Lucy and Kipling

Lucy was my spiritual Godmother. I adopted her in my late 20's because she quickly led me to a much fuller understanding of what a militant Catholic ought to be and do. She introduced me to The Wanderer and many other Catholic periodicals. She paid for me to attend a Catholic conference out of state. She sponsored several days of recollection led by good priests. She held a free banquet to celebrate Cardinal Mindszenty's anniversary. Lucy served the Church in ways too numerous to mention--many of which occurred after she turned 65.

Shortly before she died in her 80s, I knocked at her door. When she opened it, I gave her a bouquet of red roses. She looked puzzled and asked "Why?" I responded that she should receive roses before she died, not afterwards!

Lucy was the first one who spoke to me of the devilment coming to the Church after Vatican II. She knew her Church history and contemporary Churchmen, and predicted that a catastrophe was in the making. She said she would never see the restoration of the Church, and she was not sure that I would see it in my lifetime. Her death in the late 1970s was a great loss to Kansas City Catholics.

Lucy particularly liked the poems of Rudyard Kipling, an English poet of the early 20th century. One time we talked about the problem of "sexual freedom." She told me of The Ladies, a poem that continues to be remembered whenever I read or hear about men and women living together in sin.

Kipling's poem describes a British soldier who goes from woman to woman as he is stationed to different posts. The poem ends with the warning:

've taken my fun where I've found it,
An' now I must pay for my fun,
For the more you 'ave known o' the others
The less will you settle to one...