CHAPTER 19

WEDNESDAY, JAN, GEORGE OLSON, and Granny sat on the back steps of the courthouse in the shade of three huge cottonwoods.  The morning heat suggested this June day would be a scorcher.

“Wow!” Granny said upon learning of Melissa’s determination to be involved, “This gets better and better all the time!”

George Olson turned ashen at the news.   “You know, Jan,” he said, “I don’t mind risking my neck and my retirement to nail Hansen, but I am not willing to risk the life of a civilian.  It goes against all my training during thirty years of service.  The problem is I’m already so compromised by my criminal activity that I sure can’t be the moral voice here.  But, Jan…”

“If it helps,” Jan said, “there is absolutely no way you could stop her short of abducting her.  She’s in.”

Olson sighed.  “Well, at least Granny says he thinks I can hook this thing up.”

“Piece a cake,” Granny said.

“Anyway,” Jan continued, “this means that we need to hold off until Saturday night.”

“I guess that isn’t a problem,” Olson said.  “Unless Granny has to get back to Seattle.”

“What! And miss the chance to do the nightlife in Basin, Wyoming?  Not a chance!  I have not yet begun to explore the possibilities for fun and games.  I think the Methodist Church has a bingo game planned for this very evening!”

Olson rolled his eyes.

Jan smiled.  “Well, OK, Saturday night it is.  At least that gives us a little more planning time.  How about we meet Thursday night for a dry run?”

“That’ll work,” Olson said.  “I want to bring in my two associates.  They’ll be running backup for us.”

“And I’m sure the sheriff will want to bring Harold in.”

“Another thing,” Olson said.  “Hansen took his chopper to Billings this morning and boarded his jet.  He landed in Salt Lake City.  I got that info from an FAA buddy.  However, we don’t have clearance to surveil him in Utah.  Seems like he has friends in high places there.”

“I’m surprised to hear that.  I would think that Utah is one place he would not have much authority.  I’m sure the main branch of the Mormon Church sees him as a fake, and maybe even a threat.”

“Yeah, I don’t know the answer to that.  Anyway, I thought you’d be interested.”

Jan crossed his arms over his chest.  He stared into the distance.  He wondered what Prophet Hansen was up to.

***

At 2:00 p.m., St. Andrews Episcopal Church rested among giant cottonwoods, as though hiding from the baking afternoon sun.  Jan parked on the north side and walked around to the west entrance and entered the nave, passing the baptistry on the right.  It was the same baptistry from which a priest had dipped water and made the sign of the cross on Jan’s forehead when he was five years old.  A photograph showed that his father was in attendance in a suit and tie, which Jan remembered as unusual.

Jan had marched down the aisle of the nave many a Sunday morning as a child, carrying the crucifix, or the brass candle lighter, or the American or church flag, wearing a black cassock and white surplice, looking, his mom said, like a little angel.  The smell of the old building was pleasant.  Here Jan had sat on polished oak pews listening to Father Sullivan talk about eternity.

Jan slipped into a pew.  He remembered solving a conundrum one Sunday in this pew.  Every Sunday the congregation repeated a phrase from the prayer book, a phrase that confused him.  The phrase was “For Christ’s sake.”  What did that mean he had wondered?  Were they swearing?  He had never asked anyone.  But the prayers were read every Sunday from the Book of Common Prayer.  Many of them ended with the phrase “And this we beg for Jesus Christ’s sake.”  The prayer of general confession, for example, ended with “for His sake.”  These prayers were asking God to forgive men because they were sinners—they had not lived “godly and sober” lives.  They asked God to forgive men “for His sake.”  Evidently for Christ’s sake!  What, Jan had wondered, could that mean?  Wouldn’t God want men to live good lives for their own sakes?  Why for Christ’s sake?

Then one day it had come to him; just came to him in an instant—an epiphany.  The revelation was that Christ had sacrificed his life so men could live good, sober, lives.  If they did, Christ had not died in vain.  Jan suddenly knew that was the meaning behind the phrase—that was what it meant.  By living godly lives, men and women somehow brought fulfillment to Christ’s sacrifice.  Christ’s death was not in vain to the extent that people were changed by it.  That was as far as Jan ever went in unraveling the mystery of those words.  But they still intrigued him.

