Draft
Back to Land’s End Stories: Contents Page
Saint Ignatius High School Stories: Charles Henry, S.J.
To this day, nearly fifty years after the event, Father Henry’s gratuitous act of spiritual violence still astonishes me. Out of nowhere, he served up one fantastic moment of revelation: that a priest could be so casually cruel and vindictive. A split second, like pulling a trigger on an uncomprehending bystander. So small a gesture, almost imperceptible to others, it is amazing how one single act of brutality can determine an entire life, his and mine. An evil act wounds not only the victim, but also the perpetrator, forever. It revealed him to be a surprisingly evil man; and it created in me a profound hatred of the Jesuits and eventually the entire Catholic Church. How coult it be otherwise? How could it not be seared forever into both of our souls? And it happened just like that. And I let him get away with it.
Father Charles Henry, S.J., of the two first names Startlingly,breathtakingly
for how long had it been eating at him?beware the cassock-wearing hypocrite mouthing all that Christian humbug
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” So he began his last confession, as a freshman at a Jesuit high school in San Francisco. They had been led from their classrooms in large groups, double-file, to a larger room set up with makeshift confessionals where they were to relieve themselves of their sins and cleanse their souls of all the vileness that fourteen-year old boys carry with them. The procession, punctuated by the Jesuit keepers in their dirty black cassocks and their black scowls, flowed through the halls and down the wide stairs, reminiscent of other such processions with more nefarious ends.
ravens, blackbirds, crow, vulture
This bizarre regimented ritual of mass-produced confessions
McFadden, Carroll, Hyde, Hyde, Phipps, Henry
(an …………outpost in an…………outpost)
Henry turned out to be one those malicious, vindictive, rock-throwing Anglo-Irish-American Jesuit priests. There you have it, all at once, no way to deliver it slowly. Graceless…
I’ve come to pay for my sins. Does it matter that the debt collectors are all dead?
I’ve come to collect the debts owed to me for their sins. But the deadbeats are all just that, dead. I am the repo man, and want my life back. Why, oh why, did I give them so much credit? Not one paid me back. They should be dunned; their wages garnisheed.
Janos got his revenge on me. He didn’t pay the school bills, and didn’t tell me
Meunier and his callous anti-semitism (“Fuck a duck, and screw a Jew.” Ha ha. Or, in French class, “Bon Jew.” Hilarious.
