As Bellringer fell into step alongside Paparazzo, he greeted him and asked what he was planning to do now the war had ended. He told Paparazzo he intended to disappear into the abbey of Melk, where he would call himself Brother Adso. ‘Alas, Paparazzo, what willst become of thou?,’ Bellringer asked. ‘Look to yourself before the Amerikanski ferrets catch up with you.’
As they trudged along, Bellringer probed into Paparazzo’s past life (he had once been a member of the Gestapo so was good at this). Paparazzo told him he had been educated at a convent and then a Jesuit seminary in Munich. ‘Ach, das ist gut,’ Bellringer said. ‘und dost thou not know our beloved Fuhrer called our Reichsfuhrer his own Ignatius Loyola? Why dost not thou, too, make thyself a new career within Holy Mother Church?’
‘But which church?,’ Paparazzo naively asked. ‘The Church of Rome, naturlich,’ Bellringer replied. ‘Surely the equivocation of a Jesuit and the fanaticism of a Hitler Youth make you admirably suited for holy orders?’ Their conversation rambled on about famous Jesuits, and how they experienced many different callings and many different backgrounds.
Paparazzo asked Bellringer how he, with his life as a soldier, could become a priest. Bellringer replied by quoting the exemplum of the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, who argued that a Jesuit should experience every temptation and sin known to man. In this way de Chardin reasoned that he could become a machine-gunner, and hence commit mass murder. ‘But he was still a Jesuit priest’, Bellringer concluded, ‘und so everything is possible, vielleicht?’

Lend your eyes to the blog of a young fellow struggler, whom Paparazzo stumbled across in his route-march. Paparazzo asked the young fellow who he was. "I am called Dilbert von Ringmeister, but that is not my real name." Dilbert's Rottenfuhrer was marching beside him. He said this fellow also had an alias, and he went by the name of Catbert. On their travels they were trying to find their Wachtmeister, a man called Dogbert. Somewhere further down the slowly moving column was their officer, a pointy-headed man called Obergruppenfuhrer Bellringer. The adventures of Dilbert and co. are recorded in http://www.bloglines.com/public/christopherpaxton. Bellringer was afraid he would be exposed as a leading member of the SS, so he was also busy inventing a new identity for himself.

As Paparazzo trudged along among his fellow assorted poor strugglers, he happened to fall in step with a flim-flam man who was peddling a curious collection of things. In his knapsack he had a circular-shaped contraption that flew. He explained to Paparazzo that this was a new American invention called a frisbee. He also had a drinking flask and a star-shaped ashtray. Paparazzo asked him what he was going to do with these items. The flim-flam man said he was going to sell the benefits of his assortment to all the other lost souls accompanying them. The man reckoned he could make millions by duping and fleecing all these other poor fools. He encouraged Paparazzo to join him in his devious scheme ......

Paparazzo was born in 1929. He was a member of the Hitler Youth until the decadent Amerikaners convinced him of the errors of his ways and he joined millions of other lost souls as he trudged through the remains of the thousnd-year Reich. Meditating on his surroundings and pondering his future, he wondered where the next step in his picaresque journey - his Rake's Progress, would take this scoundrel: "I could not dig/I dared not rob/What lies shall serve to please the mob".

This is my latest postchristian meditation on Sin and Redemption.
MFP
PD....R