This publication spoke to me, primarily because I, too, was raised by an intensely religious grandfather AND father both--it's easy for them to wake up much earlier than I ever could just so they could read Liturgy of The Hours in private!
The path I walked in their stead is... weird... but even then I never lost that high-sense of wonder that they had. My upcoming Sci-Fi novel is _awash_ with mythological symbolisms and spiritualities for this exact reason!
Also, hi, welcome to Substack, Ms. Layne! Your Youtube video about Plot Twist being a Hidden Narrative Line helped me a lot. I'll be sure to watch your move on this platform with great interest.
I remember reading an essay by Eco himself in a foreward of the same book.
He wrote it was pointless to ask the author the meaning and purpose of their artwork, since when the artwork is out in the word, it does not belong to the author anymore, but to anyone that reads it, as well as its meaning (to the point of suggesting that the author should "die" after publishing, so that every reader could find their own meaning in their work).
Daphne du Maurier once said that writers should be read and not seen. I always took this to be what she meant, as well. That a writer's job is not to loom like a guardian figure over their work but to let it be read. And however it was read was how it was read.
This is a fascinating personal account! (I would read a whole book on your experience or a fictionalized version.) It seems—from my limited outside perspective here—that God gave you a way to know the Truth in the face of your circumstances, a way to strengthen your faith against the cult perversion of faith surrounding you.
Your father clearly sensed Beauty and Truth, but perhaps put too much stock into the means as opposed to the end, the Telos of faith. (I’m speculating, of course.)
I came into the Catholic Church seven years ago without knowing the inter-warring sides within it. It’s been interesting—if not disappointing—to see the human tendency toward extremes. Yet, the Holy Spirit is rich in my non-extreme Catholic life, and He has guided my faith.
I think that's certainly true. Both in terms of God's hand in everything and regarding my father. Interestingly, there's an element of this in the book. Br. William refers to books and other sources of wisdom and truth as ladders, of a sort. After we've used them to climb up in knowledge we ought to kick them away. Not just because we shouldn't develop a reliance on them, but also so the ladder can be there for the next person to use.
For a great description of New Orleans, may I recommend Tom Robbins's "Jitterbug Perfume"? He's a little New Agey and a product of his times, but an absolute master of the English language and wrote unique speculative fiction. One of the features of this book is that "beets" are on about every third page. "You could tell by the look in Rasputin's eyes that he was an eater of beets." Stars a genius waitress. You will love and hate its earthiness. "Her voice wore no pants." The slopes we have slid down... But his writing's worth it.
Oh my goodness this is quite shocking to me. I am newer to your page and youtube. Have you done a video on this? Have you thought of writing a memoir on this exact topic and part of your life? I believe I wouldn't be able to put the book down. I kept saying to myself "is this real?!" I have so, so many questions. Please write a book on this!
I loved reading this. The Eco novel that helped my awakening from faith was Foucault's Pendulum. I was struck by the realization that my church was more impressed by the occult than the divine, and Eco's argument that martyrdom was a sign of stubbornness, not necessarily truth.
If Martyrdom, Which Is The Single Thing That Sends One Straight To Heaven (just as your suicide(s) are the single thing that sends one straight to hell), is not the most potent expression of Truth, then there is no Truth. This will not be the "salve" to your shame as you swallow your pistol that you insist it is.
you were allowed to be Born here instead of directly in hell to give you this ONE chance to Repent. shame is The Natural Response to you doing the unnatural. you would be ashamed even if you never heard of God.
The six possible ways to unforgivably blaspheme are as such:
1) Despair of salvation,
2) Presumption of God’s mercy,
3) To impugn the known truth,
4) Envy of another’s spiritual good,
5) Obstinacy in sin,
6) Final impenitence.
you do the first 5 to psych yourself up for 6.
When the capital sin of pride (the delusion that "ye will be like gods" through "gnosis"/"enlightenment"/wishful thinking) is threatened (and therefore totally refuted), it turns to the mortal sin of despair:
1) hopelessness,
2) trying to damn others in your place by projection,
3) trying to normalize your sin by claiming damning you will somehow damn everyone.
you do all three in a loop.
5 steps of the reprobate:
1) mortal sin.
2) denial of God due to shame over mortal sin, hoping that makes it go away.
