Page 77

By Jack Joseph Smith

from the mill towns are good football players. They are also tough, which puts the spirit of Saint Bernards on a level Papa Joe feels good about. The following is an attempted quote form the newspapaer article my friends mom read us one day when she was telling us about good men and bad men. She read a short part smiling. Father Lawnegan Tells Bishop To Go To Hell Father Lawnegan, parish pastor of Saint Bernards Church in the wealthy section of Mount Lebanan during last Sundays sermon suggested that the Bishop mind his own business, and became more demonstrative later in his sermon by telling the most reverend bishop to go to hell. Father Lawnegian said to those attending twelve o'clock Mass, look around all of you. Do you see the chairs your sitting on? I'll bet some of you wonder why they aren't fastened to the floor. Well I'll tell you why. Because we take them all out of here every Sunday after you leave and set up partitions for a clasroom on Monday. Kids from all over the place come, here for school, and its going to stay that way. Father Lawnegan is also known for his passing out holy cards at Mass, which on the back read, if your ever in trouble, you didn't see anything, you didn't hear anything, and you know nothing. Notify Father Lawnegan immediately. Testifying to the type of communication he has with his children is also the statement printed in his own newspaper, The Boy Scouts are twenty percent boy and eighty percent girl, which made him somewhat a controversy from Pittsburgh to Miami. I can see him now dark and dismal in his walking in the early morning. His hat was frayed and old like his vestments that he had been wearing sence he was ordained. He lived alone in an attic above the tattered wooden rectory. The rectory was the only building on the grounds, that wasn't made of stone. But his face was stone, and the Mount Lebanon people were afraid of him. He was a tall man who moved as if he was

Original Scan

Page 77

AI Interpretation

GPT

Papa Joe Lawnegan enters as a scandalous parish force through newspaper legend, football pride, holy cards, and a school that he insists will stay open to children from everywhere, not just wealthy Mount Lebanon families.

The newspaper voice and neighborhood retelling make him feel larger than a priest almost immediately, half outlaw and half protector. School, church, class, and toughness are fused together so completely that his defiance of bishop and police reads like the moral style of Saint Bernard's itself.

Claude

The narrator transcribes, as 'an attempted quote', a newspaper story his friend's mom read aloud: Father Lawnegian told the Bishop to go to hell over his parish school, whose chairs are cleared every Sunday for Monday classes, and he hands out holy cards telling kids in trouble to know nothing and notify him; the page ends picturing Papa Joe, 'dark and dismal', in frayed vestments, living in the attic of the only wooden building on the grounds.

The embedded newspaper article gives Papa Joe a legendary, defiant public voice, and the boy clearly relishes a priest who sides with kids against authority. The closing portrait turns from comedy to austerity, a man whose face 'was stone' and whom Mount Lebanon fears, setting him up as the strong father figure the magician promised.