Peter remembered talking to Ingram about it the last time he saw him, not long before he left for Jammu. It was the only occasion on which he could recall Ingram expressing genuine inability to understand the choices of the church he’d devoted his life to. It wasn’t easy to watch. Ingram’s face hadn’t contorted in rage or even protest the way it typically did when he talked about something he felt passionate about. Instead, he’d sunk deeper into the chair in his office and scowled at his fingers, arching them against each other to create a misshapen circular cage. It was the first time Peter asked him directly about his thoughts on the subject. Not specifically about the nature of pedophilia. Ingram was clear it was a crime of the worst variety and that anyone who committed it, priest or not, should be punished. Perhaps more importantly, anyone who committed such crimes should be absolutely and utterly prevented from having the opportunity to do it again, no matter what that took.
They’d had that particular conversation before. But out of respect for his friend more than anything, Peter had refrained from asking Ingram his thoughts on the Church’s larger role. The Church was being blamed in a number of ways. Peter, who’d been raised Catholic but didn’t consider himself that religious, thought he’d been pretty fair about deciphering criticisms with merit and those without. He didn’t believe, for example, that by refusing to let priests marry, the Church had effectively hung a neon sign in front of its doors saying “Child Rapists Welcome Here!” And he was even willing to entertain the idea that with charges as serious at these, it was necessary to afford accused priests a certain amount of due process—a silent investigation of sorts to determine what the truth was before destroying someone’s career or reputation.
But when he read articles about a diocese refusing to turn over church records related to accused priests, even when they were subpoenaed, he was floored. Such conduct was detestable when CEOs of companies that mortgaged their staff’s pensions did it. When a religious organization employed the obstructionist tactics of a Fortune 500 company, it somehow seemed that much more distasteful.
A Montana Supreme Court ruling was what set him off that hot July afternoon when he and Ingram met. The court had ruled that a Catholic diocese didn’t have to turn over its records on a priest who was charged with deviant sexual intercourse with a minor. The prosecutor obtained a subpoena to review the priest’s personnel files and establish if a pattern of similar conduct had been reported to his superiors. The diocese refused to surrender them, offering instead a private inspection of select records in the judge’s chambers and only in the presence of the chancellor of the diocese. The priest, the diocese argued, was entitled to reasonable privacy. The Montana Supreme Court had agreed.
Peter wasn’t interested in whether the Church was correct from a legal standpoint. It didn’t matter that the prosecutor was still able to get the information, either. What mattered was that the Church demanded special treatment and expected its own ideas of justice to trump the civil laws governing the rest of American society. To him, it was a moral imperative to cooperate with that system because it was the right thing to do, not just because it was the law. Hiring lawyers to split hairs and prevaricate like executives at Enron or Brown & Williamson wasn’t acceptable under any circumstances. “Why would you argue about something so clearly black and white?” he asked Ingram during their discussion. “I don’t understand it. I just don’t.”
Ingram stared at his fingers, a vexed expression on his face. “If there’s one thing I’m beginning to learn throughout this entire mess, Peter,” he said, “it’s that none of what you know about the Church—about the people in the same pew as you or the priests you’ve known since your baptism—is the complete truth.” Ingram looked at him sadly but firmly.
“I’m sure there are genuine moments,” he continued. “But when these men stand in front of that parish every Sunday and talk about the power of forgiveness—that we are all blessed with the grace to ask for it and to receive it—they’re not being completely honest.”
“That’s for sure,” Peter grunted. “There are just some things that can’t be forgiven.”
Ingram shook his head. “No, not that exactly,” he said. “Everything can be forgiven. And I do mean everything—my acceptance that Christ was the son of God hinges on it.” Ingram had unconsciously begun to rub the topmost button of his shirt, where his Roman collar normally peeked out from under its side binding, though Peter couldn’t remember the last time Ingram had worn the garment. “But there are some people who will never have the humility to ask. And without that, nothing—not forgiveness or healing—can be offered.”
