The Senator and the Priest

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I realized that I would have to concentrate on the confident swagger because that was not how I thought a lawyer should enter a courtroom, at least when a jury was seated.

  We would be completely dependent on our staff. We should pay them well—the Chief of Staff and the top Legislative Assistant were worth six figures—and permit them extra days off when they asked. We should be loyal to them. When they make mistakes that cause us trouble, we should never blame them in public or snub them in private. We should strive to be pleasant and collegial with them and avoid arrogance. We should reach our offices by eight or eight-thirty in the morning and do our best not to look and act like we had a hangover on arrival. Therefore we should be out of bed by six, especially if we wanted to exercise and read the Times and the Post. We should remember that a morning exercise postponed till later in the day would be an exercise lost.

  I took copious notes, though more for my next book than because I doubted my ability to remember them.

  I did ask whether bells rang for morning and evening prayers and what was the time for spiritual reading. This implicit comparison of the Senate with a monastery occasioned only a weak and delayed laugh.

  Then there was a remarkably candid discussion of Sex and the Senate. Some Senators on occasion indulged in adultery and fornication, as was well known, sometimes even in the Senate itself or the office buildings. How prevalent such behavior was problematic, most likely less than gossip or folk lore would lead us to believe. The senatorial day was long and difficult and left very little time for seduction. There were many attractive women around the Senate, some of them potential groupies. The Senators present for the seminar would have to make their own personal decisions on this matter based on their existing commitments and their personal code of morality. Nonetheless, it must be observed that such intimacies always carried some element of risk, more in these days of the ever-present media eager to destroy as many Senators as they could. There is a tight-knit gossip network among the Senate staffs. A seemingly secret and private relationship consummated in the office after hours or in a hideaway can easily become common knowledge the next morning. If you want to make love in a hideaway, it might be better to bring your wife.

  Nervous laughter, though not from me. I thought it an excellent idea and I thought the virtuous Marymarg would agree.

  Not yet.

  The speaker, a woman, drove home the point. An affair, even a brief one, could lead to swift destruction of a Senator. You’d have to be a gambler, even a reckless one, to risk it.

  OK. I wasn’t planning one. Or so I thought then.

  After I was sworn in and we had our little party at the house in Georgetown, my first assignment from my staff was to attend both prayer breakfasts, Protestant on Tuesday morning and Catholic on Wednesday.

  “You don’t have to go ever again,” Chris said. “At least they’ll see you there. You won’t be branded an atheist.”

  The Protestant prayer breakfast turned my stomach.

  The Evangelicals have the right to their own convictions and rhetoric. However, I don’t have to feel at ease with them, any more than they would feel at ease if I took out my rosary and began tolling the beads. The preacher enjoyed pronouncing the name of the Lord as if it were “JAYZ-zus,” with musical variations around both syllables. The BIBLE was also subjected to such rhapsodic enunciation. I felt like someone was rubbing a ruler against a blackboard.

  “You’re a Roman Catholic, aren’t you Senator?” Wayne Bates, the Senior Senator from Kansas sitting at my left, asked when the praying and preaching were over.

  “Yes, Senator,” I said not wanting to dispute that I didn’t find the adjective demeaning.

  (“You’re a real shanty Irish bigot,” my wife insisted as I told her the story.)

  “Then you really haven’t been saved yet, have you?”

  “I think I have.”

  “Not unless you have experienced faith in the love of the Lord JAYZ-zus who covers our sins with the blood of the Lamb.”

  “Oh.”

  “My dearly beloved wife is a Roman Catholic. It makes me sad to realize that when we die, I will have to look down from heaven and see her burning forever in the fires of hell. Yet I’ll see in her torment the fires of divine justice and I’ll cry out, ‘Praise the Lord!’”

  “I hope you are pleasantly surprised,” I murmured.

  He quoted several verses from scripture with which I was unfamiliar. Then someone else rose up to pray that the Lord would grant us the strength of faith during the coming term to snatch the Yewnited States back from the edges of hell by fighting against the horrendous sin of homosexuality. There were cries of “Amen” not unlike those I had heard at the Rainbow Coalition in Chicago.

  “Don’t take all of that seriously,” Senator Hatfield McCoy said as I walked out of the breakfast. “I’m a Christian, but I’m not an extreme Christian, if you understand my meaning.”

  “There is but one tragedy,” I said, falling back on a quote I had heard in college, “and that is not to be a saint.”

  “I suppose,” Hat answered. “Take old Wayne for example. He’ll screw any pretty girl he can get his hands on. Doesn’t bother him at all. Everyone knows it. He’s drunk half the time too. Yet the piety flows out of his lips like he was a preacher man … I’d say he’s an extreme Christian.”

  “I’m sure there are many sincere and devout Christians in the Senate,” I replied, “even if they’re Republicans.”

  He slapped me enthusiastically on my back.

