Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  And so back in her cell, as the room she had always found quite habitable was called, she lay on her bed in the dark. She mimed sickness the next morning and escaped Mass. It was not that she believed she needed absolution before she could take Communion. It was more frightening than that. She did not know why she should make any confession in the first place, seek an absolution, meaninglessly consume the host at a meaningless Mass.

  She rose somehow and taught the morning classes as automatically in her numb condition as she had in the fever of the previous day. At lunchtime she sought out one of the Jesuits in the old priests’ home down the road, where retired clergy came and went. The old man sat in a chair in a corner of the sanctuary and she told him. She noticed remotely that he was not as astonished as she had expected he would be. It was as if she were doing this from ancient habit, not from conviction, accessing the rite of the release of sins so that she could take the sacraments like an innocent nun until she decided what to do – to hang herself or leave or stay.

  The old priest could not have been wiser or calmer. He said wonderfully banal things.

  ‘We have all come close to lapsing. We have all had these temptations, and you did well through the grace in your soul to resist them. What would our calling mean without such powerful tests?’

  She was too exhausted to argue with him, contest his amiability or tell him that she now saw this supposed sacrament from another angle. Yesterday she had been a believer; today she was a woman who could see a device of manipulation as quickly as the next woman.

  Thanks to her numbness, she taught her way through two weeks. Nobody seemed to notice the altered nature of her soul, so strong was their belief that everything came to her easily and with grace.

  Then one night after midnight Alphonsus found Constance unable to speak or move beneath the stone Gothic stairs in the entry hall of the convent.

  25

  Monsignor Shannon Fights the Good Fight, 2

  May 1996

  The proceedings of the first day of Dr Devitt’s attempt to sue the cardinal of the archdiocese of Sydney and the trustees of the Roman Catholic Church drew considerable interest, especially when Devitt began to give his evidence.

  Monsignor Shannon and Mr Callaghan sat behind the Church’s lawyers and observed throughout the first afternoon the scientist’s questioning, and his demeanour, alternating impressively between ferocious memory and calm reason.

  Early on, Devitt was asked to identify Father Guest from a photograph that loomed large on the courtroom projector. Guest’s imprisonment was discussed, and Devitt’s lawyer, Conlon, a young man, leniently asked his client whether he felt consolation at Guest’s punishment or whether he was roused to even greater fury to see that, though the man had been disgraced, he had not paid for the full catalogue of crime.

  Devitt agreed to the latter.

  His counsel was the first to ask him when he decided that the abuse had affected him seriously and he ought to approach the Church for justice.

  ‘I became particularly aware of the harm when I got engaged and was at the same time under stress in my work with the research team. But as for approaching the Church, that idea came when I saw a report of Guest’s death in 1993.’

  ‘So you became aware of the scale of the damage around April 1992 but did not think of approaching the Church until Guest died.’

  ‘Yes. I think my psychological reports bear this out.’

  ‘Why did you wait until Father Guest’s death to seek any recompense?’ asked Conlon.

  ‘Because at that point I realised there was no chance he would ever confess what he had done to me. I always imagined a public confession, but after he died I couldn’t delude myself.’

  ‘The Church has agreed to make an offer to compensate you for these assaults, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I would have been bound to confidentiality if I had taken it.’

  ‘So why do you now take this action in the public forum?’

  ‘To get them to face up to the reality of what’s been done in their name. Of what is almost certainly still being done in their name. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.’

  ‘Why do you object to a confidential settlement?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s just that I’d be muzzled about what has happened. Mind you, when it first happened, I didn’t want anyone to know. But when I was ready to speak, it seemed alien and intolerable to me, the idea that if I took the terms of their settlement I could never again speak of the abuse by Father Guest.’

  ‘What would you say to people who might accuse you of latching on to Father Guest’s death and, since he is not alive to deny it, falsely claiming, for monetary gain, that you were assaulted by him?’

  ‘If that had been my motive,’ he said, as calm as counsel wanted him to be, ‘what the Church offered me would probably have satisfied me. For the Church has itself acknowledged I have a valid case.’

