Those words haunted me for my entire life.
*
Father Donnelly first told me about the Island of Lost Priests in 1968, just before he died. I’d come home, exhausted and bruised from my years in Chicago. My wife, God rest her soul, had been dead about a year, and I finally understood some of the despair that took my father, even if I didn’t succumb to it.
I had to leave Chicago though, which meant leaving the Chicago Police Department, even after I’d risen to become one of the best homicide detectives in the entire city.
I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t look at death any more without seeing Mary Claire, jaundiced from the cancer, trying to smile even when it was an effort. Death had ceased to be a puzzle for me then. I knew it snuck up on all of us, but I had forgotten how slowly and mercilessly it could attack.
I figured New York would be my balm, but I wanted the New York of my youth – the loud brash city that had been the centre of the world, not a growing cesspool.
Not even the Church was the same.
No Latin Mass at all, not even for the purists. A priest younger than me who seemed to have no wisdom, just platitudes.
I asked about Father Bill, but he’d moved to a parish in Louisiana to take care of his ailing parents. Father Donnelly had retired – if a priest could well and truly retire – but he still kept his hand in. Although that young priest I didn’t know told me I should see Father Donnelly soon or I wouldn’t see him until we met again in the afterlife.
Father Donnelly lived in an apartment in a building owned by the Diocese of Brooklyn. The building wasn’t far from the church. Father Donnelly’s apartment was small. The door opened into the dining room. The kitchen was to the left, along with a corridor that led to the only bedroom and the bathroom. The living room was in the front of the building and had a bay window that overlooked the street. A working fireplace showed that the apartment was what the city called Pre-War, meaning pre-World War II.
A fire was burning in the fireplace, making the living room about twenty degrees hotter than it should’ve been. Still, the man I remembered, who could throw a perfect Dodger’s pitch even with a softball, had shrunken to half his original size. He was wrapped in thick quilts that I knew had come from parishioners.
Father Donnelly might’ve been strict, but he was well loved.
He sat in the bay window, feet propped along the edge, and he leaned against cushions stacked against one of the window panes. An old potboiler was open across his lap.
We talked about novels and how much we both escaped into fiction. We talked about our lives since we last saw each other, and Father Donnelly was the first to draw me out about Mary Claire. He’d married us, after all, and knew how much I’d loved her. He had sent me some kind letters after her death.
But he had lived long enough to know that love and loss were two sides of the same coin. He believed I should move on, and I wasn’t so sure. She had been my wife, and I knew I’d see her in God’s heaven, if I lived well enough. I wasn’t sure, no matter how many times the priests reassured me, that I’d see her again if I replaced her with someone else.
Philosophy, religion, the past and my future. It was a wonder he didn’t tire out sooner. But the woman the parish paid to care for him nudged me gently to leave so he could rest.
As I stood, I asked him something that had been gnawing at me for years. ‘Do you know where Father Joe ended up?’
By then, Father Donnelly was nearly asleep. But his rheumy blue eyes opened and I thought I saw sadness in them.
‘The Island of Lost Priests,’ he said.
I wanted to ask what that meant, but his eyes closed and the woman shooed me out.
The next time I saw Father Donnelly, he was looking beatific in his casket, a rosary in one hand and a baseball in the other.
I was glad I had gotten to speak with him one last time. It had been through the grace of God. My life hadn’t always gone as planned, but that moment, that little lagniappe as Father Bill would say, was a highlight.
Shortly thereafter the diocese hired me to investigate things for them, mostly small items at first. But once they learned I could do the job quickly and well, without ruffling a lot of feathers and with as much discretion as possible, I received tougher assignments.
Which was how I got to be one of the guys who could look stuff up at the Vatican itself.
*
Italian wasn’t a problem for me. I had always dabbled in languages – taking classes in other tongues not only helped me on cases for the Chicago PD, but it also helped me relax from the worst of things, thinking about conjugations and literature in a language not my own.
I loved the puzzle of language, found it as easy to assemble as a homicide investigation. I loved taking disparate parts and making them whole.
By the time I started looking for the Island of Lost Priests, I spent much of my year in Rome, leaving only during the worst of the tourist season – from December through Easter – when it felt like tourists hadn’t just taken over the city, but conquered it.
I would always go back to New York during those breaks, looking for my past, and touching base with my employers, such as they were. The things I was investigating – well, I can’t discuss them even now – but some of them disheartened me even more than the murders I used to see during my time at CPD.
I knew that man could never be perfect, but I liked to think – even after my years in homicide – that most people tried. Or, at least, most religious folk. Or, at the very least, the religious folk who guided the rest of us.
Yeah, naïve, and I knew it. But I couldn’t shake it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I escaped more and more into what I had known, into my own past, into my memories.
Then the cases started, and the accusations, and my memories went into turmoil, making those months the first time in years I wished I had someone besides a priest to talk to. Someone who understood both me and my memories. Someone who understood the Church and the concept of sin. Someone who could wonder with me what God could and did forgive. And why.
