Joe Sobran on something infinitely more important than politics.

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Let’s call him Jack. He is 15, the runt of the litter in a large family, his father having deserted long ago. Jack barely knows him. He thinks it’s normal to be fatherless.

Boys are the primary victims of divorce and irresponsible fathers.

Jack is a tiny, cute boy with a cowlick on his forehead, a snub nose, and an endearing sense of humor, but he was always in the soup from the time he started school. “A trouble magnet,” he has been called. He couldn’t stay out of fights, which he usually lost, and was expelled from school countless times, when he bothered to show up at all.

Jack was an affectionate kid, but he got used to being humiliated. He was small for his age, and he’d been told he was “ugly” so often that he refused to believe otherwise.

Jack was a bit slow in school, with a short attention span. They put him in “special education.” Other kids were quick to call him a “retard.” One day he came home from school and told his mother he had been diagnosed as “hyperactive.” By then he knew how to interpret official euphemisms.
“That means bad,” Jack explained sadly. It also meant Ritalin. Her heart ached, but there seemed no other way to control him.

"Get your Soma! Get your Soma right here!"

Not that it controlled him very much. By the time Jack reached his teens, he was smoking, and not just tobacco. To support these expensive tastes, he stole. Now he was getting into trouble with the police, not just the school authorities. He was hanging out with the wrong kind of kids. Neither his mother’s tearful pleas nor Ritalin seemed to make much difference. His young life was already shaping up like a Merle Haggard song. Mama tried. Would Jack turn 21 in prison, doing life without parole? The trajectory seemed all too clear.

Jack was like a lot of kids — incorrigible for sure, but not wicked. The lovable black sheep, who never seemed to hurt anyone but himself. His grandfather tried to help by taking him in for the summer a few times, just to help Jack’s poor mother, and the two became attached to each other. Jack’s humor made the old man laugh, when Jack’s behavior wasn’t driving him nuts. They shared a love of old Marlon Brando movies, On the Waterfront and The Godfather, both of which furnished them with running gags.

The old man often asked Jack what he wanted to do when he grew up. Partly he wanted to start the boy thinking about the future, but mostly he sensed that Jack needed someone to listen to him with respect. To most people, he was a pest or a problem. But what was inside him?

Someone else took an interest in Jack too. He was befriended by a Brother Thomas, we’ll call him, a member of a Catholic religious order, through Big Brothers of America. Jack saw him weekly and loved him with a passion, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to smoke and steal and break his mother’s heart.

Despite warnings and lectures and probations, he wouldn’t change. Why? Why? He was ruining his life, and it was all so needless.

Finally, inevitably, Jack was arrested for something more serious — being accomplice to some bigger boys in a minor robbery. He was put in a “juvenile detention center,” a clean, well-lighted dungeon. He was helpless and homesick.

Then something happened that wasn’t inevitable. Jack started praying. Hard. Daily. Constantly. He said the rosary twice a day, he became devoted to the great saint Padre Pio. He repented bitterly, not just for what he had done, but for the way he had hurt his mother. For the first time, he was putting himself in someone else’s shoes.

Ta-da!

“I just want to cry when I think of all the bad things I have ever done. She did not deserve the mean things I have said to her,” he wrote to his grandfather. (He added a postscript — a joke from On the Waterfront.)

His grandfather barely resisted the urge to write back to the little boy, “You are more of a man than your father.” Though it was the truth.

Suddenly Jack had matured dramatically. Only weeks before it would have been hard to imagine. And everyone who knew him marveled, understanding that the Good Shepherd had found the black sheep: “There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine of the righteous.” And he who said that was pretty righteous himself.