Jan was surprised he remembered much of the text of the prayers.  He found himself repeating aloud the poetic phrases from the general confession:

“We have erred and strayed like lost sheep.  We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.  We have offended against thy holy laws.  We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.  And we have done those things which we ought not to have done…”

“Amen,” a voice behind him said. Startled, Jan turned to see Father Sullivan.  Not the thirty-year-old Father Sullivan that Jan had listened to as a child, but a nearly eighty-year-old Father Sullivan who had come back to Basin to finish his years in service to the same tiny congregation he had served when he was young and just our of seminary.

Jan had only seen Father Sullivan on two occasions since the priest had returned to Basin five years earlier.  He had seen him when he had come to ask the priest to conduct Emma’s funeral, then at the funeral itself.  Jan had promised he would call on the priest later, but he never did.  Today he had arranged to see him here.

Apparently Father Sullivan had seen Jan enter the church from his office window.  He must have walked around the outside of the building and followed him into the nave.  The priest’s once black hair had turned white, but the ruddy complexion and black eyes could not obscure his manly Irish lineage.  Father Sullivan’s own father had changed the family name from O’Sullivan when he arrived in Hell’s Kitchen, fresh from Ireland.  

Father Sullivan still carried the same broadness in the shoulders and barrel chest that Jan remembered from childhood; the priest’s hulk had been ill-concealed even back then by the black robes he wore during morning prayer.  His voice still had a trace of the old country in it the way Jan’s father always maintained a trace of Southern Europe.

“Jan, my boy,” Father Sullivan said.  “I see you still remember the general gonfession.”

“I’m surprised I do.”

“Aye, but not I!  Forty-five years ago when you came to see me at your mother’s insistence—because she thought you were an atheist—I recognized something special in you.”

“I remember the meeting.”

“Do you remember what I told you, lad?”

“Yes.  You said you weren’t worried about me.  You said you saw faith in me.”

“Indeed I did.  I saw it then and I see it now.”

“How is it that I can’t see it myself?”

“Ah.  Good question.  Sorry I can’t answer it.  You see, I don’t know nearly as much about faith as I should.  People think I do.  In truth, I find myself at a loss for much of what I see in the world.  However, I catch glimpses of the hiding God—very brief but satisfying glimpses.  And I have always seen what theologians call ‘fear,’ or ‘awe,’ or ‘reverence’ for God in your eyes.”

“Well, in a way I hope you’re right.  But honestly Father, I have never had a handle on faith.  Not at all.  I have almost no spiritual life.  And I never have.”

The old priest’s eyes caught a flash of humor and energy.  “Oh! Jan, my lad, I wonder if we are not at a semantic impasse here.  The life of the spirit is not always well defined by those who participate in it.  But, just now you were praying the general confession.  Why do you suppose you remember it after all these years?  I have had priests in my employ who couldn’t remember that prayer.  I’m sorry, my boy, I hate to mar the profane picture you have of yourself, but I have to stick with my initial judgment of you.

“But, let’s leave your delusions of doubt.  And, by the way, please call me Aidan.  I’m more comfortable with that from given all our long years of friendship—interrupted though they were by a mere four-and-a-half decades.”

The priest leaned forward.  “May I inquire, Jan, about your emotional health?  How are you dealing with the loss of Emma?  It’s been two years now, I believe.  And, of course, I heard about the most recent attempts on your life.”

“How am I dealing with it?  I see a shrink, I drink too much, and I hang out with John Broadbeck.”

Father Sullivan erupted in laughter.  “That’s an unholy trinity indeed!”

Jan laughed as well.  “Which is the chief demon?”

“Oh, the shrink, no doubt!”

They both laughed some more.

“Jan, when you called, you said you had some theological questions to ask me.  Would you like to come to my office?”

***

In the church office a Mr. Coffee dripped its last fresh drops into its carafe.  Father Sullivan poured a cup for Jan and one for himself.

“Thank God for a bit of the brew.  No amount of prayer can get me through an afternoon like Yuban can.”

“Yuban?  I didn’t know they still made it.  That was what my mother drank.”

“I remember her well.  A tougher congregant I never had.  A touch of bitterness in her, following your father’s fall from grace.  She, herself, struggled with faith.  And, like you, she seemed almost proud of her doubts.  But she was not proud of her son’s doubts, I believe.”  The priest laughed.  “She passed on about ten years ago, as I recall.”

Jan nodded.

“Father—Aidan—tell me about atonement.”

