by Tom Keneally
‘You gave a lecture,’ she asserted with a sudden piercing look.
He uttered a few banal words about it and the reception it had had, and then eventually forced himself to ask, ‘How is the monsignor?’ trying to sound as though he was indifferent to the answer.
Maureen looked at Damian, who had raised his eyes from the barbecue. ‘He’s involved in a damages case against the archdiocese,’ she said. ‘It’s been in the press.’
‘Ah,’ said Docherty. ‘Yes, I think I’ve seen something about that.’
‘He’s giving evidence for the archdiocese. Damian doesn’t approve of the Church’s case. He’s a most subversive Catholic, my husband.’ She adopted a brittle chirpiness.
‘They’re engaged in this,’ cried Damian, ‘like any big corporation trying to scare off plaintiffs. But it’s worse. Because corporations don’t pretend to love the world and honour a moral code.’
‘Litigation is very bad therapy,’ observed Docherty. ‘For all parties.’
‘We are not as concerned as some are about the Church’s temporal wealth,’ said Maureen, puzzling Docherty with her bleak eyes. She paused and looked into a middle distance. ‘Just for example,’ she asked after a long pause, ‘what would you do if you’d been told the name of a priest who might have been an abuser?’
By the barbecue, Damian paused. What if I know the name of an abusing priest myself? Docherty privately asked himself.
‘You’d certainly let him know you had heard something of the kind,’ Docherty suggested cautiously. ‘I think it’s too broad a question. Do you have details?’
He knew this could not – surely – concern her brother. It must be another grievous story.
Maureen and Damian exchanged a long look. She addressed Docherty with that same sideways flick of her eyes that had once enchanted him, and still did, for that matter. He thought that this was why marriages lasted. However a face aged, the contours of ageless intentions rose in it as freshly as ever.
‘Frank, we’re terribly sorry to put this on to you when you’re here for such a short time and there is so much to catch up on – so many more pleasant matters. But this is a pressing one that we need to deal with, no matter how distressing it is. We need to show you a note that’s come Maureen’s way,’ said lean, intense Damian. ‘As soon as we heard from you, we knew we’d need to consult you about it.’
‘But especially given your expertise, Frank,’ Maureen rushed to say and her face had paled. ‘Wait a second.’
She went into the house and while she was gone Damian turned to him and said, ‘If the sod had taken after his sister, he might have been halfway a man.’
‘You mean Leo?’ asked Docherty.
Damian did not reply immediately. ‘I’m sorry,’ he confessed then. ‘I really don’t want her to have this grief to deal with. She’ll feel more guilt than he will.’
Docherty felt helpless to give her aid. He had earlier heard accusations against her brother, and seemed now about to be offered a kind of corroboration.
Maureen returned holding a sheet of paper, two-handed, as if it offered resistance.
‘Some days ago I visited Liz Cosgrove. Do you remember Liz? She and I met in your group of Gandhi-ist revolutionaries. I believe you helped her with that drunk of a husband of hers. Do you recall? They had two boys. And now the younger one, Stephen, has killed himself. A heroin overdose of all things – he’s been addicted for years. I blame that awful father of his – he drank himself to an early grave, and now his son.
‘I went to see Liz to console her, and for some reason Stephen’s brother, Paul, let me walk away with this.’ She held up the piece of paper. ‘It’s Stephen’s suicide note. Maybe it was confusion or maybe Paul wanted me to be stuck with it for some reason. And I am stuck with it. It was like carrying home a spider on my dress. I’d like to pretend I delayed before making copies. But I did make them. I sent the letter back the next day with a note of apology, saying I had taken it by accident …’ And now Maureen looked on the verge of breaking down. ‘I know I don’t have to say it, Frank. But I give you this copy in strict confidence.’
Acutely aware of her harrowed eyes on him, Docherty nodded, reached a hand to her lower arm as if she might not be able to walk further without support, then took what she had given him and began to read.
