A Pilgrimage to Eternity

by Timothy Egan

  Europe does not feel united. The small nations despise the large nations, particularly Germany. Britain is leaving in a fit of nationalism that has spread to other countries. Migrants are feared and loathed. Un-Christian Europe wants to hold on to its “Christian identity,” in the phrase that threatens to disrupt many governments. Even the British atheist Richard Dawkins said he finds the bells of England’s empty cathedrals soothing, a much better sound than the call to prayer of Islam. (He was told that atheists don’t get to choose.) At the same time, the pope frets about a secular Europe facing “a vacuum of values.” Too many people feel left behind, voiceless, their furniture-making shop or lace factory or nonpasteurized cheese a victim of the Eurocrats who sold them out to globalism. Spain and Greece suffer Depression-level unemployment, one in four out of work. Italy is a dead end for anyone under the age of thirty. A turn to autocrats and crackpots, in Poland and Hungary and Bavaria, in parts of Italy and France, not to mention the Russian menace, is evidence that the darker impulses of a continent long soaked in human blood have not been washed away by treaty.

  But the alternative is worse. Far worse. What is that alternative? The history of Europe.

  Besançon could have been another casualty of the grind of multistate capitalism. They make cuckoo clocks, for Chrissake! Who has time to craft a fine timepiece? You think of Geppetto-like laborers working half a year to make one thing by hand. And then you think of the Chinese, rolling out knockoffs on wages that couldn’t pay for a French worker’s vacation. This city is chockablock with big-windowed ateliers, designed to let in the maximum amount of daylight so people could see the tiny little pieces they were assembling.

  But Besançon has found a way forward. At its peak, the watchmaking industry employed 20,000 people and cranked out apprentices from the École d’Horlogerie. It was a company town of time. What nearly killed the city was the rise of easy-to-make quartz watches in the 1970s. It’s been revived by technology companies that welcomed the skills of former watchmakers. At the same time, there’s been a renaissance of “artisan” timepieces.

  The biggest timekeeper, the Astronomical Clock of Besançon, pulses away inside the Cathedral of Saint John, at the base of a mountain just beyond Hugo’s house. It’s a massive beast of brass, copper, steel, and gold, about eighteen feet high, with thirty thousand mechanical parts. The main faces are outside, on each of the four sides of the cathedral tower. Inside, over 70 dials and 122 indicators keep track of phases of the moon, sunrises and sunsets, tides in French ports, eclipses, and local time around the world. The calendar, built to take in leap years, is said to register up to ten thousand years. Considering that Europe didn’t even have mechanical clocks until the fourteenth century, this has to rate as one of the supreme triumphs of timekeeping evolution. And yet, the big clock is still just a thing, not a hunchback roaming around Notre-Dame’s crumbling bell towers. Here again is chronos time, measuring seconds, hours, days, months, seasons, and years, with no way to track the quality moments of kairos. It’s lifeless. In an attempt to make the astronomical clock something more, the church says that one of the most complex horological devices in the world is really about the Resurrection of Christ. Come again? Every tick of every day, the guide inside the cathedral explains, represents fresh time since Jesus rose from the dead. Rejoice and take in a good-news moment! Well, O.K. I wasn’t the only one scratching my head while exiting the cathedral. But I did wonder, not for the first time, how many beats of my own heart have passed while I was doing worthless shit.

  * * *

  —

  UP THE HILL and above the river, the Franciscan friars run a little shelter for the poor and pilgrims. Testing my still-purpled thigh, I hike through a winding tunnel of green, on a part of the V.F. that is shockingly well signed—a by-product of the time-obsessives living below. Emerging from moss-draped woods, I come upon Chapelle des Buis, balanced on a knife ridge. The view below, of the chimney-studded homes, of Vauban’s Citadel, of the oxbow of the River Doubs, requires more than a single deep breath to take in. The chapel, like the Franciscans themselves, is powerful in its simplicity. I grab a newsletter and read up on the latest good works of these men in cinnamon-colored robes held at the waist by a knotted rope. The Franciscans are happy to spread the news of their anniversary, the jubilee commemorating eight hundred years since a companion of the saint from Assisi founded an order in this country. Francis, the ex-noble in rags and friend of the dispossessed, has always had a large following among the devout. But he continues to fascinate nonbelievers as well.

  “Come and meet Franciscan joy!” So they say in the newsletter.

  Trying to do just that, I walk around the chapel to a small residence and idyllic garden. Trellises drip pink and peach-colored roses. Late-stage irises hold their papery blossoms. Tall geraniums, with the sturdy limbs of plants that have wintered over, sprout from pots placed between rows of vegetables. The only thing missing is the statue of Saint Francis, a hallmark of even the most secular gardens. It’s a nice bit of irony. I knock on a door. No answer. It pushes open. Well, sure. In addition to having a sense of humor, the Franciscans would never lock a door. But I won’t intrude. From a window overhead, I hear snoring. Nap time! I tiptoe away.

