Sex and the Single Priest

on the radical possibility of living for the spirit and the flesh

A tall assured man came to the switchboard at Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in Maryland, on the night of March 21, 1969, and asked the woman there to buzz students Joe O'Rourke and Mike Dougherty.

"Who shall I say is calling?"

"They'll know."

Dougherty reached the phone first. "There is someone to see you," the woman said.

"Who is it?"

"He won't say."

"Describe him."

"Tall, gray hair, blue eyes."

"OK." He hung up.

The next day, Joe O'Rourke and Mike Dougherty, along with seven others, were arrested while publicly destroying files taken from the Dow Chemical Company's offices in Washington. The woman at the switchboard, Barbara Meyer, of vague age and mixed girlish and maternal feelings toward "her boys" at Woodstock, was disturbed. "That man who came last night is the one who got them into trouble," she told her family. They asked if she knew who he was. "No, but I could pick him out of a crowd of thousands. That height and those eyes."

During the trial of the D. C. Nine, Mrs. Meyer got to know "that man." He came to Woodstock often, and seemed just as concerned as she about "the boys." He had not joined them in their act, she learned, because he was already convicted of one felony in Baltimore and was planning another for Catonsville. Everyone called him Phil--except Mrs. Meyer, who made a stiffish point of addressing him as Father Berrigan.

Joe and Mike were the first Woodstock men to be caught in an illegal action, and Mike's New York superior decided to delay his ordination, at least until he had undergone his trial--perhaps, if it came to that, until he had served his prison term. The New York seminarians in Maryland resented this; a carload of them drove up to New York and exacted an agreement that their classmate would be made a priest. Although Dougherty knew of these efforts, and let them go forward, he had other things in mind. One night, after a grueling session on the witness stand, he called Woodstock around midnight to summon friends back to Washington. A priest of their circle was about to marry him and a girl who had camped with the peaceniks at Woodstock. This dismayed some of Dougherty's supporters, not all of whom agreed with his politics; they had, after all, opposed their superior at some risk to their own priestly careers.

Not long ago, those who left the priesthood did it quietly, under cover of night, not letting others know they had to leave. A tacit agreement had all along been assumed, that such men were lost to the community--an embarrassment to some, temptation for others--never to be welcomed back. Departure was to remain, for others, unthinkable, an option neither considered nor imaginable. Even in the mid-Sixties, poet and novelist John L'Heureux, studying for ordination at Woodstock, told of a secret party thrown for a departing seminarian as a daring and unique act that "no one [would] believe"--the violent wrench had been softened, friendships reaffirmed at parting, in a way that old seminary rules were designed to forestall.

Entry into the seminary was an abrupt and rending thing, full of symbolic renunciation; similarly, one should leave with a sharp break. Taboos were cultivated--inhibitions to prop up the disciplines of poverty, celibacy, clerical apartness. The priest was safe inside this inviolable zone, the area marked out by his stiff collar's magic circle. Being in or being out was a matter of choice, clear-cut. Either or. One could not be both.

But all such walls of division have come down in recent years, "the house" fraying out into "the world," students for the priesthood coming and going casually, bringing their friends in with them, even meeting their future wives at the seminary. There had always been priests who married, but new questions arose in this context: If priests were now judged by professional academic norms, why should they leave the institution in which their competence had been established? And so another taboo was shattered: Priests who married would no longer be pariahs at Catholic schools. Attempts to get rid of them were met with legal suits, appeals to the American Association of University Professors and fights over the principle of tenure.

The problem arose for Woodstock after the college had moved to New York City. A bright young moral theologian, Giles Milhaven, married and his students asked the administration to allow him to stay on--not only as professor but also as priest and Jesuit. He agreed with the request in principle, though superiors begged him to spare them embarrassment. Milhaven saw the uneasiness that would be caused by his staying, both for old friends on the faculty and for his new wife--added strains placed on the early trials of marriage. Besides, he was a qualified professor and the college was uncertain of its academic future. He accepted an offer from Brown University. The students wished him well. But some thought he had let them down by acquiescing to old rules, perpetuating obsolete taboos.

