Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  ‘When did he say that?’ I wanted to know. ‘I wasn’t aware …’

  ‘An encyclical letter, actually, “Pacem in terris”. A few years back. In so far as the Church is a human institution − too human according to some of us − it struggles towards the light like any other organisation. And I believe John XXIII took us as close as he could. Until peritonitis killed him.’

  I had heard discussions like this occasionally, earnest Catholics of democratic temper sipping moselle and arguing for individual conscience and wondering if that made them Protestants. But I never thought I’d have this kind of exchange in the confessional.

  Father Docherty murmured, ‘If you didn’t have the right to your own conscience, you would be less than human. You would actually sin against nature.’

  I coughed. Confession, the sacrament of penance, had always been for me the shamefaced muttering of failures, the allotment of a penance by the priest, then fleeing the confessional box and muttering prayers at the back of the church. I was both pathetically afraid and exhilarated by the concept of a discourse in the confessional. I could not help but tell Father Docherty that what he was saying was new for me. ‘I’ve never heard that quotation before.’

  ‘Do you think I made it up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You probably wouldn’t have heard it. We celibate patriarchs tend not to tell people things that might make them more independent of us.’

  Would my brother ever have made a statement like this? Had he even considered the idea? It was unimaginable. But I had not finished arguing, this first time I had ever argued in the confessional box, and now I protested against the right Father Frank Docherty was trying to press on me. ‘We were always told the conscience was a fool,’ I insisted. ‘Hitler’s conscience told him to kill Jews.’

  ‘I don’t think it was exactly conscience that told him. It was doctrine. All the signs are that the Church is now ready to acknowledge the individual conscience. Indeed, if more had had the chance to exercise individual conscience, instead of obeying the state, there might not have been a Hitler. The difference between Hitler and you is that your conscience doesn’t tell you to do the unreliable and the savage. It is telling you to do a quiet, kindly thing. It won’t always do that. But that’s why you’re here. You are conscientious about humanity − yours, your husband’s. We must rely on who we are and what we perceive. Anything else, depositing your entire conscience in an ancient institution in Rome, is less than human.’

  So he went on arguing that my conscience should have sovereignty not only over that of a parish priest and a bishop, but also, more fantastical still, over the Vatican.

  Through the confessional grille I could see Father Docherty’s profile. The wire of course made him near-invisible to me; this grille that, as I had learned at university, was prescribed by St Charles Borromeo to prevent Renaissance priests from being tempted into dalliances with sexually confused young women. Young women like me.

  ‘In the end,’ said Father Docherty, ‘you can only filter these outside authorities − the state, the Church − through your own conscience. We’re always saying that the greatest commandment is love. And what you tell me you did, you did from love, and I wonder how offensive that can really be to a merciful God.’

  I suddenly and for the first time felt that I was the confessor and he the penitent.

  ‘But how can one tell one’s conscience from what is convenient and comfortable?’ I asked, like a true Catholic of my generation.

  ‘You can tell it’s your conscience if it keeps speaking to you despite all,’ he said. ‘If other choices seem morally absurd. Look, our consciences can deceive us, but they’re all we have.’

  This was wonderful to me. I had heard it in the confessional, the international forum of absolute moral authority, and it suddenly made eminent sense. Within that strict and sometimes tyrannous space, Frank Docherty had set me free. It is true, as orthodox feminism has it, that the history of the confessional is a history of male authority over women’s bodies. And it seemed to me that he somehow knew this and didn’t want to play that trick; perhaps he’d played it once in callow times but had now got beyond it. Frank Docherty seemed a heretic to me, but he’d made me rebellious enough to believe that if I was judged with him and condemned, I was judged in good company.

  5

  Docherty Gives His Lecture

  July 1996

  Docherty had been invited to speak at the Sydney Council of the Clergy by Dr Gil Heffernan, a former priest. Heffernan, a man of considerable moral repute, was now laicised and married, and ran the office of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council. Docherty had never met him, but Heffernan had been a young progressive in Melbourne when Docherty himself was a young progressive in Sydney. Docherty had been sent away; Heffernan had taken his expertise as a social scientist into the Social Justice Council, a tolerated arm of the Church generally considered a haven for Catholic lefties, liberation theologists and ineffectual liberals. To what extent the return to authoritarianism in 1963 by the Vatican after the death of John XXIII had explained the departures of some of the best and cleverest was a question hard to measure, but the losses had been considerable.

  Earlier in the year, Heffernan had read in the Toronto Catholic Register one of Docherty’s articles debating celibacy, and asking whether it contributed to the spate of child abuse cases emerging in North America. He had also read Docherty’s article in Psychology Today, entitled ‘Emotional Dwarfism and the Abusive Priest’, which was based on Docherty’s research and clinical work at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; and then a speech Docherty had given at Waterloo in which he outlined his findings on how the Church dealt with abuse cases, findings based on his interviews with victims, men and women, who had been sent to him for counselling.

