The way Erickson hoisted the host over his head and held it aloft for a minute or more made a vivid contrast to the perfunctory elevation that the senior priests favored. Tears rolled down his cheeks during the ceremony. The monk’s cassock he affected billowed theatrically, hiding the bulge at his waist from the pistol he always packed there.
The only snag is that it comes from Minneapolis (via, as so often, the revealer) and has not yet hit the Times. With two murders, a suicide, and a paedophiliac traditionalist, what’s not for a newsdesk to love? Perhaps the most attractive detail is the angry denial by a supporter of the murderer that he could possibly have been gay: “Schemel has heard rumors of alleged sexual improprieties involving Erickson, but nothing beyond that. And he asserts that Erickson never made any advances toward him. ‘He never touched me, due to the fact that I would have killed him–friend or no friend,’ says Schemel.”
I can’t trace the original of this quote, which proves nothing either way, though I have found something very close to it. But while looking, I came across a wonderfully outraged letter: “Father Richard McBrien’s ad hominem attack on me and my co-author, let alone the uncharitable and slanderous remarks against Mother Angelica and EWTN, are completely inappropriate for an archdiocesan newspaper. He launched a scud missile against Catholicism for Dummies, yet it alone has an official imprimatur, whereas the competing editions — The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Catholicism and The Everything Catholicism Book — have none whatsoever.” These fine distinctions matter, you know.