Last week I had dinner with Paul the theologian and Willie, who is a rosary-thumping Catholic and, for a moment, I thought the Reformation and the Seven Years War were about to start all over again.

Oddly, what started the conflagration was Willie saying he’d just read Pat Buchanan’s new book; then he leaned across the table toward Paul and asked, “You like Winston Churchill, don’t you?”

Paul said he did and in the next breath Willie said, “Well, you know Churchill was a war criminal?”

Now, like a lot of Baptists, Paul believes sin is bone-deep. He shrugged, “Well, I reckon Churchill had plenty of opportunities – but I wouldn’t want to look too closely at whatever Pat’s calling war crimes because back then we were walking the same road and our hands may not be clean either.”

Willie shot back, “But we never firebombed Dresden.”

“We firebombed just about everywhere else. Like Hamburg.”

That didn’t phase Willie. He explained firebombing Dresden was a war crime (and pure meanness to boot) because there was nothing there but shops that made porcelain cups and refugees fleeing from the Red Army – while Hamburg was packed full of factories that made tanks and rifles.

Paul thought that over. “So if I’m flying over Hamburg in a B-17 and drop a bomb on a factory but hit a convent instead and kill fifty nuns in your view that’s not a sin?”

Back in his wayward youth Willie decided to become a monk; he spent a couple of years in an Italian monastery training to be a Jesuit, changed his mind, came home, got one degree from the University of Virginia and another from the University of Michigan and settled into an academic life.

“That’s right,” he said. “Bombing Hamburg is not a sin. Because your intent was to hit the factory – not the convent.”

Paul considered that bit of Jesuit logic. “So to commit a sin I’ve got to intend to commit it – up front?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t recall the part in the Ten Commandments where it says, ‘Thou shalt not intend to commit murder.’”

Willie put down his fork. “Look. Imagine this. You’re driving down the highway at midnight and someone runs out in front of your car and you kill them – that’s not a sin. Because you didn’t intend to.”

“Well, it sounds to me like you Jesuits just created a loophole that eliminates 99% of all sins.”

A week later we had dinner again and this time Paul dropped a newspaper on the table in front of Willie and said, “Read that. About Rashaan Ali’s trial.”

The headline read, “Two guilty of killing Wake girl,” and the story said a gentleman named Rashaan Ali, leading what sounds like a gang, broke into an apartment on Green Street to collect drug money and in the ensuing melee a thirteen-year-old girl, who was sitting innocently on the sofa, was shot.

“Alright, Paul said, “Ali didn’t intend to kill the girl – but do you want to argue that murder was an accident and not a sin?”

Now the Catholic Church has been studying sin for about fifteen centuries longer than the Baptists and for the last five hundred years the Jesuits have been the Catholic equivalent of the Marines – they’ve established colleges and universities to study, analyze and categorize sins and they’ve written untold tomes about every kind of sin, covering every doctrine; on top of that they’ve got razor-keen minds that would put the cleverest trial lawyer to shame. Paul was face to face with all that knowledge but didn’t know it.

Willie studied the headline. Leaned a little closer to the girl’s picture. Looked up.

“Well,” he said, “In a case like this you have to consider the encompassing secondary effect. Since Ali’s initial intent was evil – to consummate a drug deal – and his overall act was evil, even if he didn’t mean to kill the child he was pursuing an evil goal, which his second evil act flowed from (which is how evil works), so he’s guilty of a sin and, besides,” Willie grinned, “We Jesuits would hang him for trespassing.”

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