  “Hell fire! You Irish are really quick with words!”

  “Hypocrisy is a part of the human condition, Senator.”

  “You shouldn’t let all that piety in there trouble you, Tommy. It’s part of our culture. Like I say, I’m not an extreme Christian, but I don’t fool around, though it’s pretty easy. My wife would de-ball me.”

  “I know the type, Hat. I’m sure we have our share of hypocrites in the Senate too. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

  “You shunuff sound like a preacher man, quoting the scriptures … You ever think of being one of them celibate priests?”

  “I gave it some thought. My brother beat me to it.”

  “He approve of you?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Does he find celibacy difficult?”

  “He’s utterly dedicated to his work.”

  “Nice to talk to you, Tommy. We gotta see more of one another.”

  “Good idea, Hat.”

  Hands across the two great divides.

  I felt more at home at the Catholic breakfast. The minority leader signaled me to an empty seat next to him. He was leaving no doubt that I was a man approved.

  “Heard you went to the other side yesterday. Enjoy it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their piety, it’s just not mine.”

  “I heard you got thrown out of Church by that asshole priest over at St. Ethelreda.”

  “My whole family. Sins of the parents are visited on their children. A lot of the congregation walked out with us. It was towards the end of Mass anyway, maybe they just wanted to go home and work through the Sunday editions of the Times and the Post.”

  “Jesuits take you in?”

  “They almost had to. My wife and I both had seven years of higher education with them. My oldest daughter is going to Gonzaga prep.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Not much you don’t hear.”

  “My job,” he laughed. “Some of the bishops expect us to vote the way they tell us to vote. I hear your brother is on their side.”

  “Again you hear right. I’m my own man, Senator.”

  “Didn’t doubt it for a moment.”

  You just wanted to know where I stand with my brother. Legitimate question. Honest answer.

  The Catholic breakfast was much less frenetic though there were some manifestations of piety, prayers for guidance and faith and patience and persistence. I had n
o trouble saying “amen” to all of them. I wondered whether God had time to listen to such breakfasts or to our prayers. He had said that he did. Did he ever get bored with us I wondered? Did I ever get bored with my three Marys?

  “Why do you think after all these years the Bishops are after us?”

  “It helps their careers. They think they’ll win back some of the authority they lost with the pedophile mess. Kidding themselves.”

  The speaker for the morning was, naturally enough, a Jesuit. He did not drop his ‘r’ and then add it elsewhere. Rather there was the flavor of the prairies in his voice. Gary Cooper playing the Plainsman in an old western. He argued that much of the religious response to science didn’t work because it assumed that God was subject to the same kind of rhetorical proof as the Big Bang or evolution. That, he said, was a language mistake. Any God that could be proved that way might be the great Unmoved Mover but he was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not my God and your God. The Catholic philosophers in their arguments in favor of God had given the game away by ignoring the “religious,” that is mysticism, saints, devotion, faith, stories, music, art—all the resources for which science had no room and could not have room. Who believes, he asked, in God because of one of St. Thomas’s five ways and who believes because of devotion of a mother or father, the patience of a grandparent, the goodness of a parish priest.

  I talked briefly to him afterwards.

  “Good points,” I said. “We’ve been giving the game away on lots of things.”

  “Descarte, Kant, that bunch.”

  “And religion teachers.”

  He laughed.

  “I hear you’re already in the hands of the Society here in D.C.”

  “There was no room in the other inn … and let me assure you that my brother has little effect on my thinking or acting.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?”

  I promised I would be back for future breakfasts, a promise I kept occasionally.

  The next day Schlenk was after us again.

  SOFT CORE PROVIDES DC HOUSE FOR TOMMY

  Supporters of cute little Tommy Moran were embarrassed to learn yesterday that his palatial house in the tony Georgetown district in Washington was provided free by his father-in-law, Charles “Chucky” O’Malley, who is famous for his soft core porn photos of women. O’Malley, who likes to call himself “Ambassador” because of a post in Germany forty years ago, allegedly bought the home during the Johnson administration. Convenient isn’t it? Especially, despite his big seven-figure book contract, Tommy doesn’t have much money to spend on housing. Will he ever stop embarrassing the people of Illinois?

  We put a “clarification” on our web page and in my newsletter and sent it to the Daily News which often printed such replies. We had a hard time talking the Ambassador out of a suit. His lawyers demanded that the Examiner issue an apology. They admitted that his rank was valid, that he had won Pulitzer prizes for his photography, and had photographed every president since Dwight Eisenhower. Neither the house nor our family were mentioned.

  “He’s a smart man,” Manny admitted.

  “Been at the game a long time.”

  “Best office art in the building. A lot of staffers come by to look. Can I show them the family pictures in your office?”

  “Free of charge.”

  One day, it must have been about that time, I brought in a five-foot statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and put it in the corner of our reception office. No one complained. So there she stayed.

