Home † Treatment † Script †
Characters & Setting † Producers †
Meet the writers † The Church & Sex † Famous Ex-Seminarians † About

FATHER DISMAS REHAGY (Dis – pronounced ‘Diz’ – 46) is the Senior Prefect at St. Mark Seminary, watching over high school juniors (Third Class) and seniors (Fourth Class).

An only child, Father Dismas was born Richard N. Rehagy in an industrial city in the North.  When he was 10, his father Earl was killed in a gangland shooting while driving a truck loaded with bootlegged booze.  His mother Yvonne never recovered, becoming aloof from her son in the years that followed.  She never remarried but spent every available moment in church.  She became president of the Altar Society in St. Waldo Parish, joined in Perpetual Adoration in the wee hours of the morning, and made pilgrimages to Lourdes, each time leaving young Richard in the care of her tyrannical older sister Laura, who lived in the South.

On Sunday afternoons, however, Richard’s Aunt Laura would strip the boy naked (so that he could not run away) and lock him home by himself while she went off to attend Vespers at a monastery miles away.  Uplifted by the inspirational Gregorian chant, she invariably returned that same night in a much better mood, always bringing the boy a huge slice of Devils Food cake and fudge ripple ice cream.  He would sit down to enjoy the sweets while she immediately drew herself a bath.  She always sang during those baths.

Self-absorbed, Richard wasn't interested in playing with other children.  At every turn Yvonne dragged him to church, where he spent way too much time sitting alone in the back pews of St. Waldo's while his mother prayed or tended to the chores of the Altar Society: cleaning, dusting, arranging flowers, and caring for vestments and linens.  The boy occupied his time by sleeping, daydreaming, or reading volumes of the Golden Books series on nature.  When his mother went into the sacristy, Richard would lie down in a pew, staring upward at wicked gargoyles painted on the church ceiling, imagining fantastic battles in which he was slaying the evil creatures.

On a late summer afternoon, a cicada flew into church with a loud buzz and landed on the back of the pew in front of the startled boy.  Richard studied the insect and then stealthily picked up a weighty hymnal and smashed it down on the insect.  A jet of the cicada’s bodily fluids squirted into his eye.  He screamed and rushed toward the sanctuary where a startled Yvonne grabbed him and washed out his eye with Holy Water.  Rife with microbes, the Holy Water triggered an eye infection that nearly cost the boy his sight.

Yvonne made sure Richard entered the seminary at 14.  Although living up north, Yvonne made arrangements through Laura to enroll the boy in St. Mark Seminary.  Laura, it seems, had an unexplained ongoing personal connection with Fr. Mauritius, the Novice Master at St. Mark Abbey.  At St. Mark’s, Richard became obsessed with the devil, reading everything he could on Satan and his howling minions of darkness.  Richard identified with St. Michael the Archangel as the foe of Satan – one angel pure good and the fallen angel pure evil.

Having spent little time around girls, Richard remained asexual until 16.  While working at St. Waldo’s rectory the summer after Third Class, his pastor, Fr. Byron Spurling, grabbed him as he was folding Sunday bulletins and fondled his genitals.  Bewildered, Richard tried to get a date with a former girl classmate as a way to counteract the experience with the priest.  But no one would go out with him.  Afraid to tell anyone what Fr. Spurling had done, he went back to his job in the rectory, where the pastor resumed groping him, often leading to ejaculation by the boy.

Richard returned to the seminary and joined the Society of St. Barnabus in 1942.  Ordained in 1949, he took the professed name ‘Dismas,’ after the redeemed thief crucified alongside Jesus.  Father Dismas worked his way into a position on the seminary faculty because he persuaded the abbot of his interest in forming young men and after several years of exemplary performance teaching general science, biology, and chemistry, the abbot appointed him as a Prefect.

Tall and lanky, Father Dismas has brown eyes, crewcut gray hair, and a neatly trimmed full gray beard.  In his office he cultivates a collection of phallic plants, including Devil’s Tongue, Peace Lily, and San Pedro Cactus.  His prized possession is the anatomically correct Genital Mushroom.  He chain smokes cigarillos, enjoys sipping Port, and listens to classical music.