That was the situation when Mike Dougherty (of the Dow Chemical trial) showed up again at Woodstock, along with his wife and their new baby. He was still appealing his conviction, along with Joe O'Rourke, and he wanted to remain active for peace. The Jesuits made room for his family in their apartments, on what seemed at first a temporary basis. When he expressed a desire to take his wife back to see her parents in California (where they had stayed for some time after their marriage), a collection was taken up throughout the Woodstock community. The seminarians--some with particular relief--dug into exiguous salaries to finance the trip. Yet though the money disappeared, the Doughertys didn't. The plans for the trip faded along with the funds for it.

Woodstock students were divided in the matter. At last a house meeting was called to thrash out the problem. The defenders of the family were clear in their position: Mike was doing work for which the house had prevailing sympathy; he should be supported. The opposition was ill focused. Some maintained that a baby around the house was an imposition; but undisturbed leisure and easy access to the TV are not very high grounds on which to vindicate the sacredness of cloister. How could the Jesuits kick out a Catholic folk hero--one of the D. C. Nine, for God's sake--to preserve Colonel Blimp's favorite leather chair in the lounge? Others used an argument from the concept of religious poverty--Jesuit students live on the contributions of benefactors who do not intend, when donating money, to house and feed non-Jesuits in a seminary. But that, too, was easily answered. The donations are given so that Jesuits may carry on their apostolate, and most of those where the Doughertys lived would agree that peace work is part of that mission--more a part of it than work in laboratories or classrooms, on which donated funds are gladly expended. Besides, Joe O'Rourke is genially candid about use of his order's funds: "We should be religious Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to feed the poor. Half the people who donate to us are making money from the war system or from exploitative corporations and hope they can buy their way into heaven with some Masses said for them."

It seemed to some that Dougherty came out of the meeting with stronger claims upon the resources of the house than many of those who were still Jesuits. What is given the order is given for service: given to be given back in the form of active ministry. The donations that make helping others possible also make it imperative; without this reason, nothing would be given in the first place. Thus, most Jesuits were for Dougherty's staying. Given the poor quality of arguments against his staying, it's a wonder they did not all end up on his side. But the debate arose initially, one suspects, because of arguments no one was willing to voice. These sophisticated young men were afraid to be "square" and bring up the question of celibacy, the traditional basis for cloister. If they are to remain celibate, it must be with eyes open, not as naïve boys shut up monastically in cells. With all of New York around them, how can they shut out the regular contemplation of other men's sexual fulfillment? Indeed, sex takes far grosser forms than married life in almost any New York street. Families live just down the hall in the Woodstock students' apartment building. What does it matter, then, that one family lives in the next room?

So goes the argument--or so it would have gone if even one man had spelled out such obvious things. Yet, in practice, it does make a difference that the community, no matter how close it lives to the world and its cares, does not even try to create a celibate style of its own. If celibacy is not a mere accident and anomaly but a thing chosen for its positive values, then that choice and those values should take external form, actual and symbolic. To strive for an "inner" celibacy that needs no outer expression is to dismiss the body and fall back on a simple-minded view of the soul as a detachable "ghost in the machine." The sophisticates turned out to be more naïve (continued on page 108)Sex and The Single Priest(continued from page 100) than older guardians of the cloister walls.

It is also naïve to think that the life of a religious order can continue if there is no difference between staying inside and going outside it. If there is nothing distinctive about this way of life, why belong to it? The crucial matter is not whether or not priests will marry in the future or religious orders find some new kind of communal discipline--I think both developments should take place and will (with time). What matters is that liberated young religious men be honest with themselves and realistic about what is at issue. Yet liberals are as subject to bad faith on the subject of sex as any target of their criticism. That was true of the nondebate at Woodstock College. It is true of many priests who leave to get married. There is continual nervous insistence that the priest had other objections to Church discipline, not merely to celibacy--as if an immaturity or shallowness attends any man who leaves "only" to marry. Friends would like to represent his act as one of all-inclusive protest against ecclesiastical backwardness. The real issue has been authority, or reform, or social concerns. And then--well, yes--as long as the protest involved leaving the active exercise of priesthood, one might as well get married, too.

There are some truths hidden in this line of argument, but they're twisted by the hiding process. The latent desire is to make marriage or nonmarriage incidental to much larger issues--which is rather an insult to any woman married to a priest. Not only was the man not "led astray" by her personally, their whole life together is reduced to an after-thought, made the vocational adjunct to more important decisions. The lucky woman is a beneficiary of her husband's dissatisfaction with the Roman Curia.