“Atonement!  Well!  And you still protesting ignorance in matters of faith?”

“It’s not what you think.  I’m trying to understand Ronald Hansen.”

The priest’s face darkened.  “Ronnie?  Dear Ronnie.  Tragic man, tragic family.”

Father Sullivan sighed deeply.  Leaned back in his chair.  He opened a drawer and withdrew a pipe and tobacco pouch.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

Father Sullivan stoked the pipe.  Jan remembered the same ritual when they had met nearly half a century ago.  He wondered how the old priest had avoided the consequences of his habit.

Father Sullivan removed the pipe from his mouth.  “You, then, are asking rather about the Mormon concept of blood atonement, I take it?”

“Yes.  That’s correct.  I think it must be a hybrid of the earlier Christian theology.”

“Well, in a sense that is necessarily true.  However, the Mormon doctrine may come down to us from a yet more ancient source.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let me avoid that answer now.  I may return to it later.  Let’s treat it as you suggest, as an aberration of Christian doctrine.  I’m qualified to talk about Christian theology, but I make no pretense of knowing much about Mormonism.  My attempt to understand Mormon theology has left me very frustrated.”

“How so?”

“It’s rather like trying to nail water to a wall.  To my mind, Mormon teaching seems inconsistent.  But I must add I have not studied it deeply.  However, it seems that ideas in Mormonism just pop up and are declared to be true by the Mormon leadership whether or not they fit in with anything else in earlier history or practice.  As when they declared in the early 1970s that blacks could hold the Mormon Priesthood, after teaching for a hundred years that they couldn’t.  When I was here in the 1950s, it was common shocking knowledge that blacks—Negroes then—could never hold office in the Mormon Church.  They were considered unfit in some obscure way I can’t remember.  But then, bingo, it all changes when members of the Western Athletic Conference picket BYU.  It seems to me there is no consistent theology, rather a list of beliefs and doctrines which are revised without explanation from time to time.  Do you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly, but what you are saying sure sounds like what others are telling me.”

“You know, Jan, you probably should talk to a man by the name of Deck Edwards.”

Jan laughed.  “Deck is a friend of mine.  I went to him.  He sent me to see a former Utah investigator.  I seem to be getting the run-around.”

The priest got up and refilled both coffee cups.  Today he was wearing his priest’s shirt and collar.

“Well, Jan, the problem is that the Mormon doctrine is not out in the open.  In fact, the church leadership denies they ever practiced blood atonement—but history tells us they certainly did.  So it’s rather a closet doctrine.  You can patch together ideas and get the drift.  But you can’t look it up in a book about Mormon theology.  That it was practiced and that there is such a theory is not in doubt.  Mormon scholars and even Mormon presidents have admitted that in print.”

“I guess, Aidan, that I could profit from understanding the historic Christian position on atonement.”

“With that I can help you.  You’ll have to bear with me.  I might even be able to touch upon the relationship between Mormon blood atonement and other religious human sacrifice.  But, let’s start at the beginning.  I hope I don’t get too theological or esoteric.”

Jan settled back into his chair.  He cradled the cup in his hands.  He watched as the old man seemed to drift off, drift away to another time and place.  He waited for him to speak.  Finally, he did.

“The life is in the blood.”  He drew deeply on his pipe.  “The life is in the blood.”

The words made Jan strangely uneasy.  He looked around the old, weathered office where he had sat forty-five years earlier.  The office was old even then.  St. Andrews was a hundred years old.  Episcopal missionaries were the first to bring Christianity into Wyoming Territory, establishing churches among the trappers and Indians.  As the trading settlements turned into villages, Episcopal churches—their buildings often funded by denominational money from the East—sprang up.  Both of Jan’s great-grandfathers on his mother’s side had been instrumental in the founding of St. Andrews.  But now the voice of the old priest talking about life and blood sent a chill through Jan.

“The Bible, Jan, from the first, has taught the interconnectedness between life and death.  What living thing survives except through the death of another living thing?  That is the principle behind the Jewish kosher laws.  The clean animals are slain in order to provide life—as food—to humans.  It is, in a sense, a passing on of life.  As for the blood, the Book of Genesis tells us that when Cain rose up and slew his brother Abel, God came to him and said, ‘The blood of your brother calls to me from the ground.’

