The life in the Center was busy. In the penthouse each of us had an
office and Cave had a large suite where he spent his days watching
television and pondering journeys. He did not follow with much interest
the doings of the organization though he had begun to enjoy reading the
attacks which regularly appeared against him and us in the newspapers.
Bishop Winston was the leader of the non-Catholic opposition and his
apologias and anathemas inspired us with admiration. He was, I think,
conscious of being the last great spokesman of the Protestant churches
and he fulfilled his historic function with wit and dignity and we
admired him tremendously. By this time, of course, our victory was in
sight and we could show magnanimity to those who remained loyal to
ancient systems.
I was the one most concerned with answering the attacks since I was
now an editor with an entire floor devoted to the _Cavite Journal_ (we
were not able to think up a better name). At first it was published
weekly and given away free but after the first year it became a daily
newspaper, fat with advertising, and sold on newsstands.
Besides my duties as editor, I was also the official apologist and I
was kept busy composing dialogues on various ethical matters, ranging
from the virtues of cremation to fair business practices. Needless to
say, I had a good deal of help and some of my most resounding effects
were contrived by others, by anonymous specialists. Each installment,
however, of Cavite doctrine (or rationalization as I preferred to think
of my work) was received as eagerly by the expanding ranks of the
faithful as it was denounced by the Catholic Church and the new league
of Protestant Churches under Bishop Winston’s guidance.
We received our first serious setback when, in the autumn of our first
year in the new building, we were banned from the television networks
through a series of technicalities created by Congress for our benefit
and invoked without warning. It took Paul’s lawyers a year to get the
case through the courts which finally reversed the government’s ruling.
Meanwhile, we counterattacked by creating hundreds of new Centers
where films of Cave were shown regularly. Once a week he was televised
for the Centers where huge crowds gathered to see and hear him and it
was always Paul’s claim that the government’s spiteful action had,
paradoxically, been responsible for the sudden victory of Cavesword:
not being able to listen to their idol in their own homes the Cavites,
and even the merely curious, were forced to visit the Centers where,
in the general mood of camaraderie and delight in the same word, they
were organized quite ruthlessly. Stokharin’s clinics handled their
personal problems. Other departments assumed the guidance and even
the support, if necessary, of their children while free medical and
educational facilities were made available to all who applied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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