[solzhenitsyn]

Now that is a man!

[solzhenitsyn]

We all have to face our mortality some day, but not every death has to be meaningless. What a wonderful way to leave this world this good priest found!

[Romulus]

What's funny is that we have no way of knowing if this was a "good" priest at all. It's entirely possible that he was a very bad priest, a lost soul headed nowhere but down, who in the last moments of his life received a terrible, transforming grace. The Lord's ways are not our own; in his determination to save as many sinners as possible he may well have known that the only way this fellow was ever going to make it was by flooding him with the grace he'd need to make an offering of his life in this good cause. It's the sort of ending Flannery O'Connor would have loved.