In God's House (25 page)

It had been months since anyone associated with the diocese had spoken with me. If the lawyers were having meetings, I was locked out. I decided it was time to call Sister Julianne, the nun who had given me her card on the day of the lunch at the Old Bishop’s House. There were things I wanted to know the truth about, and she had said she would never lie to me. I left a message on her home phone Friday and received a return call Saturday morning.

“Can we talk?” I asked.

“Sure. How about tonight about six?” she said.

“Tonight’s okay?”

“I’ll have to break a date – with Bogart. I was gonna watch
Casablanca
and
The Barefoot Contessa
again.”

The address was near the cathedral, an old, well-kept Victorian home. On the porch I found four mailboxes and buzzers. Three of the mailboxes had names on them and the other had a small toy fat nun in traditional habit taped to it. I rang the nun’s buzzer and immediately heard her coming down the steps. When Sister Julianne opened the door she was wearing sweat pants and a
tee-shirt
with lettering that said “My Way Is the Highway”.

“You’re here,” she said.

I followed her upstairs to a comfortable flat filled with books, photographs and some paintings. The old gas heaters warmed the apartment, gave off a blue flame and fogged the windows. “I didn’t know nuns had apartments.”

“We do. Priests have regular houses now. A lot has changed.”

“The art’s great,” I said, motioning to the crowded walls.

“The paintings are cheap ones I find in flea markets. I took most of the photos a long time ago during summers in Europe. I love Europe.”

I pointed to a photo of a handsome, athletic young man with a bottle of champagne in one hand and sunglasses propped on his forehead. She picked up the picture and smiled at it. “He’s probably one reason I’m a nun. We wanted to marry, but he was killed in a car accident in our senior year at college. This was taken in Switzerland one summer when we traveled together. We camped out a lot, shared our dreams.”

She offered me water, tea, a soft drink, a beer or what she called “really cheap wine”. I took the soft drink, and so did she.

“I’m glad I don’t gamble. I would have bet you would never take me up on my invitation to talk.”

“Sister—”

“You don’t have to call me Sister if I don’t have to call you Mister. How about Julie and Renon?”

“Just Ren is fine. What kind of religious order are you in?”

“I belong to an order of administrators. It’s what we do. What I do for the diocese is what we do for dioceses, hospitals, Catholic charities and other organizations around the world, including relief agencies working in places like Africa, Latin America and developing countries.”

“Thiberville is Third World in some ways,” I said.

“You’re right. After Tommy was killed, I buried myself in schoolwork, finishing with a double major in management and economics, then an MBA. Along the way I studied with two nuns in this order. I looked their situation over, and decided to become one of them.”

“Why?”

“Don’t you know that I’ve asked myself that a whole lot of times. It’s silly, I think, but the lack of money appealed to me. Tommy and I were both non-materialistic. We hoped to never own much in the
way of possessions. We were idealistic and wanted to work for organizations like the Peace Corps our whole lives, to try to make a small but positive contribution to humanity. Maybe make a few lives better. I thought if I joined the order, I would end up in Africa. Both of the nuns I studied with had worked in Africa.”

“And?”

“Obviously, I did not get to go to Africa. I was sent to Thiberville when the diocese made a request to our order for a personnel director. That was four years ago, a century ago it seems.”

“What do you do as personnel director?”

“I insulate Monsignor Moroux from the complaining, whimpering and whining priests who don’t like their assignments. A lot of priests here are elitist and only want to be in the big parishes where rich parishioners can dote on them and spoil them. It’s like sucking up to rich Catholics is a special ministry here. Priests want to be in parishes where they are pampered by old ladies whose maids bring them meals and feted by old men who take them golfing and fishing. Some rich parishioners take priests golfing in Florida, even gambling in Las Vegas. There’s a lot of money in Thiberville, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

“You’re between Monsignor Moroux and his priests?”