  I began to learn many facts, some of them distinctly unpleasant, about my job.

  I rarely spent much time on the Senate floor. No one did. When someone demanded a quorum call—usually a delaying tactic—we’d race over to chamber and register our presence. Most of us would immediately go to the subway which runs from the office building to the chamber, answer “present” when our name was called, and then hurry back to whatever we were doing. Senate debates were rare—only when a major piece of legislation was up for a vote and many of us wanted to say something for the record. There was very little give-and-take argument on the floor. We said what we wanted to say, then yielded to others who would say what they wanted to say. Debates didn’t affect the outcome of the voting in the slightest. We’d all long since made up our minds how we were going to vote. Even when an actual vote was taken, we’d often not be present—unless it was on, let us say, a major cabinet-level appointment about which there was controversy and on which the media would be focused. On lesser issues, Senators would leave immediately after their vote was cast. Some of us would come in, catch the eye of the clerk, and give him a thumbs up or thumbs down.

  Committee meetings were another matter. Usually they were not hearings for which the TV cameras would be present. In those cases we—or more often our LAs—would hammer out the issues and we would argue and fight about them and either send the bill on to the floor or let it die. It was a rare bill that came before the committee and an even rarer one that went up to the full Senate. The other party had the majority of votes, so in theory they should dominate the committees. But not infrequently some of the nominal Republicans would vote with us. So, as much as it offended the Republican ideology to compromise on anything, they would sometimes have to hammer out a compromise. I turned out to be reasonably good in those situations and earned a reputation as a tough but honest negotiator. All those years as public defender had served me in good stead.

  Most Senate speeches are made for the record, written and televised. One wants to establish what one is for and against and for many reasons—most of them having to do with keeping the constituents happy. On occasion we might want to leave a minor record for history. We’d all put the text of our remarks on our Web page and quoted them in our newsletters. Sometimes our speeches were intended to impress our colleagues. Occasionally we spoke out of passionate conviction. I can’t sort out which motivations affected me whenever I rose in that august chamber (and it really is august) to tell the world or whoever was present what I thought.

  CHAPTER 19

  MY TOMMY’S maiden speech in the Senate was on St. Patrick’s day, chosen in part because the kids would be out of school and they could sit in the galleries and be proud of him. His topic was to be immigration, an appropriate subject for the day. He had worked very hard on the draft, argued with me about some of it, then gave it to his speech writer, a bright kid from Notre Dame, who looked at it and said, “I wouldn’t change a word.”

  He would speak at about noon, so he would appear on the evening news. We would eat lunch in the Senate dining room, from which we had hitherto been barred, after the talk. The kids were dying to see “daddy’s office” and “the place where daddy works.” That this was the United States Senate didn’t matter in the least. We all wore green dresses of course. And I bought Tommy a very special green silk tie, which would look truly bitchin’ on C-SPAN.

  Tommy is a cool one when he has a major speech or plea or anything of the sort. I can never tell if he’s nervous, not until afterwards and even then only sometimes. He seemed especially cool this time. Maiden speech in the Senate? So what!

  We showed up in the office at ten, two hours after he arrived. After we had gone through security, Capitol Hill cops escorted us to the second floor of the Dirksen building and down the corridor to his office. The pretty receptionist stood up to greet us when we came, a bit nervous in the face of the four solemn redheads in brilliant green dresses—womanly druids.

  My kids either had inherited it from Rosie or had learned how to be gracious and charming in all possible circumstances and from their father how to take in everything with a glance and store it.

  “Gramp’s pictures,” they said, noting the artwork in the outer office. “Cool!”

  “Guadalupe,” they said as they touched the statue with the respect and reverence they had learned from their Sonoran friends, perhaps more than reverence. “Neat!”

  Tommy met us at the door to the large of
fice. Everyone on the staff looked up, stopped working, and cheered.

  We blushed and smiled and I said, “We’re grateful to all of you for keeping our daddy out of trouble this long.”

  Then in the inner office, the kids rushed to the window to look at the dome of the Capitol.

  “Out of sight!”

  “Excellent!”

  “Outstanding!”

  A bright young man took charge of us on a brief tour of the office building, the Capitol, and the Senate. A plainclothes cop trailed behind us.

  We ascended to the visitor’s gallery where a cop viewed our credentials and let us in. Two or three Senators were on the floor, talking to one another, while a fourth was reading a speech to which no one was listening. The acting President Pro Tem seemed to be snoozing in his chair. The various senate staff members looked bored. The pages in their uniforms also looked bored.

  “here is everyone?” Marytre demanded.

  “In their office working just like Daddy.”

  “Will there be more when Daddy talks?” Maran wondered.

  “There had better be.”

  “The page uniforms are yucky.”

  “What a boring job!”

  “I’d never want to be a page.”

  I confess that the four of us garnered a lot of attention as we wandered around. Juno and her daughters come to listen to the paycock.