In God's House (33 page)

I flew back to Thiberville to take care of some of the backlog at my office that was crashing around Mo. Leaving long-term parking at the airport, I called Julie from my car phone. She asked me to come by her apartment for dinner. When I arrived, she apologized for not having cooked.

“So, we’re ordering in pizza again, right?” I asked.

She nodded, poured beers, and clinked glasses. “I dropped my papers,” she said.

“What?”

“I wrote the head of my order and advised I would be leaving.”

My heart sank. We clinked glasses again. “Well, now, this… I guess this is good news. It’s big news, for sure. When will you be leaving?”

“I don’t know. It’s up to me. Today I got my response. They will leave it to me to tell the diocese and to leave my job and the religious community when I am ready. I don’t think it will be long.”

“Did something push you over the edge?”

“No. It wasn’t one thing. I just need to get out of here and get out of this religious life. I can’t take it anymore. I’ve felt unclean inside for a long time.”

Julie paused. Her voice was softer, quieter. “I promised you I would never lie to you, Renon. I said it on the day we met. But I’ve not been completely honest. The truth is, before this business with
Father Dubois came to a head, I had worked with Moroux on other cases like this. We manipulated families whose children had been sexually abused by our priests. They used me to work with the mothers and children. Few of the children’s fathers gave me the time of day, but some of the kids’ mothers wanted to pray all this away. I was as guilty as anyone who covered this stuff up, guilty as hell.”

She started to cry. She looked away. I wanted to hold her, but didn’t. I was more concerned about her pain than what she was saying.

“It’s okay, Julie. We all do things. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“Let me, okay? It’s important to me that… important that you know me. My job was to placate the families, take the criminal violation of their children to some kind of spiritual level, make their anger with the diocese go away, convince them the problem priest had been dealt with even when I was sure he was in the process of abusing more children in his new assignment. That’s why I was in the meeting at the Old Bishop’s House on the day I met you. Don’t you see? I was like part of their team. They kept me close because they thought they might need me again – the good nun. If they had taken your advice and reached out to other victims of Dubois… if they had, they would have sent me to those families to convince them prayer was all they needed, not lawyers or police.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at Julie, shocked.

“I was complicit in the cover-up – up to my ass in this sickening, sinful, shameful stuff. What I did made me sick when I was doing it. It was like rotting inside.”

Julie’s face changed as she spoke and it was more than just an expression of deep pain and distress. There were now lines in what I’d always seen as smooth, flawless skin.

My head was moving toward a harsh judgment of her I knew I had no right to make, but my heart overrode my head. I cared so much about Julie that I only wanted to support her through her
distress. That she was so visibly sick in facing the facts was part of her goodness, and I believed, given her spiritual soundness, and love of people, that maybe she had been more of a comfort to the children and mothers than she believed she had.

I took her hand, and her palm was wet with perspiration. Suddenly a truth deep within me surfaced. I was falling in love with Julie.

“When I met you, I gave you my card, asked you to call. Remember? Why did I do that? Because I’m a coward. I wanted to do something that was right for once, but lacked the courage to do it myself. So I wanted to give the personnel files to you and hope you had the courage to do the right thing. I didn’t know if you would do the right thing, but I knew no one else in that room would. I knew I had never done the right thing.” She was staring at the floor when she finished.

I touched her face, held her left cheek in my right hand and turned her face softly, making her downcast eyes look up at me. “You’ve done the right thing now, Julie. None of us who’ve come in contact with this stuff did the right thing in the beginning. This stuff has put a stain on our souls that we’ll never scrub clean.”

“Well, I have those fifteen other files for you. I have had them since I copied Dubois’s file. Those priests are as sick as Francis Dubois. When you use the files, please tell them that they came from me. Use my name, will you? Tell them where they came from.”

I nodded. “I’m going to miss you a lot.”

“And I am going to miss you. More than you can imagine, I think.” She took her hand back, kissed my cheek, and said, “You’re a good person.”

“Good people don’t conspire to destroy evidence,” I said.

We had a few more beers and talked about where she might go and what she might do. She was looking at doing what she had always wanted, relief work in Africa, and said, “I want to do the right thing with the rest of my life. Really help people.”

“You had no choice here in Thiberville. What could you have done to change the way the bishop and Monsignor Moroux handled these things?”

“Maybe I could not have changed them, but I did not have to be a willing participant. When I was telling mothers that prayer and the Church could heal the wounds of their children and their own wounds, of course I knew that wasn’t true. The kids and their families needed extensive therapy. But that’s how the diocese paid off these families. They paid them with prayers.”

“Look, don’t go beating yourself up. I just heard a cardinal confess that he had done far worse things. Everyone associated with the Church has something to answer for. People who finally choose to do the right thing can be redeemed.”

“Stealing some priests’ files from the diocesan secret archives and giving them to you is hardly a redeeming act.”

“It’s a lot. In time, police and prosecutors will get those files.”

