Crimes of the Father

by Tom Keneally

  Docherty set off to walk the few kilometres to the parish church, St Anthony of Padua. The pleasant streets were empty, unaware of the Sydney ferment, the birds in the white pines not yet awake. He felt strangely exposed. What if the tabloid had followed him here? His fellow priests might not be amused. He also marvelled and his blood raced, however, to know that a great and necessary blow had been landed, that complacency had been routed, that secrecy and legal fictions would not serve.

  He came into the yard of the parish and went to the back of the presbytery. Mrs Cerretti would have arrived to make Father Madelena’s breakfast. She did not live in the presbytery, yet it was confidently suggested by parishioners that she and Father Madelena were or had been lovers. So be it. Madelena was a good and attentive man and a fine parish priest to his people, a man of acceptance and not of exclusion. If love had taught him that, who could condemn him to Hell?

  Docherty could see her, a dumpling of a woman, through the lit kitchen, chopping shallots as if for an omelette. He knocked on the door.

  ‘It’s me, Docherty.’

  She opened up with her slow, shy smile, the antithesis of the dragon women who’d guarded presbyteries when he was a child.

  ‘How’s Gene?’ he asked as she ushered him in.

  ‘Overworked,’ she said. ‘How are you? How did you get on Down Under?’

  ‘I got into trouble with the cardinal archbishop of Sydney.’

  ‘Why do I believe that?’

  ‘All jokes aside, is Gene well?’

  ‘No. He’s had the flu. He’s been given another parish to run. We’d be sunk without you guys from the monastery.’

  ‘Do you want to let him sleep and I’ll say morning Mass?’

  ‘Well … I’ve got to call him soon.’

  ‘Why not let him rest? Let me do it. I’ve got jetlag and I’m wide awake. Ready to go dancing.’

  ‘All right. You’ll have a congregation of about fifteen. I’ll be one of them. I’ll deal with the criticism from him when it arrives.’

  ‘You have an acolyte, I take it?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Meaney. He’s here.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He’ll already be over there at the sacristy. He has the keys to unlock the church.’

  ‘What a man!’ said Docherty. Meaney was old, and of indomitable faith. Post-Famine Irish, his family had come down the interminable St Lawrence on a fever ship – so he had told Docherty. They had died by battalions in the quarantine station of Grosse-Île off Quebec. Mr Meaney’s grandparents were descendants of the survivors.

  Docherty went across from the presbytery, traversing the nearby school’s basketball court, and entered the standard sacristy – like one found anywhere in the English-speaking world: dim, austere, clean, with its drawers of vestments. It had always been the side-room sanctuary of the traditional second-class citizens of the New World, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians.

  Old Mr Meaney, waiting on a chair in the corner, stood up and growled, ‘H’llo Father. You on today?’

  And now here we are together, thought Docherty warmly, in the dark years of the faith of our forefathers, in an age when working mothers no longer slave to have the honour of their sons as altar boys, when Father Madelena had wisely fallen back on the option of the altar boys of yesteryear, represented today by Mr Meaney.

  ‘They said you were in Australia,’ said Mr Meaney, as Docherty washed his hands.

  ‘Just back, Mr Meaney.’

  ‘And your family there well, I hope?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ said Docherty. ‘My mother’s in a retirement home. But she seems undefeated.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Meaney, ‘that’s facing me too, if my kids have their way.’

  ‘Green vestments, isn’t it, for today?’ asked Docherty.

  ‘The same the whole world over,’ said Meaney with a sort of weary but proud certitude.

  Docherty began to robe himself according to the garments of ancient Roman princehood – in an amice and the long white alb, with the cincture tied around his waist, and the stole around his neck, crossed and held by the cincture. With Mr Meaney’s help, he placed the chasuble of green over his shoulders. These were considered the robes of supermen when he was a kid, though they had through the follies of the Church since earned a more ambiguous response.

  As he robed he said the old Latin prayers to himself – he was keen on Latin, though he could not as a democrat refuse the validity of an English-language Mass.

  Meanwhile, Mr Meaney had put on his own surplice and was dressing the chalice and preparing the wine and water cruets. It was said that altar wine was designed to be so bad that even alcoholic priests did not look forward to the consecration and consumption of Christ’s blood.

  ‘Thank you for that,’ Docherty told Meaney as he took the chalice in his hands.

  Meaney now preceded him and opened the door on to the sanctuary. The congregation that stood for him was precisely as he expected − the few widowed men, the pious women of over sixty, and an obsessive-compulsive young invalid pensioner, who sometimes went to two or three Masses at various churches in a day as a belt and braces form of achieving salvation. Docherty had counselled him and assured him that observance once a day was more than enough. The young man had cheerily agreed with him and continued to seek Masses around the place.

