c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) Who could tell, despite the sweet first full moon of spring, that Holy Week would have such a surreal character that, as with the Resurrection, we would have to wait and watch for truth to emerge from a strange modern background of lies and distractions?

The week began with a New York Times story about what they termed the “downside” of a new drug for impotence that might help men not assisted by Viagra. The only problem, it appeared from the preparatory research, was that one in 30 men suffered such varied side-effects as getting dizzy, passing out, or driving their car off the road. In short, the earth moved for them but not as they had expected.

Are these drug manufacturers serious or are they, as it seems from other ads, pioneering a new form of unethical ethics that is part-public relations and part-Gotcha?

The week on television displayed other direct advertising for drugs set against backgrounds sunny enough to have been left over from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “It’s morning again in America” campaign. Flowers bloom; children smile; fluffy clouds drift across a blue silk sky; life is good.

Then a sweetly modulated voice quickly adds the equivalent of the fine print at the bottom of the page, the downside, “Some people have suffered dizziness, bleeding gums, nausea or drowsiness. Do not use if you are pregnant or plan to drive a car.”

This was merely a prelude, however, to the campaign unveiled in this same week by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. “The best choice for smokers who worry about their health,” the ad read, “is to quit.” Jump to the next page; “Here’s the next best choice.”

The choice is Eclipse cigarettes which, according to the Wall Street Journal, “may be less likely to cause cancer and other diseases in smokers.” In short, get sick slowly. Did any of these advertising geniuses, champions of ethic-less ethics, look up eclipse in the dictionary?

It means “to obscure,” “to darken,” as well as “any temporary or permanent dimming or cutting off of light.” Are these words that you want applied to your lungs or your life? The downside, as they say, is obvious in its signifying “a decline, a downfall,” as in your health and well-being.

Pondering how much more dangerous the Advertising/Public Relations Complex is than the Military/Industrial Complex, I was reminded that the president, that great shaver of the truth, did not mean to but actually told the truth: “I would like just once to see someone acknowledge that the Whitewater thing was a lie and a fraud from the beginning. …” Ethical statements from Clinton are always an accident.

Then I read that, although there had been a big drop in the number of Catholic priests in the last generation, there had been a substantial increase in the number of bishops. Is this a great church, or what?

Easter Sunday would have seemed less surreal if the government forces had found an empty tomb instead of a terrified Elian Gonzales in an incident that both mimicked and mocked the Resurrection. We freed him, in effect, to imprison him along with his father at the heavily armed Andrews Air Force Base.

Perhaps the next time, the attorney general could just slay all the children under 6 years of age.

Dizziness was the week’s side effect. But there was an upside, a resurrection for us in a pair of stories about finding long lost hearts. One, in the chest cavity of a dinosaur, was grapefruit size, reddish brown and fossilized 66 million years ago. Yet it had pumped warm blood and may have been an ancestor of the warmblooded birds who sing of new life for us every spring. What a mystery, one that was as steeped in age as the drug and tobacco ads had been in the passing moment.

The second heart, hardened into a reddish but much smaller stone, had belonged, sophisticated tests indicated, to the dauphin, the child of the last king and queen of France, whose short life was burdened with illness, imprisonment and a lingering mystery about whether he had died in the mean and darkened world of revolution.

Two lost hearts, each with a tale about time and chance, two lost hearts found with the truth still in them about the world they had known and what they had suffered, two lost hearts to buoy our own in this strangest of Holy Weeks when the world had seemed to forget that, like the dinosaur and the dauphin, the truth outlasts all the re-writing and distortion of this public relations age.

KRE END KENNEDY