Franciscan Identity Crisis Ramble

I've been thinking about trying to write this post for a long time.

There's a lot of begging in Rome. There are scammers too, but with the scams that I usually get, I guess because I look like a good 'ugly American' mark, I've grown wise and I turn the tables and frustrate the person and try to playfully shame him."What would your mama say? Going around tricking foreigners!"

But it's the begging that troubles me more.

Hemo the Magnificent

As a child I was interested in religion and I experienced some attraction to Jesus. But since I had no formal religious upbringing, where did I get these ideas? Various places, I suppose, but one that I've been reminded of recently is the film Hemo the Magnificent--on blood and the circulatory system--which I saw at least once in elementary school. Watching it now, it's amazing that something with so much explicit Christianity was shown in a public school. I'm sure it wouldn't fly nowadays.

The film begins with Leviticus - "the life of the flesh is in the blood" (17:11) and ends with St. Paul.

Salty Ramble

Jesus said to his disciples: "You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. (Matthew 5:13)

Two days before Christmas the fog lifted just enough to allow a single chopper to work its way up to us, a dangerous journey, squeezing beneath the cloud ceiling just a few feet above the jungle-covered ridges. Along with food, water, mail, and ammunition came the battalion chaplain. 

He had brought with him several bottles of Southern Comfort and some new dirty jokes. I accepted the Southern Comfort, thanked him, laughed at the jokes, and had a drink with him. Merry Christmas. 

Inside I was seething. I thought I'd gone a little nuts. How could I be angry with a guy who had just put his life at risk to cheer me up? And didn't the Southern Comfort feel good on that rain-raked mountaintop? Years later I understood. I was engaged in killing and maybe being killed. I felt responsible for the lives and deaths of my companions. I was struggling with a situation approaching the sacred in its terror and contact with the infinite, and he was trying to numb me to it. I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies, and friends, not Southern Comfort. I needed a spiritual guide. (Karl Marlantes, What It Is Like To Go To War)

Get Fat And Dye My Hair

This is another ramble, I guess. But I also guess that I won't apologize. I'm reminded of one of my favorite things anybody has ever said to me about preaching: after lamenting to an older priest that I thought I had rambled a little in my Sunday homily, he said, "Sometimes you're the arrow, sometimes the shotgun."

Living in Assisi is a funny business. I think it's doing things to me. Like the light and space of Vietnam did to Mr. Clean, I think it's putting the zap on my head.

Everywhere you go it's St. Francis. Franciscan friars, Franciscan sisters. Pace e bene. The Tau cross. "Welcome to Assisi, City of Peace," you see as you spend your euro to take the bus up to Piazza Matteoti, noticing once again that you could have gotten away with not validating your ticket. I guess it all strikes me because Francis's own relationship to the place was so much more ambivalent. I think of his participation in the civil disturbances to his youth, and especially of his leaving town to show mercy to the lepers, thereby making himself unfit for respectable, public life.

Reflections along these lines arrive in my Franciscan heart especially when I find myself around Santa Maria degli Angeli, where I have often been in my free time, praying, going to confession, or just enjoying a flat place to walk and think. I pray by the Portiuncula and try to think of it as it might have been at the time of Francis and the first companions. Out in the tranquility and danger of the woods, just the homely little chapel and maybe some huts for the brothers. Just a place, as they would have said, not a convento or a friary or a studium, curia, collegio, or anything, really. No big beautiful church, no amazing bookstore where you can buy a tau cross or someone's acts of canonization or latest volume of the critical edition of Scotus, no sellers of religious articles and internet meme t-shirts, no pizza, no nice lady reigning as queen of the habit rosary and breviary cover racket. Just the insecurity and openness of not-city.

I guess Santa Maria degli Angeli is just one of those places for me, a place where the boundaries are thin. Maybe it's also because it's the starting point of my favorite travel story, which I have told many, many times over the years. Praying there these days I also keep thinking, for some reason, of Simone Weil and her experiences there. There was a spell when I was a novice when I became quite enamored of her and her writing, but I haven't thought much about her since. Maybe it means something, maybe not.

Is it gauche or bad form to make a second oblique movie reference to the same movie? I guess I don't care.

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Francis got off the boat. He split from the whole program. Francis got out of town because it was there, with the lepers, that he found the sweetness of beginning to do penance. He went to meet Jesus where he was to be found, outside the camp, and bore his reproach.