“It won’t matter who gets those files. Not many priests will do any prison time for sex crimes against children. We both know this. You told me that if Kane Chaisson had not brought so much pressure on the district attorney, who is scared of him, then Father Francis Dubois would have had another get-out-of-jail-free pass. Bishops are maybe bigger criminals than the child molesters. Covering-up crimes—”

“Julie, if it’s okay with you, I really can’t talk about this stuff anymore tonight. My days are filled with it, my nights too. I hardly sleep anymore. I have dialogues with myself all night about this stuff. Let’s order pizza and talk about something else, okay?”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Let’s talk about where you’re going.”

“Africa?”

“My beautiful friend, I think you’re going to be in trouble in Africa.”

“Why?”

“I can’t imagine they have pizza in Africa.”

It was late Sunday afternoon by the time I navigated my way across Baltimore to the rectory of Bishop Garland Franklin. If someone had gone to central casting looking for a man to play a handsome bishop or cardinal, the part would have gone to Garland Franklin. He needed no vestments, altar, pulpit, or other trappings to project the sense of authority he exuded.

For four hours, I briefed the bishop on the Thiberville situation. I returned on Monday for another three hours. Throughout both sessions, Bishop Franklin never let on what he was thinking or feeling. He never took a note, never asked a question, never said or did anything that could provide a clue about how he was receiving the information.

The books that lined the shelves of the bishop’s study seemed to reveal a literate, well-rounded intellect. One wall was dominated by photographs depicting him with elderly women. There were photographs of the group at the matinee of a play, a flower show, an art museum, a waterfront shopping mall, a restaurant on the shore. He told me that was what he did on Saturday afternoons. Together with a school bus driver and a nurse, who both volunteered alongside him, he picked up these women from their urban public housing projects, places they were ordinarily too afraid to venture out of, and took them out for the afternoon. He said, “My mom passed away a bit too soon. Like any son, I wished I had spent more time with her, done more things with her. I found this opportunity
to bring some joy to some elderly women and… the truth is, Renon, I think I get as much enjoyment from these outings as they do. I have probably seen more art, more plays and museums, and more state parks than I would have ever seen. And I’ve heard a lot of laughter where I’m not sure there was much before.”

He was almost too good to be true.

When I motioned to a different kind of photograph, a picture of him as a tanned young man on a beach, holding a surf board, he broke into a wide smile. “Can you believe the kind of boards we had back then? It was more like floating than surfing. I was born sixteen miles south of the best stretch of water California has. I almost flunked out of school a couple times because I was riding waves instead of going to class. I don’t tell many people this, but I still go back to California every year. Usually, I watch. But sometimes I still try. One good wave is all it takes. After that, the air you breathe is better, food tastes better, everything is better. I’m going back out there to get in the water again. Nothing is more humbling than the sea.”

As our Monday meeting ended, the bishop walked me to my rental car behind the rectory, shook my hand and said, “I’ll be coming to Louisiana soon, Renon. First, I have to make another trip, a short trip, on some Church business.”

Bishop Garland Franklin of Baltimore was seated in a
well-appointed
suite on the top floor of the most important building in Vatican City, an office some referred to as “the Eagle’s Nest”. Cardinal Hans Kruger entered the office wearing riding gear.

As Bishop Franklin stood to greet the cardinal, Kruger shifted a coin he had been holding in his right hand to his left. It was the last gift his father had given him and it was always in his pocket – a 5 Reichsmark coin minted in Potsdam in 1936.

“I am off to the countryside for an afternoon of riding. If I had been sure you would make it from the States today, we could have saddled a horse for you.”

“I’m not a horseman, Your Eminence,” the bishop said.

“With these mounts, it wouldn’t matter. They can make you look and feel like you’ve been riding all your life. I have always loved riding. It takes me away from my work. The stable is only 47 kilometers outside the city, but it takes me far away.”

Bishop Franklin had never met Cardinal Hans Kruger, and he had never heard a good thing about him, but, like everyone in the Church hierarchy, the bishop understood that the cardinal’s power in Rome was nearly absolute. It was widely believed that Hans Kruger was only one funeral away from the papacy. The easy talk about horses and personal references surprised Bishop Franklin. Such small talk was not commonplace inside the walls of the most formal religious institution on earth, where conversations were usually guarded.

The bishop knew from the language of the summons that this meeting was to be private and confidential. From the timing, he surmised that the discussion was to be about the Vatican appointment he had received a week earlier.

The cardinal slipped the coin in his pocket and perused his bookshelves, tapping the bindings with the index finger of his right hand, making a kind of humming sound as he passed his fingers across the volumes that were crammed into the bookcases. Pulling a thick volume from the stack, the cardinal put it into Bishop Franklin’s hands.

“Do you know this book,
Of an Order in Life
?”

“No, I don’t, but obviously I recognize the names of many of the authors.”

“I don’t do a lot of reading, Bishop, but I read this book twice. It’s a collection of writings – essays and meditations – by some great thinkers. Some Christian, some Muslim, several Jews, many without any spiritual or religious identity. Their subjects are duty, obligation, and loyalty. Some of the writings date to antiquity and
the most recent is from just before the book was published in 1953. Keep it. If you read it, I believe you will be inspired. The things discussed in this book we no longer encounter much in the modern world, where there is little sense of duty and obligation and almost all loyalty is lost. These things guide my life. Without them, there can be no order. Without order, there is nothing.”

