A History of Loneliness

by John Boyne

  At fifty-seven years of age, I could count on one hand the number of trips that I’d made out of Ireland. Rome, of course, and Norway, for Hannah and Kristian’s wedding many years before. America, once. And I had been to Paris for a weekend trip that my sister had given me on the occasion of my fortieth birthday, little thinking of the unintentional cruelty of sending a single, celibate man who had never known any form of intimacy to the city of love for three days and two nights. The fact that my birthday fell at the end of the second week of February made things even worse.

  I had never been to Africa, Asia or Australia. Had never stood before the Sydney Opera House or the Winter Palace of the Russian Tsars. Instead, I had made my life in Ireland, and there was a part of me that wondered now whether that had been a terrible mistake, but then the list of mistakes I had made was so long that I could not bear the idea of it expanding even further.

  But here I was out in Dublin Airport once again. I could remember standing here in 1978 clutching my ticket in my hand as I left for Rome, Mam and Hannah waving me off, pride on my mother’s face, boredom on my sister’s, as I marched from the ticket counter to the plane itself without any difficulty. Now it was like trying to enter China. Security checks galore, taking half my clothes off to be passed through an X-ray machine before being patted down by an overweight man with bad skin as he masticated loudly on chewing-gum. The threat of terrorism, everyone said. We were none of us to be trusted.

  I was enough of a novice to enjoy the sensation of the plane rising into the air, taking time to look out of my window at the stretch of M50 beneath me, the way the city opened itself out towards the water and the twist of cliffs around Vico Road, where the big-shots lived. The woman beside me was reading a book by Bertie’s daughter and wasn’t to be disturbed for love nor money. The man next to her was watching a film on one of those portable machines and snorting through his nose every few minutes. I’d saved Jonas’s new novel for the journey, but hadn’t I forgotten it in my rush to leave the house that morning and I could picture it now, sitting on the table by the door. To make up for this, I had bought a copy of The Irish Times in the airport shop and of course it was full of talk about the radio interview that RTÉ had conducted the day before with Archbishop Cordington, who had moved me to Tom Cardle’s parish six years before and who had been elevated to cardinal in the meantime, courtesy of the German Pope, for it was well known that the pair of them had been as thick as thieves for years.

  The interview took place in response to a newspaper investigation which suggested that Cardinal Cordington had been fully aware of the crimes that had been going on in the Church for decades, that he had facilitated them in a way that made him as culpable as those priests who had committed these acts. In the past, no doubt acting on orders from Rome, he had refused to engage with any of these issues, but things had gone too far now; the Murphy Report had been deeply critical of him and more and more civil cases were being taken against the Church by victims of abuse. The point had come where he had little choice but to address the scandal and so he had agreed to do a live radio interview with Liam Scott.

  No slouch, Scott started off with a few easy ones. He asked the cardinal to talk about himself, about his life, about what had led him to the priesthood in the first place.

  ‘A calling,’ he replied in a gentle, mellifluous voice. ‘I felt it first when I was just a boy. There were no priests in our family. To be honest, my parents were not particularly religious, but for some reason I felt a vocation inside me and as I grew older I talked with a priest in our parish about it, a very nice man, and he gave me the benefit of his advice.’

  ‘How did you feel about that vocation?’

  ‘It frightened me,’ said the cardinal. ‘I wasn’t sure if I could make the sacrifices or if I even had the mental resources for the life that it entailed.’

  ‘Did you have any doubts about what you were giving up?’ asked Scott.

  ‘I did, of course.’

  ‘But you went ahead anyway?’

  ‘Did you ever feel, Liam, that the path you were walking along was one that had been laid out for you long ago? That you had no control over it? That’s how I felt. Chosen. By God. And when I entered the seminary for the first time, I knew instinctively that I had come home.’

  Listening to the interview, this, at least, had spoken to me, for I had felt something similar when I first arrived at Clonliffe College: that here was a place that had been waiting for me my entire life.

  A few more platitudes were thrown out, the cardinal was put at his ease, and then things got harder. Scott started with the statistics. The number of child-abuse cases which had come before the courts in the last few years. The number still outstanding. The number of priests behind bars. The number who had been found not guilty through a lack of evidence, but over whose heads serious question marks remained. The number of victims. The number of suicides. The number of support groups. Numbers, numbers, numbers, and the man from RTÉ had them all at his fingertips and he rattled them off clinically, with no threat in his tone, content to sit back and let the statistics stand as challenge enough. When he got to the end and the cardinal had uttered not a word through it all there was a pause before he asked, ‘Cardinal Cordington? How do you respond to all of this?’

  It was a terrible thing, replied the cardinal, his tone filled with well-rehearsed remorse. A truly terrible thing. There was talk of barrels and rotten apples, of lessons being learned, mistakes from the past being rectified. Going forward, looking backwards, the usual guff. But then, misjudging the sense of the remark, he mentioned that for every priest who found his name in the papers, there were a hundred more who did not.

