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Author’s Note
I SUPPOSE you could call me a child of the Church. It defined me and gave my young life any higher meaning it possessed. I was certainly one of several generations of children to be introduced early to the deranging Catholic addiction to guilt and the possible neuroses that lurked in the confessional—Pope Pius X’s edict of 1910 that seven years was the age at which a child was fit to confess made sure of that. In the confessional I encountered irritable priests, priests bored by the task, priests of admirable and tireless compassion, priests who actually tried to temper my religious overenthusiasm, and priests who seemed at best eccentric messes themselves. But I never encountered any greater perils, of the kind for which plentiful evidence exists, those dangers that encouraged the English author and former seminarian John Cornwell to call the confessional a venue for pedophiliac priests to groom children for abuse.
At an immature age, I chose to study for the priesthood, and I would like to put on record my thanks for the more generous and openhanded aspects of that training. It was not, however, an education designed to encourage a callow young man to achieve full maturity as a sentient and generous male adult. I was too innocent to understand that the education to make me a celibate strayed easily into stereotyping half of my species—women—as a perilous massed threat to priestly purity; or that the attendant emotional dwarfing could create, encourage, or license the young men whose abusive tendencies are mourned in this novel.
Those who trained me nonetheless proceeded in good faith. I might well have been a doctrinaire catastrophe if I had lasted, or else a whiskey priest, but a nervous collapse after I was ordained a deacon, accompanied by a long spate of disabling mental exhaustion and inertia, saved me from finding out. I left a few months before my ordination as a priest. By then I had been partly humanized by some of my wiser fellow seminarians and priests.
I felt compelled to leave, but I did so with the conviction I was letting down not only the universal Church but also the traditions of my Irish-Australian clan. Like some characters in this novel, I too had heard about the Mass stones of western Ireland, and I knew the worth of the despised Irish because I saw it amongst my own people, now transplanted to Australia. I knew that persecution had made us associate our identity with the Church. I knew that it was true, in fact, to say that some of my forebears in North Cork had starved instead of taking the chance of Famine soup and becoming Protestants—all for the sake of “the auld faith.” I knew that the struggles of the Irish had continued in the New World, that there were places I could not get a job in the 1950s because of my name and religion, and that my father and other kin of his had volunteered to fight in the Second World War in part to show that Catholics were reputable citizens like anyone else.
In the seminary not only did I have problems with belief in such theological fables as the Virgin Birth, but I was also shocked out of my own arrogant piety, in particular by seeing the callous way the institution treated young men who left. Some of these men were unwell—mentally or physically—yet even when that ill health stemmed from conditions at the seminary, they were cast back on their families with minimal financial or pastoral support. The rest of us were told to avoid them. Much later, as the abuse cases emerged, setting off an era of scandals, I saw a connection between the way the Church treated these young “failed” priests—with nominal care and no responsibility—and the way the victims of abuse were being “helped” and maneuvered.
As a writer and former seminarian, I was asked in 2002 to write an article for the New Yorker on child abuse in the Catholic Church. In researching it I spoke to priests in both the United States and Australia who were friends of mine, and one of them, an Australian stationed in the US, predicted two outcomes for the Church in its failing to address the matters of both pedophilia and underage abuse. One was Frank Docherty’s message as narrated in this book: if the Church did not face up to the problem, and act according to its highest principles, the civil arm of society would ultimately force it to do so. The second was that a time would come when all priests would bear the opprobrium of the crimes committed and covered up. Both these prophecies of my venerated and now deceased friend turned out to be, as they say, on the money.
My friend was certainly not the only honest, striving priest to foresee these perils, to be scandalized by what had happened, and to appreciate what was coming. He, like a number of my friends in the priesthood, possessed a genuine spirituality and a social conscience—a taste for what St. Paul said was the first commandment: fraternal love. I wanted, therefore, to write about the spirituality of such priests, even though a fellow former seminarian jokingly warned me that spirituality was a rare animal amongst Catholic clergy. I was, however, lucky enough to know many priests with whom it was more than a pretense, and so, for good or ill, I based my main character, Docherty, on priests I have admired, none of them sadly the kind who are likely to be made bishops.
I have come to realize that if you leave the Church, the Church may not leave you. Even so, I am afraid that despite my arm’s-length admiration of spirituality, I am what you would call a cultural Catholic, one of a subspecies despised by the more doctrinaire and totalitarian Church officials. I got the idea from those agnostic Jewish folk who celebrate Passover to commemorate their fellow humans whose lives were ended by barbarous decrees in the 1940s. In the same spirit I attend all the rites of passage of my esteemed late father and mother’s numerous Irish-Australian clans, both of which had American wings as well. I am grateful to celebrate the Last Supper and, in the name of people now gone, and much nobler than I, take the host, the sacrament. A deity could not be more appalled at my unworthy welcome to the Eucharist than by the celebration of the Mass by abusive priests. Many of the Church’s ayatollahs will queue to call me a delicatessen Catholic. Perhaps the Church is lucky still to have a delicatessen. But to say so is just the beginning of a tiresome debate in which the legalistic certainties of some priests and many bishops fall like axes; falling, as they always do, on divorcées, homosexuals, users of contraception, and all the other outcasts who might hanker to take Communion.
