Necessary Sins

by Elizabeth Bell

  “Purity is a habit, my son. You must practice it.”

  “But how do I begin? Everything I’ve tried has failed.”

  “You are an intelligent young man, Joseph. Perhaps at this stage, a little reason will help.” Father Verchese picked up a pair of shears from the nearby bench. His hands shook, but he used one of the blades like a saw to remove a bloom from a climbing rose. His confessor laid the blossom in Joseph’s gloved palm: freshly opened, damp with dew, and an exquisite shade of pink. “Beautiful, yes?”

  Joseph nodded. He couldn’t take his eyes away. His filthy glove seemed an unjust resting place for such a treasure.

  “Today, it is beautiful. But tomorrow, its beauty will fade. Admire it—chastely—on the vine, but remind yourself that such beauty does not last.” Father Verchese chuckled. “And remember the thorns! Myself, I do not envy husbands.”

  Joseph smiled back, but without conviction. Because in this moment, the rose was beautiful.

  “Celibacy is a sacrifice; but every man makes sacrifices, whether he chooses the Priesthood or an earthly family. The question is not: ‘What do we give up?’ but: ‘What do we gain?’ There is more freedom and joy in the Priesthood than laymen can comprehend. To be able to perform God’s work wholeheartedly, without distractions or divisions in our affections; to step within the Holy of Holies and experience the divine as only a handful of His creation can; to transform ordinary bread and wine into the Body and Blood of the God Who existed before time…”

  Joseph remembered the longing he felt when he assisted at Mass, and he nodded. But he had not let go of the rose.

  His confessor settled on the bench. “When I was in seminary, I had a friend who struggled until his final year.”

  Joseph sat beside him.

  “Let us call my friend Lot. As we progressed in our studies, as our Ordination to the Subdiaconate approached, Lot grew increasingly restless, increasingly curious: what was it really like to know a woman? Finally he…stumbled, shall we say. And afterwards, Lot confided to me not only his profound regret but also his disappointment. The forbidden fruit proved far less delicious than he had imagined.”

  Joseph frowned. That possibility had never occurred to him.

  Father Verchese wagged his finger at Joseph. “Woman fell short of his expectations. But God will always surpass them.”

  “Your friend still became a Priest?”

  His confessor nodded. “Lot confessed and did Penance. Now, he is a fine pastor.”

  Joseph stared down at the rose in his palm. He wondered what had happened to the woman who’d shared Lot’s sin. “What about…would you recommend mortification of the flesh?”

  Father Verchese considered. “It has proven effective for numerous saints. When they were tempted, both Saint Benedict and Saint Francis stripped to the skin and threw themselves into thorn bushes.”

  Joseph grimaced.

  “One of the Desert Fathers found that even while fasting in the wilderness, he was haunted by obscene visions of one particular woman. Eventually word reached him that the woman had died, but even this did not quell his lust; he still dreamt of her. Finally, the Father travelled to the place where she had been buried months before. He unearthed her coffin, opened it, and dragged his robe through the putrescence that had been the woman’s body. After that, whenever he lusted after her, he could bring the robe to his face, inhale the stench, and remember what had become of the flesh he’d so desired.”

  Joseph closed his eyes against the image, but he should have pinched his nostrils: somehow the stench of that robe reached him even here. Or it might have been the manure he’d spread that morning. When Father Verchese patted his knee, Joseph started as if his confessor were a corpse—or a woman.

  “Perhaps the mere thought of their fortitude will strengthen yours, my son,” Father Verchese chuckled as he stood.

  Joseph swallowed and nodded. He admired the rose one last time. Already it was wilting. He leaned down to lay the bloom on the earth beside his bench. “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”

  Chapter 16

  It seems that 60 men deprived of hearing and speech should have constituted a painful and grievous sight; but no, not in the least. The human spirit so animates their faces, most of which are truly beautiful, it so shines forth from their lively eyes, it blazes its way so rapidly to the tips of their fingers, that instead of pitying them, one is tempted to envy them.

