LAST NIGHT WAS Catholic night. My Catholic but otherwise human mother has been after me to see a childhood friend named Francis, who is studying to be a priest. I say childhood friend, but he was just a fringe member of the gang, always a bit separate, a bit precious. My most vivid recollection of Francis is a time some kid broke his glasses and a piece of glass got stuck in his eye. For six months afterward his mother came out after school with him, and that was his undoing, I think. No one broke his glasses again, but then no one wanted to either. Looking back on it, it was then that he turned to adults, turned his talents to pleasing and getting along with them. In the last year of high school he disappeared, and when the following summer we heard that he was going into the seminary, we understood why he had kept to himself. He could hardly have hung around with us on street corners cunt-baiting, planning seductions that never came off, working up the nerve to visit a cat house. It’s funny, I had left the Church three years before, when I was fourteen, but even then, at seventeen, I was awed at Francis’s decision to become a priest. All of us, as cynical and tumid as we were, were deeply impressed. It was really something to give up the potential of the adult world for the priesthood. Potential? At seventeen, that meant quiff. My mother has never pressed me about having left the Church, which I guess was part of her arrangement with my father, no overt religionizing. But I’m sure she harbors fond wishes for my return to the fold, and I suspect that my meeting with Francis, which she arranged, was part of a secret scheme to get me back in touch with things sanctified. Well, I picked him up at her place and took him to the nicest restaurant in the neighborhood, the kind of restaurant the local judge takes his wife to once a week and ordinary wage earners celebrate their wedding anniversaries at, and we were given the finest treatment because of Francis’s as yet unearned Roman collar. The captain knew him and his parents and made a great thing over him and me, placed us at a quiet roomy table, came over with every course to see how it was going. Our waiter was a big Italian-American in his late twenties, a smoothy, a tough, a cocksman, whose true values obviously didn’t coincide with the Church’s. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what kind of guy he struck me as, married probably, three kids—which was why he was waiting on tables and not hanging around a candy store—but also he was banging some broad on the side, with ambitions to make it in the local annex of the Mafia. Get the picture? And yet he was overwhelmed at serving a man of the cloth. I felt like saying, paisan, spill the soup in this eunuch’s lap, it’s one thing for your wife and mother to defer to priests, but you’re a big boy, you know better, grab your fly and ask him if he wants a bite, don’t fawn on this nothing. Well, Francis took all the attention as if it was coming to him, and I made a discovery last night. I never understood the attraction of the priesthood before, but seeing this four-eyed, peckerless little vacuity opposite me, I realized what a magnificent solution it was for him. What would Francis be without that collar, without the skirts of the Church, the ready blessings, the power to loose and to bind, the mumbled Latin and the talismanic breviary? Either a fag, practicing or frustrated, or an impotent married man. In both cases his true situation would be apparent, and he would be the object of contempt for our big wop waiter. Even the mothers, the aging ladies of the parish, would know that something was amiss and avoid him, whisper about him, discreetly warn their sons away. I mean, maybe he’d run the local library, teach school or start a Boy Scout troop. But the mark would be on him. And if he married, he’d take to drink, finally shoot himself at forty. But now, here, Roman-collared, he was a master of the community. All loved him, all respected him. And if he has any humanness in him, as I suspect Francis has, he will be clever enough to make cutely sacrilegious jokes about the Pope, so that after he leaves the households of parishioners, where he has been served roast beef and rich red wine and homemade apple pie, all will say together Isn’t Father Francis a regular guy! The roughs, the big-nosed Irish souses, shame of their children, will say of him He’s all right! Now, I’m not sure Francis has this talent, maybe he’ll be a prissy priest, insisting on absurd proprieties, striving for unattainable virtues, but I don’t think so. He swallows the social sweets too well. When we came into the restaurant, the captain said to him How’s it coming along, then paused, wanting to use the proper term of address, but, not knowing what it was, simply smiled at the end of the question. And what did Francis say? St. Francis has not despaired of his namesake yet. O my hairy balls! St. Francis has not despaired of his namesake yet. Well, this priestling played me the same way, revealing little peccadilloes of his housemaster and his theology professor, how some fellow seminarians smoke on the sly, hints of jealousies and backbiting—all very human, you understand—but nothing at all about pulling their pricks into black socks in the quiet of the night, nothing about lusting after the new blond underclassman’s rectal aperture. Jesu, I don’t know why I should be furzerzled over so patent a nothing as potential Father Francis, except that someday he’ll set up in a parish and titillate the nuns with his toothy smile and tell thirteen-year-old boys in the confessional that they are wasting their life’s blood by laying hand on tool. I suppose there’s just no being an ex-Catholic, you have to be an anti-Catholic. I wish sometimes I could be big about religion, see the greater wisdom in it for the masses, see it as an unconscious folk creation that gives the common man the only dignity he’s likely to get on earth. But I can’t, I’ve been a victim, and when I think of Mary with her fanaticism, which in forty years will be an ancient crankiness, I could cry. Well, after dinner, during which Francis much patted lips with napkin and belly with hand, already adopting the manner of the mouth-centered middle-aged monsignor, I took him downtown to my digs. What else to