Bishop Franklin thanked the cardinal and slipped the book into his briefcase. Also in Franklin’s briefcase was his two-page Vatican appointment, and the set of papers that was becoming known as “the Wolleski Document”.

Cardinal Kruger stood ramrod straight in front of the seated bishop. “I have read the document of your appointment by the Holy See, Bishop. I have read the document Cardinal Wolleski carried to Rome that provoked the hysteria that led to your appointment. I have no intention of attempting in the slightest degree to interfere with the terms of or the charges contained in your appointment. Considering the appointment was issued from the office of Cardinal Marcello at the insistence of the Holy Father himself, it would be inappropriate for me to even comment on the content of the appointment document, and I certainly will not criticize the appointment. The Holy Father’s will shall stand.”

Until that moment, it had not crossed Bishop Franklin’s mind that the pontiff was involved in the matter or that the Holy Father had personally selected him from a roster of over four hundred American bishops. He would never know that the Pope had never heard of him and that a young priest at the nunciature named Desmond McDougall was the one who had chosen him.

Bishop Franklin selected his most enthusiastic tone. “I understand completely, Eminence.”

Kruger took a key from his pocket and unlocked a side drawer in his desk. He pulled out the appointment papers and looked them over.

“And so, I see your appointment and charge is to monitor… assist in managing… and report to the Vatican through the office of the papal nuncio in Washington,” the cardinal said.

“Yes. That is as I understand it.”

“Let us now see if we understand this entire business in the same way.”

The bishop nodded.

“The problem was surely exaggerated in the document Cardinal Wolleski carried to Rome. What you have is a document about one priest in some southern place in America that no one has heard of and… and statements of supposition that are baseless. These three men have sounded an alarm, rung the bells in the Vatican, about something they call… what?” Cardinal Kruger reached back in the drawer for the Wolleski document and flipped through the pages. “Yes, yes. Here it is. They refer to this as ‘a crisis of clergy sexual abuse in the United States Catholic Church’. It is nonsense. It’s the work of madmen.”

The bishop nodded his head in agreement.

“Always remember in this meeting that I did not comment on the charge of your Vatican appointment. My comments were restricted to the document that caused your appointment.”

“I understand, Your Eminence.”

“So you will return to the United States. You will monitor this situation, and you will assist in managing the situation.”

The bishop nodded again.

Cardinal Kruger pulled the coin out of his pocket, and turned it over and over in his fingers during a long silence.

“Report,” Kruger said in a sharp tone. He continued in a loud voice, “Report what? What will you report from America? This is what I care about; this is why I asked you to come here.”

The cardinal’s tone threw Bishop Franklin a bit off balance. He did not move to answer the question about what he might report, for he believed the answer was going to be supplied by this powerful cardinal.

In a lower tone, but more commanding than any voice he had used since Bishop Franklin entered the room, the cardinal resumed. “Each report will of course be filed with the office of Cardinal Antonio Marcello as directed, routed through the office
of the papal nuncio in Washington. Do just as your appointment requires.”

“Yes. Those are the instructions in my appointment.”

“And you will confidentially send a copy of each report to me. These matters are the responsibility of my office, my responsibility.”

“As you wish.”

“Each report will advise the Vatican, Cardinal Marcello, the Holy Father, his Polish pal Majeski, or anyone else who reads them… each report will tell the truth. I want the reports to tell the truth. Do you understand this, Bishop?”

“I do.”

“And the truth, Bishop, is that these three men who wrote the document are engaged in hypothetical situations and hyperbolic rhetoric that has no relationship to reality. The truth is there is no problem in America worthy of Vatican attention. Do you understand this is the truth?”

Bishop Franklin nodded, but not nearly as strongly as he had earlier.

“These reports filed by you, over your signature, could be discovered in future years and if these reports contain untruths that point to a big problem existing in America, the Vatican could have problems. Do you understand this?”

“Yes.”

“And finally, do you understand that if these men are right about what they wrote and a big problem develops, it’s America’s problem and the Vatican does not need to have knowledge of the extent of the problem, especially in the form of written reports from one of our bishops. None of your reports can contain language that could be used by anyone to impute direct knowledge about this problem to the Vatican.”

Those remarks too only resulted in a slight nod from Bishop Franklin.

“These three men,” Cardinal Kruger fumbled with the papers looking for names, “McDougall, Patterson, and Chattelrault, will discredit themselves, and this you will report. They must be
discredited and you must report it. That will be an easy task as they discredit themselves in this hysterical document. Their statements are not the statements of serious men.”

Bishop Franklin understood what he was being told to do. He swallowed hard.

“There are ways to bring this lawyer and these priests under control. Everyone involved – except our Holy Father – has a superior. These priests have superiors, I know. The lawyer works for a diocese.”

Bishop Franklin’s affirmative nod was a tired nod. Either jet lag or the intensity of the German cardinal had sapped all of his energy.

“I believe you understand about duty, obligation and loyalty to the Church, and I believe you will demonstrate those things. Now, I take my leave. The horses are saddled, awaiting some exercise. God go with you.”