  — Société Centrale des Sourds-Muets de Paris, Banquets des sourds-muets (1842)

  At the Propaganda’s villa, the seminary routines of silence and prayer changed little. Even if their families had been close enough to visit, such a prolonged return to the world would have offered dangerous temptations. Joseph found that swimming, clothed and alone, helped to ease the restlessness still humming in his rebellious body.

  Though there were no lectures to attend during the summer, he and the other seminarians continued their studies through guided reading. Not a moment must be lost, or souls would be lost. While Canon Law stated that a Priest could not be ordained before the age of twenty-five, the Holy Office frequently granted dispensations, especially for missionaries. Bishop England had entered the Priesthood at the age of twenty-two.

  The seminarians were permitted letters from their families, although the seals were broken. Most of Joseph’s correspondence was with his mother, his grandmother, and Hélène—nothing the censor judged harmful to his vocation. Joseph suspected that many of his father’s letters were destroyed, but it hardly mattered; he only glanced at the ones he did receive. When Bishop England sent a missive, Joseph cherished every word.

  In 1830, Joseph received a rare letter from Cathy. Its contents made him realize just how long he’d been away. Five years. Long enough for his sister to become a young woman of sixteen. A young woman whose hot blood had dictated her future.

  Joseph, I am married. His full name is Peregrine McAllister, though I call him Perry. He is your age and a Scot. He’s also a good Catholic, but Papa likes him anyway. Papa has been wonderful. He never said “No”; he only said “Wait.” Mama and Grandmama are the ones who turned up their noses. “He’s beneath you,” they said.

  We gave them no choice.

  Here some of the letter was cut away, but Joseph surmised that Cathy had allowed her lover to compromise her.

  Now that Perry has married me, Mama and Grandmama are usually civil, though they still think I deserve someone finer. But we know better, don’t we, brother?

  I told him, Joseph, and Perry says it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t understand that it would matter to anyone of quality. But I don’t want to be someone’s mistress. I want to be a wife—even if that means being a mother too. Perry says he loves me, and he makes me feel beautiful, at least for a little while. I’m not like you, Joseph. I’m weak.

  For now, we’ll share Grandmama’s house. Don’t tell anyone else yet, but in a few years, when he’s saved enough money, Perry and I plan to leave Charleston. He wants to own land even if that means going westward. I want to go where we’ll be safe, where no one knows Papa.

  There was a postscript in Hélène’s hand that made Joseph smile.

  Don’t worry, dear brother: I shan’t get married until you can marry me!

  The next summer, Cathy wrote again to tell Joseph he was an uncle.

  We had him baptized David Joseph, since you’ll never have a son, and so you’ll remember him when you offer Mass. Mama and Papa say he looks just like you when you were a baby, only fatter. I am simply grateful he does not resemble Papa’s mother.

  Sweating and alone beneath an olive tree, Joseph closed his eyes against the words: “since you’ll never have a son…” He thought he understood some small shard of what Christ felt in the Garden of Gethsemane. A part of Joseph envied Cathy and her husband. A part of him wanted to beg his Heavenly Father to take this bitter chalice from him.

  What was his sacrifice next to their Savior’s? Joseph mad
e himself pray as Christ had: “Not my will, but Yours be done.”

  The month after Joseph’s twenty-first birthday, Bishop England came on his visit ad limina, to kneel before the tombs of Saint Peter and Saint Paul and report the state of his diocese to the Holy Father. Joseph had not seen his Bishop for eight years, and at first he hardly recognized him. But the smile that reached all the way to Bishop England’s eyes was unmistakable.

  Once, he had seemed like a giant. Now, Joseph found himself looking down on this great man, at least literally. His Lordship was no longer as vital as Joseph remembered him, heavier in body, his dark hair gone grey. He must be forty-seven, but he looked even older, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders—or at least, the weight of three American states.