“Of course,” the priest continued, “the idea of sacrifice to God was evident from the biblical account of the Garden of Eden.  The fruit of the field and the firstlings of the flocks were presented to God as a tithe—a portion returned to Him in thanksgiving for his provision.

“But the idea of sacrifice as an offering for sin, well, we really don’t see that in the biblical record until Passover.  You remember the story.  The Jews are slaves to Egypt’s pharaoh.  God sends Moses to tell Pharaoh to let his people go.  When Pharaoh won’t cooperate, God sends plagues to motivate him.  But Pharaoh, the Bible tells us, ‘hardened his heart’ against the working of God.

“So finally, God tells Moses that an angel of death will stalk the land, killing the firstborn of every creature.  The Pharaoh’s own son is killed and Pharaoh lets God’s people leave.”

Sullivan drew on his pipe which had gone out.  He produced a kitchen match, struck it on his shoe, and relit it.  “God spared the Hebrew firstborn children, by way of a substitute sacrifice.”

Jan spoke.  “The Passover lamb?”

“The Passover lamb.  Now here is where, I believe, the error of Mormonism—as well as the error of other forms of human sacrifice—comes in.  It is a mistake to think that the blood of the Passover lamb itself had the power to hide or cleanse sin.  It is simply a lamb after all.  Much confusion begins here.  It is a mistake to think that animal blood somehow pleased or appeased God.  Or that it could appease His wrath.”

“What?” Jan asked.  “Isn’t that exactly what we are expected to believe?  If not, then why do we have animal sacrifice commanded in the Bible and practiced by pagan cultures throughout the world?”

“Why indeed?  That is exactly the point, my friend.”

Jan watched the priest purse his lips, working them in and out.  Like Nero Wolf solving a crime, Jan thought.

“Jan, let me see if you remember your catechism at all.  Who does man sin against?”

Jan sat in silence and turned his mind back to those chilly afternoons in the basement of the church when he and the future Judge Hartman used to sit at a table while Father Sullivan taught them orthodox Christian doctrine.  He could almost hear those words echoing across time.  ‘Who does man sin against?’”

“Against his neighbor?” Jan had volunteered back then.

“No!” the priest had said.  “No, not against his neighbor, but against God!  All sin is against God.  Since the neighbor is the property of God, the creation of God, when you harm your neighbor you do damage directly to God.”

Jan opened his eyes.  He looked at Father Sullivan, the eighty-year-old priest’s eyes aflame with zeal.  “Man sins against God,” he said.

“Yes, my boy!  Yes.  The debt is owed to God.”

Jan considered that.

“And,” the priest continued, “if the debt is owed to God, the debt is really outside the ability of the debtor to pay.  Let me return to the blood of Abel, calling out to God from the ground.  Whose blood was it anyway?  Well, of course, if you had asked Abel, it was his blood.  But in a larger, more accurate sense, it was God’s blood.  What I mean is the life of Abel belonged to God because He created it.  It was a creation of God that Cain spilt upon the ground.”

Jan held up a hand.  “OK, Aidan.  So now Cain owed his own life to God.”

“Well, he owed that to Him anyway.  It was God’s life in him.”

“Yes, but doesn’t the Old Testament teach that a man who spills blood is to be put to death?”

“Oh, indeed it does.  But capital punishment was never equated with forgiveness.  It is one thing to say that a murderer must be put to death.  And we say in the law that he paid for his crime.  Well, he paid a price all right.  But his death does not buy him forgiveness.  It prevents him from taking another life.  It protects society, that is true.  There is a sense of justice in it, but it certainly does not renew the life of his victim.  Do you see that, boy?”

“I see that there is no creative power in Cain’s blood.  Abel will remain dead whether Cain lives or dies.”

“Yes, of course.  Now take it to the Passover lamb.  If there is no redemptive power in a man’s blood, how much less power is there in the blood of a sheep?”

“Then why?”

“Hold on, son.  Think for a moment.  Where does life come from?”

“God?”

“Then whose life, whose blood, is the only agent able to redeem that which is lost?”

Jan was extremely uncomfortable with the conversation.  It was surreal.  Too over the top.  What in the world was he doing in a dark office, talking to an old priest about blood?  He wanted to bolt.  He felt like he was watching the end of The Godfather or something from The Exorcist.  Yet, on another level, he felt a strange sense of comfort.  Maybe it was what the priest had meant earlier when he talked about a sense of awe.

