), but am likely now on occasion to hit the Target button. Later if I do, will tell about it.
People at church, yes! Pious as all get-out, let me tell you. Far more so, I must say, than at our Oak Park churches, where avant-garde liberalism was a take-for-granted factor and so-called Novus Ordo, new way of doing mass, reigned experimentally, as in a so-called family mass in the gymnasium of one of the village’s four RC churches, where going for Communion, standing, of course, the man — not a priest, of course — required that I say my name before he’d hand over the Eucharist!
Speaking of Oak Park, in which I grew up and where the love of my life and I raised our six perfect offspring, the other day is worth mentioning a headline and story in its local paper, Wednesday Journal, that unfortunately demonstrates the village’s uproariously leftist character:
Driver fatally shoots themselves after crashing into Pace bus in Oak Park,
featuring one of the more obvious and ridiculous — I’d say laughable but for the horror it reports — violations of common sense and stunning sample of say-not-gender-admitting practice in our time!
“A driver fatally shot themselves after crashing into a Pace bus in Oak Park, leaving more than a dozen others injured,” the story went on, showing it not an editor’s inglorious headlining,
And:
“The driver was travelling south on Harlem Avenue when they ran a red light at Lake Street.”
And:
“The driver then took out a gun and shot themselves in the head. They were pronounced dead on the scene, according to the village.”
Ouch, ouch, ouch. Saints preserve us from such damage to the English language!!!
Blithe Spirit 