Thots from *Assassini*

I'm reading a really good novel, a detective thriller called *Assassini* about a group of religious assassins inside the Catholic church, & a lot of it happens in Nazi-occupied France. I came across this quote that I thought some of you'd appreciate:

*Yet I had to force myself to remember the essential truth: she was one of them, a nun, someone you couldn't trust. Everything for her was filtered through the prism of the Church, either its secular rules or the mumbo-jumbo. Ether way you couldn't win, not with them.

Look back at Torricelli, I told myself; now, there was a case in point. Poor Torricelli, the quintessential churchman, caught in a vise of Nazis, Catholics, Resistance fighters, and no clear choice for the old bishop. For hm it was always a question of tiptoe, tiptoe, along the line, being neither one thing nor the other, ignoring or refusing to acknowledge right and wrong. If you couldn’t decide right and wrong in a world run by Nazis, then you had a problem. Didn’t you?

Yet Sister Elizabeth would have understood the old bishop’s dilemma. It was like an amputation you underwent upon entering the Church: the Church cut away your morality and replaced it with something of its own, something unnatural and contrived and prescribed. There was no room for simplicity anymore, no room for right and wrong. Expedience was the new morality and you accepted it.*