3) persecution of The Church due to shame over mortal sin.
4) Martyring Catholics due to shame over mortal sin.
5) suicide.
5 is immediately right after 4.
Oh, dead one, where is your sting? So much for Us being "stubborn." All that blaspheming (unforgivable and otherwise) and what did it buy you or a disgruntled jewish fellow like "eco" (perpetually FURIOUS at his Convert Parents, "oh this next unforgivable blasphemy will be the one!") that you could even fill a cup with?
Nothing. The answer is nothing.
Faith Is Founding Oneself In God, The Highest Thought That Allows All Thought To Exist.
Reason is pure intellect (provided by the Rational Soul) and is totally blind without Faith. this is the broadest form of thought and it explains why you are lashing out in the dark here.
Logic is the lowest form of thought as it requires the senses.
Venerable Fulton Sheen about you:
"Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable."
you cannot be exempt from Faith, Love, Absolute Truth, Natural Law, Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, Scripture, Reason, Logic, et al by calling Reality as mere Catholic “belief” and then claiming by not being Catholic that you are exempt from Reality.
you have no access to Love, Absolute Truth, Natural Law, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, Scripture, Faith, Reason, Logic outside of The Church.
people deny The Mystical Body Of Christ In The Catholic Church, they deny The Church As Foundation, they deny The Church As Teacher, they assume "christians" are and have been a random book club pawing around in the dark making things up as pablum to stave off nihilism.
Because you try to rob God Of His Church, God relinquishes you of your senses, then He relinquishes Us of your lives.
There nuclear bombs out there that would do less damage to your body than what your offhand absurdist statement does to the soul.
On the topic of religion, there is ZERO reason for people to come together outside of Communion and Worship, let alone zero reason for Institutions and Civilization AT ALL outside of Religion.
Societies exist to Protect Families for the sake of perpetuating Worship.
Language has zero reason to exist outside of Religion.
Knowledge and learning has zero reason to exist outside of Religion.
Without Religion, man is not only mute, he is without roots, without Community, and most of all is unable to think; this makes capable of little BUT being an artificial construct fit ONLY for being controlled, therefore the sheer antipathy of all wealth, pleasure, power, honor (the four temptations) against Religion.
In other words, in direct opposition to your totally satanic inversion of Reality: Religion is the single means by which fallen man is even CAPABLE of freedom (the capability of being Responsibility) and morality (the act of being Responsible) in our degraded state. Not to mention there is no other vector by which Love (Willing The Good Of The Other As Other), Will (Capability To Do Good), Intellect (Recognition of Natural Law), Free Will (Responsibility To Do Good), et al can be practice by man in his fallen state. Nor would Good (What Is Rightly Ordered, As God Created All To Be) or evil (the absence of Good that seeks to destroy Goodness) be knowable as even concepts, let alone observed, without Religion pulling even the top of fallen man's head out of the mud.
I'll conclude with this from GK Chesterton (though his essay "the maniac" is about you too!):
"This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool. I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.
And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world."
Once more and Forever, your curses are Consummately Returned even if this message is censored!
to say the very least, By My Final Authority you are Hereby Marked!
This reminds me very much of several conversations I had with friends after my father's death. They asked if I had ever felt my faith challenged by the contradictions he espoused later in life. I said no. It took me a long time to understand why. In the end, while William and Adso are watching the library burn, William is depressed and despondent. Adso had never seen him so melancholy or pessimistic. But he was misinterpreting William. His learned master uttered several variations on: "In the end, after all the learning, one has to proceed on one's own power." He refers to truth as a ladder used to climb up, but which must then be pushed away. In the end, all libraries burn. In the end, we have to be able to think for ourselves, and not like the abbot with his bookcase for a head. Which is why it is so important to train and govern our minds. Sometimes we're wrong, but that doesn't mean that everything we ever learned is also wrong. We're humans with free will and the ability to train our reason. We'll be wrong sometimes. We just have to keep climbing. Of course William was depressed at the loss of the library. But that was because he had made a mistake, and not because the entire moral and intellectual fiber of his being was constructed in error. That is the danger of thinking for oneself, sometimes mistakes will be made. But that, too, cannot undermine one's faith in Truth. Also, just because one takes it upon himself to train his mind and think for himself, that doesn't mean he's immune from error.