Ingram had been more troubled by the discussion than Peter had ever seen him. At the time, Peter assumed he was struggling to reconcile his feelings about the abuse with belonging to the religious community that had committed it. But now, as he looked up the names associated with the letters, he wondered. He stared at the envelopes, pondering whether to open them and read the contents. The owners had either returned them or didn’t know of their existence. And Ingram was gone. Peter wasn’t exactly worried about his friend finding out and chastising him, but he was superstitious enough to envision Ingram staring at him from whatever form Heaven or the afterlife took, and shaking his head in disappointment.
As often happened, Peter’s curiosity got the better of him. He opened the first letter, to Terzulli, and unfolded it. Based on the introduction, it appeared to be one of a series. It made reference to how long it had been since last he wrote and his hope that the words and sentiments he expressed in that letter had achieved their desired effect.
Peter scanned the page, looking for anything that might offer a specific explanation. None popped out. The phrasing was, it seemed, intentionally vague and made almost constant reference to the earlier letters. When he got to the end, Peter froze. Ingram once again expressed regret—his remorse for what had happened and his hope that Terzulli might someday be able to forgive him and the others to find peace for herself and her son’s memory.
The page shook in Peter’s trembling fingers. He read the words again. Words cannot express how sorry I am for what happened or my personal regret for what my failings have created in this life for you.
Ingram’s failings? A flaw in him that left another person’s life irrevocably changed for the worse? Peter tore open the next letter, to Erik Bader. Once again, Ingram offered a personal apology for what happened and expressed hope that someday Erik could find a way to offer forgiveness. This letter too appeared to be one in a series. In ornate script that stretched across the page, Ingram said he’d been giving much thought to what happened and why. That he was trying to find the answers in himself to offer an apology with more merit, because apologies without explanation were the most dissatisfying and disingenuous kind.
Peter blinked repeatedly, refocusing on the words each time as though doing so could change their meaning. It didn’t. Each time he looked at the pages in his possession, he found his longtime friend and mentor apologizing to young men who had been sexually abused, or to their families, and asking for their forgiveness. From down the hall Emma called out to come to dinner. Grady entered the room and urgently nuzzled Peter’s knee. But all Peter could feel was his churning stomach and the weight of his last conversation with Ingram about the sexual-abuse scandal.
Peter had read aloud from a newspaper profiling a priest in upstate New York who was being investigated for abusing children on a retreat. He’d been there less than a year after transferring from a parish in Pennsylvania. The community was in absolute shock, the article stated. The townspeople were in disbelief about the charges. “He helped set up the battered women’s shelter downtown,” said one resident. “Went door to door to find the money until the women of this community had a safe place to go.” Another one, a widowed father of four, described how the priest lent him his personal car so he could go to work after his truck broke down, and it took him two months to save up enough money to pay for the repairs. “This
just isn’t possible,” the grateful father told the reporter. “Someone that good just doesn’t do this kind of thing.”
But that was the main point of this entire situation, Peter knew. Folding up the paper, he looked up at Ingram. “He’s right. How does that happen? How can someone be so devoted to helping others and do this at the same time?”
Ingram looked straight at Peter for the first time since the discussion began. “That’s a question we’ve been trying to answer since Cain and Abel,” he said. His eyebrows curved inward in an expression that bordered on pity as he rose slowly from his desk chair. “Ah, Peter,” he said, leaning over to pat him on the shoulder. He picked up Peter’s copy of the newspaper. “May I?” Peter nodded. Ingram glanced once more at the article before expertly folding it in preparation for his MetroNorth ride home and stuffing it into his jacket pocket.
“The truly terrifying thing about evil isn’t that it exists, Peter,” Ingram had said. “It’s that it manages to coexist with good in the places we least expect it. And always has.”
Peter thought about the other letter he’d found but could not take, and what Ingram had been hiding, the trail of recipients he left behind who’d been owed apologies for some reason. Staring at the letters in his hand and unable to deny their meaning, for the first time Peter believed him.