We all know the irony of the mendicants then becoming the experts in preaching and pastoral care in the new complexity of urban life. And in some ways all the truths and myths of that still obtain. But I think for me it's still Francis's departure, his leaving the city, his getting off the boat, that draws me to him, that draws me to want to follow Christ in his footprint and his poverty, according to the pattern of St. Francis of Assisi.

Mi Chiamo Charles

I've written before about how I'm fascinated by how names work in foreign-language environments, both in conversation and in liturgy. Whenever I've been living outside the states since being in the Order, I have always been prepared to be the version of my name in the local language. It seems, however, that the tendency among the friars is keep one's own name in his own proper language. I noticed that this is certainly true in the curia in Rome where there is a plurality of native languages. Even before I arrived there was a Charles, a Carlos, and a Carlo. There are two Marks and a Marek and a Peter and a Piotr. So there I will surely be Charles.

But also here in the very Italian friary in Assisi, I seem to be Charles and not Carlo. At Italian school I am Carlo; Professoressa Carla translated all the names she could, first thing. What's funny are the associations the Italian friars seem to have with the name. For one of the student brothers, it seems to be Charles Bronson. So when he sees me he says, in English, "Charles...Charles Bronson...tough guy!" Another of the young guys seems to immediately think of Charles Ingalls, 'Padre di Mary e Laura,' as he explains to me, often bursting into a rendition of the theme from the TV show when he sees me. La casa nella prateria, did I know of it? he asks.

I guess it just shows the reach of American entertainment.

God Is the Bigger Elvis

In the quiet of a Friday afternoon yesterday, I finally got around to seeing Rebecca Cammisa's God Is the Bigger Elvis, the short film about Dolores Hart which came to everyone's attention when it was nominated for an Academy Award this past year.




I appreciated several aspects of the little documentary. Most simply, as a Connecticutian myself, I had always been curious about the Abbey of Regina Laudis, but had never visited or known much about it.

On a deeper level, though, I was grateful for the way the film treats of the religious vocation in an individual life. In addition to the story of Dolores herself, the vocation stories of a couple of other nuns are touched upon as well. There's a reverence about the treatment, in the sense that a religious vocation is, on the one hand, something for which no apology needs to be made. On the other hand, the film communicates well that the experience of vocation touches upon certain intimacies and mystery that defy being shared with an audience.

I also appreciated how religious life is displayed in all of its unglamorous plainness. I was reminded of the Trappist who told me that his favorite aspect of Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence was that it showed the monks with unsightly nose and ear hair. "Religious life is not so pretty as it usually seems in the movies, brother." (Of course I also loved seeing the Abbey liturgy. The sisters were praying in Latin (according to the spirit of Vatican II)  and were shown receiving Holy Communion by intinction--and I mean the right way, on the tongue and without illicit self-communication.)

Most of all, the film made me reflect on celibacy. In it one meets Dolores's former fiancé, with whom she broke up in order to enter the Abbey. He is even shown making a visit. Almost fifty years later he admits that he isn't over Dolores, and doesn't appear to have ever married. The whole business sits at the awkward intersection of sweet and sad. Anyone in professional ministry will have their boundary buzzers go off during these scenes, but perhaps it reminds us that boundaries are often messier than what our textbooks taught us.

Even though I reflect on it from time, I don't blog on it because I don't have anything solid to say, but the film certainly convinced me even more that female and male celibacy are somewhat different things. Maybe some readers have thoughts on that.

Maybe I missed it, but one thing I was surprised to miss was a mention of Dolores having played St. Clare in Francis of Assisi (1961).

God Is the Bigger Elvis is really worth a look if you have a chance.

Drops vs. Gushes, Etc.

One of the fascinating dynamics of my religious life in recent years has been my questioning of doctrines that I received and took for granted in my early training. Here's a convoluted path to an example.

On one of the evenings over the Christmas quiet, another friar and I watched the movie Black Robe. It's one of his favorites. One of the things I always note in the film is the way the Jesuits baptize with just the tiny amount of water that will stay on a fingertip or two.