“Right. The policy is that no personnel complaints of any kind can be made direct to the vicar general, Moroux, and no one ever gets an audience with His Excellency, Bishop Reynolds, who I think I’ve met only three times. Our ghost of a bishop is known to many of us as ‘Casper’ – you know, after the cartoon. No one ever sees him except on the altar on important holy days. He hangs out all the time on some bay in Alabama where his wealthy New Orleans family has a compound. He is a ghost, but way too ugly to be called Casper.”

I laughed.

“It’s a weird place. The vicar general has a closed-door policy. No one can approach Monsignor Moroux about anything. All the complaints come to me. I alone have the responsibility for hearing all complaints, but I have no authority to address a complaint. I
have no authority to do anything but write a one-paragraph summary of the complaint for Monsignor Moroux to peruse and ignore.”

“Sounds bizarre.”

“It’s the way this diocese works, probably many dioceses. Bishops are the sole authority in their fiefdom, and a diocese is a fiefdom. What bishops do is delegate responsibility, but they never delegate authority. Even our vicar general is like a eunuch in terms of authority. Moroux has a lot of responsibility, but no authority.”

“I want to know some things.”

“Ask whatever you wish, Ren. I can tell ya that this case with Father Dubois was long overdue. I knew it had to happen and I believe things are going to get a whole lot worse. Tell me what you want to know.”

In detail, I laid out everything I had learned since I’d met her on the swing at the Old Bishop’s House months earlier, everything I had experienced, everything I thought and felt about what I had learned. I even told her about the night that Monsignor Moroux had sanitized and shredded the priests’ personnel files, confessing that I thought I might have been an accomplice in obstructing justice. And I told her about Kate’s theory that the diocese had a nest of perverted priests, something I was beginning to believe was true now that Zeb Jackson had named other priests who had molested children. It took me a long time to finish telling her all that I knew. I believed I was running no risk for I was already persona non grata with everyone else in the diocese. And if she was with them, one more enemy would make no difference.

When I finished talking, she brought me another Coke. I pulled out a pack of cigarettes and motioned to the balcony. She grabbed the pack from my hands and said, “Don’t you know these things can kill you?”

Then she laughed, pulled one out, extracted a lighter from her pocket and pulled an ashtray from behind her stereo. “We can smoke right here, Ren. We’ll die together.”

I said, “Since that luncheon at the Old Bishop’s House I’ve
obviously had no ally, been alone. Those I thought were going to be my allies have acted as enemies since the first day, literally the day after I signed on to represent Dubois and flew to New Hampshire to see him. I guess I am looking for an ally in you.”

“Whoa! Hey, I may not be the ally you’re looking for. I’m probably not as brave as you hope I am. If I spoke my mind or if it were known I was assisting you in finding out the truth, or even having this visit with you, I think I’d be gone tomorrow, fired. They can replace me overnight. They don’t even need to replace me. They can just outlaw all complaints, which is the way I think it was before they hired me to listen to priests vent.”

“And you want to stay?”

“No. I didn’t say that. We’re going to tell the truth to each other, right? Well, I don’t want to stay here or stay in the religious order either. I’d like to be married one day. I am not a lesbian, Renon, never even experimented with it. I have a gay brother and gay friends I’m really proud of, people who are healthy and comfortable with their sexual orientation. Inside the Church, it’s different – a lot of nuns and priests are gay and hiding behind robes and cassocks, pretending to be something unnatural that no one can be, a sexless being.”

I nodded. “I know most of the priests I’ve met are either gay or missing a good chance.”

“Probably the priests you’re talking about are gay. It’s twisted and this kind of sexual suppression overflows into everything in the institution. A lot of people in the religious life sublimate their natural sex drives and end up acting them out in ways that are pathological, positively evil. The sexless priest or nun – it’s the first lie. This is the least healthy place I’ve been and I just don’t fit here. I’ve finally gotten over or maybe I’ve just gotten through losing Tommy, and I want to live again. So, I will be leaving Thiberville and leaving the order. But I’d like to decide when that happens, rather than being forced out of Thiberville for cooperating with you. I think I am willing to run the risk of giving you some information, but I want as much cover as you can give me.”