do with him? He was on leave from the seminary because his mother had died, and he wanted something more from the evening, some other benefit. And through the purest good fortune, who should come to my door but Jose. I drafted him, excellent fellow. Seeing that I had company, at first he wanted to flee, but seeing more closely that my company was collared by Rome, he drafted gladly. What an evening! He fetched the remainder of the cognac I had given him, as well as his latest Very Tale, and proceeded to do his stuff. As the wind of time, he said, continues to blow against man, loosening his grip at the top of the evolutionary ladder, only the Church can maintain him. God in His infinite wisdom has created this institution to save us from history. Do you realize, Father—I had explained that Francis was only a seminarian, but Jose chose not to hear—that only the Church allows men to be human, allows them to err. All other orthodoxies demand perfection. If I am an intellectual, my taste must be faultless. If I am a Communist, my views must never vary from the State’s. If I am a liberal, I must be tolerant even of reaction. Only Mother Church allows for imperfection, and thus she will be mankind’s salvation. Mother Church understands that man is weak, that he lusts and envies, hates and covets, doubts and despairs, that he has an animal heritage. I admire fascism, do my progressive friends permit me this? I believe the world is in a stranglehold of Jewish conspiracy, do my Jewish friends forgive me this? I have a certain distaste for the flesh of woman, which you yourself no doubt understand, Father, will my psychoanalytically oriented friends let me lie? They insist that I lay. And then, in honor of Father Francis, Jose read his latest Very Tale, a wild story about a Spanish priest, which he claims will show children the strange ways of God’s will. It seems that after serving a small village in central Spain for some years this priest experienced a moral crisis. He came to the ugly conclusion that he was not accomplishing his mission. The peasants and petty merchants of his parish kept coming back to him, over and over again, with the same sins. This man was a thief, that woman an adulteress, their sins seemed to be part of their characters. O they were always repentant at the time of confession, always determined to do better in the future, but what good was this when he knew their intentions would come to nothing? It got so that he could tell almost to the day when a given parishioner would turn up with his or her particular sin. He berated them for their frailty, imposed severe penances, described the terrors of damnation, and they would weep and beg forgiveness and make resolutions. But always, in a week, a month, a year, they came back. He even tried withholding absolution from the worst offenders, but one of them died. The priest was overwhelmed with remorse, feeling that he personally was accountable for the man’s damnation, and he made a special trip to Madrid to see his bishop. Well, the bishop was a worldly type and told the priest not to worry about the dead man, that his desire to confess was no doubt sufficient to have gained him preferment in the afterlife. For the future, however, the bishop warned, the priest must not withhold absolution except in the most extraordinary circumstances. These are simple people, the bishop explained, they cannot see too far ahead, and, besides, he should have more faith in God’s mercy and the machinery of the Church. Well, this didn’t satisfy the priest. He returned to his village and consulted Canon Law, which plainly states that a man dying in mortal sin is damned, and he knew only too well that most of his flock were hardly cool from confession before they returned to their evil ways. Now it so happened that shortly after his trip to Madrid one of the greatest sinners in the village came to the priest to confess. This man confessed once a year like clockwork, just before Easter, and each time he was loaded with enough transgressions to damn him ten times over. To make matters worse the man was in bad health. He would surely die before another year had passed. There was only one thing to do. After hearing the man’s sins and giving him absolution, the priest followed him home and on a lonely stretch of road dispatched him with a piece of broken pew he had taken along for the purpose. Now, on the one hand, the priest was cast down because he had committed the first mortal sin of his life by killing another human being. On the other hand, he was joyous at having sent an otherwise lost soul to God. And even if he himself were to die at this moment, he reasoned, the score would be one up, one down—not bad if you consider that many are called and few are chosen. The next day he similarly saved an old lady. Now the score was two to one. Well, the priest was so stimulated by his success that he volunteered for missionary work in Africa, and there he did wonders. Assigned to a tiny tribe in the interior, he not only converted the natives to Christianity as Europeans practice it, he also sold them on his sure-fire salvation technique. As new babies were born he baptized them and clunked them on the head with the piece of pew. And the adults he didn’t have to sneak up behind any more. They came to him voluntarily to be clunked off to heaven. Well, in a matter of two years he had the whole tribe safely established in paradise, and now that his work was done he decided it was his duty to return to civilization and seek forgiveness for himself. But it so happened that before he could reach another priest he succumbed to jungle fever and went to hell. There Satan, peeved at his achievements, committed him to a special part of hell where the torments were worse than in any other. Despite this dire punishment, however, the priest was completely happy, so great was his satisfaction at having saved two hundred and sixty-one souls for God. Well, I don’t know whether it was the cognac or not, but Francis said that he thought in many ways it was a very beautiful story. Jose was delighted, and since I was falling asleep, he invited Francis back to his room, where, he said, he would read him his interpretation of Genesis, which showed that Eden was lost to man because Eve, overreaching herself, tried to seduce the Lord.