It reminded me of one of the doctrines I was taught early in my religious life, which suggested that we had inherited a minimization of the symbolic riches of the sacraments, and that this needed to be strenuously and energetically corrected. Baptism ought to be by immersion, of course, but if this was not possible a whole lot of water ought to be poured. Altar bread shouldn't be boring wafers ordered from the church supplier, but made at home to look like bread. (Here is inserted the classic gag about the kid who, being tested before his first Holy Communion, said that he could believe that the bread became the Body of Christ, but that he didn't believe it was bread beforehand.) Confirmation shouldn't be a dab of Chrism on the forehead, but oil all through the hair and running down on the collar of Aaron's robes, as it were.

We were taught that the 'symbols were rich' and thus were to presented abundantly and sumptuously. Not that there's anything wrong with that as a principle.

On the other hand, why would someone believe that with a paltry few drops of water he was baptizing in a way that was in no sense deficient? I think, because the efficacy of the sacrament was believed in, and was known to be unrelated to what was made of the 'symbol.' The danger of placing a lot of emphasis on the sensual and conscious experience of the 'richness of symbol' is that these things can become a focus. Performance and showmanship can get to be too important. Is this not also the funny clericalism that is the danger of the Mass celebrated versus populum? (Which is not to deny that the Mass celebrated ad orientem doesn't also risk certain clericalisms.)

The GIRM does say that the "meaning of the sign demands" that the bread offered at Mass "truly have the appearance of food." (321) On the other hand, my experience says that the concern that altar bread resemble or taste like what we ordinarily have for bread is inversely proportional to the concern for caring for the sacred species after consecration. In other words, the more a group holds up the value of using what they think of as 'real bread,' the less concerned they are about consuming or caring for the Body of Christ that the bread becomes. So what's more important, the sensual experience of the bread or the sacramental communion with Christ?

Supernatural? Perhaps.

My all-time favorite movie quote: Bela Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast in The Black Cat (1934)

Duns Scotus Movie

I found out about this over at The Smithy.

Anointing of the Said to be Sick

Having just passed another World Day of the Sick, the parish is offering the Anointing of the Sick after each of the Masses today. This tends to be very popular, so I'm helping the pastor.

A robust looking little boy presents himself for the anointing, and this conversation ensues:

Me: Are you sick?

Little boy: No.

Mother, standing behind him: Yes he is.

I couldn't help but be reminded:

Friars of the Primitive Observance

Since I've been back here in Boston I have begun to meet some of the brothers of the Franciscans of the Primitive Observance. The student friars among them attend St. John's Seminary, which shares a campus and a library with the Boston College School of Theology & Ministry which I am supposed to be attending. On my first visit to the school back in the spring I ran into one of them on the train and we had a delightful conversation about Franciscan and Capuchin topics. I call them our 'grandchildren;' the Primitive Observance is a reform that emerged out of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal (the CFR), who themselves came to exist when some friars broke away from my province of the Capuchins just over twenty years ago.

Meeting these brothers makes me reflect on some of the basic dynamics of the Franciscan charism. Apart from their somewhat more rugged appearance and untrimmed beads ("manly, austere...and despised" as the Capuchin Constitutions of 1536 puts it), I realize that these friars are not so different from me, even though their religious lives are two reforms removed from mine. The Franciscan Rule almost seems to make such reforms and divisions inevitable; it seems sometimes to contain within itself the seeds of Franciscan fractiousness. It is not a moderate rule, as is said of that of St. Benedict, nor endlessly applicable, as is sometimes said of that of St. Augustine. Our Rule is stark and demanding, on the one hand leaving little room to interpret things away, but on the other hand imbued with a power to catch hearts and minds on fire with a desire to live it. No money. It may not even be touched. No property, neither individually or corporately. Two or three extended fasts a year. It's a radical imitation of the poverty of God himself in Christ, and it attracts radical hearts.

But as we have known from even the first years of the Franciscan movement, it is a hard Rule to put into practice 'without gloss' as Francis himself asked of us in his Testament, with anything but a very small group of brothers or sisters. And so comes the fractiousness of the Franciscan movement. There have always been brothers and sisters who break away from larger and more routinized communities out of a desire to follow the Rule more purely and strictly, attracted by the radical life the Rule describes and a desire to fulfill what seems like the command of Francis himself that we live it "without gloss." Some of these breaks turn into the great reform movements of the Order, like the Observants and the Capuchins. Most, like Mia Wallace's pilot for Fox Force Five, "become nothing."