“I really need to know what is in Father Dubois’s file. I don’t know if it was sanitized by Moroux. He would not even let me see my own client’s file. He had orders from Jon Bendel. Can you tell me what’s in Dubois’s file?”

“I can show you.” She got up, went into the next room and returned with a huge folder bound by oversized rubber bands. “This is a copy of the complete personnel file of Father Francis Dominick Dubois. Consider it a gift. Do with it what you wish. I’d rather not be named as the source. If you have to do that, I’d like some warning, so I can make plans like packing, gassing up my car, and heading for the highway.”

As I pulled the individual files from the folder, she said, “Reading this will take some time. I am going to drive over to the university indoor track and go for a run. On my way back I will pick up some health food. I’ll be gone a couple of hours. We’ll talk over dinner.”

I read every line in the file. The documents bore out everything Dubois had told me at the Stalder Institute. There was documentary proof of every horrific thing he had done. If Dubois had been damned by the accounts the children gave to Doctor Kennison, his personnel file damned the prefect of the seminary, Bishop Reynolds, Monsignor Moroux, and every priest who had been complicit in covering up his crimes for decades. I kept returning to something Dubois and I had not talked about, his seminary academic records.

Finally, I heard Julie pounding up the steps. The door flew open and a perspiring beauty carrying two pizzas crossed the threshold. She went to the kitchen, picked up two beers, grabbed a towel from her bathroom, wiped her face and draped it over her shoulder. “Here, my new friend. Health food – pizza.”

“How far do you run?” I asked.

“About six miles. It’s what you do when you don’t have sex,” she said.

“Have you read his file?” I asked.

“Yep. When Father Dubois was first sent away to New Hampshire, I went into the archives one night. Copied it, brought
it home and read it. Just before the time you tell me Moroux shredded damaging information in the personnel records, I went back into the secret archives. I went back in to make sure Dubois’s file had not been updated and I found that document where he was suspended from performing sacraments or acting as a priest. So, it’s up to date. Every document is in the file.”

I fumbled for the right words to pose my question. “Reading over Dubois’s transcripts from the minor and major seminaries, it seems to me that he failed academically every year, yet he was always promoted to the next level. Can that be right? He was either an awful student or plain stupid.”

“Probably both. My guess would be both.”

“And… and there is a letter from the rector at Saint John Seminary, this Monsignor Billadeaux, in the file that is carefully drafted. It’s a letter to the man who was bishop here then, recommending against the ordination of Dubois. The letter mentions Dubois’s unnatural affinity for young boys. I mean, it’s there. It’s in black and white. Before he was even ordained. They knew about his sexual activities with boys when they made him a priest.”

“Right. Probably happened a lot of times with other priests.”

“Well, how… how?”

“Well, you’ve got to understand, Renon, this Church does not operate like any other institution on earth. In canon law, no one in any diocese has any authority over anything except the bishop. No one is over the bishop. The Pope couldn’t pick our bishop out of a lineup. Every bishop wants to look good in Rome’s eyes and there are not many things Rome notices, but I think maybe they do notice the number of vocations a diocese has, the number of new priests ordained that year, the number of men in seminary who are to be assigned to the diocese upon ordination – that and finances. I think maybe the Vatican notes those things.”

“And?”

“And that’s how a Dubois happens. The number of priests a diocese has is important for a lot of reasons.”

“That’s how he got here. But how did he stay here? How did the first bishop and that vicar general then, Monsignor Darnell – or Bishop Reynolds and Monsignor Moroux – allow him to stay here when he kept sexually abusing boys every place they sent him? He should have gone to prison twenty years ago.”

“This place is what is known in our Church as a benevolent diocese, meaning that out of our bishop’s goodness we will ordain men or accept transfers of priests who some other dioceses might deem unfit. There is a high tolerance here for conduct that would not be tolerated anywhere.”

“It’s an outrageous concept.”

“It’s worse than outrageous. There are no words for it. I attend conferences of diocesan personnel directors. I’ve had conversations with some who are really distressed about the caliber and character of priests in their diocese. They are also in benevolent dioceses.”