A Good Nose is Requisite

A decade or so ago, two of John's friends, Alfred Myers and Charles Bowen, worked with us on a walk-through of Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies.  The project was to help us better understand the time and place from which it came from as well walk us through John's sense of humor in many of the jokes, puns, and satire.  Anyway, Bowen shared this remembrance during our research and we came across it again recently.  Dig in.

"I suppose all religious people, when their kids are annoying them, have a tendency to attach moral force to what are really injunctions against bad manners. One of the brothers who taught me in high school described a scene he remembered in a church where all the kids from the parochial school had been marched en masse to confession. Nuns kept the waiting children in order, and one of them was apparently so offended by the boorish behavior of some boys that she issued a theologically incorrect statement. After hearing the next couple of confessions, the priest burst out of the confessional and bellowed so loud that every child in the church could hear, 'IT IS NOT A MORTAL SIN TO PICK YOUR NOSE!!!'”