Why this denial that marriage can in itself be a worthy motive for vocational change? The argument is no doubt framed in response to right-wing prurience, which reduces all valid criticisms of the Church to mere excuses for getting married. Faced with these sexual obsessions. Church reformers insist that other reasons for dissatisfaction with the ministry do exist, that there are ways of repressing priests other than the sexual, that Church complicity in evil cannot simply be reduced to a man's desire for a woman. But this response is too symmetrical, framed to meet the other side on common ground. The prude says priests leave just to get married--other arguments are merely covers for concupiscence. His opponent answers that priests do not leave just to get married--other arguments can express good reasons for dissent. A tacit agreement has been reached that sex comes low in the scale of concerns--when priestly defectors are accused of submission to this inferior consideration, their defenders try to acquit them of it, forgetting in the process that sex is not something of which a man needs to be acquitted.

Both sides, in other words, treat sex as a separable part of life, something that can be placed over against other "issues." They do not recognize the way sex permeates all of life: the life of a man, of society, of a church. The priest who resents being set apart from life--political and intellectual, as well as social--cannot tick off what is sexual and what is nonsexual in his desire to re-enter the human community. Those who believe in such neat divisions have retained some of the sterile habit of mind they are attacking.

This attitude is not surprising. Not only the Catholic Church but all Christian history--indeed, the whole Western religious tradition--is shot through with bad faith on the subject of sex. It shows in the customary defense made for a celibate clergy. Lack of a family is supposed to open a man to all people, make him more accessible, able to give himself wholly to others. If he had his own children, he would devote himself first to them, only secondarily to others. He would not have time to do all that priests should do. What is given to his family would be taken from what is given to his flock.

Merely to state this argument is to reveal its absurdity. Priests are not more accessible than other men, but less--at both the literal and the symbolic level. Most Catholics have easier access to their (married) doctor than to their (unmarried) pastor. I can more easily talk to my Senator than to my bishop. Many things explain this remoteness, but the most obvious explanation takes the form of a vicious circle: The priest (it is said) should remain celibate to be less remote; and then a remote life style is built up around him to keep him celibate. Grim rectory, forbidding chancery, sealed-off seminary, the "brand" of collar and black clothes--these are all meant to keep a man "safe," even when they destroy the justification for his remaining safe.

This "practical" argument of accessibility is based on a psychological fallacy, the quantification of love--as if one had a fixed amount to give and what goes to the family is lost to all others. It is everyone's experience that the more one loves, the more one can love, that love is denied not by intensity of love directed elsewhere but by general lovelessness and desiccation of spirit. (It is interesting that Catholic authorities abandon the quantum theory of love when they move from the question of clerical celibacy to that of birth control; none of them argue that the big family reduces love, that what one gives to a third or fourth child is necessarily subtracted from the first or second.)

Even if the quantum approach were valid, it would not serve as a defense of celibacy as it now exists, since most priests do not live by it, any more than they live by the norm of greater accessibility. If they did, they would seek to develop wider forms of love, social forms of giving and total ministry--yet the men most adamant on retaining celibacy are also most opposed to social activism. They try to restrict the range of services to be rendered by a priest. Some in this group are the victims of their training, so much of it focused on the repression of sexual love. This amounts to a systematic undermining of all kinds of love, which are all, in their own way, sexual, since they have to do with one's sense of self, and therefore with sexual identity.

The fact that sex itself, as well as marriage, is denied in this training is symbolized by nuns' old habits, which made breasts and hips not only invisible but nearly unimaginable. This explains that frisson of illogical guilt felt by two little boys in Elizabeth Cullinan's House of Gold when they catch a glimpse of the nun without her headdress. Her short hair covered only by a white cap is enough to suggest all the body's shame of nakedness. Not only breasts and thighs were to be hidden but also calves and hair. The face could not be entirely veiled, if nuns were to do practical work in the schools; but it was framed, cosmeticless and with very little mobility, in a stiff coif apparatus, cut off from the rest of the body as if floating above it--a picture hung on a wall or a waif face of indeterminate age and sex glimpsed through the grating of a cell.

This deliberate effacement of all womanly attributes was meant to affect others as well as to guard the woman inside. She was not to be made available as an object for concupiscence. Because of this laundering of possible responses to her, she experienced a diminishing reality. She was a neuter, felt and treated as such; and she had, for reasons of self-preservation, to shrink into this assigned state, learn to be content with it, not venturing out, not trying any but the most tested gestures of human affection or need.

