"Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Twelfth Night
1601

The entire parish of Our Lady of Immaculate Action said an extra rosary when the word of Cardinal Marlon O'Grady's recovery broke. Surely one of the most robust octogenarians in all of Illinois, Cardinal O'Grady shocked his parishioners when he dropped dead of a heart attack after stepping away from the altar. The EMT's arrived in record time to the church parking lot (from the station across the street). When they saw that the good Cardinal was expired, they shocked him anyway with the portable deliberator. After ten minutes without a pulse, the Cardinal sat up.

On the way to St. Mary's hospital of Chicago, he babbled a story so fantastic that the EMT's didn't know what to think. The driver, Mike Hoffman, told his partner to keep quiet about the things Cardinal O'Grady said. "We better call another priest…somebody."

His partner, Freddie Piejko, nodded, but tried not to shake. "Yeah. No use letting word out of this to the papers! They'll say he's a nut!"

"You better call then," Mike told him as they approached the hospital, "I dunno about all of that Catholic stuff."

Freddie concurred. Mike was Jewish.

"It's all right, father, uh, Cardinal," Freddie whispered to the frantic man on the gurney, "I'll call Chaplin Bell at the V.A. Better not tell the doctors what ya told us!"

Cardinal O'Grady was breathless, but nodded in agreement. Freddie was sure the Cardinal comprehended him. The Chaplin at the Chicago Veterans Hospital, Father Bell, a seventy-year old priest of the old orders was a good egg and could keep his mouth shut. Bell loathed modernism, Freddie recollected, and still believed that there was a Devil. As they took the Cardinal in the emergency room, Freddie dialed a cell-phone and called up Chaplin Bell. Freddie was intimate with this Bell's activities because he often watched Bears games with the priest and his disabled father at the V.A.

Patiently, Father Bell listened to Freddie, and then agreed to come to St. Mary's. He told Freddie to stay near the Cardinal and shut him up if he could. Freddie promised he would try.

The ER doctors were shocked that Cardinal O'Grady was alive. He indeed suffered a massive heart attack, buy they couldn't explain how the EMT's managed to revive him with one shock. By the time they sent him upstairs for further tests, Freddie was glad to see Father Bell arrive. Freddie was close by the Cardinal, but the doctors wouldn't allow him in the room.

Father Bell was known to a few of the doctors and nurses so he was permitted access to the room to speak with Cardinal O'Grady. Under Bell's request, Freddie was blessed with a pass as well. When the three were alone, the Cardinal turned to Father Bell and rasped, "Hell is revolting."

Without missing a beat Bell quipped, "I'd imagine so."

Freddie couldn't help but grin, but the old Cardinal insisted, "No, father, the place of Hell, the eternal pit is revolting . . . having a revolution!"

"Tell me what was revealed to you, Cardinal."

"Revealed? Hah!" The husky, barrel chested Cardinal rustled in his bed. Freddie thought the Cardinal's physical power was returning for he tried to rise, but failed. "I tell you as I told that young polish man, father, I was there!"

Freddie looked at the pale white tiles on the floor, disturbed by the Cardinal's words. First, by the concept that the old man was brain damaged, Secondly, that there might be a sliver of truth in his words.

"It was as real as anything, father," Cardinal O'Grady went on dryly, "It was something out of Dante and a Disney movie. Almost cliché ridden, really, it was. The demons were hideous creatures with leathery wings like a bat. Their faces were dark but not ugly. Putrid, it was! Pools of boiling blood, fire everywhere! Such agony!"

Father Bell gave the Cardinal a sip of water. "Well, you are here now."

"But I was there! Father, I never lived a bad life really! Every man does bad things, but why was I sent to Hell?"

"Was there any indication as to why, your imminence? Did you talk to anyone?"

"It was so confusing. I thought someone would talk to me, but no one did at first. They gave me a pitchfork and I just stood there. I just tried not to be noticed."

Freddie heard the word pitchfork and decided the Cardinal was deprived of air far too long.

"I beheld several huge demons, twice the size of the other flying ones, strung up by their heels. They were being tortured in such ways that I cannot tell of them! When I thought aloud as to the identities of these demonic giants and another man with a pitchfork told me their names. Baal, Moloch, and Dagon. I know it sounds insane, but it is so! I know the New Order of the church does not promote demonology anymore, but it was so! They tried to overthrow the old Prince, Lucifer . . . Satan the dark lord, but they failed."

"I imagine that Satan knows the ropes better than they," Bell offered gently.

"But that is what I discovered! Satan is not in Hell! He never has been there. He rules it from afar!"

"I've heard that put forth before," Father Bell nodded, his hazel eyes darting to Freddie. "Lucifer was cast down and he landed on Earth. In the book of Job, he tells God that he's been walking up and down in the Earth. A lot of folks have the Bible confused with PARADISE LOST."

"It does make sense," Cardinal O'Grady stated calmly. "If he is cast into the lake of eternal fire at the end of the Bible, how can he be there already? But father, the man who told me who the demons were!" the old man crossed himself and said, "It was Pope John! The good pope! He is a man who taught me in the fifties! A good pope!"