  They turned onto the Ponte Sant’Angelo, lined with Bernini’s angelic statues. Each bore an Instrument of Christ’s Passion. “Have you already met with the Holy Father, my lord?” Joseph asked.

  Bishop England nodded, keeping his eyes downcast. “Yesterday. I wanted to draw the attention of His Holiness toward the American souls we have been neglecting: the souls of the negroes and Indians. His first step in addressing the problem is one I had not anticipated.” His Lordship stopped beneath the statue of the angel with the scourge. “The Holy Father has appointed me Apostolic Delegate to Haiti.”

  “Haiti?” Joseph felt as though he’d uttered a curse. “Does His Holiness not understand that you are Bishop to three states full of slaveholders?” The mere word “Haiti” inspired terror and hatred in Southerners. In their eyes, the island contained only fiends, fallen too far to ever be redeemed. Its name might as well have been Hades.

  His Lordship looked ahead to the angel with the great Crown of Thorns. “My current flock will distrust me because I go to serve former slaves who freed themselves through violence—and those former slaves will distrust me because I have not condemned the slavery in my diocese. If the Haitians were to discover that I myself own a man…” Bishop England met Joseph’s eyes and added in explanation: “His name is Castalio. His former master left him to me in his will. And this is how it happens, you see? The heirs of slaveholders are born into a trap—a burden carried from generation to generation.” His Lordship started forward again. “Slavery is ‘the greatest moral evil that can desolate the civilized world’—I wrote that for a pamphlet published in Ireland last year. But in the United States, we Catholics walk a razor’s edge of resentment already. If I were to condemn slavery from a Charleston pulpit, I would be hanged in effigy if not in fact, and all the gains I have made for our Church these thirteen years would come to nothing.”

  “Can you decline this mission to Haiti?”

  Bishop England shook his head. “The question is one of nearly a million souls and of the generations to succeed them.”

  “But surely someone else could go.”

  As they passed, Bishop England glanced to the other side of the bridge, where an angel held the Cross against the sky. “What if Christ had given such an answer when God the Father asked Him to sacrifice His life for us?”

  Ashamed, Joseph fell silent.

  “I would be comforted if I could take with me an assistant I trust, an assistant who is fluent in French…and perhaps conversant in Creole?” Bishop England peered hopefully at Joseph.

  Now he interrupted their progress; Joseph could only stand gaping. To go willingly toward that scene of slaughter, which Great-Grandmother Marguerite had invoked so many times in his childhood…

  “I know—you must complete your studies. But I imagine this mission will continue for a number of years. If you feel called to minister to Haiti, son, I would welcome you at my side.”

  They’d nearly reached the end of the bridge. Joseph stared at the angel above them now, the one who held the sponge of vinegar. “I-Is it safe?”

  His Lordship leaned against the marble balustrade. “The President has invited us—an homme de couleur named Jean-Pierre Boyer.”

  “President, or dictator?”

  “President for life.” Bishop England looked up to the statue of the avenging Saint Michael atop the Castel Sant’Angelo. “At least he’s brought unification and peace. But the cost!”

  “More bloodshed?”

  “No. Did you realize, Joseph, that in order for France to recognize Haiti’s independence, in order to finally secure peace, Boyer had to agree to pay reparations to the slaveholders for their lost property? The indemnity is 150 million francs!”

  For a moment, Joseph stared down at the muddy Tiber. He had heard about this: as the heirs of a Saint-Domingue planter, Joseph’s father, his sisters, and Joseph himself were eligible to receive part of the indemnity. But his father had refused to apply for it. Joseph had been relieved—surely such a claim would risk exposing his father’s illegitimacy and their true color. “By ‘lost property,’ the French don’t mean only the land,” Joseph murmured.

  Bishop England shook his head. “France has forced the people of Haiti to purchase themselves.”

  Joseph and his Bishop agreed that he would depart from the College of the Propaganda the following year, so that His Lordship could confer on him all three of the major orders. Joseph would spend his months as a Subdeacon and Deacon in Charleston and complete his studies at the seminary there.

