Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [62]
Father Ogg took the cap off the holy oil and smeared it on Dickie’s forehead, cheeks, chin. He then took Dickie’s head and placed it between his two hands and pressed it like he was in a vise.
“Oowww!” Dickie screamed. “That hurts.”
It was nice to see Dickie hurt.
“Silence!” shouted Ogg in a voice that I swear wasn’t human.
“Ephpheta, quod est, Adaperire. In odorem suavitatis. Tu autem effugare, diabole; appropinquabit enim judicium Dei!” he continued in some ancient tongue, or perhaps no tongue at all. I’m not even supposed to be sharing this with you, and to commit these words to paper makes me want to go and check the lock on my door (I’ll be right back).
It was time for the olive branches. We were each given one and told to hold them out over Dickie—but not to touch him. Ogg then took his branch and started to wail on poor Dickie, careful not to whip him anywhere that might hurt.
“Christo Sancti!” Ogg yelled, causing Dickie to turn to me—the one who brought him into this—and scream, “Fuckin’ moron! I’m gonna kill you!”
“Don’t make me have to tie you down!” Ogg shouted. “Abrenuntias Satanae? Et omnibus operibus ejus?”
And at this moment, Dickie started to cry. Father Ogg, a bit surprised, stopped.
“Hey, hey, it’s OK,” the exorcist said in a comforting tone. “This isn’t real. It was just a demonstration. You don’t have the devil in you.”
At least not now, I thought. I prayed that this exorcism, albeit a “practice” one, would have a real effect on this miserable bully.
But, alas, such was not the case. The next day I found my transistor radio in the toilet and my underwear all gone. One of the nuns would find them later that night in her own drawer, with the words, in magic marker, on each waistband: PROPERTY OF MICHAEL MOORE. I did not want to take the punishment for finking on Dickie, so I took the extra week of garbage duty instead and said nothing. Frankly, it was worth it just to have the extra time to myself so I could replay in my head Dickie being whacked with an olive branch, olive oil dripping from his face, and the Devil departing his miserable body.
Not all the time at the seminary was spent on my knees or observing strange rituals or playing pranks. I actually had one of the best and most challenging years of education I would ever have. The priests and nuns loved to teach literature and history and foreign languages. The class I had the toughest time with was Religion. I had a lot of questions.
“Why don’t we let women be priests?” I asked one day, one of the many times that everyone in the class would turn around and stare at me as if I were some freak.
“You don’t see any women among the apostles, do you?” Father Jenkins would respond.
“Well, it looks like there were always women around—Mary Magdalene, Mary, Jesus’s mother, and his cousin what’s-her-name.”
“It’s just not allowed!” was the end-of-discussion answer he would give to most of my questions—which included:
“Jesus never said he was here to start the ‘Catholic Church,’ but rather that his job was to bring Judaism into a new era. So where did we get the idea of the Catholic Church?”
“The only time Jesus loses his temper is when he sees all these guys loaning money in the Temple and he smashes up their operation. What lesson are we to draw from this?”
“Do you think Jesus would send soldiers to Vietnam if he were here right now?”
“In the Bible, there’s no mention of Jesus from age twelve to age thirty. Where do you think he went? I have some theories…”
On the first day of English Lit class, Father Ferrer announced that we would spend nine weeks dissecting Romeo and Juliet, word by word, line by line—and he promised us that by the end of it, we would understand the structure and language of Shakespeare so well that for the rest of our lives we would be able to enjoy the genius of all his works (a promise that turned out to be true).
I have to say that, in retrospect, the choice of a heterosexual love story with characters who were our age and who were