I also found it interesting that he drew a comparison between the destroyer of the library and the antichrist. He was driven insane by his reliance on the written words to direct truth. His reliance was so aberrant that he believed a written falsehood would be indistinguishable from the truth, and so he sought to destroy all of them, even the beautiful and true ones if only to destroy possible falsehood. And by doing so he would only prevent others from learning the truth themselves, and also force all those who sought the truth to submit to blind obedience to some random authority.
Assuming an unforgivably blasphemous novel made by a sociopath trying to outrun the shame over sexual sin in college, one SPECIFICALLY designed to reject Love, Absolute Truth, And Natural Law... whose very neitzchean quote of "In the end, after all the learning, one has to proceed on one's own power." is SPECIFICALLY about said total rejection of Reality... is somehow claiming that Truth Is Eternal, is perhaps a proof that cope can sand down any worldly structure.
Without getting into too much detail since I did like your videos before this, I wouldn't try sacralizing that demonic book because doing so will (not can, WILL) take you down with it and its author Eternally and temporally.
An honest satanist suffers less in hell than a dishonest Catholic, and you would go mad if you understood what I mean by that.
This publication spoke to me, primarily because I, too, was raised by an intensely religious grandfather AND father both--it's easy for them to wake up much earlier than I ever could just so they could read Liturgy of The Hours in private!
The path I walked in their stead is... weird... but even then I never lost that high-sense of wonder that they had. My upcoming Sci-Fi novel is _awash_ with mythological symbolisms and spiritualities for this exact reason!
Also, hi, welcome to Substack, Ms. Layne! Your Youtube video about Plot Twist being a Hidden Narrative Line helped me a lot. I'll be sure to watch your move on this platform with great interest.
Hello, and thank you for the welcome! I'm glad my video could help you so much. Good luck with your novel!
So they’d pray Lauds. Monastic Diurnal or the regular Divine Office?
Thanks for sharing this.
I remember reading an essay by Eco himself in a foreward of the same book.
He wrote it was pointless to ask the author the meaning and purpose of their artwork, since when the artwork is out in the word, it does not belong to the author anymore, but to anyone that reads it, as well as its meaning (to the point of suggesting that the author should "die" after publishing, so that every reader could find their own meaning in their work).
Your story proves it's true ❤️
Daphne du Maurier once said that writers should be read and not seen. I always took this to be what she meant, as well. That a writer's job is not to loom like a guardian figure over their work but to let it be read. And however it was read was how it was read.
This is a fascinating personal account! (I would read a whole book on your experience or a fictionalized version.) It seems—from my limited outside perspective here—that God gave you a way to know the Truth in the face of your circumstances, a way to strengthen your faith against the cult perversion of faith surrounding you.
Your father clearly sensed Beauty and Truth, but perhaps put too much stock into the means as opposed to the end, the Telos of faith. (I’m speculating, of course.)
I came into the Catholic Church seven years ago without knowing the inter-warring sides within it. It’s been interesting—if not disappointing—to see the human tendency toward extremes. Yet, the Holy Spirit is rich in my non-extreme Catholic life, and He has guided my faith.
I think that's certainly true. Both in terms of God's hand in everything and regarding my father. Interestingly, there's an element of this in the book. Br. William refers to books and other sources of wisdom and truth as ladders, of a sort. After we've used them to climb up in knowledge we ought to kick them away. Not just because we shouldn't develop a reliance on them, but also so the ladder can be there for the next person to use.
Buddhism uses a similar metaphor, but calls it a raft for the crossing of the flood.
This one hit close to home.
Thank you.
Thank you for reading it!
I only saw the movie of tNotR (and liked it), but I read Eco's The Prague Cemetery, about a generations-long fraud, where lies are also eternal.
What "cult?"
For a great description of New Orleans, may I recommend Tom Robbins's "Jitterbug Perfume"? He's a little New Agey and a product of his times, but an absolute master of the English language and wrote unique speculative fiction. One of the features of this book is that "beets" are on about every third page. "You could tell by the look in Rasputin's eyes that he was an eater of beets." Stars a genius waitress. You will love and hate its earthiness. "Her voice wore no pants." The slopes we have slid down... But his writing's worth it.