When he was finished, he handed back the letter. He wished he could reassure her in some way. But the gravity of the thing, and what he knew from the cab driver, Sarah, prevented him from uttering the normal comforts – ‘I find it hard to believe’ or ‘The accusation might be unfounded.’
He muttered, ‘That’s terrible.’
The worst of cases – those in which the victim was left by the predator so empty of solace that he or she killed themselves.
Part of him was even aggrieved as he read that he was being given too hard a test, and that if he could not rise to it Maureen would be damaged. He had heard the accusations about Shannon and girls, and now Maureen sat fretfully waiting for his word on accusations about Shannon and boys. There were abusers who did go from boys to girls, but it was rarer, as far as he knew from research he had read, for a man to go from adolescent girls to pre- and barely pubescent boys. That did not mean it could not happen. Or that Maureen could be easily consoled.
Maureen looked directly at Docherty, her eyes irreparably young under the stylish, grey-streaked coiffure. Despite his professional competence, he did not want to be a judge in this case, one that dulled her gaze with so much anguish.
‘Do you think this note is reliable?’ she pleaded. ‘Tell me, absolutely frankly.’
Docherty felt that he could not manage to answer. But then he heard himself talking. ‘Well, I believe it should be investigated. Nobody wants anyone unjustly accused.’ He was saying that a lot lately. ‘On the other hand, this boy took his life. All I can say is … The sense of unworthiness, and inability to validate himself academically … these are certainly symptoms of some sort of emotional or other abuse. And … well, he mentions your brother.’
There, he thought, it’s getting easier. She wants candour, this honest woman.
‘You asked me to be honest with you. These are all elements that give a certain credibility to the note. He was about to suicide, he evinces guilt about his family, but he can’t avoid talking of your brother. Was he delusional? Anything’s possible. Was he moved by malice – well, he himself was the target of his own malice.
‘This other young man mentioned in here … Brian Wood. Do you know anything about him?’
Maureen said, ‘No. We’ve done some research, but we don’t even know if he’s still in Australia.’
‘He’s got an international consultancy firm,’ said Damian, ‘and we think he’s living in Hong Kong.’
‘I felt I must urge Liz to take it to the archdiocese,’ said Maureen. ‘I called Paul yesterday but he said she won’t be persuaded, she’s still irrational with grief, as she’s entitled to be. The question is, what on earth should we do? Naturally, I don’t want to betray my brother in any way.’
Damian and his wife again exchanged glances. Despite everything, there was a steeliness in the look Damian gave her. An uxorial ‘I-told-you!’
‘I can’t send it off to the cardinal,’ Maureen said in a throttled way. ‘I don’t think I can …’
‘You should contact this Wood,’ Docherty suggested.
‘How can I?’ Maureen demanded. ‘I’m the sister!’
‘I should let you know,’ said Docherty, ‘the coroner would have been given a copy by the police. There’s an outside chance he might send it to the public prosecutor as evidence on which to charge Leo.’
Maureen began to weep very softly now. Docherty rushed to comfort her, however irrationally. ‘Though I’m not at all sure he would, without further evidence.’
‘So it’s back to us,’ Damian said. He assessed Frank Docherty almost as if weighing him for some form of combat. ‘We wondered if you would do it. We understa
nd it has to be done. In case … Well, we know enough of these cases to know the people involved are usually repeat offenders.’
‘I have no standing in this archdiocese,’ said Docherty. ‘As you know.’
‘But you’re still a Catholic priest, aren’t you?’ asked Damian.
‘Marginally considered so, I believe.’
‘Then you’re entitled to take it to the cardinal.’
‘If I did that,’ said Docherty, feeling a profound sadness at the fearsomeness of suicide and damage and harsh duties, ‘I would have to warn your brother. But the best thing would be to persuade Liz or Paul to do it.’
Damian looked directly at him. ‘If they haven’t, it’s because they feel powerless. They can see the way the plaintiff is being dealt with in this trial that’s in progress.’