  Before he left Rome, Joseph visited Santa Maria della Vittoria one last time. He found with alarm that the church had been invaded by scaffolds, tarps, and workmen. A fire had ravaged the apse and licked at the crossing. The high altar had been reduced to ashes, but Saint Teresa and her angel remained untouched, luminous in the gloom. Joseph knelt before the altar-piece that now seemed more miraculous than ever. Help me to be like you, Saint Teresa, he prayed.

  A saint would have recognized the money his father had sent him as an occasion of sin and put most of it in the offering box. Instead, Joseph left the Papal States and did something that certainly was a sin for the pleasure he took in it: he attended an opera, Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. As soon as he reached Paris, Joseph sinned again, twice. A Mozart aria was almost worth eternal damnation.

  He’d come to visit the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes. Joseph learned that its board of directors was discarding the deaf teachers and suppressing the language of signs. The Abée de l’Épée, who had founded the Institute, would not have approved. He’d celebrated Masses in the manual language of his pupils.

  In response to the school’s hostile new board, the deaf community decided to commemorate the Abbé’s birthday. That year of 1834, sixty men gathered for their first annual banquet: printers, engravers, painters, cabinetmakers, farmers, teachers—their only commonality was their deafness, but this made them immediate allies.

  The deaf men invited Joseph and two other outsiders, but this night was to celebrate sign, so they agreed not to use their voices.

  ‘Do you ever dream that you can hear and speak?’ Joseph asked one of the deaf men with his hands.

  ‘No,’ the man answered with a wistful smile. ‘I dream that everyone in the world can sign.’

  In this, Joseph’s father had been right: these deaf men amazed him. Their difference gave them a place to belong, yet they did not let it limit them. Every day they fought tirelessly to prove themselves proud and intelligent Frenchmen, who deserved nothing less than the rest of their countrymen.

  Joseph returned to Charleston through the port at Nantes, in order to make a pilgrimage to the place of his Great-Granduncle Denis’s martyrdom during the Terror. Only forty years ago, in the country of Joseph’s own birth, to be a true Priest had meant treason, and treason meant death. Before his capture and execution, Denis had been forced to live and minister in hiding, sleeping in caves and celebrating Mass in stables. With one simple oath to the Republic, he could have saved his life by damning his soul.

  Joseph could not help but wonder what he would have done in Denis’s place. Would he have been a martyr, or a coward? What price was he willing to pay for his faith? Help
me to be like you, Father Denis, Joseph prayed. Help me to be worthy of carrying your name. Help me to be worthy of the Priesthood.

  Chapter 17

  Do you really think…that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to.

  — Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (1895)

  From his childhood in Charleston, Joseph knew he must remove his soutane when he left Catholic Europe. For the first time in nearly a decade, he wore only a black woolen coat, waistcoat, and trousers over his shirt and drawers. He felt lighter but practically naked, like a knight deprived of his armor. Until Joseph’s hair grew out, his hat would cover his tonsure—that too was abandoned in hostile countries. The true badge of a Priest was his conduct, not his dress.

  Joseph soon learned the new pitch of American persecution toward the true Church. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Protestant citizens believed nuns were being held against their will, or at least the mob used this fiction as their excuse. Fifty men dressed like Indians rampaged through the Ursuline Convent and school, setting it alight. The nuns and their pupils fled in terror. Firemen were called, but some joined the mob, and the others simply watched the convent burn. Thirteen rioters were arrested, but all were acquitted or pardoned to applause in the courtroom.

  Four Ursulines had just arrived in Joseph’s Charleston to set up a girls’ school. The Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy had established themselves five years before. Perhaps Bishop England had invited these holy women in order to ease the loss of his own sister Joanna to stranger’s fever. His Lordship had retained Castalio, a quiet negro about thirty years of age, who served as his valet and also as coachman when the Bishop toured his diocese. Father McEncroe had returned to Ireland to recover his health.