Even when nuns were "humanized" in jokes and funny stories, there were unspoken rules to be observed. One could show their little foibles and vanities, as long as they were not feminine vanities--Ingrid Bergman up at bat during recess; Celeste Holm playing tennis in her habit; or a long-unsuspected, then dramatically revealed wizardry at playing marbles. A nun could even touch you, as long as it was a teammate's pat on the (continued on page 195)Sex and The Single Priest(continued from page 108) back. She could be something other than a neuter, as long as that something was a little boy.

Yet nuns often survived their training better than priests--remained more human, more spontaneous and loving. They were saved by another Catholic prejudice--the view that women are basically emotional, not capable of much reason. The priest, by contrast, had a specific duty and ability to "rise above" the emotional life. He was (or should have been) more a creature of reason, and he had more occasions of danger. The nun could stay in her convent, but the priest had to go out into the world--to deathbeds for the last sacraments, to banks for the parish mortgage. Yet even this mobility was felt as a dangerous traffic with the secular. A success in the priesthood was the man who could work his way toward isolation--up the hierarchic rungs to that large office where a bishop could be all alone with his ledgers.

The priest's own instincts fit in with those of many Catholic laymen, who rejoiced in the fact that priests were aloof and different. "We would not respect priests so much if they were just like us." That judgment was betrayed by its selective character. A priest could be "just like us" in enjoying food or sports or pets. Despite the fact that Irish Catholics have suffered a good deal for their love of the bottle, Catholics have not expected their priests to set an example of abstinence in this regard. They can be just like others in most weaknesses--in all of them, actually, except one. If they resemble them by "indulging in" sex, they lose their respect.

Why are we allowed to respect doctors and lawyers, Presidents and Senators, Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis without demanding that they be separated from their sexuality? Where priests are concerned, we were told that having no family would make a man more open and caring. If that were true, then we should require celibacy from the President, who has his hand on the nuclear-destruct button and needs all the humanitarian inhibitions we can place upon him. But of course it is not true. The reason Catholics admired celibacy in their priests was simple--they still believed, despite formal professions to the contrary, that sex, though not quite evil, somehow sullies, makes a person subtly contaminated or second-rate. The married person is allowed sex--a minimum amount, anyway; enough to beget children and blunt concupiscence--as a concession to weakness. The better way is that of the priest, who is "above all that"--an attitude expressed whenever women said they could not go to confession to a married priest (one not neuter, above all that, a nonman).

Thus Catholics were sorted out into first-class (priests and nuns) and second-class citizens (the married laity), with an unrecognized group of resident aliens (the unmarried laity). It was unfortunate that the debate on states of life began at all, and doubly unfortunate that it drew on the Aristotelian idea of perfection as self-sufficiency.

The religious life of the three vows became the state of perfection (martyrs, since they were considered perfect, became first-class citizens honoris causa, even if they had been married). Other celibates, those without the formal profession of vows, were lower in the scale of things--priests outside the religious orders or pious widows, too old to take the vows, leading a single life of dedication to God (widows were also "above all that"). But widows fell back into the second-class category if they remarried. This second stratum was a different world as far as merit was concerned: The great class distinction was given a spurious Biblical sanction by sharply dividing Christ's commands from his counsels. Hard sayings such as "Turn the other cheek" or "Become a stranger to father and mother" or "Go and sell all and give to the poor" were held to be additions to the minimal course that could be steered to salvation. The "ordinary" Christian strove for salvation--to scrape through, as it were. The more generous strove to live up to the full Gospel by adding things onto the preaching that made for salvation, obeying not only what Christ commanded but what he merely counseled.

The result was a professionalization of virtue: If one really did seek perfection, he would hardly do it in the second-class context. To get married was to admit you were not in the big race, not even in the running of the perfection stakes. Perfection came as a package deal--true poverty, chastity and obedience were all to be found together, in the religious life. Note the quiet assumption that chastity (sexual virtue) was synonymous with celibacy. Terrible misconceptions were bred by this set of norms: saintly Christian laymen feeling they could never practice the full Gospel--indeed, had no right to do so; lax priests and nuns feeling superior "by virtue of their state"; the reversal of all the Gospels' reversals--the last making themselves first; the idea of competitive virtue reintroduced after Christ had mocked it in his own roles of slave and clown and criminal, had said the kingdom was saved as a whole, not splintered into individuals.