‘For which, of course, you blame my brother,’ said Maureen to her husband – with a repressed, teary anger suddenly let loose.
‘Well, I won’t pretend I ever fell for His Smarminess the monsignor.’
‘Well, I didn’t either,’ Maureen declared defensively. ‘But it doesn’t mean his guilt is proven.’
‘Oleaginous,’ murmured Damian. ‘Smooth as oil. Sorry, my love. It’s the way he is.’
Docherty intervened, suddenly resolved as to what needed to be done. ‘Why don’t we go together to see Liz Cosgrove?’
‘She won’t let me in,’ said Maureen. ‘She tossed me out when I visited her.’
‘We should try it anyhow. I could do it tomorrow afternoon. Would you consider that?’
Eventually Maureen agreed, but the spirit had gone out of her. A sort of dread, a weight of conflicting duties, seemed to have overcome her.
16
Maureen Breslin Remembers
Humanae Vitae, 1968
Despite our subservience to the Church in those years, we felt, in fact, venturesome and daring. Looking back, we were honest and hopeful children, waiting for the Christmas of the cosmos. We were anti-Vietnam, anti-apartheid, and the first Australian generation to be interested in the parlous state of Aboriginals’ lives − to call for the breaking down of de facto race barriers in cities, and real ones in the swimming pools and cinemas of bush towns.
Some time after my visit to Father Docherty’s confessional, news had finally begun to spread that the Vatican was considering liberalising their birth control doctrine. Now, some three decades later, we tell ourselves that we should not have awaited the permission of old men in Rome, or even of the smooth-faced Paul VI, an urbane northern Italian and Vatican bureaucrat. But according to the temper of the times and the nature of our upbringing, we did wait, and grasped every rumour about the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control, which was said to favour the dictates of modern science and practice. Our attitudes were no less or more absurd than those of long-serving members of the Communist Party, accepting the swerving and contradictory policies of the Comintern. It is interesting that the year of crisis of belief for both communists and Catholics was 1968 – for communists the Prague Spring was followed by a Soviet repression, which alienated many true believers.
In the months leading to the release of the expected papal encyclical on birth control, the press was full of comment by leading clergymen, especially Germans and Canadians, Dutch and Americans, who seemed much more progressive than our rather dour bishops, proclaiming the good sense of a new direction on a matter not only substantially altered by modern technological discoveries but also necessary for both the poor of the Catholic world, and the prosperous children of Italian, Polish and Irish immigrants in the countries of the New World. Frank Docherty’s advice to me on conscience seemed validated by this speculation.
In that happy season, Damian and I did not waste time on thermometers. We did not weary our desire. We went for it. Meanwhile, it seemed there were unlimited signs of renewal in the world. We were invited to a friend’s house where, he said, a priest of his acquaintance would honour us with a family liturgy − that is, a Mass said in the household, without a boring sermon from an elderly priest with cemented views; a ceremony in which the people, along with the priest, were very nearly the co-consecrators of the bread and the wine. It seems tame now, I know. But in that other world, it said to me that the Church belonged to the people, to normal people, not only to the anointed on high at St Mary’s and St Patrick’s cathedrals, nor to the College of Cardinals, nor to the Pope alone, but to a young woman with three children.
The young priest who said the Mass in a friend’s lounge room turned out to be Father Frank Docherty, my former confessor, invoker of my conscience. I watched him. He had a pleasant face, a little gaunt, and he was more than six feet tall. He began to recite the new English-language liturgy with earnestness. When it came to the consecration, he asked us to recite the words with him, as if we all shared in the priesthood. This was heretically exciting − the suggestion that we, too, might help to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
When the Mass ended, we all watched Frank shed his vestments, and the excitement of seeing these ancient garments laid aside with reverence in an ordinary living room − the chasuble, the alb, the stole, the maniple − seemed to me as blatant a statement of revolution as did anything from Che or Timothy Leary. These vestments, representing power, had descended amongst the people.
