Twixt Charybdis & Scylla.

I've just received a letter from my parish priest asking me to sponsor him per km on the Pronutro AfricanX Trail Run in the Western Cape in March.  It's 90km over 3 days up and down mountains and along beaches and a friend of his is braving the run and his company for the event as it is run in pairs.

I think this is really great and I applaud his initiative and the effort he is making, I would never do it!

I do have a problem with why he is doing it.  The Archdiocese of Johannesburg is building a new Chancery Building at a cost of R30 million.  Our parish has been levied R882 000 to help pay for this and has shown very little interest in raising the money...I think we have raised about R180 000 so far.

I am very opposed to the project.  I agree that the Archdiocese needs new offices etc but I am sure that such huge expenditure is unnecessary as I said in a previous post (scroll down to 18th July).

Our Parish Priest is caught twixt Charybdis & Scylla on this one as he is no-doubt under great pressure from the Archdiocese to produce the cash and is faced with a laity that is less inclined to pay a huge amount foisted upon them without consultation.  What do you do?  Refuse to sponsor him?  That seems mean and churlish.  Sponsor him knowing that the money is going to what could well be someone's personal monument for posterity?  Sponsor him and say "Don't give it to the Archdiocese"!  Any bright ideas?

“Scylla lurks inside it – the yelping horror,
yelping, no lounder than any suckling pup
but she’s a grizzly monster, I assure you.
No one could look on her with any joy,
not even a god who meets her face-to-face…
She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,
packed tight – and armed to the hilt with black death!”


“Atop it a great fig-tree rises, shaggy with leaves,
beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.
Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down,
that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down -
not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.”