Perhaps the worst injustice, in this systematized round of wrongs done to others and to oneself in the name of the Gospel, was embodied in this fact: The religion that gave such honor to celibacy was far more cruel than most to the unmarried laity. This, too, was a result of the professionalization of the counsels. If a person were seeking perfection, he would enter the state of perfection. If people were equally holy outside that state, what would happen to that state's claims, to all the prerogatives of professionals? Bachelors and old maids did not belong to the union. They had not chosen, had only been rejected--nobody wanted them. A nun was the pride of an old-fashioned Catholic family; an old maid was its shame.

It should be clear by now that all the arguments for institutionalized celibacy are dodges and deceits. The Church's problem lay in its double heritage, a Hebrew tradition firmly rooted in the goodness of the Creator and His gifts ("It is not good that the man is alone") and a classical tradition insistent on the body-soul dualism, treating the body as enemy and encumbrance. Some young Catholics have rediscovered the bias against sex in early Christian Fathers and treated it with a judgment as ahistorical as the blanket approval of all patristic texts. We get endless replays, now, of the idea that Saint Augustine laid down repressive rules for the Church out of his own guilt-ridden past and half-shed Manichaeism. But anything he said against sex can be topped by even the most casual reading in late classical authors or early Christian heretics. Augustine's importance, in this context, lies not where he echoed the culture but where he opposed it--opposed the Platonizers by saying this life is properly imperfect, even in its Christian sectors; opposed the Manichaeans by saying marriage is a good in itself (though not the highest one); opposed those who, like Tertullian, said men should not bring children into this imperfect state of trial; opposed the prejudices against bastards by lavishing praise and love on his son (defiantly named God's Gift); and opposed those who were critical of his "confessions" as too frank about sex.

Over against his background and environment, Augustine was on the side of life--and that is the point: There is cultural struggle, all the way, in man's attitude toward sex. The ahistorical mind cannot take this in. It strives for one rule, a perduring thing, one discerned from earliest to latest times, dimly or clearly grasped but always there. Such a predisposition to changelessness is destructive wherever we find it, but nowhere more so than in dealing with sex--where, as Chesterton said, we are all a little mad, and those maddest who think they are most rational. There is always clash and tension in the charged area of sex. Those who deny this by saying it is all a blessing are as idiotic as those who think of it only as a curse. The Catholic Church, in trying to deny such contradictions, has been forced in an eminent way to embody them: All its formulas say sex is good, the Creator's gift, while all its instincts and many of its actions say just the opposite.

The whole Church teaching went astray when two virginities were misinterpreted--that of Jesus and that of his mother. The Hebrew world was as harsh on unmarried people of its day as has been any Catholic community of the past--a common prejudice in tribes seeking perpetuity of lineage. Why, then, are Mary and Jesus presented in the Gospels as virgins? Bible scholars argue that the virgin birth can be interpreted only in conjunction with the schematic genealogy of Jesus, as a balance of continuity against discontinuity. Jesus was the heir of David, fulfiller of the kingly dreams, yet not in the line of expected hopes. He fulfills unexpectedly (his kingdom not being of this world) and represents a new departure, a beginning; a birth as unindebted to the past as Adam's own. He is both the heir of David and the canceler of David's line, of all earthly hopes of power; the heir of Adam and his own Adam--second Adam, man returning to God, as the first Adam had come from Him. So, as the Spirit moved through an inchoate universe, to call Adam up in abrupt creative act, the Spirit once more moves over "virgin territory" to begin anew with another Adam. Mary is virgin not because she is "above all that"--though her likenesses in the modern age have been as vague about breasts and hips as those of a habited nun. She was virginal as the dust from which Adam came--innocent, as yet, of history; for history was about to be reversed.

Then what of the virgin Jesus? He did not "fall through woman," it is true--though Genesis does not have the misogynist and anti-sexual mind of this patristic interpretation of Adam's fall. Adam fell out of his self-sufficient isolation into human need--into the complex possibilities created by the existence of another person. He fell to his "own flesh," the rib that yearned outward and turned back wearing a different face, and he fell because it is not good for man to be alone. The fall was an escape from Aristotelian self-sufficiency into history and mutual need. Adam is the sacrament of the beginning, mere promise; he could not be more. Jesus is a sign of the end, of the Gospel's disturbance of ordinary life, and of Christianity's union with Jesus in that "last time" he lives.

