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effectively, I am afraid.”
    â€œI know the college is there, of course, but little else about it.”

    Amos over brandy developed the pathology of the once Catholic college. The Second Vatican Council, providential as it no doubt was, had effects it could scarcely have envisaged. The urge to renew and update—aggiornamento—was taken by many to be an invitation to jettison the past. The Edmundites, whatever their lack of success in the country at large, had flourished in the Chicago area. Their seminary was on the grounds of the college; indeed the college was in its way an outgrowth of the seminary, thought of at first largely as a source of new vocations but soon opened to young men at large. The curriculum expanded, accreditation was won, the faculty enlarged. In the wake of the Council it was the college that wagged the tail of the Edmundites, soon eclipsing all else. And becoming increasingly secular.
    â€œPriests became rarer and rarer on the faculty, lay professors were hired, soon the standards for hiring became increasingly like those of any secular college. Today it boasts of its academic excellence, and in a sense this is justified, but at what an expense has it been bought. Raymond Bernardo was not the only Edmundite priest to abandon his calling. There was for a time a hemorrhage. It seemed to have subsided, and then he left, a blow to Father Bourke. The seminary was closed years ago.”
    â€œNo vocations?”
    â€œThat is not a problem confined to the Edmundites.”
    â€œIndeed not. You knew Raymond Bernardo?”
    â€œOnly in the way you know a youngster. And then he was assigned to the college after ordination and further studies.”
    â€œWhat did he study?”
    â€œPsychology.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œThe witchcraft of our times, Father Dowling. Freud, Jung, Reich, the whole lot as far as I can see needed exorcism rather
than therapy. It has made mincemeat of the law, of course. The assumption is that a criminal act cannot be freely performed but is the result of some obscure mechanism that need only be righted. No matter the harm that has been done to society and the demands of justice. The courts have become the anteroom to the counselor’s couch. But I am raving.”
    Father Dowling chuckled. Passionate as Amos’s words might be, his precise elocution and modulated bass voice seemed the very organ of rationality. “Bishops too have fallen prey to it. A battery of psychological tests must be taken before one can enter the seminary.”
    â€œRaymond Bernardo was named spiritual director of the Edmundite seminary on campus. He changed the title to spiritual counselor.”
    â€œHow long after ordination was he laicized?”
    White brows rose over Amos’s dark rimmed glasses. “That would suggest that he left in an orderly way. Not at all. He commandeered one of the order’s cars and credit cards and went westward with a young nun from campus ministry. Bonnie and Clyde.” Amos closed his eyes. “A dreadful movie I once saw as captive on a flight from Rome.”
    Amos did not know if young Father Bernardo had ever applied for laicization, once easily had for the asking but after the unbroken flow of men from the priesthood made more difficult.
    â€œHe married the nun?”
    â€œGod knows. The Reformation seems almost innocent compared with recent years. Luther and his nun, the vulgar talk at table, German earthiness, but at least it was accompanied by a sense of sin. No one could think less of Luther than he thought of himself. Of course he thought his actions did not matter since he was not truly free. God would throw a cloak over his corruption;
that was salvation. I suppose psychiatry is a version of that but without the sense of sin and without redemption. Sanity consists in accepting the actions we do not freely do.”
    â€œYou are becoming a philosopher, Amos.”
    â€œI am an old man who is