Training to Be a Clergyman

At Pasadena, California, 22-year-old Bernard York, a theological student at Pasadena Nazarene College, pleaded guilty in municipal court to a charge of cat-torturing. The youth admitted that he doused a cat with alcohol and then set the cat ablaze, watching the flames and hearing the shrieks. The judge, who placed the boy on a year’s probation with no jail term, commented that the youth is a “normal, intelligent and industrious student with a background of Christian training and anxious to become a minister.” (Los Angeles Examiner, April 16, 1955) One cannot help but wonder if the boy is training to become a teacher of the sizzling flames and shrieks that make up the fictitious clergy-inspired hell of eternal torment.