Reflections of a stormy petrel

Funny how stuff that contradicts your certainties always turns up after you published them. I just found a bizarre rumour that he may have had last rites from a Jesuit priest who was in the neighbourhood and who seems to have been called to his bedside when he lay dying. I find that hard to believe. That a man like Oscar Wilde, who wrestled with Christianity and Catholicism half his life, should have a deathbed conversion, is one thing; or that Charles II of England, over whose whole dynasty Catholicism broods almost like a curse, should have a priest secretly conveyed to his death chamber - all right; but that a convinced and successful rationalist should, is quite a different matter. It is hard to see anything in the life of the Freemason Washington, friendly though he may have been with various Catholics, that would incline him to a mystical crisis in his last days, given that he never seems to have altered the energetic and rational tenor of his ways.