UNITED STATES
StAR
Kevin O’Brien
Bill Cosby is not a Catholic, so what does he have to do with the Catholic Church?
To answer that question, I am going to bring in Plato, Socrates, St. Bernadette and the now obscure comedian Professor Irwin Corey (pictured below).
It all began early this morning, when I woke up angry.
I was at the Super Eight in Higginsville, Missouri, which is bad enough, but the only reason I had spent the night there was that my wife had insisted that I not try to make it all the way home after last night’s show. I’m on the road every weekend, performing shows for one of my two theatrical companies, Upstage Productions or Theater of the Word Incorporated, and this weekend was no exception, featuring three performances in two days, with 14 hours of driving and 1,000 miles round trip in the car, along with my acting partner Maria Romine. My wife Karen remained at home, but insisted that I not try to push myself and make it all the way back to St. Louis after our Saturday night show in Kansas City. So, like a good husband, I did what my wife back home told me to do, and Maria and I got two rooms at the Super Eight in Higginsville, where I promptly fell asleep on Saturday night. But a crack of thunder woke me up Sunday morning at 5:45 am.
We’ve been having torrential downpours all spring and summer in Missouri (last month was the wettest June on record in St. Louis), and the storms are often so violent and the rainfall so heavy that it’s hazardous to drive – especially on the interstate. “If we had simply gone home last night we would have avoided this!” I said to myself as the rain began to pour. The radar on my phone showed lots of oranges and reds between Higginsville and home, and you don’t want to drive through the oranges or reds. But God has a plan for everything, so I decided that we’d roll with it (as the thunder rolls). “If we leave Higginsville by 7:00 am, we’ll make the Latin Mass in O’Fallon by 10:00, and even Confession, which begins at 9:30,” I said to myself, and texted this plan to my actress Maria, who was undoubtedly just getting up in her room down the hall.
Now, I’m not a big Latin Mass fan per se. What I seek are reverent Masses, in whatever language or form. I choose Latin when I can because Latin Masses are almost always reverent. But I’m on the road about fifty weekends out of the year, and fulfilling my Sunday obligation (with Maria, who is, like me, a Catholic convert) can be a real challenge. It’s always easy to find the nearest Catholic Church (with the help of masstimes.org), but finding a Mass that doesn’t ruin my day is not easy. I freely admit that attending an irreverent Mass should not necessarily be a near occasion of sin, making me curse under my breath and despise my neighbor in the next pew over, and that if I were a better Christian I could be more tolerant of what we experience on the road, but we experience some real horrors. And sometimes the Masses we attend are not merely irreverent but downright sacrilegious.
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