Our Lord

"But what would they want with money? They just went around as a gang."

"But it was over. Judas knew it was coming to an end, that's why he did it."

Father John was used to girls shuffling with embarrassment and asking was French kissing a venial or a mortal sin, and accepting whichever he said it was.

He was not normally faced with such cosmic questions and debates on the nature of Free Will and Predestination.

He tried to answer as best he could with what was, after all, fairly inconclusive evidence. He said he thought that, as in all things, the benefit of the doubt must be extended, and that perhaps in his infinite mercy Our Lord had seen fit... and to rememver that one never knew the heart of a sinner, and the words that passed between man and his maker at the moment of death.

Loosening his collar a little, he asked Mother Bernard afterwards abot their extraordinary preoccupation.

"Was there any case of anyone local who perhaps ended their own life?"

"No, no. Nothing like that. You know the way girls get something into their heads." Mother Bernard sounded wise and certain.

"Yes, but this is very intense. Are you sure?"

"Years and years ago, long before any of them were born, there was an unfortunate woman who found herself in a certain condition, Father, and is believed to have taken her own life. I think the ignorant people had a story about her ghost or some such nonsense. Maybe they are thinking of that." Mother Bernard's lips were pursed with disapproval for having to mention a suicide and an out of wedlock pregnancy to a visiting priest.

"That could be it, all right. There are two little girls, two of the younger ones in the front row, a very fair girl and a very dark one, who seem most het up about it, and whether or not people who take their own lives should be buried in Holy Ground."

Mother Bernard sighed.

"That will be Cliona Kelly and Mary Katherine McMahon. Those two would aruge with you that blackbirds were white. I'm afraid."

"Well, it's good to be forewarned." said Father John, as he went back into the convent chapel and told the girls very firmly that, since taking your own life was taking away a gift that God had given you, it was a sin against Hope-one of the two great sins against Hope - despair. And that anyone who did so was not fit to be buried in a Christian burial ground.

"Not even if her poor mind..." began the blonde girl in the front pew.

"Not even if her poor mind." Father John said firmly. He was worn out from it, and he had the boys' school to do still.

Serious warnings on the evils of drink and self abuse. Father John sometimes wondered whether any of it did any good at all. But he reminded himself that thinking along those line was almost a sin against Hope.

He must be careful of it.