Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Hey, You, up there ...

... The World Groans.

A priest, a sort of whisper in the chaos, made his rounds. One day, when Ben Steele seemed almost gone, Father Cummings "opened his Mass kit, took out a prayer book, a rosary, [and] a tin of holy oil." He anointed Steele with oil and asked you to forgive the nearly dead man's sins. Cummings always led the men in the prayer you gave your disciples on the Mount; he baptized and anointed: "He played medic as well as priest, crawling over and across men to get to the worst of the wretches." He argued with men who said that the Japanese were worthless. He said, "no one is hopeless." He planned to work for you in Japan after the war. He died in the bowels of a Japanese "hellship" en route to Japan.

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