Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  In the year before his ordination, however, he became strongly moved by the claims of desire. To call what overcame him fantasies was to understate the severity. They were hungers in as definite terms as hunger itself. He had a potent sense that out there, somewhere in the aether, was the other half of his body and soul, and it was undeniably female.

  This perception of himself as an incomplete hemisphere seemed a far more severe challenge than ordinary sensuality. Celibacy was one of the terms of trade of the priesthood. Until now it had seemed achievable without too much fuss. But not if north sang out for south, and vice versa.

  He had a confessor, Father Holland, a priest who taught the seminarians history – a good historian, too; one who would embrace with relish questions to do with scandalous and worldly popes such as John XXII and the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, by whose fiat the globe was divided into land to the west, open to Spanish occupation, and land to the east, available to the Portuguese.

  There was wistfulness in Father Holland, and it was clear it sometimes edged into depression. He was fascinated by Luther, had read his earthy Table Talk, with all its Germanic fart jokes. He mentioned to Docherty one day that before Luther’s declaration of war on Rome, the man had been tormented by the words that consecrated the host, and had repeated them over and over to ensure the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ had indeed taken place.

  Serving Holland’s Mass on clear seminary mornings, Docherty found that the priest was cursed with the same consecration neurosis as Luther. ‘Hoc …’ Holland would say, for the Mass was still in Latin, ‘Hoc … hoc est … hoc est enim … hoc est enim Corpus meum …’

  When Docherty was struck by the great hunger, which was more than eroticism, and less arguable, he felt he must take his conscience to this priest’s confessional. He tried arduously to define his exact feelings – they were so serious, so likely to end his career, he had no choice but to be honest with Holland.

  ‘That sensation,’ the priest told him, ‘is going to occur to every priest, and if it doesn’t, it should. You see, this celibacy is a complex matter. It is one thing to lay down the law to the laity. How does a man lay down the law to himself?’

  Holland breathed audibly a while, letting the question settle. ‘Part of the answer, they tell us, is to see celibacy not as a restriction but as a privilege. But that’s only a small part of the solution. If the feeling of incompleteness doesn’t pass, indeed you may have to leave. Consider this: you cannot live by the letter of the law, because the letter kills; but the spirit of the law sets free. What I mean is, you must be lenient on yourself in these matters. What sort of God expects you to suffer a nervous breakdown if you sin? The Church wants to prohibit all sexual release in adolescents for fear they’ll do it all the time. Let me tell you, God understands if a good man – doing his best, obeying the rule – lapses. And you’re a decent fellow. If we were not fallen people, what would be the sense of this sacrifice and these temptations? Don’t feel you’ve got to come running to the confessional every time you’re stricken with feelings of this nature.’

  By now the man sounded almost embarrassed.

  ‘Another thing,’ said Holland, laying it down with the weight of an edict. ‘Some priests temper this feeling by choosing to prey on young girls and boys. This is a sin that evokes the word unforgiveable. You are not troubled in that way, I hope?’

  The idea was news to Docherty.

  ‘No, I’m not troubled by any of that.’

  ‘Good,’ said the priest, and Docherty’s experience of confessing to the seminary’s historian and being absolved was all the more potent because Holland had as good as confessed his own anguish at travelling the same via dolorosa as Docherty.

  8

  Docherty Meets the ‘Priests Against Abuse’

  July 1996

  Three priests met Docherty at the coffee shop that Friday morning: the bearded young man belonging to the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, who ran one of the Sydney parishes, and two priests of the diocese. As their stories spilled out, the specific details varied little from ones Docherty had heard during other confidential coffees he had drunk with men shocked by the behaviour of others, who also had seen their reports disappear into the clerical apparatus, with at best a transfer for the offender. Docherty knew the pattern was consistent from Canada to Tasmania, because the ecclesiastical habits of mind were consistent.