I have taken the liberty of setting this novel in the 1990s, when the pattern that would mark the Church’s circumstances in the new twenty-first century was beginning to emerge, yet when the voices of the victims did not have the force they have now gathered. I chose that time setting in the interests of making Docherty something of a prophet, as my dear friend in the United States was in 2002.
Though I am far from saintly or free from shame myself, I have—like many Catholics at birth—been profoundly shocked by what has happened, by the hubris of notable Church leaders, and by the fact that the Church, faced with this crisis, reached not for the compassion of Christ but for the best lawyers available. I am not the only one. On a recent visit to Listowel Writers’ Week in Kerry, I noticed how thoroughly—more thoroughly than in the United States and Australia—the Irish Church has lost the west of Ireland, the land of our observant forebears. The most devout are the most profoundly scathed by these scandals. Much was required of them and of the rest of us as Catholics. Observance and innocence were required of us. But at the higher level of the priesthood such rigor lapsed, and the laps
es were hidden to the limit of criminality. That, I suppose, is the story of this book.
A Plea from Father Frank Docherty
1996
Monastery of the Congregation of the Divine Charity, 2214 Kitchener Boulevard, Waterloo, Ontario N2J AO1, CANADA
16 June 1996
His Eminence Cardinal John Charles Condon
Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney
Polding Centre
133 Liverpool St
NSW 2000
AUSTRALIA
Your Eminence,
Re: Dr. Francis Dominic Docherty CCD, formerly of the archdiocese of Sydney
Please accept my most reverent respects. I am the above-mentioned Frank Docherty, Australian-born, Canadian resident, and incardinated at the moment in the diocese of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, where I live in my Order’s house, performing many parish duties at the Church of All Souls in Framborough Street, but also working as an associate professor in the Psychology Department of the University of Waterloo. There I specialize in developmental psychology and am accredited to conduct a clinical practice as well as being involved in the clinical training of doctoral students.
The Very Reverend Eugene Egan, Bishop of Hamilton, will attest to my record as a priest of this diocese. On his authority and with his backing, I have embarked on a study of the problem of clerical child abusers, whether that abuse be pedophilia or assaults upon minors. As required by their bishops, I give consultations to a number of priests from eastern Canada who face psychosexual problems. I hope I shall have concluded my present research, and made a helpful contribution in that research area, within the next three years.
Your records will show that the reason the cardinal archbishop of the archdiocese of Sydney, Norbert Scanlon, canceled my faculties to administer the sacraments in 1972 involved no reprehensible behavior on my part. Like many a young person at that time, I was vociferously involved in human rights issues, which, in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, I have never seen as separate from matters of dogma. I also took an unambiguous position on apartheid and the Vietnam War, opponents of which were wrongly seen by some Catholics of the early 1970s as communists. I was denounced by members of the laity, who believed sincerely but wrongly that I was undermining the papal magisterium and exalting individual conscience over its authority.
Given that I was advocating no more than Christ himself had advocated, I felt they were wrong in their condemnations of me to the archdiocese. I still claim, with respect, that this was so. Therefore, I would be grateful if you would review my situation when my academic career in Ontario comes to an end, and allow me to return to Sydney, my home city—indeed, the city in which my mother is ageing, to resume priestly functions there under the aegis of my congregation, to which I have belonged since adolescence, the Congregatio Caritatis Divini—the Congregation of the Divine Charity.
I am coming to Sydney at the beginning of July to speak at a Council of the Clergy, and to see my relatives, and I would be happy to discuss the matter with you then, at a time of your convenience.
Your sincere servant,
Frank Docherty CCD
1
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Docherty Comes to Australia
July 1, 1996
SARAH FAGAN was driving a cab. Some might think her cab-driving a pathetic attempt to meet men. In fact, it was a genuine attempt to allow a recovery of her brain, which was depleted, and a revival of her spirit, which had been rendered numb from all that had happened to her.
Driving was an art, but it also allowed intellectual vacuity, plain rituals of conversation. And if Sarah did not want to converse on the issue of why a woman like her was driving a cab, she would say, “We’re all filling in for my husband, who has cancer.” The “we’re all” implied a tough family hanging together in a crisis; that she was not, therefore, in favor of being messed around by passengers. She suspected that a decision about whether she would stay in neutral gear for the rest of her life, or might pull herself out of it, would most probably arise not from conscious thought or frantic self-analysis, but with her brain muted by routine. Listening to and exchanging banalities with her passengers, she hoped she would hear some healing neutral words. She might then learn to live in the same room as the tiger, the flesh-tearing fury.