Freddie saw Father Bell's face tighten at the mention of Pope John. He knew the old priest from the V.A. loathed the reforms in the Catholic Church that Pope John started. After John's death the church was sold out to the Devil, Father Bell thought. Vatican II had offended many old time Catholics including Father Bell. He felt that all of the Church's sins since 1963 were the result of Christ withdrawing his grace in disgust and Freddie agreed. The Latin mass was replaced with the New Order. It was so sterile to Freddie. Father Bell figured that the old way was good for nearly 2000 years, why change it? Freddie concurred but never voiced this to his wife or friends.

"Cardinal, perhaps it was all a dream! A blip in the mind caused by your condition!"

"I know what I saw and felt," the Cardinal declared firmly and with confidence. "What does it mean?"

Father Bell sighed and shot Freddie a demure look. "You seek my opinion? It's difficult to speculate on. Perhaps the reforms of Pope John were wrong? If this was all a vision and not reality then perhaps this is what your sub conscious mind is trying to tell you."

Cardinal O'Grady gave Father Bell an irritable look. The Cardinal always carried the banner of reforming the old church since the idea came up, Freddie knew. He was glad to do away with a Latin mass and put forth the New Order. Freddie wagered the Cardinal's fear that he been wrong to try to commune with other faiths got to him.

Father Bell said gently, "Perhaps you were in error to remove the crucifix when Jewish leaders came around and this is your mind telling you so. Personally, I would never have participated in that Native American Pow-wow! Bad enough to talk to the Anglicans or Greek Orthodoxy again, but father!"

"They aren't savages, father."

"But they aren't Christians either! Ever consider that the New Order of Vatican II really been a plot by other forces to weaken the church?"

Before the Cardinal could answer, the door to the room opened and two men in priestly black stepped in. Freddie knew them to be Father Anthony McCain of St. Peter's in Elmwood Park and Father James Cook of Our Lady of Great Action parish. Both were in their thirties and much in step with the New Order.

"Father Bell! How good of you to come!" Father McCain snapped. He was a short man with auburn hair and no happiness in his voice. "How is it that the Chaplin of the Veteran's hospital comes to the Cardinal before the Chaplin of St. Mary's?"

"The Cardinal has experienced near death visions. We wouldn't want anyone with loose lips to hear of it," Father Bell volleyed back, not backing down.

"Thank you ever so much," Father Cook said blandly, his face not changing at what the old priest said. Cook stared at Freddie through tinted glasses, his eyes tracing ever bit of his form. Freddie felt uncomfortable at the gaze, knowing that the eyes were the windows to the soul.

"You can go," Father McCain whispered to both of them acidly.

Freddie looked to Father Bell as the old Veteran gazed down at his Cardinal and squeezed his hand. "I'll be back, Cardinal." He leaned down, kissed his Cardinal's hand, and left the room. The oddest feeling seized Freddie and he knew it came from the two priests, but left the room with Father Bell.

In the hallway, Father Bell turned to Freddie and asked him, "Do you pray?"

"I'm an EMT, father. We pray all of the time."

"Then pray for your children. Pray for their friends. Don't pray for those men."

"What about you, father?" Freddie quizzed him with a smile.

Father Bell exhaled, then took in a deep breath before saying, "I'm not afraid of my faith, son. If I were a pedophile that grabs his crotch at the Almighty and his Son, I might be scared. I'm ready to face Jesus or Satan."

* * *

The two young priests listened to Cardinal O'Grady as he relayed his story to them. He ended with, "Suddenly, I was gone! It was a white flash, huh; it must have been the shock from the young men in the ambulance. What do you think it means, my boys?"

Father Cook stared at the Cardinal without moving a stitch. Father McCain said, "What do you think it means?"

The old Cardinal shook his head. "I don't know if I have the will to think about it all yet. Perhaps it is that the reforms of the church are wrong. We have spent so much time enforcing the New Order! Owe to us if we led good people astray!"

"Sorry to hear that. It sounds as if the forces of darkness should better get their own house in order before they can challenge the Lord of light, in any case," Father McCain commented as he walked to one side of the Cardinal's bed. Father Cook took up a place opposite him. "The New Order will prevail always over the old ways. Such things are best left to dust."

"Yes, well, I guess that is true, I don't know," Cardinal O'Grady grunted. "Perhaps it was all nonsense. It was so authentic, boy! So real! I could just feel it. It was almost like—a warning! That is what it must've been! A signal from God to abandon this New Order! Yes boys! We must go back to the old ways and preach The Way as it was given, not as some fool in Rome thinks it should be said! If Satan has taken us for fools then it is time to change. I must tell the children of God this!"

The two young priests exchanged glances. "Yes. If it was a warning, this is something the masses must not hear of. The plan is the correct one, Cardinal and must not be upset by cracks in the armor. Soon all will know better than to challenge the name of our light bringing Lord," Father McCain stated as he pulled a pillow from the other bed in the room and stared down at the Cardinal. He massaged the pillow before saying, "There will be nor more whispers of revolution against our Lord, the true light of the world, Lucifer."

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