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Show Anting Alone Page 288 such an inflated sense of their own wisdom that they can just cavalierly destroy the lives of other people? Take away foodstamps from thousands of poor single mothers in Salt Lake City's slums simply in order to exhibit your godlike powers for the entertainment of your wealthier constituents. Exploit your non-literary fame, toss together a couple of cheap bestsellers that help to destroy an already floundering church in the minds of a few million readers by portraying priests as arrested adolescents leering on the sidelines of life, drooling for vicarious sex. (Incidentally, from what she'd heard and read and seen of this Father Greeley creature, Polycarpana felt it was safe to assume that those priests must be self-portraits.) And, with a flick of your Florentine pencil, commit a once-young, energetic, beautiful nun to Saint Francis Hospital's psychiatric ward for the sin of loving somebody. Men like these are belching monsters of their own infinite egotism - an egotism that only the male of the species can develop, must develop, to one degree or another, in order to survive in America. See what becomes of a man without a trace of that puffery? One such man weeps and bleeds gently right outside this bathroom door even now, all alone in a bus that's speeding him directly to someplace whose very name he probably hasn't even bothered to guess at. Had Bopp ever wept in his life? She doubted he'd even bled. Whenever the whim struck Father Wagstaff Bopp, he would put a leash on Liebchen, his doberman attack dog, and would walk the twenty yards from his elegant stone rectory to the ramshackle frame refectory, in order to allow the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration the |