A Friday morning at Sydney Airport provided taxi drivers with lots of fares. The line of cabs was prodigious by seven o’clock, with a dozen ahead of her. But the stream of morning arrivals kept it moving, and as Sarah was a cabdriver more for the therapy of it than for sustenance she was unfazed by the wait.
When eventually the last cab in front of her had cleared off, Sarah’s fare proved to be a tall, lean man, studious-looking, in his late fifties or early sixties—you couldn’t tell in an age when even the old went to gymnasia and sweated themselves thin. This fellow hauled a modern suitcase on wheels and in his other hand carried a briefcase. The suitcase was not massively packed, nor the briefcase of the latest design. A sensible traveler, but neither a conventional businessman nor tourist. A chiropractor, she thought, or a health-shop owner.
“Good morning,” he said as she got out and came around the cab to watch him putting his bags briskly into the boot, whose lid she had released. When he was finished, he set out walking around the car to take the other front seat, as was the custom with Australian men of his age, a residual gesture of egalitarianism. It was only then he noticed she was a woman and was struck by doubt.
“What should I do?” he asked her in a level, earnest voice. “Would you like me to sit in the back?”
She told him it was his choice, he was the passenger. So, after weighing the matter, he took the front seat. She asked him where to, and he said Gladesville—he believed he knew the way, he said, since he used to live in the area. He mentioned a street. “We’ll work it out as we go,” he said.
She pulled out and asked him if it had been a good flight, and he said it had been passable—given the time change, he preferred to fly by day than by night. But he hadn’t had a choice this time.
Where had he come from?
“Vancouver,” he told her.
“Oh,” she said vaguely, because all points of departure were equal to her. She liked these conversations, but did not want to take on any of their weight. “They say it’s a little like Sydney,” she remembered to contribute.
“Yes,” he said, “it is like Sydney, and yet they’re both their own places. They’re like siblings, very much the same and very much different.”
It was what she wanted to hear. Something unchallenging, which still transcended plainness.
“So you’re pleased to be home.”
“Proud Australian boy,” he said. “Though I live in Canada.”
She asked when he was going back and he said in three weeks’ time. His mother had a few mobility problems, he said. She was old enough to warrant his coming to see her.
Did he live in Vancouver? No, he said. Ontario, over in the east. Flat country but very pleasant. She asked him what the winters were like and he laughed. “Unspeakable. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that any Canadian survived before 1900.” He shook his head. “And yet, when you live there you just take it as it comes. Pretty much the way Australians accept their summers.”
Apart from such superficial issues as geography and weather, she generally left her passengers free of inquiry. It was astonishing, however, how many would offer particulars without her asking. Humans were natural confessors, and she was sure it was this, rather than the sophistication of police forces, that landed many people in the criminal dock.
He said, “Things have certainly changed in Australia.”
“In what way?” she asked. She wondered if it was wise to ask.
“Well, it was all freckle-faced Celts and Anglo-Saxons when I was a kid. Now the faces are Asian, Middle Eastern. And women driving cabs. The old crustaceans aro
und me when I was a kid wouldn’t have considered them safe enough drivers!”
“You haven’t seen it in Canada?”
“Not particularly. Well, yes. There’s an Ojibwe woman in Waterloo who drives for her husband because he’s got diabetes. You see, I live in a sort of big country town. But also . . . well, I always thought the Canadians a bit more progressive.” And then he laughed. “In a backwards sort of way.”
She said nothing.
“Are you driving for your husband?” he asked.
She did laugh at that, and was aware it wasn’t an entirely kindly laugh. She said, “Why would I need a taxi owner for a husband to make it all right for me to drive a cab?”
He held up a hand. “You’re quite right; forgive me. I’m a sexist brute. Women in Canada tell me I am all the time.”
“You can get cured of that, you know!” she said, a little tersely.
In the silence that followed she wondered idly if he was married. She was not going to ask. He asked her about the present Australian government, but he was treading water and she gave a simple answer, discontented with politicians in the Australian way that expects no prophets ever to emerge from the desert.
She went left beside Hyde Park, reached Chinatown, and crossed the Glebe Island Bridge. It was only when she turned into Rozelle that he recognized familiar landmarks on Victoria Road. “My father and uncle owned that pub,” he told her. “If I called it an old stamping ground, you’d asked me what I stamped on it. But at least I’m familiar with it.”
He had a weird sense of humor, she thought. She said, “We’re close now.” For some reason she said it for her own comfort. This one was just a notch too subtle for conversation. Whereas she could live with “my old stamping ground,” she found “I don’t know what I stamped on it” harder. She wanted clichés, not a smart-aleck expatriate who turned them on their head. “Not far,” she said, but again to reassure herself.