  ‘The Church has acknowledged that?’

  ‘Through the chairman of In Compassion’s Name, Mr Callaghan QC. It was also stated by Monsignor Shannon. They offered me more than the normal payout of fifty thousand dollars. They wouldn’t have done that if they thought I was a fake.’

  There was an objection, an argument about the terms under which Mr Callaghan and the monsignor had said such things. It ran on between counsel and the judge.

  Monsignor Shannon was sweating inside his lightweight clerical suit. He was distracted by the prospect of committing a convenient perjury when it was his turn to give evidence, but rejected the temptation. He did not hear the counsel’s next question, to which Devitt answered in his level way.

  ‘The sole motivation for coming forward when I did is that by then I had demonstrations of what Guest had taken from me. What he had been guilty of was measurable in my professional life and in my marriage.’

  He uses slightly odd terms, Shannon thought. ‘Demonstrations of what Guest had taken from me …’

  The defence counsel then attempted to forestall any claim against Devitt of mental disablement by taking him through the question of his marriage and his falling-out with his research team. Devitt frankly and effectively explained his relatively sudden irrational rages against his wife and in his laboratory. His regret for them seemed unfeigned. He had been treated with understanding both by his wife and his peers, and was now part of a team at Macquarie University researching the same area of laser and computer technology. The counsel read and tabled assessments of his excellent performance in his present job as an individual and scientist.

  Devitt had performed well. Monsignor Shannon knew that Callaghan, such a decent man, was uneasy that the following day the Church’s counsel, Mr Kermode SC, would endeavour to undermine Devitt’s re-established reputation for stability. But, as Kermode had said when they had met in his offices, there were contradictions between Devitt’s statements in various documents about when he became aware of the true extent of the damage done him.

  ‘Of course,’ Kermode told Shannon and Callaghan in his debrief at the end of the first day, ‘you will both give truthful evidence for theological as well as civil reasons. But, Mr Callaghan, how does your memory square with Devitt’s claim that you acknowledged his was a valid case?’

  Callaghan said, ‘I don’t think we took as emphatic a view as he says. But under oath I’d have to say I thought him credible. And I probably conveyed that, informally, outside the transcript of the meeting.’

  Kermode turned to his junior, Ms Zoldak. ‘Would you check the transcript of the meeting at the cathedral, Marissa?’

  She nodded and made a note, and Kermode inhaled. ‘But we have to look forward to the picture of Devitt offered by Father Guest’s sister. It has to undermine credibility. So I think we should put her on first. With any luck Devitt’s counsel will decide there’s no profit in having you two in the witness box.’

  Father Guest’s sister was her brother’s one remaining champion on earth. Widowed i
n her mid-years, she had shared the presbytery with her brother. She was the aggrieved priestess of his shrine.

  Kermode’s secretary was in the meantime serving wine, beer and whisky, according to desires. Monsignor Shannon thought he certainly desired a whisky, while Kermode told them Father Guest’s sister had stated she plainly remembered how the boy pushed himself on Guest, turning up after school, his face aglow, insistent to see the priest. ‘We can make Devitt seem at least halfway a seducer.’

  Callaghan coughed. ‘I’m not absolutely convinced of her. I mean, she is his sister, and there’s something about her that declares, “My brother, right or wrong.”’

  Spreading his hands, palms outward, Kermode said, ‘I think she deserves to express her observation of events, Peter. We can leave it to the plaintiff’s counsel to make your point.’

  Shannon decided to intervene here. ‘I agree with Mr Kermode, Peter. Surely we’re entitled to make our own case, now that Devitt’s rejected our overtures.’

  He thought that the sister’s evidence, if it turned out as Kermode hoped, would show that schoolboys like Devitt have the desire in them, the same desire that came to Shannon himself. I took their sins on me. I took the sins of the girls and the sins of the boys. On me. I risked my soul so that they would not have a squalid experience in a suburban toilet. But I will never be thanked.