Frank, as he insisted on being called, sat around with us and drank his glass of moselle dutifully. It became apparent, not through priestly assertions but in the course of conversation, that he believed the Vietnam War immoral and unwise, a great sin of the West only equalled in recent years by the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He thought – as did we – that our system of conscription was as unjust as the Americans’, each being based on a lottery. And there was another important issue: a referendum was proposed to give the federal government the power to legislate for Aboriginals, based on the belief that the parliament would reform the patchwork of laws relating to the Indigenous across this enormous continent − their continent, after all, as many of us believed − according to a new pattern of justice, dignity and equity.
Frank did not pronounce at great length on these issues – he was not the loudest authority in the room. One of the reasons, I felt then, was that unlike other men in the room he did not have in him a head of leftist anger built up during twenty years of government by a conservative Coalition. Frank’s moderate voice was even shouted down by others, including Damian, in whom Vietnam had raised a fury.
That evening, of course Frank gave no sign of having encountered me in the confessional. I was only a little embarrassed that he might remember or identify me. I wondered whether he had permission from his superior, the head of his monastic house, to perform liturgies, since he was a member of a religious Order rather than one of the regular parish infantry of the archdiocese. Or was he once again acting on the basis of the independent biddings of conscience?
One woman in the group brought up the matter of the contraceptive pill. It was not us comfortably off women who needed contraception most, she said. ‘It is the African and South American women, who give birth to more children than they can feed or educate. It is women who die because they believe they must beget or be damned. Talk about martyrs for love! Surely the Vatican doesn’t think it glorifies God for that to occur?’
Damian and I began to attend a parish church in Longueville – the same church in which I had first approached Father Docherty’s confessional – to listen to the sermons he gave there during his Mass. Again, my description of Frank’s near-heresies and his skating along the edge of the unorthodox, a mysterious and unexplored landmass for us, might not seem surprising now, but then … We were as a nation so easy to impress. Ours was the last generation of the post-colonial cringe. At school we were still taught that it was the northern world that produced clever things, and the northern world that had taken the trouble to explore, possess and define the destinies of the southern world. Thus our destiny and our boasted-of identity was t
o harvest wheat and shear sheep and extract minerals for the northern world. We did not need to be a venue for fresh ideas, thank you very much. Up there they had enough of them already.
My brother, as I have said, instinctively gave sermons that did not shock faith, rouse enthusiasm or shake the pillars of a comfortable society, and to that extent he was an unexceptional Australian priest of his day. Frank Docherty was not. He was by nature a pillar-shaker. I remember a day he took on the text about rendering unto God the things that are God’s and to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and he did so with the innocent, barefaced intention of telling us that we should listen not only to the government on the issue of Vietnam but also to the Vietnam moratorium groups, and to the mothers of Save Our Sons. We should consider whether the military conscription lottery was a Caesar-sanctioned, state-ordained form of Russian roulette, and we were entitled to ask of Caesar whether it was just. Even in liberal democracies, bad laws could be passed and Caesar could be reprehensible. Did God want us, at such a time, to concentrate on our personal piety or to be sufficiently vocal in reasonable complaint to bring Caesar back to the moral order? It was the duty of citizens to stand up against law that was at variance with the laws of universal brotherhood. But when one stood up to bad law, it ought not to be done with the self-indulgence of anger or violence, but out of love both for those who suffered the damage of that law and for those who enacted and enforced it.
It was well established, he would say on later Sundays, that against the proposition of St Paul’s that the greatest commandment was love, the fact that in South Africa there prevailed a regime which denied proper human status to the majority of its residents was an outrage. And having inherited our land from an indigenous race, whose dispossession we had not yet faced, we should neither imitate apartheid nor fail to condemn it. It was one of the counsels of Christ that no government should legislate to exalt one race over another. Yet only when the world was persuaded to condemn apartheid would it end. Indeed, Frank said, it would be interesting to ask if we in Australia would ourselves have passed an apartheid law had there been many more Aboriginals than whites.