Happy Are The Oppressed, by AM Greeley

"Your Grace," the handsome and wondrously underclad woman on my right said, "I'd like to make a general confession."

"Ah?"

"I am going to die..."

"Indeed. . . might I ask what is the nature of your illness?"

"I am going to be murdered, Your Grace .. . before the end of the year.

I readjusted my pectoral cross (a silver St. Brigid cross made by my cousin Catherine Curran, the only one of its sort worn by any bishop in the Catholic world).

Then, because it is my job as a priest to say such things even in the most unusual circumstances, I added, "You must remember, Ms. Cardin, that God loves each of us with a parent's tenderness and a lover's passion."

"Now?" I said in some dismay, losing for a moment the cool for which Bishop Blackie is (arguably unjustly) famous.

We were sitting at the speakers table in the Grand Ballroom of the Drake Hotel, something less than an appropriate site for the outmoded Catholic practice of raking up all the alleged sins of one's life.

"Of course not," she said calmly and without a smile -- she never smiled as far as I had observed. "I am asking for a recommendation of an appropriate priest.."

"They are too lenient. I wish to prepare seriously for the end of my life. I need to hear no sermons about helping the poor."

Her voice was low and cool, utterly self-possessed. I shivered slightly. Despite her revealing white dress with its narrow belt of Christmas red and green around her slim waist -- high skirt with a higher slit, low back, bare shoulders, plunging décolletage -- the woman generated as much heat as a snow bank dumped on the side of the Kennedy expressway by a plow of the Department of Streets and Sanitation. Her pale blue eyes were as cold as frozen lakes under icy skies.. Her white skin radiated as much warmth as would a field of newly fallen snow

"Ah . . . and the stern and strict clerics from the prelature of Corpus Christi?"

I was referring to priests from the Corpus Christi Movement, a "secular institute" which was to some considerable extent independent of the local bishop, even when said local bishop was as eminent as Sean Cardinal Cronin. The Corpus folks were considered to be somewhere to the right of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

She dismissed them with a brief movement of her ring laden hand. "They are more interested in exact numbers of sins that the anguish of guilt and failure."

"I am going to die very soon, Your Grace," Chantal Cardin replied, ignoring my piety, ice in her carefully modulated voice, "a terrible and painful death. I deserve to die. I want to be certain that I'm at peace with God, despite my wretched life."

For the second time that evening I shivered and for the second time groped for words.

"It is a mistake, Ms. Cardin, to overestimate our sinfulness. Indeed we are creatures and sinners. But at this time of the year we also remember that we are beloved children."

She turned towards me, frosty blue eyes pondering me, lovely breasts all too close. "Priests ought to be stern with their penitents."

A flush rose from her chest to the roots of her hair. A faint upward tug of her lips suggested the possibility of a smile.