CHAPTER 9
Ally arrived at the office the morning after her Philadelphia trip to find an embossed invitation sitting in the incoming mail basket on the right-hand corner of her messy desk. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was holding a series of lectures and discussions on the modern face of Catholicism and would be delighted if she could join a reception at the Oval Room to launch the series. She beamed at the invitation, imagining how excited her parents would be when she called to tell them she’d get to go. A quick glance at the schedule of events precluded any hope she had of attending the lectures. All fell during hours she would inevitably be at the office doing any number of tasks. In fact, even the launch reception itself might be difficult to attend, but she decided it was worth mentioning to her manager, Mark, to see what he said.
“Absolutely not,” Mark replied. “I’m going to need you here.”
“For what?” Ally said with slightly more irritation than she meant to.
“Stuff—you never know what’s going to come up.”
“Mark, it’s one evening. It could be a good place to talk to people, and I know for a fact I’m not so vital to this place that everything will fall apart if I’m gone for three hours.”
Milton Casey walked by just then and, spotting the invitation in her hand, interjected mildly, “Oh, you’re headed to that? So am I. It will be good to have you there.”
Mark looked at her in defeat. “Fine,” he muttered before turning to sift through his own mail, clearly searching for an invitation of his own.
“How did it go in Philadelphia?” Casey asked, walking her back to her desk.
“I’m finishing the summary now,” she said. “The director of the center we visited seemed mostly concerned with recent church and school closures in the area.”
“Mmm,” Casey said with uncertain interest. “Times are tough, I guess. If they don’t have the money to keep going, it’s hard.”
“Wyncott’s going to continue the Faith-Based Initiatives office, right? Can’t we say we’re exploring ways to support religious education as a tie-in for his overall ed policy?”
“Ah, well, we can’t go promising money to Catholic schools,” Casey said, shaking his head.
“We don’t have to say we’ll give them money. But can we say the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives will look at developing partnerships to support them?”
Casey nodded in measured agreement. “Yes, Ally. We can. Just keep it vague and noncommittal.”
He turned into his office, leaving her at her desk to research the number of school and church closures. It was going to figure prominently into her write-up for Casey.
When she met with Ernesto Horta at the Saint Rita’s community center in Philadelphia, she had been unprepared for the amount of information he lobbed at her. In her mind, the purpose of the meeting was to establish what the members of that community were looking for and why the message Wyncott’s team was sending didn’t seem to be landing.
This was not, of course, the first time Wyncott’s camp had reached out to grassroots organizers in the Latino community. There was an entire task force dedicated to sculpting Wyncott’s finely nuanced stance on immigration, amnesty, and border control. Since Archer’s rally in Fairhill, they’d stepped up the efforts significantly. Campaign flyers were being inserted in La Voz Hispana and El Diario, while a new television ad had begun running on Telemundo and Univision. In the advertisement, a serious voice spoke in Spanish about Arthur Wyncott and what he had accomplished. At the end, Wyncott looked into the camera and said, “Por un mejor y brillante futuro!” forming the words with an uncomfortable expression of constipation on his face. The words fell awkwardly from his mouth. Ally cringed every time she saw it. It was evidence that Wyncott had made a huge mistake by packing his staff with Spanishspeaking white kids like herself instead of finding politically active Latinos to weigh in. Mark explained it was a point of contention between Wyncott and Casey. “I don’t need to trot these people out on the podium with me,” Wyncott had apparently said at a meeting long before Ally joined, shocking everyone. Casey hustled him away from the rest of the staff before he could do any more damage, but Mark said they could hear Wyncott shouting, “I won four years ago without them. I’m not going to be held hostage by them this time either!”
The night before Ally and Steve left, Casey reminded them to find out not just what Latino voters were saying, but what Latino Catholic voters were saying.
