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| Paradigmatic Sunday Sermon, A |
One of the sections of The Moist Heart [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 120-3]. Reads in part:
(NOTE: This is offered as an aid for those parish priests who don't have time to compose a new sermon every Sunday of the year. It is a sort of sermon concentrate, which may be thinned by the skin milk of rhetoric.)
A man trying to root out the rotten spots in his life is like a solider combing the trees with his eyes in search of snipers. When you zero in on the devil of Avarice, of Lechery, or anything that moves, let him have it - whammo! - right between the eyes. Sometimes, though, in fighting entrenched evils, you have to wheel in what I call the big guns of Spirituality: Prayer, Sacrifice, and Good Counsel. ...And when you get near the enemy wire, don't try to cut yourself. Let Christ run the interference...you will reach GHQ [general headquarters] with Mission Accomplished. Amen.
Bowen feels the last paragraph of the paradigmatic Sunday sermon may have a bit of Notre Dame satire in it, mainly the military metaphors. "It was the fond belief of the priests who looked after our spiritual welfare that they could appeal to our boyish nature by athletic and military metaphors, thus showing us that religion was not a thing for sissies. I don't mean that the metaphors were extended to the ridiculous lengths seen in St. Fidgeta, but they were annoying all the same.
"For example, we were frequently encouraged to receive the sacraments of penance (i.e., confession) and communion, and the language was invariably the same: 'hitting the box' and 'hitting the rail.' The confessional was the box, and as I mentioned previously, there used to be a rail (called the altar rail) separating the sanctuary from the part of the church where the congregation sat; you would kneel at this to receive communion. I think the object was to make it sound like we were participating in football or possibly military combat - obviously manly stuff, red-blooded, hairy-chested, and all that. I never encountered that before I went to Notre Dame, even in a Catholic high school run by brothers who had all been educated there, as their order was an affiliate of the priests' order that ran Notre Dame."
Myers agrees "wholeheartedly with the annoyed comments about being exhorted to 'hit the box' and 'hit the rail.' These would be promulgated on so-called 'religious bulletins' that would be slipped under all the doors in the residence halls several times a week. Notre Dame during our era was in the process of morphing into a pretty fine university, but as I may have mentioned before, the sophistication of religious instruction lagged way behind the rest of the school."
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