  ‘It’s like a plane crash,’ he said, using a preposterous analogy. ‘Whenever a plane goes down, everyone hears about it. It’s on the news, it’s on the television. Because so many tens of thousands of planes take off every day around the world and land safely, but a crash is so rare in the great scheme of things that every one is worth reporting. And so it is with these priests who have been accused: there are so few of them among the vast number of decent, honest priests that we hear every bad story.’

  Scott picked up on this quickly, suggesting that this was an extraordinary comment to make, for generally speaking no one on board such a plane – captain and passengers alike – was responsible for what happened; it was usually a fault with the engine. The priests, he pointed out, knew exactly what they were doing. They had made their decisions, they had acted as they saw fit without care or consideration for the consequences on the lives of the children in their care. They were the authors of their own misfortunes and the cause of untold suffering for others. They were criminals; pilots of doomed jets were not.

  ‘And one other thing,’ said Scott, landing the killer punch. ‘Even though we hear about every plane crash, it’s not as if there are hundreds of other plane crashes going unreported around the world every day or being ignored due to lack of evidence.’

  The cardinal stuttered in his reply; perhaps he realized that he had spoken badly. He dithered and Scott called him on it, asking him to respect the intelligence of the audience and give an honest answer. I heard a sharp intake of breath on the microphone; it had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him like this. Listening to the interview on the radio in the presbytery, I found myself rooting for Scott, urging him along, telling him not to let the cardinal off the hook. Let the truth come out, I thought. Let it all come out.

  ‘Maybe we can come to some specific cases,’ Scott said, moving on, and the case of Father Steven Sherrif was brought up. He had received ten years for abuses in a school that stretched back to the mid-1960s. Seventeen boys had come forward and told their stories. Four of them, with living parents, claimed that they had spoken to the principal of their school about what was going on and they had been threatened with expulsion.

  ‘That would have been reported to my predecessor,’ said Cardinal Cordington. ‘Who is dead and gone now, m
ay God have mercy on his soul. I can’t be held responsible for what he did or failed to do.’

  ‘But you were an auxiliary bishop in that diocese at the time, weren’t you?’ asked Scott.

  ‘I was, yes.’

  ‘So presumably, before it went to the cardinal, it came to you.’

  ‘And I referred it to the authorities.’

  ‘So you referred it to the Gardaí?’ asked Scott.

  A slight pause. Sure we all knew that’s not what he’d meant. ‘I referred it to the Church authorities,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But not the Gardaí?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It wasn’t my place.’

  ‘Hold on there,’ said Scott. ‘You become aware of a crime and you don’t feel that it’s your place to report it? If you looked out into our producers’ booth now and saw one of my colleagues stealing money from someone else’s bag, would you say nothing?’

  ‘I would tell you,’ said the cardinal, ‘and let you deal with it.’

  ‘And what if I said that it didn’t matter?’

  ‘Well then I’d assume that you understand your business here better than I do.’

  ‘Why would these boys be threatened with expulsion when they had done nothing wrong?’ asked Scott.

  ‘You have to place these things in context,’ said Cordington calmly. ‘The case you’re referring to took place decades ago—’

  ‘The abuses continued until the 1990s,’ said Scott.

  ‘Yes, well I don’t know the specifics of the timeline. But what you must remember is that this was an isolated case. And I had no reason to believe that any of those boys were telling the truth.’

  ‘Or any reason to believe that they were lying?’

  ‘Boys …’ he began. ‘They can be very …’ Wisely, he chose not to continue with that thought.

  ‘Cardinal Cordington, the Murphy Report shows that you were directly involved in eleven separate cases where allegations were made, isn’t that right?’

  ‘I haven’t read the full report, Liam, but if you say that’s so, then I’m sure you’re right.’

  ‘You haven’t read it?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a slight pause. The presenter sounded astonished. ‘Can I ask why not?’

  ‘It’s very long.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘I’m a busy man, Liam. You must understand that. Someone in my position has many calls on his time. Suffice to say that I have read many of the important passages and thought deeply about them.’

  ‘You say that this was an isolated case, but that’s not true, is it?’

  ‘It is true. The priest in question had never been accused of anything before.’

  There was a silence as Scott, along with the listening public, tried to make sense of this logic.

  ‘And that makes it isolated?’ asked the interviewer, baffled.

  ‘Look, it wasn’t right,’ said the cardinal. ‘Of course it wasn’t right. We can all see that now. And I feel great regret about it. Great regret.’

  The stupid man should have left well alone there, for at least there was something of an apology in his reply, but he’d been at this game too long to concede anything and he followed up by pointing out that they had been different times.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Scott. ‘Are you saying that it was all right to leave children to suffer abuse in the 1950s? Or the sixties? Or the seventies?’

  ‘Of course I’m not saying that. But we didn’t know then what we know now,’ insisted the cardinal and I could smell the perspiration through the airwaves. ‘These men didn’t know how to act when cases like this were brought to their attention.’

  ‘So would you condemn your predecessor, the previous Primate of Ireland, for his lack of action?’ asked Scott. ‘Will you say out loud, here and now, that he was wrong?’

  ‘Yes, he was wrong,’ he replied after only a slight pause. ‘And yes, I would criticize him for it. Condemn, however, is a very harsh word. I am not in the business of condemnation, even if you are.’

