Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday morning, September 12, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, September 19.
Notre Dame sophomore running back Kyren Williams running for daylight in Saturday's game against Duke. Williams ran for 205 yards and the Fighting Irish beat the Blue Devils, 27-13, and, hopefully, with the luck of the Irish, everyone on the field and in the stands beat the odds of catching the Covid virus. Courtesy of Notre Dame Athletics.
There’s a priest I follow casually on Twitter---not Father Martin, not even a Jesuit, so there’s no danger his tweets are going to tempt me into returning to the Church, but he’s often amusing, usually pithy, and routinely exasperating in a forgivable way in his contrarianism, which makes him hard to peg as a liberal or a conservative---something I think he takes too much pride in, and pride, as he would know, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins---and he’s on the faculty at Notre Dame.
I have a sentimental attachment to Notre Dame. Mrs M’s brother went there. My brother Lyle earned his M.A. in theology there. When I was a kid I thought that as a good Irish Catholic I was required to go there for college. I thought everybody who went there and taught there and played football there was Irish or at any rate Catholic. I thought this even though Ara Parseghian was their coach at the time and not only was he not Irish, he was famously not Catholic. He was Presbyterian. And then of course, there’s Joe Montana.
So, this priest posts this anecdote this morning and for those sentimental reasons and because it brought out the old altar boy in me I laughed out loud and immediately RTed…
First Saturday of football and I walk out of my office to this traditional gameday conversation: A Senior explaining to a Sophomore how to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with the breviaries we have in our chapel
Story also appealed to me as a former college professor who misses his students. So like I just said, I retweeted it immediately.
And immediately regretted it.
Because I could see the scene too clearly. And what I saw was that those students weren’t maintaining their social distance and neither one was wearing a mask.
I called the priest on this, in a less than tactful way…
I'm assuming they were wearing masks and maintaining social distance and if not you reminded them, otherwise this isn't quite the amusing anecdote it would be
If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I’m usually more politic than this. And I knew why he’d left the masks and the social distancing out of the anecdote. It would have wrecked the flow of the story and ruined the joke. But I was feeling grumpy and impatient because I was waiting at UrgentCare for a checkup and Covid test and I took it out on him. He, naturally, took umbrage at my tweet.
Everyone was, of course [he replied]. Very strange comment.
I blundered on…
There's no "of course" about it. Or aren't you aware of what's going on at many other schools? And what do you think is going to go on in the stadium?
He retorted with an implicit “Excuse me!”...
I think it was an odd comment because it suggested I might be indifferent to doing my job. I would not be highlighting a situation that was dangerous--I'm well aware that here and at other places it requires constant vigilance. But that doesn't mean I expect that a wholly separate observation needs the skew line of "but did you do your job?"
To which I replied by pointing out that...
My followers don't necessarily follow you so they aren't going to automatically give you the benefit of the doubt
But they're really unlikely to give the benefit of the doubt to a pair of college guys even if they are good Catholics
I have to confess I was getting sardonic pleasure out of being rude to a priest. In 2002, my by then tenuous relation with the Church ended with me being rude to a priest, for which I offer no penance, because he deserved it and then some. I was looking forward to more but the good father was willing to let it go. He had a game to get to, after all. And I was being called in for my checkup.
But I wasn’t willing to let it go. I don’t have to let things go. It’s why I have a blog. So here I am, not letting it go.
For the record, I’m fairly certain this priest doesn’t read my blog.
Anywho…
Like I said to the priest, there’s no “of course” about it. Colleges that opened for classes last month are already shutting down because of outbreaks of infection among the students who---here’s a shocker---aren’t wearing masks and maintaining social distance. SUNY Oneonta here in New York has closed for the semester. Ken Mannion’s classes at SUNY New Paltz are all online by his choice, but he won't risk going up to campus even though it's practically a ghost town to use the library, the cafeteria, or the gym. My sister Laura’s daughter is back at SUNY Geneseo but she went back reluctantly. She’s a dance major and her dance classes aren’t offered online. The protocols in place make it practically like she’s in prison. Students are pretty much confined to their dorm rooms when they’re not in class. She and her roommate and floormates are being diligent, but they’re girls. The worry is that some maskless, self-believingly immortal, invulnerable guy will burst in the door some night to yell, “We’re having a party! Come on down!” Another niece, my sister Linda’s daughter, is aghast and appalled and frightened by the recklessness of students at her college out in Texas. She lives in her own apartment off campus, but when she walks to class she has trouble avoiding other students, maskless, traveling in bunches, convinced they have nothing to worry about because they’re young, and young people are immune, and, besides, it’s Texas---Covid only affects old brown and black people in Blue States and where did you get those numbers, Yankee? Notre Dame is in Indiana, a state full of idiot, Trump-loving Republicans of the type who make up most of the crowds at football games.
But there’s one more thing I wanted to remind him of, if he and the nurse waiting for me to gather up my effects and follow him into the examination room had given me the time to tweet.
Lou Holtz, arguably the greatest football coach in Notre Dame’s history, had just been given the Medal of Freedom by you know who. And you know who gave it to him as a political reward for speaking at the Republican convention where mask-wearing and social distancing were conspicuously not only discouraged, they were treated as cowardly and un-American.
What did he suppose students at Notre Dame made of the sight of those gleeful, maskless supposed adults sitting shoulder to shoulder in folding chairs on the White House lawn? Hopefully, the same thing most kids their age make of adults in general. But even if they know better, the adults in their sphere probably don’t. The crowds at college football games aren’t made up of students or even alumni. They’re made of average middle-aged, middle-class chuckleheads for whom college football is a tenet of their personal religion and an expression of their patriotism. Fans of the Fighting Irish come to South Bend from all over the Hoosier state---all over the country really---to worship and wave the flag.
And not incidentally watch young men risk life and limb for their amusement.
The fans are there by choice.
The players have to be there or else.
If that priest had been willing---and foolish enough---to get into it with me, I’d have liked to argue theology with him.
See, in my religion, holding a football season during a pandemic is a sin.
Recent Comments