Jan cleared his throat.  “Whose blood is able to substitute for the life of a human?”  His mouth was dry.  “The blood of God?”

“Yes, Jan.  The blood of God!  That truth is what Christianity has taught for 2,000 years.  Oh, it is a radical and misunderstood and even much-maligned concept.  The secular community of today has little interest in the great thinking of the church.  It almost seems sacrilegious even to discuss these matters.  The profane world thinks of Christianity as a bloody religion.  And, as a matter of fact, it is.  But Christendom teaches that Christ is God—God come in human form, making a full identification with humans for the sole purpose of becoming a substitute sacrifice for them.”

Jan stared at the priest.  He wasn’t sure he understood what the old zealot was saying, or that he even wanted to understand it.

The priest went on.  “The Atonement of Christ is the real event, the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament are all simply symbolic shadows of that reality—foreshadows of reality.”

The priest appeared to struggle.  “Look.  Take another example. Water baptism is not about magic water.  It’s a symbolic representation by the participant who engages a faith concept.  Pouring water over someone or dipping him in a swimming pool or river only makes him wet.  There is no magic in the water and there is no magic in human blood.  The sacrifices of the Old Testament were symbolically anticipatory of a real human event that had not yet occurred.  Once the real sacrifice—the sacrifice of Christ—had occurred, there was no reason to continue the anticipatory rite.

“I fear I am waxing a little eloquent here.  But I’m trying to make the distinction between Mormon blood atonement and the Christian doctrine of atonement.”

“And what is that difference?”

“The difference is that, historically, Christians have believed and taught that faith placed in Christ’s sacrificial death allows that death to cleanse a man’s personal sins.  Mormon theology guts the atonement, robbing it of its true power.  It makes the atonement to be simply one part of the process of cleansing a person from sin.  Man, according to Mormon theology, benefits—to a degree—from the atonement of Christ, but the blood of Christ—alone— is not enough, in Mormonism, to save a sinner from his sins.”

Sullivan upturned his pipe, tapped it against an ashtray, and laid it aside.  “Mormonism’s blood atonement doctrine makes that clear.  The anchor point for understanding Mormon salvation theology is in the infamous statement of Brigham Young: ‘There are some sins which the blood of Christ cannot atone.’  In those cases, Young said, a man’s own blood must be shed.  That is a quantum leap from the orthodox doctrine of atonement, but a quantum leap backward!”

Now Jan’s chin was on his chest.  His fingers were steepled over his stomach.  His brow was furrowed.

Finally he said to the priest, “So, the difference between Mormon blood atonement and Christian atonement is that Brigham Young taught his people that if murderers—and other gross sinners—would have their own blood spilled they could find forgiveness; and Christian atonement says that a person simply must believe that it is only Christ’s blood which can cleanse sin?”

The priest snorted!  “Simply believe?  You say that as though it is an easy thing to do.  You, Jan, a man who has spent forty or more years struggling to believe?  And just now you can cavalierly say ‘A person simply needs to believe?’  As though believing was simple.  As if believing was nothing.  No, my friend, believing is everything!  Faith must not only be found, it must be nurtured, protected, and defended!

“The bottom line, Jan, is this.  The shedding of mere human blood serves no purpose whatsoever.  On the other hand, the shedding of the blood of God represents the exchange of the life of God for the sin of mankind.  That action does have infinite power to make an actual, legitimate claim against sin.  It is called substitutionary atonement—the substitute of life for life, or death for life, if you prefer.

“All I’m saying,” the priest continued, “is that if there is a God, and if that God did atone for sin—as the Christian gospel has proclaimed for 2,000 years—then all attempts to assert the idea that human bloodshed is an agent for the forgiveness of sin are flawed.”

“And that is what Mormon blood atonement tries to do?”  Jan asked.

“As I understand it, yes.  But, I have to remind you of what I said earlier, that Mormon doctrine is elusive on this point.  This doctrine has been kept hidden since the practice was initiated more than a hundred years ago.”

“Do you, Aidan, really believe it was widely practiced by early Mormon Church leaders?”

“It depends, Jan, on what you mean by ‘widely.’  Do I believe that hundreds have been blood atoned in Mormondom?  Yes, I believe that.  Just as I believe human sacrifice, which is a demonic rip-off of true atonement, has been practiced since the dawn of time and is still being practiced on many fronts to this day.”