  Docherty’s diocese in Canada happened to have a more progressive leadership than Sydney. He knew this for a fact because its bishop had authorised and supported his research even though his repute was still considered risqué by those who did not understand his true case – which was that as well as giving solace to victims, Docherty also advocated methods more likely to protect the name of his profession in the long run.

  On the bus to town that morning of Docherty’s second day in Sydney, uncertain of his reception by an audience of his fellows, he went over his notes. He was to lecture on abuse phenomena amongst the clergy. He got out near Museum station and walked across the park towards the sandstone mass of St Mary’s Cathedral. ‘Oh, the place where I worship is St Mary’s Cathedral,’ they used to sing in the seminary, ‘built on the blood of the poor.’ Docherty had been ordained here in the year of President Kennedy’s election, a high water mark for Irish Catholics the world over.

  He saw a fairly expectant scatter of priests on the pavement around the doorway of the cathedral chapter house, a neo-Gothic hall down the hill from the neo-Gothic exuberance of the cathedral. Surely the entire conference was not taking place here?

  Heffernan met him. After they’d exchanged pleasantries, he took Docherty aside by the elbow. ‘Look, when we authorised you to come, we thought you’d be given the main venue, which is up the road at the Sheraton. But we got orders from above.’ Heffernan put his thumb in the direction of the cathedral. It was a weary gesture. ‘And we had planned that you would have a plenary session everyone would attend, but, again …’ He made an apologetic noise with his lips. ‘You’ve heard about the resumption of the Supreme Court hearing?’

  Docherty had indeed read in his newspaper a short item about a man who intended to issue a writ of damages against the Church for abuse he had suffered as a boy.

  ‘It’s a young scientist pleading to get the Limitation Act lifted so he can sue.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Docherty. ‘So the old sub judice considerations operate.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry – you shouldn’t refer to it.’

  ‘Of course. Don’t worry yourself, Gil. Please.’

  ‘But we all need to h
ear this – the good, the indifferent and the expedient of us.’

  ‘Yes,’ Docherty agreed. ‘But I can imagine the cardinal archbishop would have been against a plenary session. I’m not necessarily judging the man up the hill. And I’m certainly not comparing him to my bishop in Ontario.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ Heffernan said, ‘you will have a good and interested audience in a Gothic ambience. You’ll be preaching in large part to the converted, I’m afraid.’

  Docherty reassured him. They had paid his economy fare and he would do his best by them, he said. If he could, he would give it back … Heffernan insisted he wasn’t implying that at all. ‘I’ll take you round to our green room,’ he said ironically, as if they were on a television set.

  Heffernan told him on the way that a number of bishops – those who would not be attending his talk – had sent their secretaries or, in a few cases, their vicar-generals. Docherty was part-relieved that by and large he would be speaking to priests and not the hierarchy. Though the priests would, no doubt, be reporting to their superiors, it meant he’d be able to speak more directly.

  There was, in fact, a hulking Western Australian bishop sitting in the green room in shirtsleeves but wearing his collar and purple stock. He rose with fraternal promptness as they entered. He was the chairman of the council, a man with a good reputation, well known for his work with the bored youth of the hinterland towns and for inventive programs for Aboriginals, in which he followed the advice of a council of Noongar tribal elders, without, it was claimed, second-guessing them. This man greeted him, said that the Council was honoured to have him here, and asked if Heffernan had been discussing with him ‘the problem with our betters’, as this bishop called it. Then he said he should get a seat, and without fuss left them. Docherty could hear a lot of talk from the hall. Engaged voices.

  He went in and saw the old cedar rafters above, the sconces flowering at their bases and the pilasters that continued the line of the rafters down to the floor. The room was filling. A few priests nodded at him, but as to a stranger. Many of them were caught up in personal exchanges with an edge of intensity to them. The subjects he was to address put everyone on edge. Him, too.

  The Western Australian bishop led the congregation in a prayer that asked for wisdom and reverence for each other to infuse the session. Heffernan gave a polite tap on the microphone and the audience composed itself. There were laypeople in the hall, Docherty saw, and a number of women, members of the council or its secretariat.

  Heffernan’s introduction was brief: Dr Docherty, formerly of this archdiocese, was an associate professor in developmental psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. His work gave him clinical access to Catholics who complained of priestly abuse, but also to priests themselves, whether they suffered from depression or psycho-sexual disorders. The bishops of eastern Canada had taken an interest in his work because of its potential application to the psychological screening of men who wanted to become priests. Dr Docherty would, he continued, also address the question of the relationship between celibacy and some of the scandalous instances of child abuse being reported from America and Ireland, and now Australia as well. ‘I am very pleased to see that these matters are sufficiently important to you that you have attended today. And you will give, I’m sure, a strong welcome back to his home city to Dr Frank Docherty.’

  Docherty rose to an earnest barrage of applause. After the introductory formalities and a joke about jetlag, he began.

  ‘I was asked, in part, to speak on the future of celibacy. That is, I was asked to be a prophet. But Five Dock, where I was born, statistically lacks in prophets, and I do not intend to mar its record.

