Precious Moments -- or, My Little Golden Book of Retroviruses

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Mar 26, 2004

Mommy, why is Daddy always so angry when we come home from church?

He gets upset because Fr.Tim makes changes in the Mass he shouldn't, dear.

But WHY does Fr. Tim do things he shouldn't, Mommy?

(Oh dear. Do I give her the charitable or the uncharitable response?)

Well, Melissa, Fr. Tim spends two or three nights a week at the "Lost & Found" downtown -- that's a kind of pub or tavern for men who like men the way they shouldn't like them. Many times they do bad things and germs get inside Fr. Tim that compromise his immune sys -- let me try again. You know the policemen that guard the bank on 59th Street? If all those policemen got sick, anybody could come into the bank and take all the money out, right? Well, the germs that Fr. Tim's men-friends put inside him kill all the bank guards, and then other germs come in that make Fr. Tim really, really sick. No, not real bank guards, honey, pretend guards. So he spends ten months out of every twelve with a series of low-grade secondary inflammations that cause -- sorry. Fr. Tim has lots of infections -- fevers -- that eventually find their way into his cortical tissue -- his brain -- and bring about a kind of dementia that can be sporadically triggered by stress or fatigue. Oh honey, don't cry. All I meant to say was that Fr. Tim is not a well man and sometimes he says silly, silly things. But he's doing the best he can.

That's the charitable answer. Here's the uncharitable one:

Fr. Tim hates the Church and wants her to die. Daddy doesn't.