  The second day continued with Devitt’s evidence. He now faced Kermode, who rose with habitual smoothness and an air of natural, amused authority. Yet Devitt, self-possessed as ever, seemed settled in the witness box. It was obvious to Shannon that though having temporarily lost the management of his soul around the time of his engagement, Devitt was in calm command these days.

  Kermode referred to the report on Devitt prepared by the Church’s clinical psychologist. According to that, Shannon noted, Guest had declared to Devitt at one stage that he was saving Devitt from sinning with heedless men in public toilets; he was generously willing to take the shame and guilt on himself, said Guest further – on his own body, to bear the double sin. Devitt had told the psychologist that Guest fed him gin and lemon, and it became the sweet anaesthetic, the sacramental numbing before he was instructed to remove clothing, and endure the mutual tests of their private parts to which Guest had introduced him.

  ‘Did you feel, then, while you were with him, that he was doing you damage?’

  Devitt thought for a number of seconds. ‘No. Though I certainly felt, even then, as if I were carrying a wound. I thought it was my fault.’

  ‘But you told the psychologist that you didn’t like the extent to which your own body enjoyed the encounters. So … your body liked them?’

  ‘Of course there was reflex pleasure. One abominates the memory of it. One is guilty. But —’

  ‘But for many years you did not perceive damage in what had been done to you?’

  ‘I knew there was damage and that I was wounded, but I did not identify or assess the wounds.’

  ‘That is a convenient argument, Dr Devitt.’

  ‘I think it is a clear distinction, Mr Kermode. And apart from that, had I possessed the capacity to analyse the damage, I wouldn’t have known at that stage it would entitle me to any legal claim.’

  ‘And the case study in 1988, when Father Guest was still alive. You felt there had been damage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t come forward then?’

  ‘No. I explained the distinction in my evidence to Mr Conlon.’

  ‘At least we can say you tried to. So for a considerable time you didn’t appreciate that you had suffered damage?’

  ‘No. I didn’t appreciate that it was Father Guest who had done the damage. In 1988 I still thought I was largely to blame.’

  ‘That means that until the early 1990s, you knew you had been sexually assaulted but did not believe it had had an adverse impact on you?’

  ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t vaguely aware of an adverse impact.’

  ‘Well, you are a man for making distinctions, aren’t you? Tell us in your own words about the adverse impact that you recognised before you ever thought of approaching the Church.’

  ‘A sense of unworthiness, which kept me a recluse through my high school and university years. I didn’t relate to too many people then.’

  ‘And you did pretty well out of your reclusiveness, didn’t you? I mean, the Shields Medal for Physics, First Class Honours, and the rest?’

  ‘Study and exams were my sole validation. But you can’t live like that in the big, real world.’

  ‘You say you began to feel the damage as your research life became more active?’

  ‘I felt that I was stuck in exile behind a pane of unbreakable glass, and all my colleagues were unreachable across that barrier. They looked at ease in the world. They looked to me like its inhabitants. I suffered a terror because I didn’t feel I was amongst them, and I feared they would get to know it and discount me, and write off my research as well. It was an upsetting realisation. And through no fault of my then fiancée, it seemed to be triggered in part by meeting and growing closer to her. I blamed her for it all at first. It was exactly as Oscar Wilde said – “Each man kills the thing he loves.” She seemed by her generosity, by her decency, to show up the … the dreadfulness of those Father Guest episodes.’

  ‘This sudden upsetting realisation made you depressed, then, at the time of your meeting your wife?’

  ‘Yes, it did.’

  ‘Did it make you angry?’

  ‘Yes. An anger even then without a target. Myself at first, maybe. I certainly thought of suicide.’

  ‘And this was four years ago? That you got engaged.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What month?’

  ‘We were engaged in July.’

  ‘And you say around then you began to identify the Church as somehow to blame?’

  ‘I think it was even before then – earlier in the year – that I began to blame my sense of separation from human beings on Guest and not entirely on myself.’