  ‘In my research, I do my best to investigate whether the training of a celibate clergy has anything to do with this alarming phenomenon of claims of abuse, many of them already proven. Is it good enough for us to tell ourselves, as some do, that acts of paedophilia and abuse occur in all manner of institutions – from the Boy Scouts of the United States and Britain to boarding schools throughout the world – and are not peculiar to the Catholic Church? The Boy Scouts, however, do not claim the authority over faith and morals that the Church does. The scale of the Church’s claims, and the boast that we are urged forth by the love of Christ, compels us at least to consider whether there is anything systemic in the Church to encourage the perpetrator of reprehensible and, by the way, criminal acts against the young. For we should be concerned that these laws offend not only morality, but are subject to the intervention of the state, and we should not content our selves that the repute of the Church is such in our communities that police forces and justice systems will never intervene. In many cases they already have. Increasingly, we shall not be permitted to continue to deal with these matters exclusively in-house. Indeed, the days when we could confidently depend on applying our own solutions, enlightened or not, self-serving or not, are vanishing.

  ‘There will be more civil cases. Writs have been issued, for example, against the archdiocese of Dallas, Texas, involving a single complainant. And a number of class actions are likely to emerge in the United States. It seems essential that the Church does not look upon these merely as an assault on its treasure, but as a claim for compassion, a test of its moral standing and, most significantly for the individual priest, of your and my repute and effectiveness.

  ‘As for criminal prosecutions, in Canada charges are in the process of being laid against Christian Brothers who have been accused of paedophilia by a number of former inmates of the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St John’s, Newfoundland, during the 1950s. Police were slow to react to these accusations, but the media and groups such as the National Abuse Coalition have since given the victims a forum and a level of support, and solace, they did not previously have. Legislatures have reacted to such initiatives as Congress’s 1986 Child Abuse Victims’ Rights Act, reducing the trauma for victims in testifying in these cases.’

  The mood of the audience was engaged and there were no wry mouths or shaking heads.

  ‘I am far from being the first to issue such warnings. The American Father Gerald Fitzgerald, a pioneer in treating abusing priests, wrote a series of letters to bishops in the United States in the early 1950s warning them of a coming crisis and urging them to take account of the fact that moving offending clergy to a new parish, or diocese, or country would not reliably prevent them from reoffending.

  ‘The collapse of the Fianna Fáil government in Ireland due to its lack of cooperation in the extradition of abuser Father Brendan Smyth to Northern Ireland, and the resignation two years ago of Monsignor Ledwith, the president of the great Maynooth Seminary, following a sexual abuse allegation, are signs that more than stopgap policies are needed and that in issues involving paedophilia and abuse, we must make the victims the chief issue – for reasons of both humanity and governance.

  ‘We cannot blame the media’s appetite for these cases on sectarianism, on doctrinaire feminism, on the theory of the child as it arose during and after the Industrial Revolution. None of this will give solace to the victim or redemption to the Church. The condition of the world is what it is, and our response is sometimes what it should not be. Self-preservation and the protection of assets have figured, in practice, in many North American dioceses, as if they were of more significance than the pain of the wronged victim.

  ‘Simply to raise the issue is in some eyes an outrage. It is not my intention to outrage anyone or unsettle men in their vocations. The future of celibacy may well turn out to be more celibacy. There is a sense now, however, that the terms of trade under which a priest plies his tasks have altered. The onus and solitary nature of the priesthood are of a different order than they once were. In towns of old, in Ireland or Poland, or in Catholic cities in the booming New World, there used to be presbyteries full of priests, and a constant traffic of the community. We as children were attracted to the priesthood perhaps by the camaraderie between priests, and between these men and their community, in big pari
shes and big presbyteries. Those presbyteries are now a memory. The community is at work, men and women fitting themselves to the strict regimen of the new economics. So nowadays presbyteries can seem sterile houses without visitors – I know myself from relieving in them in North America – and often with one priest and none of the former vivifying human traffic. I must say I am pleased to belong and live in the fraternity of my Order’s house.

  ‘Many earnest scholars interested in the future of the Church feel the need for new, transparent studies that are open to peer scrutiny. The University of Chicago has conducted one – needless to say, a confidential one – into clerical celibacy. Catholic bishops in a number of dioceses encouraged their priests to participate, for they felt it was time to be realistic about the issue. Let me say, I hold no brief for abolishing celibacy – that is not my business. An old priest once told me, “Celibacy is the card you’re dealt, and if you want to play the game, you have to take that card as well.” Based on the Chicago study, however, more than sixty per cent of priests admitted to sexual experience of one kind or another.’

  Now the first mockery, with unease at its base, broke out. ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,’ someone called. There was a prurient seminarian guffaw.

  ‘But as the Chicago study also makes clear, that is true only for those who have volunteered to comment on the end of a relationship, however temporary. There are other men who may have pursued a relationship, whether within the priesthood or not, but have chosen not to give evidence. In any case, the study concluded that the great majority of the men who did give evidence possessed a relatively high level of emotional and, if you can bear the far more pretentious term, “psycho-sexual” maturity.’