Though this seems to be one of the creative drives of the Franciscan movement through history, it doesn't make such reforms and schisms any easier or any less personal for those who go through them. Communities and friendships get wounded. Generations go missing from provincial families. Nevertheless, though it is painful and wounding, in some sense to be Franciscan has to include an affirmation of the thrust toward creative reform that has served to renew the movement through its history.

Better Men and Honored Maids

In my experience as the Church's official witness for nuptial consent, which is admittedly brief, I have observed a disturbing phenomenon. Increasingly, couples are unable to elect a singe Best Man and Maid of Honor. I know, it's awful to have play favorites, and in our PC culture everybody has to be a winner, but this business is a little silly.

To be honest, though, I don't mind the extra person on the bride's side. The way I do things, the Maid of Honor is the hardest worker in the whole ceremony, charged as she is with preventing the bride from falling down the stairs or ruining her makeup with tears, etc. She is responsible for the maintenance of She Who Is High Maintenance, and rightly so, at that moment. So having these two Maids of Honor isn't so bad.

On the other hand, I see no redeeming quality in having two Best Men. The Best Man is charged with two simple but critical tasks: making sure the groom doesn't faint or run away, and producing the rings on demand. Even in my short experience, the question of the rings is fraught with danger. "That's not my ring," said one of my brides once. "It is today!" I responded. To have two Best Men in this job would seem to me a violation of the Airplane Rule. Complexity increases the probability of failure. Keep it simple.

Finally, given that this is happening, I want to suggest some changes in nomenclature. There cannot be two Best Men; it is a grammatical absurdity. As St. Paul reminds us, though all the athletes compete, only one can win the prize, just as he also said that it is better to marry than to be on fire. Like Tyler Durden, St. Paul is full of useful information. If there are two of them, I say they are to be called Better Men.

The same goes for the girls, though perhaps with less force. I say we call them Honored Maids.

I Can See The String! (And Masked Men)

It's one of the lines you're supposed to yell out at some point when you go to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. I couldn't resist.

But seriously, a parishioner related something fun to me the other day. She explained how she had brought a friend to Mass, a religious sister who had once been a teacher of transitional deacons in a seminary. Sister had remarked upon her observation that I was the first priest she had seen in a long time who seemed to have been trained to make the 'hands extended' or 'orans' gesture with a procedure involving a piece of string extended between the hands or the shoulders somehow. I didn't really understand what was meant, but I guess I really do, because I was doing whatever was supposed to be the outcome of the stringy pedagogy in question.

So if I say I don't understand what the piece of string does, do I commit the masked man fallacy, given that I seemed to have learned what it was supposed to teach me?

As is often observed, one can tell a lot about a priest from his orans or extended hands posture.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

The other night I had a chance to watch Ben Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a film about the scientific and academic conflicts between the Darwinian establishment and the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design. The film tries to illustrate an unscientific dogmatism in the academy which leads to the persecution and professional ruin of those who wish to explore ID. Also detailed are the darker chapters in the history of Darwinism, such as forced sterilizations, eugenics, and even Nazism. The abiding institutional child of the eugenics movement, Planned Parenthood, is also exposed at its rotten origins, and one (non-religious) sociologist articulates clearly the link between the theory of evolution and the acceptance of abortion and euthanasia.

Of course I must confess that I am receptive to such a film; back in theological studies I once submitted a term paper titled, "Why I Still Don't Believe in Evolution." It was coolly received. I am not really a fan of ID, but I do believe that evolution has ceased to be a theory that might explain certain natural phenomena, but has ascended into a irreproachable and universal dogma that informs every aspect of the contemporary worldview. It enforces a competitive model upon reality, reducing us to the Hobbesian "war of all against all." It removes from the human person (and every creature) any intrinsic privilege. In this way it paves the way for abortion, euthanasia, preemptive war, and the many other crimes against life which are destroying humane culture.

These ideas began to occur to me a few years ago during a lonely summer assignment where I read Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and noticed some striking similarities to On the Origin of Species. Apart from the dangerous doctrines therein, one has to say that they are both beautiful examples of the English language.

The film has been poorly reviewed, but I suppose that Stein would say that this confirms his complaint that one is not allowed to say such things. Nevertheless, it's an interesting work, and I would recommend it.

Census Fears

Today I learn that the 2010 United States Census will be using our church hall for employment applications and interviews. This is somewhat troublesome to me, because God's low opinion of census-taking is very clear in the Scripture. See 2 Samuel 24. Also, I would caution anyone applying to work for the census, lest someone eat his liver "with fava beans and a nice Chianti."