Funny - reminds me a bit of the Tombs of Atuan. :-)
Oh my goodness this is quite shocking to me. I am newer to your page and youtube. Have you done a video on this? Have you thought of writing a memoir on this exact topic and part of your life? I believe I wouldn't be able to put the book down. I kept saying to myself "is this real?!" I have so, so many questions. Please write a book on this!
Oh, and now I must read another one of your recommended books! :-)
I loved reading this. The Eco novel that helped my awakening from faith was Foucault's Pendulum. I was struck by the realization that my church was more impressed by the occult than the divine, and Eco's argument that martyrdom was a sign of stubbornness, not necessarily truth.
If Martyrdom, Which Is The Single Thing That Sends One Straight To Heaven (just as your suicide(s) are the single thing that sends one straight to hell), is not the most potent expression of Truth, then there is no Truth. This will not be the "salve" to your shame as you swallow your pistol that you insist it is.
you were allowed to be Born here instead of directly in hell to give you this ONE chance to Repent. shame is The Natural Response to you doing the unnatural. you would be ashamed even if you never heard of God.
The six possible ways to unforgivably blaspheme are as such:
1) Despair of salvation,
2) Presumption of God’s mercy,
3) To impugn the known truth,
4) Envy of another’s spiritual good,
5) Obstinacy in sin,
6) Final impenitence.
you do the first 5 to psych yourself up for 6.
When the capital sin of pride (the delusion that "ye will be like gods" through "gnosis"/"enlightenment"/wishful thinking) is threatened (and therefore totally refuted), it turns to the mortal sin of despair:
1) hopelessness,
2) trying to damn others in your place by projection,
3) trying to normalize your sin by claiming damning you will somehow damn everyone.
you do all three in a loop.
5 steps of the reprobate:
1) mortal sin.
2) denial of God due to shame over mortal sin, hoping that makes it go away.
3) persecution of The Church due to shame over mortal sin.
4) Martyring Catholics due to shame over mortal sin.
5) suicide.
5 is immediately right after 4.
Oh, dead one, where is your sting? So much for Us being "stubborn." All that blaspheming (unforgivable and otherwise) and what did it buy you or a disgruntled jewish fellow like "eco" (perpetually FURIOUS at his Convert Parents, "oh this next unforgivable blasphemy will be the one!") that you could even fill a cup with?
Nothing. The answer is nothing.
Faith Is Founding Oneself In God, The Highest Thought That Allows All Thought To Exist.
Reason is pure intellect (provided by the Rational Soul) and is totally blind without Faith. this is the broadest form of thought and it explains why you are lashing out in the dark here.
Logic is the lowest form of thought as it requires the senses.
Venerable Fulton Sheen about you:
"Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable."
you cannot be exempt from Faith, Love, Absolute Truth, Natural Law, Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, Scripture, Reason, Logic, et al by calling Reality as mere Catholic “belief” and then claiming by not being Catholic that you are exempt from Reality.
you have no access to Love, Absolute Truth, Natural Law, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, Magisterium, Sacred Tradition, Scripture, Faith, Reason, Logic outside of The Church.
people deny The Mystical Body Of Christ In The Catholic Church, they deny The Church As Foundation, they deny The Church As Teacher, they assume "christians" are and have been a random book club pawing around in the dark making things up as pablum to stave off nihilism.
Because you try to rob God Of His Church, God relinquishes you of your senses, then He relinquishes Us of your lives.
There nuclear bombs out there that would do less damage to your body than what your offhand absurdist statement does to the soul.
On the topic of religion, there is ZERO reason for people to come together outside of Communion and Worship, let alone zero reason for Institutions and Civilization AT ALL outside of Religion.
Societies exist to Protect Families for the sake of perpetuating Worship.
Language has zero reason to exist outside of Religion.
Knowledge and learning has zero reason to exist outside of Religion.
Without Religion, man is not only mute, he is without roots, without Community, and most of all is unable to think; this makes capable of little BUT being an artificial construct fit ONLY for being controlled, therefore the sheer antipathy of all wealth, pleasure, power, honor (the four temptations) against Religion.