“You actually believe that?”

“I do. All you have to do is read the Utah papers—both historic and modern—to know that.  Modern clan leaders, like the Laffertys, are proud that God ordered them to kill people in order to save their souls.”

“Yeah.  I know about them and I know about the LeBarons.  And, I know Ronald Hansen is a stony murderer.  I’m certain he murdered Emma.  But all this stuff about religious sacrifice—human sacrifice—it seems so far from the…well…the real world.”

“Oh, it’s real all right.  In every age human sacrifice has been practiced.  The Mayas, the Incas, the Old World pagans…In fact, I was reminded of that by my recreational reading this week.  I’m going back through Winston Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples.  He talks about human sacrifice as a unifying concept.”

“What?”

“Oh, I don’t mean he condoned it.  But he wrote that Julius Caesar in the summer of 55 B.C. stood on the European shoreline of the English Channel and surveyed what Churchill called, ‘the heavy island.’  Caesar saw the Druids of Britannia as the spiritual headwaters of the Northern Barbarians.  He noted their proclivity for human sacrifice. He said, and I quote, ‘The unnatural principle of human sacrifice was carried by the British Druids to a ruthless pitch.  The mysterious priesthoods of the forests bound themselves and their votaries together by the most deadly sacrament that men can take.’

“Churchill evidently thought that the bloody practice of human sacrifice is what kept the priests in power, kept the clans in subjugation.”

“Good Lord!” Jan said, “Are you saying that this is what is at the heart of Mormon blood atonement?  That the Mormon concept of blood atonement is a form of terrorism designed to subjugate the troops?”

The priest was silent.

“Is that what you meant earlier when you said that Mormon blood atonement may not be an aberration of Christian atonement but that ‘it may come down to us from a source earlier than that?’  Come on, Aidan!”

Again the priest relit his pipe.  This time he drew the smoke in and held it deep within his chest, his eyes closed.  After a few seconds he expelled it and looked at Jan.

“How much do you know about the Mormon temple ceremony, Jan?”  The priest stood, walked over to a bookcase, withdrew a large book, and tossed it onto the desk.  He heaved himself into the chair and slowly thumbed through the book.  As he thumbed, he said, “You know, Jan, the Mormon temple ceremony has evolved over the past 150 years.  It hasn’t changed, but the wording has been made less and less offensive as the text of the ceremony has gotten out.”

“By the way, Aidan, how does the text get out of the temple if everyone is sworn to secrecy?”

“In most cases it comes from disaffected members who make notes about the ceremony after they leave.  In a few cases, Mormons who were about to depart went to the temple wearing recording devices.”

“Wires?”

“Well, I guess that’s what you call it.  Each one armed with a miniature tape recorder.  Pretty bold move.  Some of these exiting Mormons are pretty disgruntled and zealous.”

The priest continued to trace his finger over the pages of the book.

“This book is a compilation of the changes which have occurred in the temple ceremony over the years.  A lot of changes took place in 1911, and a lot more in 1990.  But listen to some of this language.  You may know that the ceremony is made up of dramatic skits and the taking of secret oaths.  In one of the skits, a man playing the part of Lucifer makes a big show out of hiring Protestant preachers and Catholic priests to preach the devil’s doctrine to unwary parishioners.  But here Lucifer says, ‘I will take the treasures of the earth, and with gold and silver I will buy up armies and navies, popes and priests, and reign with blood and horror in this earth!’”

Jan stared.  “Blood and horror?”

Sullivan continued, “Then when God, in the Mormon temple drama, kicks Satan out of the temple, the devil stops and turns to the people who are watching the drama and says: ‘I have a word to say concerning these people.  If they do not walk up to every covenant they make at these altars in this temple this day, they will be in my power!’”

“Jan, couple this highly-charged drama with bloody oaths in which the participants—at least up until 1990—symbolically slit their throats and are threatened with disembowelment if they reveal some silly handshakes…Well, you tell me if Julius Caesar wasn’t right about priests using blood oaths and human sacrifice to subjugate people.  These things come from the belly of hell itself!”

Now Jan sat silently.  He cleared his throat.  He shook his head.

“So, Aidan, I guess you believe in the devil and modern Satanism and all that?”

The priest looked evenly at Jan.  He smiled benignly.  “Oh, Jan.  Of course I believe in that!”