The "Groundhog Day" Effect

Christmas has worn me out. Much of it is the effect of having Christmas Day and its octave on Fridays. In the parish ministry, weekends are often the most intense work time; in general one works the most on weekends, evenings, and early in the morning when ordinary folks have time for elective activities and voluntary associations like religion.

Having Christmas and the octave on successive Fridays makes for this curious experience of going through a weekend schedule of services only to wake up the next day and have it be Saturday again. Have four of these "weekends" in two weeks, throw in a few parties, a couple of big funerals, and the fielding of Christmas engagements, and its enough to make someone tired.

Why Did You Miss Mass?

I make a conscious effort only to ask questions of penitents when it is really necessary, but this is one I ask a lot. I do it because missing Sunday Mass is a frequently confessed sin, but it is also one in which culpability is very often reduced by circumstances such as advanced age, infirmity, child care, etc.

It's a sin that I have pretty much avoided altogether in my own Catholic life, but whenever I ask someone why they missed Mass I feel a little bit of amused gratitude inside as I remember the one time a confessor asked it of me, and the whole confession ended up with the priest laughing out loud.

It all started in Assisi. In the spring of 1993 I was alleged to be studying philosophy at University College Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. We had a whole month off for Easter, so I and this other kid decided to wander around on the continent. We had no plan and no set itinerary. To this day I can only piece together where we were by liturgical time, since we always went to Mass on Sundays. I know that on the fifth Sunday of Lent we were in Paris. It's a miracle of Providence that we were able to get to Mass on time in Paris, as it was only from a chance comment from a guy with whom we were playing hacky sack on the grass in front of Les Invalides that we knew daylight savings time had started. A week later, on Passion Sunday, we were in Prague. I'll never forget it. Listening to St. Matthew's Passion read in Czech by one priest all by himself was pretty tiring. By the time of the Triduum we were in Verona; I remember going to the Vigil there and sharing my hand missal with a tall American girl. Catholic player I was, in those days. By the second Sunday of Easter, having split up with my traveling companion, I was alone in Assisi. It was there that I ran out of money.

Assisi was to be the last stop anyway. School had already started again back in Ireland, and it was time to think about getting home. Now there was a lot of random religious stuff I wanted to pick up in Assisi, so I counted out what money I had left to make sure I would have enough for the return trip and for my lodging bill at the pilgrim's house where I was staying. I calculated--or so I thought--how much I had left for religious articles, books, etc., and went out shopping. Unfortunately, I must have counted wrong, and found that after I had settled up with sister guest mistress, I was broke. All I had was my European train pass and a few Italian coins. I spent the last little bit on some fruit, and started to make my way back to Galway.

I remember that the train from Assisi to Florence left at 12:16. It was a Friday afternoon. So there I was, sitting with my backpack in the plaza of Santa Maria degli Angeli waiting around for midday. A gypsy woman came up to me and asked for money. What a joy it was to honestly say that I didn't have any! She said something in indignation and then went behind the bushes and urinated loudly. I have always wondered if this was supposed to be insulting to me. Then she came back. For reasons I have never been able to guess, she gave me a holy card of Our Lady of the Angels. I've kept it in my wallet ever since. It's been through the wash a few times, but has held up.

So on Friday afternoon at 12:16, I began my destitute journey from Assisi to Galway. Later that afternoon I changed trains in Florence and was on my way to Milan. I spent Friday night on the overnight train from Milan to Paris. Arriving in Paris on Saturday morning, I faced a crisis. You see, in Paris there are a bunch of train stations, and the one at which I arrived was not the one where I could catch the train I needed to get to Cherbourg, where there was a boat back to Ireland. And I had no money, as has been said. Luckily, in the course of our travels, when we had left one country for another, we tended to exchange our paper money but just throw the coins into our bags for souvenirs. So there I was on an otherwise lovely Saturday morning, unpacking my backpack full of foul socks and eccentric religious paraphernalia in a French train station, looking for a few old francs that I could use for enough subway fare to get me to Gare du Nord. The coins turned up, and I was on my way.

By Saturday night, I was in Cherbourg getting on the boat. (My train pass was good for the boat, too) On the overnight trip I met a bunch of Germans who were reciting lines from This is Spinal Tap. We made friends right away, of course. I was ashamed to ask them for something to eat, however. On Sunday morning we arrived in Rosslare, where I boarded a bus headed across the country. It stopped at every little place you ever heard of, and many you haven't.

