The Good, The Bad, And The Kevin Myerses And Reverend Kellys

Eerily enough, we were just talking about my dad's childhood Irish-American priest and his Anti Semitism. Sadly, there is a lot of Anti Semitism within quite a few pockets of some Irish Catholic circles....and you know what? Maybe that's another part of why his father's parents did not want his uncle marrying an Irish-American woman. 

(By the way, I've done a lot of family and other research as well as lived quite a life for being 27 years old: I can thus deduct, read between the lines, and otherwise have ways to figure out what I'm not exactly or at all being told.)

Long story short, Dad's from a family of Anusim Ashkenazim and B'nei Anusim Ashkenazim, and Pop-Pop's parents themselves were sort of intermarried: Great-Grandma believed in Jesus (and Great-Great-Grandma was not thrilled about this, as I deducted); and Great-Granddad did not (To him, shidduch shmidduch in any case, though: he wasn't in the Old Country, anyway.). Both of them, however, were not happy when Granduncle Tony wanted to marry a daughter of one of the Sugar Notch Lenahans (Her mother was the Lenahan.): "She's Irish!"

Pop-Pop himself married a daughter of a Rusnak whose father was somehow a relative of Yehoshua Rusnak (though I'm not sure that Grandma knew this at the time). Not that the family prominences figured into the marriage decisions, anyway; and even if they had, Great-Granddad had prominent-enough family himself, anyway, thanks (His cousin Katherine, e.g., married a Chokola; and long story short, the Chokolas are somehow Jewish). The point was that a Jew was a Jew, irrespective of belief; an Irisher was a Irisher, and you could bet that he or she grew up Catholic.

As if my great-grandparents were prescient about things that would turn out in the most-ironic way possible, it actually ended up going well for Granduncle Tony and (sadly) his widow (He died just after her 70th birthday and after they'd been married for 46 years.), and Pop-Pop got stuck with a certain Reverend Kelly as his family's pastor when he moved his family down to Glen Burnie and attended The Good Shepherd: he himself would fall asleep in the back of the church while everyone else attended services.

Only later, meanwhile, did I figure out that Reverend Kelly had a clear Anti-Semitic bias against us: according to my mother, whom is herself mostly from Irish-Catholic stock, my sister and I actually held out our hands correctly for Catholics—and not Episcopalian wise—after all when we attended a Christmas service at the Good Shepherd, including with begrudging Dad (and that Dad had to deal with Father Kelly helps one to understand why he turned out how he turned out—you deal with people in authority whom want to think that they know better than even God Himself, you might also turn out how Dad turned out. By the way, some are skeptical that Reverend Kelly was solely at fault—one good thing about attending what's now NDMU is that I know how many Roman Catholic teachers, laymen and clergy alike, think that they know better than God and try to teach their students to be robots instead of students).

Had I known that we're Jewish back then and that we did hold out our hands correctly after all, I would have realized that the same pastor whom hated my dad as his student back then picked on his now-grown former student's Jewish-looking children—as I've found out, we couldn't pass back then or now even if nobody would say anything—and years later, I am not surprised.

At least I (can be at least fairly certain that I) know that Reverend Kelly will have to (if he hasn't already had to) face a Jewish Jesus someday, and hearing "I never knew you!" will be (or was) painful: after all, as Corrie ten Boom stated, "You can't love God without loving the Jewish people," and she was paraphrasing the Paul of Tarsus whom reminded the gentiles at Rome that gentiles are grafted-in branches of the Tree of Life and Jews are the regrafted-in branches.

Update: After doing some quick Googling:

1. Reverend Kelly is out of The Good Shepherd. God hath given each according to his or her works, I see. Nonetheless, he his sycophants
2. I see nothing to indicate that he's died. Since he's still alive, then, he has had some time to reflect on what he's done throughout his life.