*
If I’m honest with myself – and it’s hard to be honest, even now – the signs were there. But I was twelve when I met Father Joe. I was lonely, and I was green.
Besides, I wasn’t one of his boys. Out of respect for my father, I didn’t become a Catholic until he died.
Father Joe got me to the Church, but Father Bill taught me doctrine. And Father Donnelly advised me. I liked him best, maybe because of those pitches. Slow for the kids who had no hope, and wicked deadly for those of us who had a modicum of skill.
I loved how Father Donnelly saw everything and said nothing, just applied what he knew to day-to-day living. He was the man I emulated, and he, more than any other, was the man I aspired to be.
Father Joe was a little too loose for me, even at the beginning. Even on that very first day, I wondered why – if everyone else was celebrating something – he was walking the streets of Brooklyn, eager to talk to lonely boys like me.
Later, I learned that Father Joe always watched out for lonely boys. He culled some of them to become his troupe. They disappeared from the barbecues on some kind of local mission. They did work at outreach centres or for Catholic charities. They went on retreats at some of the properties Upstate.
At first, my feelings were hurt that I wasn’t included. But then, I observed, and realised, few of the boys enjoyed the trips. I figured that Father Joe worked them harder than the rest of us, and these trips weren’t a reward but some kind of penance, and I became glad that I wasn’t part of them.
I’d like to say I was smart enough to realise that I might have become part of them had I converted sooner, but that would be attributing more wisdom to me than I actually deserved.
Still, so many boys from my class dropped out or disappeared. So many of them turned to drugs or alcohol. Even the ones who went to college imploded in some way.
Not that I saw the college boys implode. That happened
to them as adults, not as young men, and by then I was in Chicago, trying to convince the prettiest girl on Earth that Brooklyn was a better place than Rogers Park. She won that argument. It wasn’t hard. Chicago had Mary Claire, so Chicago got me too.
I only heard about the implosions when I got back after she died, and I only put together what really happened after the big lawsuit got settled after Father Donnelly died.
The lawsuit was confusing. I only knew about it because I was working for the diocese by then. It was a big deal, and a lot of the priests said it was only about some lawyers making money. Which is what I thought, until I started reading the reports.
They made me sick, and the Church’s response made me sick too. Because there was evidence that priests abused kids. Lots of evidence, the kind that we would’ve used in Chicago to put some pervert away for life (or maim him for life if we couldn’t build a case).
Everything got covered up, and sometimes I think about my role, and I shudder. I put guys away who paid out hush money back in Chicago, and in some ways, that was one of the jobs the diocese hired me to do.
I try not to think about that part much. But it’s hard, because I’m on the fence about all of it. I mean, after all, no guy wants to admit that some priest did that stuff to him, even when he was a boy. People would shun the guy. But the priests did it, and they had to be dealt with, and I didn’t know what the dealing was for years.
When I found out, I had to sign all kinds of confidentiality stuff. I couldn’t keep it inside though, which is why I’m writing all of this down now. God knows – and I mean that: only God knows – what I’ll do with this when I’m done.
The cases made me sick inside. The Church had saved me, and I knew it wasn’t perfect, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, those men were entrusted, not just with the boys’ souls, but with their bodies as well.
When I thought about it as a cop, I wanted to put those men away forever. When I thought about it as a man, I wanted to use my gun or my blade to make sure they never harmed anyone again.
When I thought about it as a little lost boy who had relied on the fantasies he had built up of the Church as a miraculous safe haven, well, it broke my heart.
The diocese made me look at the court documents. The scandal – it had gone on for years, and not just in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Scandals were happening all over North America, but the courts let the cases remain confidential, and if they got settled at all, they got settled contingent on confidentiality agreements.
But the Church itself had to pay a price for letting these men near children in the first place, and for doing so very little to stop them. The settlement was different for each diocese, and was based on how many children had been harmed.
Brooklyn had its share. Hundreds of kids damaged forever by some pervert in priest’s robes.
Black and white, straightforward stuff, at least that was what I thought. Until I delved into the records, armed with names, so that I could find the boys who deserved part of the settlement – grown men now, lives so ruined that some of them made my father look like a solid upstanding citizen.
Oh, a few of the boys went to psychiatrists, and many of them had productive lives, but the way they treated me, as an emissary of the Church – it was as if I had been part of the crime committed against them, as if I had looked the other way, just like everyone else.
I didn’t even think the scandal had touched me, until the names on the list started looking familiar. Then I realised they were familiar.
Father Joe’s boys. The special ones. Who went with Father Joe to do Great Work at outreach centres and Catholic missions. Who went Upstate for that special camp, every single year.
Father Joe’s boys.
To think I’d envied them.
*
I got assigned to find Father Joe’s boys to give them their settlements.