Finally, at about 9 pm on Sunday night I arrived at Eyre Square in Galway, having been traveling without a break for two and a half days and without anything to eat. The problem: it was Sunday and I had not been to Mass. I knew that I had plenty of time to make the regular 10 pm Mass at the University, but instead I went to the ATM and got a pizza on the way home. My Irish roommates started screaming when I walked in; since I had missed a week of school, they had presumed my death, they said.

So, having chosen the pizza over my Sunday obligation, I went to Galway Cathedral first thing Monday morning for confession. I confessed to the priest that I had missed Mass the day before. "Why?," he asked. So I started to explain, "Well, on Friday I was in Assisi..." Now the Irish are a storytelling culture, and the priest was clearly enjoying the tale I had to tell. By the time I came to the end, he was laughing out loud. He told me that I had probably made the right decision, but nevertheless gave me absolution for the other sins, irregularities, and missings of the mark I had committed in the course of my travels.

Latest Exercise in Pedantry

This morning I am trying to draft a homily for Sunday. In saving the file, however, a problem arises. Now that I have preached through the three years of the Sunday lectionary cycle, when I go to save my document as "28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B" I find that there is already a file with this name, containing my first Sunday homily as a transitional deacon three years ago.

So what do I call this second homily to be preached on the same liturgical day? "28th Sunday, B-2"? "28th Sunday, B2, 'Keep on the Borderlands,'"? "The 28th Sunday of Year B Strikes Back"?

Well, in hearkening back to mathematics, one of several loves lost in the course of giving my life to this religious quest, I have decided that the file will be named "28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B′," to be read, "Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B prime."

Dust. Wind. Dude.

The other day I was sitting in church at the end of the day, when the afternoon sun comes in low through the windows on the St. Joseph side. One of the windows in front of me as open, and the sunlight was beaming through. In the sunbeam I could see particles of dust hanging in the air or moving about. This sight fascinated me when I was little, and I still enjoy it.

As I continued to consider the illuminated dust, I noticed how strong a metaphor it is for ourselves. We are hardly anything, unnecessary and entirely contingent. That we are anything worth noticing--indeed anything of beauty--it is only because at certain moments we catch the Light and become illuminated by Grace. We would be dirt on the floor, except that the quickening heat of the Light bears us up so that we might float on the currents of the Spirit, Who blows where He wills. To have this habitually is what holiness means.

'Dust to dust,' as someone will pray of us one day as our bodies are committed to the earth, but in this time in between, we have a glimpse of the world to come as particles of dust made beautiful, shiny, buoyant, and warm in the Light.

Penitenziagite!

In these days in which I am studying the Mexican bishops' marriage ritual in preparation for a wedding in Spanish in two weeks, working through the 1962 Missale Romano-Seraphicum, and saying some of my Office from my Liturgia delle Ore Romano-Serafico each day for Italian practice, I'm starting to feel like Salvatore from The Name of the Rose:

Penitenziagite! watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! death is super nos! pray the santo pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! ha ha, you like this negromanzia de domini nostri jesu christi! et anco jois m'es dols e plazer m'es dolors...cave el diabolo! semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. but salvatore is not stupidus! bonum monsasterium, and aqui refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. and the resto is not worth merda. amen. no?

Or as he says in Ron Perlman's immensely entertaining portrayal:

Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw on your anima! La mort e supremos! You contemplata me apocalypsum, eh? La bas! Nous avons il diabolo! Ugly cum Salvatore, eh? My little brother! Penitenziagite!

SVILUPPO: Two years after this silly post, I find myself trying to read the book in Italian. So, arriving at this same section, how could I resist posting it?

Penitenziagite! Vide quando draco venturus est a rodegarla l'anima tua! La mortz est super nos! Prega che vene lo papa santo a liberar nos a malo de todas le peccata! Ah ah, ve piase ista negromanzia de Domini Nostri Iesu Christi! Et anco jois m'es dols a plazer m'es dolors...Cave el diabolo! Semper m'aguaita in qualche canto per adentarme le carcagna. Ma Salvatore non est insipiens! Bonum monasterium, et aqui se magna et se priega dominum nostrum. Et el resto valet un figo seco. Et Amen. No?