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“I’m leaving the church, Bishop,” Fr. Nicholas said.
“You want it out there, Father, but winter is coming.”
“I’d rather live with sin than in sin,” Nicholas said.
“You knew what you were getting yourself into when you joined the priesthood.”
“Yes, I knew I was joining the priestly order of Melchizedek but not a spousal swapping club.”
“And what are you insinuating, Father?”
“It’s inevitable that with time priests would openly take church revenues for their (once secret) families to decorate their wives and girlfriends and turn the offertory to their own hedonism and worldly pomp.”
“Such outrageous allegations are a mortal sin, Father. You need to confess…”
“No, I need to walk the hell out of this hypocritical nest of nincompoops,” Father Nicholas retorted. “Sacerdotal order has deteriorated into an amorphous shape, and I am not ready to be ensnared by the evil in the church.”
“What have you been eating, and drinking, Father? You really need some serious praying.”
“I wanted to be a Vicar of Christ, celibate and living piously, not a family man in the making. Why lie to the masses, tell them to confess their sins yet we do the opposite…?”
“Father, Christ came to save us from evil. Something must be dirty for it to be cleansed…”
“The clergy I admired and wanted to be like are solicitous and obstinate, as though on dispensation by higher prelates. They commit ‘reserved sins’ – witchcraft, convents turned bordellos and disrobing themselves for carnal pleasure, oral sex isn’t sex, and buggery is…”
“Stop this madness, and spare me the damn lectures you apostate,” the bishop said.
“It’s better I live with sin than in sin…”
“Where wouldn’t you find sin?”
“The depravity that has scourged the world today is a much welcome companion than the hypocrisy and the sin brewing in the church, the only place where such shouldn’t be found.”
Silence ruled the bishop’s small office before he said, “And where would you be going?”
Father Nicholas’ crowning moment presented itself. “The Moonies or the Reformed Catholic Church…”
The bishop afforded a smirk. “And what makes you think you’re any different from us?”
“Where I am going sin may be forgiven for its guise of piety…” Father Nicholas said. “But not piety clothed in the raiment of sin.”