In other words, in direct opposition to your totally satanic inversion of Reality: Religion is the single means by which fallen man is even CAPABLE of freedom (the capability of being Responsibility) and morality (the act of being Responsible) in our degraded state. Not to mention there is no other vector by which Love (Willing The Good Of The Other As Other), Will (Capability To Do Good), Intellect (Recognition of Natural Law), Free Will (Responsibility To Do Good), et al can be practice by man in his fallen state. Nor would Good (What Is Rightly Ordered, As God Created All To Be) or evil (the absence of Good that seeks to destroy Goodness) be knowable as even concepts, let alone observed, without Religion pulling even the top of fallen man's head out of the mud.
I'll conclude with this from GK Chesterton (though his essay "the maniac" is about you too!):
"This is the last and most astounding fact about this faith; that its enemies will use any weapon against it, the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes. Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church. This is no exaggeration; I could fill a book with the instances of it. Mr. Blatchford set out, as an ordinary Bible-smasher, to prove that Adam was guiltless of sin against God; in manoeuvring so as to maintain this he admitted, as a mere side issue, that all the tyrants, from Nero to King Leopold, were guiltless of any sin against humanity. I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool. I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young. I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgment by showing that there can be no human judgment, even for practical purposes. They burned their own corn to set fire to the church; they smashed their own tools to smash it; any stick was good enough to beat it with, though it were the last stick of their own dismembered furniture. We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.
And yet the thing hangs in the heavens unhurt. Its opponents only succeed in destroying all that they themselves justly hold dear. They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political and common courage sense. They do not prove that Adam was not responsible to God; how could they prove it? They only prove (from their premises) that the Czar is not responsible to Russia. They do not prove that Adam should not have been punished by God; they only prove that the nearest sweater should not be punished by men. With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete one here. With their paralysing hints of all conclusions coming out wrong they do not tear the book of the Recording Angel; they only make it a little harder to keep the books of Marshall & Snelgrove. Not only is the faith the mother of all worldly energies, but its foes are the fathers of all worldly confusion. The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world."
Once more and Forever, your curses are Consummately Returned even if this message is censored!
to say the very least, By My Final Authority you are Hereby Marked!
This reminds me very much of several conversations I had with friends after my father's death. They asked if I had ever felt my faith challenged by the contradictions he espoused later in life. I said no. It took me a long time to understand why. In the end, while William and Adso are watching the library burn, William is depressed and despondent. Adso had never seen him so melancholy or pessimistic. But he was misinterpreting William. His learned master uttered several variations on: "In the end, after all the learning, one has to proceed on one's own power." He refers to truth as a ladder used to climb up, but which must then be pushed away. In the end, all libraries burn. In the end, we have to be able to think for ourselves, and not like the abbot with his bookcase for a head. Which is why it is so important to train and govern our minds. Sometimes we're wrong, but that doesn't mean that everything we ever learned is also wrong. We're humans with free will and the ability to train our reason. We'll be wrong sometimes. We just have to keep climbing. Of course William was depressed at the loss of the library. But that was because he had made a mistake, and not because the entire moral and intellectual fiber of his being was constructed in error. That is the danger of thinking for oneself, sometimes mistakes will be made. But that, too, cannot undermine one's faith in Truth. Also, just because one takes it upon himself to train his mind and think for himself, that doesn't mean he's immune from error.
I also found it interesting that he drew a comparison between the destroyer of the library and the antichrist. He was driven insane by his reliance on the written words to direct truth. His reliance was so aberrant that he believed a written falsehood would be indistinguishable from the truth, and so he sought to destroy all of them, even the beautiful and true ones if only to destroy possible falsehood. And by doing so he would only prevent others from learning the truth themselves, and also force all those who sought the truth to submit to blind obedience to some random authority.
Assuming an unforgivably blasphemous novel made by a sociopath trying to outrun the shame over sexual sin in college, one SPECIFICALLY designed to reject Love, Absolute Truth, And Natural Law... whose very neitzchean quote of "In the end, after all the learning, one has to proceed on one's own power." is SPECIFICALLY about said total rejection of Reality... is somehow claiming that Truth Is Eternal, is perhaps a proof that cope can sand down any worldly structure.
Without getting into too much detail since I did like your videos before this, I wouldn't try sacralizing that demonic book because doing so will (not can, WILL) take you down with it and its author Eternally and temporally.
An honest satanist suffers less in hell than a dishonest Catholic, and you would go mad if you understood what I mean by that.