  One of the diocesan priests described his coming upon a priest behaving obscenely with an altar boy in a sacristy in a parish where he was working. He had been so shocked he’d upbraided the more senior man, who had come to him later with lowered head and said, ‘I know it is disgraceful. I don’t know how to make it up to that boy, but I need a chance to do so. A man is only human …’

  The young priest admitted that – believe it or not (and Docherty believed him, because the unworldliness of some clergy could not be overstated) – back then he had barely heard of such crimes, and had accepted this man’s assurance that he would seek confession, and that the altar boy would be dismissed for his own good.

  ‘Then I found him receiving boys for private confessions in his room,’ the young priest went on. ‘And he got careless. When I wanted to run a video of Lawrence of Arabia, I found a tape of child pornography in the player.’

  This time, he went to see the archbishop. But nothing happened. The priest was moved to another parish, where, upon his semi-retirement, he was given a part-time job as chaplain of a boys’ school.

  The priest from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart reported that he had been so appalled by evidence that two priests had abused boys in a high school run by his Order that he had written not only to his superior but, risking everything, to the Congregation of the Clergy in Rome. The priests were moved on. One was sent to England. Other than that they suffered no penalty. In an administrative sense, that was the end of the affair. The administrative sense was, this man said, all the superiors of the Order and the archdiocese seemed worried about.

  ‘I agree with you, Dr Docherty,’ said the third priest. ‘The contagion will explode. And I feel that we’ll be all suspected, as you say, and condemned.’

  Docherty shared with them a certain sense of helplessness, but he knew it must not be yielded to. He wanted to say, ‘Endure, brothers, and they’ll listen to you in the end,’ but he wondered whether it was too hopeful an assertion. ‘Look,’ he said in the end, ‘I always remind myself that Stalinism fell.’

  The priests laughed and Docherty joined in.

  ‘No, I’m not comparing the Vatican to the Kremlin. But systems change quickly when the change begins. There’s a cliff of indifference in front of us. One day it won’t be there.’

  He could not let himself think otherwise.

  ‘Surely they’ll have to listen to the results of this study of yours,’ one of them told him, and Docherty could only say that he fervently hoped the time would come sooner or later when they would have no choice. ‘But it’s going to take vigilance and determination from you fellows as well,’ he added.

  ‘I’m willing to be vigilant,’ said the young priest with the beard. ‘I’m willing to endure. I just don’t know what for. If I report a problem, nothing happens.’

  ‘Sometimes I think,’ said the second diocesan priest, ‘that we ought to form an organisation – Priests Against Abuse – almost for our own protection.’

  ‘The cardinal would love that,’ said his colleague. ‘I’m not his favourite bloke to begin with.’ He turned to Docherty to explain. ‘Theological differences,’ he said.

  ‘The boss can’t actually sack us for belonging to such a body without attracting some outrage. It’s not that he’s a bad fellow. He just doesn’t believe it’s the problem you and I know it is.’

  ‘You know what one of the problems is?’ said the bearded priest. ‘Religious leaders see the soul as their exclusive preserve. The soul is their territory, they think, so to hell with psychiatry and p
sychology. Because they … we … control the remission of sins. So the abuser goes to a retreat and gets absolution and really believes it won’t happen to him again. But it does. The bishops don’t want to face it – that the sacraments aren’t everything, can’t do everything. Sanctifying grace isn’t enough! And isn’t it interesting – we never trust the victims? We trust outsiders only if they’re lawyers or insurance men.’

  ‘Nor,’ said the second diocesan priest, ‘was any of this mentioned in our training. No one warned against it as the ultimate crime. It was all about impure thoughts towards women, and sometimes towards other males. But a bit of honest heterosexuality is nothing compared to … Well, you can finish the sentence yourself.’

  ‘So,’ the priest with the beard said, ‘we’re trying to get the word out. That we can help priests who see these things and want to report them. We keep our spirits up by writing letters to the Congregation of the Clergy. We’re like Amnesty International in that way. But until someone actually answers us, that’s the measure of what we can do.’

