There we were, the four of us:me; an academic colleague of mine; a 60-something, salt o' the earth, sarcastic Yankee pastor; and a smart Midwestern seminarian on the brink of ordination. The beer was flowing freely -- into my glass, anyway -- and we were having the kind of conversation laymen have with priests these days (which means that topics arose I'm confident never came up between clergy and laity in previous centuries). In contexts like this, I feel a little uncomfortable, constrained to somehow convey the following points:
I know you're not one of the "bad ones." Isn't it a shame how a few pervy priests and a lot of feckless bishops put good men like you under a shadow?
I know you don't say the traditional liturgy, but I hope you'll consider it, since it really is a superior expression of the meaning of the sacrament to the Novus Ordo. Which is all you've ever said. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I've got a pretty good idea how thankless, lonely, and tough your job really is. We really do appreciate you guys. Here, let me pick up the check.
No, I don't have a vocation. If we talked for another half hour, you wouldn't ask.
In the course of the evening, a topic came up that rang certain alarm bells and almost got me pounding on the table. It was nothing doctrinal; the "heresy computer" that Rev. John Hardon hard-wired into my head when I sat in on his classes from 1979-82 didn't register anything dangerous. (By contrast, when I went to the campus ministry in college, the dang thing kept going off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl.)
Instead, the issue at hand was something pastoral and subtle. Normally that's the kind of thing I'd miss. Indeed, as I've always said of my taste in art and apologetics: "Hulk no like subtlety. It confuse him. Then it make him MAD . . ."
Perhaps because it's an intellectual mistake I've made myself -- and paid for in tears and treasure -- this error, however subtle, upset and alarmed me, like finding the head of a rat floating in my soup. It's hard to just eat around it.
