Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis - Bill O'Reilly’s Holy Week Traditions in New York

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

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eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion. eBay, things people love. There's a low in the action in New York City and state politics. Holy Week, Passover, people are, you know, getting together with family and planning to do religious things and recreational things. So I don't have a lot of new things to tell you about. I remember one of the advantages of living in New York City in that area, is that we have very vivid traditions.

So if you watch a movie called Easter Parade, old movie, you know, Marks Now Fifth Avenue, everybody's dressed up, and right, so we really do the traditions of Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July. We do them up the best in the world, I think. And I remember as a kid, Easter was second of Christmas because kids get, you know, toys on Christmas and can't top that.

Easter Bunny, you know, never a big deal in my neighborhood in Levittown. They had the little egg hunts and all that. But the Easter Bunny himself, we just kind of looking like, okay, fine. We'll take the candy eggs, but we don't need the bunny. But it's a nice for little kids, a nice treat, and all of that. But I remember that during Holy Week, I went to Catholic school, St. Bridget's Westbury, and then Shamanada and Mineola. And the traditions were that if you visit three churches on Holy Thursday, which is the day that Jesus held the last supper with the apostles, it's

interesting history, too, if you're killing Jesus, you know about it. But if you visited three churches and said prayers on Holy Thursday that all your sins were wiped away. You got an indulgence. So every sin that you had up to that point vanished. This was what we were told as urchins. And of course, all the urs should go, oh, that's a good deal. Let's go to the three churches, which we all did. So my mom and some of the other moms, we got a little caravan. We go to St. Bernard's in Levittown, we go to, you know, a few other churches around, and we'd all pile in there, and then say a couple of Hail Marys, and then go to the next church and the next church, and they go out to lunch at Thomas's Hammondegri on Old Country Road, okay? And it was fun. It was a great, and then, you know, I don't know whether my parents bought the indulgence thing, but I bought it. It's 10.

Okay, why wouldn't I buy it? I didn't have any big sins by then anyway, but I'm going, hey, this is a really good deal. Now, as a Catholic school urchin, you had to go to confession. And in my class, there were 60 kids, okay, 6-0, and one nun. And the nun would impose discipline with a ruler, and, you know, they were, Let's say they weren't enlightened, they weren't woke, it was okay, I got through it. But I was a lively kid, all right, obnoxious, probably disruptive, I was always in trouble, but there was one kid worse in my class than me, and his name was Clement.

He was a Italian kid. I think Clement was shaving in the seventh grade. Anyway, Clement was a great guy, very funny, but he never shut up, and he was always in trouble. So when we went to confession during Holy Week, I would make sure I got on the line right behind Clement. Because I knew whatever Clement was telling the priest, I couldn't match. I couldn't come close to that. And one time, I remember the priest's name, he was a little guy, a mean guy, Father Tierney, a mean guy. And we didn't have any choice on who we went to confession.

They just assigned us the line. And so Clement looked at me, he goes, this is going to be great. And I go, uh-oh. And I, we're all standing outside a confessional in a line, and the priest goes, you did what? And Clement comes out, and he's got this big smile on his face. I think he had to do 4,000 Hail Mary's. So then I went in right after Clement, and whatever I did wasn't even in the same hemisphere. I thought you might enjoy that story.

A little Holy Week tradition on Long Island.