  At the bottom of the symbolic mountain made by the stairs of the altar and the little mound on which the altar stood, Docherty turned to the congregation and greeted them, these hallowed few; no less hallowed than the thousands entering the morning commute, some of them making the long daily trip into Toronto, but these had come to share the rite, and thus were the most immediately precious to him, these members of a minority club. He felt love for them stir in him − habitual, unrequited and irreducible − and for Christ his brother, the redeemer, Jesu, Joshua, Jesse, Jesus, the man who had laid down a ruthless rule: ‘If you do this to one of the least of my brethren, you do it to me.’

  Such was the Gospel according to the Bedouin-brown Jesus, better honoured by many unbelievers than by those who loudly claimed to be his men, his women. Docherty had always had fellow feeling for unbelievers, because in a parallel universe, without having begun life as he had, he would have been one. But through accidents of history and birth and even immigration, this was his mystery. And he would never abandon his misrepresented and abused brother Jesus, brought into disrepute by the apparatchiks of the Church, and, of course, a day past in Australia, by Monsignor Shannon. What of Maureen? he wondered again. How is she handling the reflected shame? For she was, of course, a victim too.

  ‘As you and I were there in the beginning, let us be there at the end of things, my brother,’ prayed Docherty. He didn’t care if it was literal sense. It made sense to him. It was the correlative of all his sensibilities.

  It was home.

  Acknowledgements

  This book of demons had its beneficent friends. My wife, whom I was not primarily attracted to for her editorial skills, nonetheless continued her work as a gifted editor of first and last review of this text. As always, it is not her fault if the results do not shine.

  The equally genial editors, Meredith Curnow and Catherine Hill, also helped me push the virtues of the text as far as they would go.

  My enduring and valiant agent is Fiona Inglis. It is just as well I can write well enough for her to keep me on the books, because life without our friendship would be bleak.

  My friend Kara Shead, a criminal law practitioner who has prosecuted a number of the cases involving child abuse by clergy and others, helped me with legal advice, and to the extent the material as I have deployed it is accurate and credible, I owe it to her. Any solecisms are, of course, my own.

  There have been many books on the crisis in the Church. Some that I read during the period of writing and that contributed insights to this narrative include Richard Sipe’s Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis (1995) and the same author’s A Secret World: Sexuali
ty and the Search for Celibacy (1990); David France, Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal (2004); and the much-criticised but valid John Cornwell’s The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (2014).

  I would like to mark the death of a dear friend, Father Pat Conner, Society of the Divine Word, expelled from the archdiocese of Sydney for no crime but the most pacifically stated political opinions. An exile in the United States until his death in 2015, an authentic thinker, meditator and believer, his book Whom Not to Marry was described by the New York Times as the ultimate word on the subject, and his activism and spirit intrigued and compelled all his Australian and American friends. You were not Docherty, Pat, since Docherty is utter fiction. But I like to think you and Docherty would have been friends, had he existed. It was above all your example that caused me to retain a belief in the authenticity of Catholic spirituality, even if I am no archbishop’s model Catholic.

  Lastly, as all we writers must, I salute the reader.

  About the Author

  Tom Keneally won the Booker Prize in 1982 with Schindler’s Ark, later made into the Steven Spielberg Academy Award-winning film Schindler’s List. His non-fiction includes the memoir Searching for Schindler and Three Famines, an LA Times Book of the Year, and the histories The Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame and American Scoundrel. His fiction includes Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives, The Daughters of Mars, The Widow and Her Hero (shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award), An Angel in Australia and Bettany’s Book. His novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest and Confederates were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Bring Larks and Heroes and Three Cheers for the Paraclete won the Miles Franklin Award.

  Also by Tom Keneally

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Blood Red, Sister Rose

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-rate Kingdom

  Schindler’s Ark

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  Towards Asmara

  By the Line

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Jacko

  A River Town

  Bettany’s Book

  An Angel in Australia

  The Tyrant’s Novel

  The Widow and Her Hero

  The People’s Train

  The Daughters of Mars

  Shame and the Captives

  Napoleon’s Last Island

  Non-fiction

  Outback

  The Place Where Souls Are Born

  Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish

  Memoirs from a Young Republic

  Homebush Boy: A Memoir

  The Great Shame

  American Scoundrel

  Lincoln

  The Commonwealth of Thieves

  Searching for Schindler

  Three Famines

  Australians (vols I, II and III)

  A Country Too Far (ed. with Rosie Scott)

  For Children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  Roos in Shoes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Penguin Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Crimes of the Father

  9780857987136

  First published by Vintage in 2016

  Copyright © Serpentine Publishing Co. Pty 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. In order to provide the story with a context, some real names of places are used.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Keneally, Thomas, 1935– author

  Crimes of the father/Tom Keneally

  ISBN 978 0 85798 713 6 (ebook)

  Sex crimes – Australia – Fiction

  Clergy – Sexual behavior – Australia – Fiction

  Celibacy – Catholic Church – Fiction

  A823.3

  Cover image © Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

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