A third of them had committed suicide directly – guns, pills, jumping off bridges. Some even left notes, and those notes inevitably mentioned Father Joe.
Another third were still Catholic enough to know suicide was a mortal sin. So they took my father’s route. Some of them were still alive when I found them, if you call that twilight between being a functional human being and being a perpetual drunk ‘alive’.
The remaining third divided itself into the angry, bitter men who would take no prisoners when it came to the Church; those who had signed onto the lawsuit, and warned people away from Catholicism; and the men who were still ashamed and didn’t want anyone to know about any of it.
They were all embarrassed to see me, embarrassed that I knew. They didn’t want any compassion from me, only silence. Most of them put the money in an account their family didn’t know about, and I knew that the family wouldn’t hear about those tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands, until those men were dead.
Thank God, I’d been a cop. Thank God I knew that you don’t dish out platitudes in the face of life-ruining events, especially after those lives were long-ruined.
I did my work, I went home each night, and I wished for someone to talk to. Because I couldn’t talk to God about this. I suspected He and I disagreed.
*
I went to Rome in the middle of that mess, partly as a vacation, and partly to research some old rumours about the diocese. It was a small job, not important, but my bosses knew how devastating the work I did was, and how it was eating at me, and they didn’t want to lose me – as an employee and a man of faith.
What better place to go than Vatican City.
The big surprise about Vatican City, particularly for a New York boy who worked in Chicago half his life, is that it’s so small. Yeah, you read that it’s 110 acres, which isn’t even close to a square mile, but that’s impossible to imagine.
And then you get there, and realise you’re in a place that has greater influence over most of the world than most countries, and it’s no bigger than a few Manhattan neighbourhoods – if that.
The sunlight in that part of Italy is intense. The sun is almost a different entity than the one in North America. The light is white, and it reflects off the white buildings. The heat, which everyone seems used to, always catches me by surprise. You can’t really dress for it, because the Vatican – and therefore Vatican City itself – has a dress code that requires full body coverings at all times.
Back in the States, I had started a haphazard search for Father Joe while I was searching for the current addresses of the adult men he had destroyed as children. I had no idea why I was searching for him, or what I was searching for.
If I found him, I wasn’t sure what I would do, particularly as I spent more and more time with the men he’d ruined.
The reports against him had started the moment he arrived in 1947, and had become a thick file by 1955. Some nameless Church officials – who were probably guys like me – had taken him away, and as to what happened to him after that, the diocese had no record.
My search was hampered by the fact that Joseph O’Malley was a pretty common name, particularly for a man who was in his thirties in the 1950s and came from the East Coast. I found dead end after dead end, and finally, on that visit to Rome, I realised that the only way to find Father Joe was through the Church itself.
I had planned to explore Rome while I waited for the Vatican Library to provide me with the documents I had requested.
Two days I’d searched for Father Joe, while sitting on gilded chairs in a badly air-conditioned part of a building that was older than my country. My back hurt, my legs would occasionally go numb, and I felt awkward walking around to loosen everything up, afraid I might break something or stumble into a forbidden area.
Even then, I found some Joseph O’Malleys but never the one I was searching for.
So, I started searching for the Island of Lost Priests, and found nothing. At least, not right away.
Eventually, I tracked down dozens of rumours about the Island of Lost Priests. Most of the officials I spoke to called it a bogeyman, a scar
e tactic, something that got told to wayward priests to keep them in line.
No one seemed to believe it existed, but no one knew what happened to the abusive priests either. They were shipped off somewhere. Whenever I asked about it, I was told they were shipped off to places where they had little or no human interaction with people who were not Church officials.
Sometimes I looked around the official places I visited – from the Vatican Library to its Museums – and wondered if the men I saw working on damaged manuscripts or repairing a ruined fresco were actually priests no longer allowed to tend a flock.
Everyone denied that, but they also denied that they knew what happened to those priests.
I asked if they were laicised – what the media called ‘defrocked’ – and discovered that a handful were, and had left the Church’s direct supervision.
But most had simply vanished, from their parishes and from the Church records.
I had hoped that the voluminous records kept at the Vatican would help me, but they didn’t help me find individuals.
They helped me find the island.
*
My discovery wasn’t simple or linear. In fact, if I hadn’t had that skill at taking disparate pieces and turning them into a whole and complete idea, I would never have found the island at all.
The first reference I found was in a series of documents from World War II. The Italian government wanted the Church to allow it to use various islands in the Church’s possession as bomb sites to take out Allied vessels.
The Church refused.
It seemed like a straightforward enough interaction, and I had no idea why that document had been hidden along with other papers to do with the Church’s dark history during the war – especially considering that in this instance, the Church had chosen the correct side.
It wasn’t until I had moved on, looking at some other documents for the research that I had a realisation: Perhaps the document wasn’t there because of the World War II reference. Perhaps it was there because of the reference to the islands.
Tales from the Vatican Vaults Page 53