  An ad break followed. Something about home insurance. And a place to get your windscreen repaired if a stone chipped up at it and caused a break.

  ‘We’ll move on to another case, if you don’t mind,’ Scott began when the show returned, pointing out that there were a lot of callers trying to get through, but that they were going to continue with their conversation first before letting the public have their say. ‘The case of Tom Cardle.’

  And here the cardinal made another mistake. ‘Father Tom Cardle,’ he insisted.

  Why do you not think before you speak? I wondered. And how did you ever reach your elevated rank when it seems you do not have an iota of wisdom in your head?

  ‘It’s been alleged,’ continued Scott, ‘and you know this because it’s been widely reported, that you were aware of Cardle’s abuse of young boys as far back as 1980. That you received a complaint from a parent in his second parish in Galway, when you were a bishop there, and colluded with the archdiocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise for him to be moved to Belturbet rather than investigate any further. Do you have anything to say about that?’

  ‘Firstly, I was a very new bishop at the time,’ said the cardinal. ‘And the pressures of the job were immense. I had no proof whatsoever that Father Cardle was involved in anything like that. To my mind, he was a hard-working young priest who was doing a great job there in Galway. The parishioners loved him, so much so that when an opening came up in Cavan and it needed to be filled quickly, I recommended him purely on the basis of all the good things I had heard about him. The timing was coincidental, nothing more.’

  ‘But had he not come to Galway after only a year in Leitrim?’

  ‘He might have. I can’t remember.’

  ‘I can tell you that he had.’

  ‘Well I’ll take your word for it so.’

  ‘Isn’t a year a very short time for a priest to spend in his first parish?’

  ‘It is, I suppose.’

  ‘So why was he moved out of Leitrim?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said the cardinal. ‘That had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘The suggestion is that a complaint was made about him in Galway,’ continued Scott. ‘And that’s why he was moved to Belturbet.’

  ‘No, that’s nonsense.’

  ‘So no one ever came to you with any allegation about Cardle during his and your time in Galway?’

  ‘I can’t remember, Liam,’ said the cardinal. ‘It’s so long ago and I had responsibility for so many priests. I genuinely can’t remember.’

  ‘The fact is that over the course of twenty-five years, Cardle spent time in no fewer than eleven different parishes. And the Murphy Report makes it clear that at least one boy from every parish was found to have made a complaint against him. Multiple boys in some parishes, even if their cases did not ultimately make it to court. Parents reported threats being made against them if they continued with their allegations. They were told that they would be prevented from taking Holy Communion, that their children would not be allowed into the Catholic school and that they would face serious difficulties within their communities. Businesses would go under as no one would shop at a store that the priests spoke out against.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ said the cardinal gruffly.

  ‘Do you know what this reminds me of?’ asked Scott, his voice even and calm. ‘It reminds me of the Mafia. Of bullying, blackmailing and extortion. Reading about what the Church got up to is like watching the box-set of The Sopranos, do you realize that? A Martian coming down to earth and studying the Murphy Report would think that there was nothing that you and your pals would not do to protect the Church’s interests. And it didn’t matter who got hurt along the way.’

  ‘I think that’s a ridiculous allegation, Liam,’ said the cardinal. ‘And with respect, I think that you’re trivializing something that is terribly serious.’


  ‘But your officials were making these threats,’ Scott insisted. ‘So either they were acting under your orders, and the orders of the Church, in which case you are fully culpable and part of a criminal conspiracy, or they were acting without your approval, in which case you were merely negligent and have no business serving in any position of responsibility. Would that be a fair assessment?’

  And once again, the cardinal decided to dig his grave a little deeper. ‘Liam,’ he said, ‘if I was looking for fairness, do you think I’d be out here at RTÉ? Sure you’re not exactly unbiased, are you?’

  Quick as a flash, Scott was on him. Here was a man who’d cut his teeth on Charlie and Garret and sharpened them twenty years later on Bertie and Gerry Adams; he knew how to respond to this. The man should have been a barrister; the Church would have hired him in a heartbeat. ‘Are you saying these allegations are something that RTÉ has made up?’ he asked. ‘That The Irish Times has made up? That the Irish Independent has made up? TV3? Today FM? Newstalk? The Irish media as a whole? Are you blaming us for this?’

  ‘No, Liam, no,’ said the cardinal, flustered now. ‘You misunderstand me.’

  ‘Did you and your fellow bishops move Tom Cardle from parish to parish because you knew that he was abusing boys?’

  ‘Liam, if we knew that he was doing that, would we not have been right to move him? Should we have left him where he was?’

  Ah here, I thought, shaking my head. Step away from the microphone, for pity’s sake.

  ‘You’d have been right to call in the Gardaí, is what you would have been right to do,’ said Scott, raising his voice for the first time.

  ‘Well of course, of course,’ said the cardinal. ‘And we did. In due course.’

  ‘You did not,’ snapped Scott. ‘The Gardaí came to you.’

  ‘Semantics.’

  ‘Do you not sense the anger out there?’ asked Scott, and for the first time it occurred to me that he had not finished any sentence in this interview with the phrase Your Eminence.