  Docherty nodded and drained his coffee grounds. ‘On your side,’ he assured them, ‘you have the fact that, sadly, the thing is not going to go away. As I said in my paper, if the Church does not face this, it will ultimately be blazingly exposed to their gaze. Then, I fear, the scandal will make the attrition of Catholics after Humanae Vitae look small scale.’

  ‘When will you publish?’ asked the piratical monk with the beard.

  ‘Not for another eighteen months at least, I’m afraid. Two years, to be realistic.’

  ‘Do you think the Congregation of the Clergy will read it?’

  ‘Naturally I hope so. But sometimes I fear it’s only the social justice elements of the Church who read these things. Not the men with the power.’

  Docherty felt he must pay for the coffees to restore a little of the men’s faith and optimism, and as they said goodbye he assured them he would keep in touch and let them know when his paper was nearing its publication.

  One of them gave him a lift back to the monastery. Their conversation was sombre and intermittent.

  That afternoon Docherty fell into a jet-lagged sleep, full of dreams of guilt and the disapproval of prelates, from which he was awakened by the telephone. When he answered it he heard a voice he recognised instantly. The cab driver. Its impact jolted him alert.

  ‘Father Docherty,’ said the accusing voice, as if it were some sort of sleight of hand on his part that he’d picked up. ‘You gave me your card.’

  ‘I remember. Thanks for getting me there in one piece.’

  ‘I was tempted to take us both head-first into a bus. Except that wouldn’t have been nice for the bus driver or the ambulance men.’

  ‘I’m glad you were considerate enough not to do it.’

  ‘The rest of the world wouldn’t have missed us much.’

  ‘My mother would have been cranky with you. And I’ve got at least two doctoral students in Canada who would have been inconvenienced.’

  ‘I was a nun,’ she said. ‘Nobody misses me. I don’t miss me.’

  So Docherty knew that he was in serious territory and there should be no further whimsy.

  ‘That explains everything,’ he told her.

  ‘What explains everything?’

  ‘The way priests have lorded it over nuns, anger is a natural result.’

  ‘It’s not only that,’ she assured him. ‘It’s the way they dwarf you, reduce you to a spiritual bonsai. And it’s the way they hide things. I’m sorry to be hostile. You might be a pleasant man, and I’m afraid I gave you the whole treatment. On the other hand, fuck you! For the complacency. That’s the sanction for all the crimes.’

  There was silence for quite a time and he could hear her breathe. He knew he must be unintrusive and let her give full play to her anger. It would be the generous way, and the professional one. She remained silent. It was as if she could not think of the next outraged thing to say.

  ‘Well,’ she said eventually. ‘You’re sending me up, aren’t you?’

  ‘The anger you have – it’s in all of us to an extent. Everyone who gets used up by the Church of the apparatchiks. The enforcers. And the legalists.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me,’ she said, and she sizzled with contempt.

  He didn’t defend himself.

  She said, ‘That’s the other thing about your crowd. The smallest gesture of respect makes you smug.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘would you care to meet for a coffee some where? I don’t dare say I think I know what your problem is …’

  ‘I have a problem and I know it. They … they have a problem and don’t. I’m carrying the shame for the lot. For them and you and me. Do you think that’s a fair arrangement?’

  Feelings of such intensity were ones he believed came from one source, though in feeling this he hoped he was not like a psychiatrist he’d met at a lecture at New York University. People whose speciality was a particular disorder had a habit of suspecting everyone they met of symptoms that only some exhibited. The psychiatrist’s speciality had been cross-dressers, and Docherty had had considerable trouble persuading her that he was not a cross-dresser, since she believed that the tendency to dress up in liturgical vestments was akin to the desire to wear the accustomed and stylish clothes of women. Now he hoped he did not see an abused child in every angry adult Catholic.

