We’re tired! So very, very tired! Of the virus news! Of the daily numbers! Of the claustrophobia-inducing voluntary and involuntary quarantine! And, almost certainly, no one wants to think about the possibility of death tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow!

The best “confession story” of all time belongs to then newly ordained Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois from Lutcher - just between Gramercy and Paulina – Louisiana. Two weeks after ordination, Roy was asked to hear second graders’ second confessions. All went well until a towheaded young man with a Cajun accent began, “Bless me, Father. It’s been two weeks since my last confession and this is my second confession and my sins are: I disobeyed three times, I told lies four times, I fought with my little brother. And I committed adultery fourteen times.” Things went downhill from there.

The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt has sounded the alarm: “In China every day is Kristallnacht.” Writing on the eighty-first anniversary of that infamous Hitlerian night – November 3 2019, Hiatt noted, “It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka. In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.”

The conversation happened more than thirty years ago. My friend, one of the three most honest men I’ve ever known, declared with Gospel-certainty, “We don’t know anyone” affected or infected by HIV/AIDS. “Oh, wait,” interrupted his wife. “What about…? And then there’s…” The list began to grow and, in a minute or two, included six or seven men and women – all within two degrees of separation.

“They were so young! Boys! Farm boys!” he practically whispered. The urgency of his words made all the more serious by the coarseness of his voice as my friend, paralyzed now well more than three decades, sought to describe an Alabama Confederate cemetery he visited long ago.

It is coming. Surely! Certainly! Like a monstrous and all-destroying tornado still just far enough off that it cannot be seen, yet it can be heard as the air turns cold. The “them-ing,” the “they-ing,” the “those people-ing” and “other-ing” of America and, in 2020, too many cases of “Christians” and “communities of faith” are falling prey to the all-infecting “those people” message.

With all due respect to the playwright Robert Bolt, his hero, Sir Thomas More, was not A Man for All Seasons. He was a man of his time, caught-up in his own and other’s political and religious fervors, willing to send - and actually sending – those whom he believed were heretics to the Tower of London and to be burned to death at the stake.

In the earliest morning hours one day in late September 1219, avoiding the scorching heat of midday, Illuminato and his companion set out from a siege camp outside the Egyptian port city of Damietta for the encampment of the Muslim Sultan Malik al-Kamil, eight miles away.

Prevaricators! Fabricators! Fabulists! Mythomaniacs! All good words! If it were children we are speaking about, we might call them “fibbers!” But they can be applied to some American religious and political leaders – those claiming that churches, synagogues and mosques are “essential places that provide essential services.”

The Roman Catholic bishops of German have a history lesson for their American counterparts. Between 1939 and 1945, German priests went to the battlefields of Europe, administering the sacraments and consoling their war-broken soldier countrymen. German Sisters and nuns served as nurses in field hospitals, tending to the wounded.

Doctors and Nurses, Field and Food Packing Plant Workers, DACA Kids and Others. Nobody, but nobody does ceremony and ritual better than: the U.S. Marines; the United States Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment (known as “The Old Guard,” charged with guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, burials at Arlington National Cemetery and the Army’s official ceremonial unit and escort to the president; it represents what is best in our military, which itself represents what is best in us as a nation, and includes the Continental Color Guard); and, the Vatican.

Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes will host a ticker tape parade honoring health care workers and first responders as New York City’s first major event after the coronavirus crisis has passed. Perhaps. Perhaps. But remember May 7, 1985?

“God must really love drunks and fools; he made so many of them.”

Frank Flynn

Yes. We know the idea isn’t original to my father. A French version dates to at least 1708.

My “me time” (prior to the Corona virus) is mornings – ninety minutes pushing heavy (for a 74-year-old priest) dumbbells, barbells, and exercise machines and at least two or three miles on the treadmill.

My closing days in Xi’an did not begin well. Expecting a contingent of visitors from Miami, I invited David and Sicko to ride with me to the airport, serve as translators and begin a week of travel with my guests.

I’ve seen the Living God, the Living Christ. Twice. As I recall, during those days in September 1973 when I was held as a political prisoner in a locker room of Chile’s National Football Stadium and expecting my (promised) immediate execution…

Paul tells the Romans, “None of us lives to himself alone, and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” (Romans 14:8)

It’s probably three decades ago, but he remains one of the most memorable, and certainly the most odious, human beings I’ve ever met. He was a modern day Gestas, the impenitent thief crucified – by tradition – to the left of Jesus.

I prize my chalice - the cup with which I celebrate Mass. It’s wood. And it’s broken.

I love my paten – the plate on which we place the bread to be consecrated, the bread which has been consecrated at Mass.

They are the two unanswerable questions. More difficult than the final in a doctoral program in Astrophysics.

Well, one question is a little easier to answer: “How do I forget?”