Dear Father Rutler,
I’m a priest and a recovering alcoholic, and I dread the day I have to drink a large amount of Christ’s Sacred Blood left over after a Mass. What should I do?
Anonymous
Congratulations on your recovering. The word itself is a gerund, or verbal noun. Think of the rarer gerundive in Latin. Cato the Elder used it (eg delenda) to rally the Senators. There are two newly elected Congresswomen with vulgar vocatives and intemperate glottal fricatives, who obviously are ignorant of this. Everyone is recovering from something by God’s grace. To persist in that recovering is what St John (John 1:16) calls “grace upon grace ”.