  Enough anger could indeed be generated by the confessional box itself, without any added wrong thrown in. Pope Pius X, by decreeing in 1910 that seven should be the age of a child’s first confession, ensured that many young people felt so abused by the fear of childhood damnation and the weight of implied guilt associated with the sacrament of penance that they were angry at the practice. This well-intentioned pope had condemned infant Catholics of the twentieth century to unprecedented neuroses to do with Hell; and to questions arising from the ecclesiastical obsession with ‘self-abuse’. Nor were priests exempt from neurosis, some thinking that even a glancing sexual thought by an adolescent had the power to cast the boy or girl who harboured it into the pit of Hell. Docherty also encountered anger about the denial of ordination, and of any real power, to women.

  Still, anger on this scale could, he believed, have just the one source.

  ‘I think we ought to meet for a coffee,’ he reiterated. ‘I think I might have at least a glimmering …’

  She repeated the phrase ironically. ‘A glimmering …? My friend, there’s no glimmering about it!’

  ‘Look,’ he told her, ‘I can’t defend the Church to you, and I know it’s futile to try. I have a hard enough time defending it to myself.’

  ‘You sound like one of those priests who’d like to leave but is too old and comfortable.’

  ‘Right on the target,’ he said, smiling into the phone. ‘I’m scared shitless of leaving. But sadly I’m also a sort of believer. I have a sense that I can’t get to joy any other way. Observing and dispensing the sacraments. That’s my shtick!’

  ‘Oh Jesus, now we’ve got Yiddish! You’re a sad case.’

  ‘I think we’re all sad cases,’ he told her.

  She mimicked him in a fluting ironic voice. ‘We’re all sad cases. You bastards either condemn us to the pit of Hell or patronise us.’

  ‘So, did you want to meet for that coffee?’

  ‘Oh yes, I earn so much as a cab driver that I can come to a posh suburb and drink latte with you.’

  ‘Is there a place near your depot?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said after a long silence. ‘Meet me at Charlie’s in Harris Street. Past the Powerhouse Museum.’

  ‘When?’ he asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Eleven o’clock. There’ll be parking.’

  ‘I’ll come by bus,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, the humility!’ she mocked. ‘Don’t bloody dare be late!’

  And she hung up.

  9

  Maureen Breslin Has a Painful Encounter

  June 1996

&n
bsp; A task of commiseration had brought Maureen Breslin to her friend Liz Cosgrove’s neat little Federation house in a wooded street in Longueville. She had heard the day before that Liz’s son Stephen had overdosed, apparently deliberately, and blessedly not at his family house but in his own small room in Newtown.

  Maureen’s friendship with Liz had waned in the thirty or so years since they had first met through Father Docherty, and the cause of that in part had been Liz’s husband’s unnervingly erratic behaviour. So Maureen approached the house with a wistfully harboured conviction about the cause of the boy’s self-destruction, and the springs that had brought it about. It was the father’s fault. He had created domestic mayhem throughout Stephen and his elder brother’s childhoods.

  Maureen remembered Stephen had been what old-fashioned Catholics called ‘a child of grace’ or, as they sometimes also liked to say, a child in whose face one could see the sanctifying grace. But he had fallen apart in high school, experimented with heroin, begun university, had therapy, dropped out and taken to heroin again. Liz’s love had not sufficed in the days when Matt, the boys’ father, had inflicted on the household either regular sullen absences or a destructive presence. Stephen’s brother had at least survived; he had become a lawyer in an NGO and, Maureen had been told, was a temperate fellow who generally avoided liquor out of terror of its malign power.

  In the face of a tragic death we all write our own scenario, and this was Maureen’s version. The father and his disease were to blame.

  The door was answered by Paul. He blinked uncharacteristically when he saw Maureen, as if at an exceptional apparition. There was a hesitation in him. ‘Ah … Mrs Breslin …’ he said haltingly. ‘Did you want to come in?’