  ‘Did you feel that your trust in Father Guest had been abused?’

  ‘Yes, of course I did. And my father had told Bishop Modena about it, and no action was taken to prevent Guest attacking other boys.’

  ‘But you told a counsellor at your university that when you first started having problems with your research team there, you made no connection between the abuse and the problems you were suffering, isn’t that so?’

  ‘That’s not right. The worse my behaviour became, the more I began to realise that the abuse had created the anger, the volatility. And that hellish feeling of separation. From the living.’

  ‘Yet you told In Compassion’s Name that you did not feel a connection between Father Guest and your problems until last year?’

  ‘I think you’re misinterpreting what I said. Last year was when I resolved to approach the Church. But I had felt damaged by the abuse much earlier. Not, however, early enough to pursue any legal remedies.’

  ‘But the point I am making is that you keep on contradicting yourself about the date on which you became aware of the damage of Father Guest’s contacts with you.’

  ‘Not at all. I’ve tried to say something honest about the growth of my awareness.’

  ‘So you claim.’

  Kermode then picked up and quoted from the report of the university’s counsellor. ‘“It was a gradual, inchoate awakening. It became explicit perhaps at that time, but had been gradually dawning since the abuse ended when I was fifteen.” So, Dr Devitt, you tell us the awareness arose when you were fifteen; it was there when you began to work in the laser laboratory; it was there when you met your fiancée; it was there when you became engaged to your fiancée; and it was there last year. Could you blame the court for being bewildered? And with such a bewildered memory, why should you be given leave under the Limitation Act?’

  ‘Again, you talk about awareness as if it were switching on and off a light.’

  ‘The la
w seeks a definite date, not the five, six, seven seasons of awareness you’re confusing it with. Perhaps with your superior intelligence …?’

  ‘I have never claimed superior intelligence to anyone.’

  Satisfied and citing laches as a reason to dismiss Devitt’s case, Kermode concluded his questioning.

  On the fourth day Mr Conlon called a psychiatrist to explain the impact of child abuse on the lives of those violated, and particularly to explain that it could take years of disquiet and problems before a victim might feel anything outright, and then to take action against the culprit. Devitt’s wife was also called – an amiable, self-possessed young scientist who declared that the Church should enable the experience victims had of bringing complaints to them to be part of the healing, not part of the ordeal.

  There would be another evening and, tomorrow, a morning of scarifying headlines, Shannon knew, but he must keep his head and bide his time.

  The sister of Father Guest gave evidence that was saved from sounding demented only by Kermode’s skill. Even Conlon went easy on the old thing and let her condemn herself with talk of Devitt’s malicious stalking of her misjudged brother.

  Cardinal Condon was at breakfast in the cathedral house on the morning Monsignor Shannon was to give his evidence. His Eminence said he had included Monsignor Shannon in his intentions while saying his Mass that morning. The cardinal realised that though the Supreme Court had not subpoenaed him, Monsignor Shannon was his proxy, and he was grateful, he said, to have such a paladin. The cardinal shone redly at the end of the table, small, bald, an old-fashioned Celtic warrior like Shannon himself, a holder of the line against secularism and flim-flam, and all the rubbish about gay marriage and the ordination of women. A man who was discreet, too; who knew it was better to be charming to politicians than to hammer them from the pulpit, as some archbishops had done, to little effect, in the past.

  Cardinal Condon had taken his political lessons from the intervention of certain bishops in the Labor Party in the 1950s, which came about as a result of their fear of communism and in a hunt for fellow travellers amongst non-Catholics. As he had observed, that intervention had ultimately been destructive. Though mildly leftist in his youth, Condon was now a conservative. He was what people called ‘a sound man’, an old-fashioned prelate. It was said that few outside his family loved him, for he was passionate about the much-pilloried Church doctrines rather than matters the world wanted him to be passionate about. But that was his job, he believed – to be pilloried by the world, intractable to fashion, and to hold the line. Monsignor Shannon sympathised utterly with these objectives.