“I know they’re not the only Catholic voters—and I do want you to work with the faith-based team for broader Catholic outreach—but I want to try to zero in on what makes these voters tick. I mean, Archer’s a pro-choice candidate who supports stem-cell research and won’t criminalize euthanasia. Does that register with them at all, or are they entirely focused on immi gration? Does it outweigh his experience in El Salvador? The more information we have to regroup, the better.”
Wyncott, he explained, was showing stronger polling numbers when asked about his status as a man of faith and moral principles, and they needed to explore if this was a good way to increase his standing with Latino voters. They weren’t trying to increase the religious vote, necessarily. They wanted to find the religious conservatives already in the community and target them, every week if possible, in case they were on the fence about voting for Wyncott because of immigration.
Ally was grateful for the opportunity. Her relationship with Casey seemed to turn a corner after their blunt discussion that late night at the office. From the start of her employment with him, she’d felt at a disadvantage. She thought Casey probably saw her as chattel, much the same way he viewed her colleagues like Steve, who was hired after a well-timed campaign donation from his parents. Everyone she worked with either knew someone or knew someone who knew someone who got them the job, herself included. She’d applied for at least twenty-two jobs in the Washington, DC, area her last semester at Marquette. Resumes and cover letters went to nonprofits, federal government postings, and think tanks. And she got interviews for only four, none of which resulted in a job offer. She was just about to give up on DC when Mulcahy contacted her to say he’d be in Milwaukee to speak at the annual National Catholic Development Conference.
He invited her to dinner with him and an old friend from the Bishops Conference. Bishop Feeney was a nice man—genuinely interested in her experiences at Marquette and her thoughts on how the current generation saw Catholicism fitting into their daily lives. Did she go to Mass every weekend, he wondered? She did. Did she tithe? Yes, she certainly did. How did she feel about abortion? It was a grave sin and damaging to society.
But unlike Feeney, she didn’t think ho
mosexuality was inherently wrong, even if they agreed that gay marriage didn’t have a place in the Catholic Church. She’d felt this way even before she met Sadie and Carol. When she was growing up, she and her mother routinely stopped by to check on their neighbor Silas, an older man who, now that she was older and more worldly, Ally realized was probably gay. It was nothing obvious that she could point to. Just some mannerisms that set him apart from the other men she knew and a strained relationship with pronouns when he discussed people who came to visit him. No one lived with Silas and he never married. In the months before he died at age sixty-eight from lung cancer, Ally felt sorrow that he didn’t have anyone to take care of him. To keep him company on those nights when his breathing labored, the gasps rattling in his chest like a countdown to the end. Even if he was gay and couldn’t be married in the eyes of God at her church, surely he shouldn’t have to spend his last days without companionship because of it? She’d phrased it more tactfully when she spoke to Feeney, but her example was clear. Feeney appeared disappointed in her response, moving on to topics with Mulcahy that were well beyond her scope of knowledge, like intricate theological principles and papal encyclicals. While Mulcahy stopped every so often to offer some short explanations here and there, Feeney continued unabated. The rapid-fire pace of his speech seemed almost like a challenge. Eventually, she’d tuned out a little, just in time for him to turn to her and ask, “And what’s your opinion on this, Ms. Larkin? Are you able to discuss Church teaching in an intellectual way, or do you just respond to feelings?”
She’d been mortified. She struggled to offer an answer, but didn’t actually know what he’d been talking about. Feeney looked at her expectantly, watching her fumble with a certain amount of amusement. After a disastrous minute of incoher ent rambling, she gave up. “I guess I don’t really know, Your Excellency. It’s not something I’ve considered fully.” Feeney’s demeanor immediately changed. He smiled warmly at her. “And that’s okay, Ms. Larkin. That’s why the Church is here. To help guide you to the right answer in these situations. Question it, challenge it even, but accept that it’s grounded in knowledgeable interpretation of our Lord’s words and messages.” Ally hunched meekly over her plate. “Yes, Your Excellency,” she murmured.
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