That is the Gospel message, one very far from Catholics' feeling that an ideal mother (e.g., Mary) would not actually, well, spread her legs; do that; take that thing into her, even for the noble purpose of producing me. (Sure, Mom's all right, she couldn't help it--it's the price of original sin, there's no other way anymore. But if only Adam hadn't fallen, then she could have been a mother and still have been as pure as Mary.) And the Gospel message is very far from the claim that anyone who wants to follow Jesus must be a virgin like Jesus. One can no more be Jesus (shouldering expensive tombstones down all over Catholic cemeteries on the third day after burial) than one can be Adam and draw a woman from one's ribs. The sign is, in both cases, a sign, a teaching--something pointing outward to fact, not contained in itself for itself.

Only once in the four Gospels does Jesus seem to call men to celibacy (Matthew 19:12) as "eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven"--and that passage has probably been as badly misinterpreted as the Onan story in the Old Testament. A number of modern scholars have returned to Clement of Alexandria's understanding of the verse, which involves no reference to celibacy (see Q. Quesnell, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 1968, and Harvey Cox, For Christ's Sake, Playboy, January 1970). Otherwise, Scripture contains only Paul's commendation of virginity to the Corinthians (I Corinthians 7)--and even there, he makes it clear that "I have no commandment of the Lord." He writes in the very shadow of the final crisis (the "impending calamity," in which "our time is a contracted one"). Out of the urgency of his own preaching activities before the end of the world, he recommends that no one bother to change his state in life--not slaves, not the married / nor the unmarried. "Let every man remain in the calling in which he was called." Why set up household in a crumbling world? Paul writes on the run, calling others to come with him if they can--there is so much to be done before the end.

When the expectation of an immediate end to the world disappeared, Paul's norms had to undergo a change. Men thought in terms of greater permanence, while adapting the idea of "the last time" to new uses. Is there a place for celibacy in a last time so reinterpreted?

Some think so--including two radical priests, Philip Berrigan and his brother, Daniel. They have seen single nuns and priests risk jail with easier minds than some who would be leaving spouses and children behind. Indeed, so critical have they been of the modern family--as a "sitting duck for the state"--that some think they are trying to limit the full Gospel once more, set up another clerical monopoly on it. I think this is a misunderstanding of their criticism. As Dan Berrigan puts it, the family is weak insofar as it meshes with other institutions as part of the suicidal working of our system: "The middle class breeds kids to become social engineers, the poor breeds kids to kill--and their progeny stays in conflict with each other and supports the state." The answer is not for everyone to go off to seminaries--for the institutional church is also engaged with the system, and it uses celibacy not to invite risk but to minimize it. The Gospel can be received by those in any state of life, as Saint Paul emphasized--and certain things (including the comatose family) can be changed only from within. But it is probably true that no change will occur without those who take special risks, wage a special kind of war upon the world. In Berrigan's words, "With regard to most of our fellows in church and state, both my brother and I are really dead men. It makes no sense not to start with that fact. We have no stake in church or state, as currently in evidence; their aims, their values, their mutual transfusions of comfort. We have said no to it all."

This kind of lonely no said to the system has nothing to do with mass-produced eunuch-servants to the Church bureaucracy. It is a way of going, individually, out to an edge of hyperawareness and risk, signifying in one's own breakaway--the most radical rejection of this order's living death. It is a highly personal way of being "dead men" to bring life back into the world, thinking in terms of ultimates, an ending to our whole scheme of things. Religious celibacy, to be justified at all, must be a radical, exceptional, exceedingly private choice related to crisis. To make of it a taming institutional device is to mock the spirit of freedom for which it should stand. Most priests, like the rest of us, have not gone far enough into danger to say, with Daniel Berrigan, "We have jail records, we have been turbulent, uncharitable, we have failed in love for the brethren, have yielded to fear and despair and pride often in our lives. Forgive us. We are no more, when the truth is told, than ignorant beset men, jockeying against all chance, at the hour of death, for a place at the right hand of the Dying One."