  Later, I connect with Brother Alexis Mensah, one of five men in the Franciscan Fraternity of Besançon. I ask him what it’s like to live by religious rules dating to the thirteenth century in a Europe that is so modern, secular, and paced by the demands of clocks set to the digital age.

  “We are carriers of light in this world that is wandering in its own way,” he said. “We are the past, the present, and we intend to inscribe ourselves in the future of this Europe.” Though his words seem boldly aspirational for a faith that has been marginalized in France, he is without pretense. “We try to be simple people, living not by the grabbing of wealth, but in sharing, of perfect charity.” I turn that phrase over in my mind: perfect charity. The duty to protect nature—creation, in his words—is stronger than ever. “Faced with a society of consumption and the scourges of global warming, we offer simplicity of life, proximity to the poorest and most neglected, and the preservation of our environment, which is undergoing suicidal exploitation.”

  The pilgrims who stay over, he said, arrive with GPSs blinking in their hands (guilty as charged), but leave with their phones turned off. “They know in advance the steps, the distances, what to expect,” he said. “Spiritual research is not always the primary objective. What they usually seek is to find their way in the world and also to know their limit. . . . They are trying to find meaning in their lives.” He has no way to register whether his tiny cell of ascetics has any impact, or can help those travelers with the search, except to say, “People are touched by the welcome, the life, the prayers, the fraternity of the brothers. That is all we have.”

  And more: a view that time should be measured by something greater than mechanical ticks, mindful of a Christ who said, “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE BETRAYAL

  The new priest was thirty-one years old when he arrived at our church on Indian Trail Road, there to take up duties as assistant pastor and director of youth activities. He had gone to the same Jesuit school as I, served in the army, and earned a master’s degree in counseling after being ordained. Despite the impressive résumé, the Reverend Patrick G. O’Donnell insisted that everyone call him Father Pat. Likable, sociable, modern Father Pat. My mother raved about him. He exuded empathy; even if it was calculated, it was welcome after so many years of pastoral freeze. He visited our house often, and I can still see him sitting in the kitchen while my parents offered him food and drink. He had an overbite and dark bangs and was quick with a compliment. Our home was always open to him. He didn’t have to knock.

  My youngest brother was eleven years old when Father Pat moved in across the street, small for his age, the easiest child to rais
e, and also the most likable and the best athlete by family consensus. He and his friends, Tim and Mike and Randy, formed an inseparable band of boys. They explored the woods at the edge of town, built forts in the pine trees, rode their bikes with playing cards placed in the spokes to give off a cool sound, tossed a football until dark. They had the kind of childhood that a city like Spokane promised people: a great place to raise kids, it was said through the generations.

  Father Pat had another thing going for him. He had access to a boat—a sleek cabin cruiser—and an off-road vehicle. Big toys. He offered to take the boys out four-wheeling and zipping along the water, something you could never imagine Father Schwemin doing. “He was a priest who was a Pied Piper with kids,” said the pastor who served with him. And if the kids stayed late, they could overnight in a cabin on the lake. Father Pat had access to that as well. The parents trusted him. They had gone to Catholic schools, taken their wedding vows on Catholic altars, baptized their children in Catholic churches, and buried their dead in Catholic cemeteries. You always looked up to the priest. Think of the sacrifices Father Pat had made. Instead of working as a professional in a fancy office in Seattle, instead of raising a family of his own, he had taken vows of chastity and poverty to work with worshippers of Christ at the fringe of a town in eastern Washington State.

  At breakfast, on the morning of August 29, 2002, my brother’s friend Tim unfolded the Spokane newspaper to find a picture and page-one story about a priest who was accused of abusing dozens of boys, something the church had known about for years, the article asserted. By this time, Tim was a father of three children of his own, married for sixteen years.

  “Look who’s in the paper,” he said, as his wife recalled in a story in the Inlander. “That’s Father Pat. Read this.”

  She skimmed it.

  “Read the rest of the article. Read it out loud!”

  The account was about another parish, in a town of five hundred people in the wheat fields of the Palouse country south of Spokane. Father Pat was sent to that remote church after he’d been removed from several others. The story that followed him from parish to parish was always the same. The priest won the confidence of young boys, got their parents to trust him as well, and then betrayed their kids in the most horrific way. When his violations of children were reported to church higher-ups, Father Pat was admonished, but never punished or reported to civil authorities. They shuffled him off to another unsuspecting community. What was different about this episode in the little farm town was that one of Father Pat’s victims, abused at the age of twelve, had recently killed himself. He left behind a suicide note with this line: “What happened to me destroyed me.”

  Tim’s wife looked at her husband. He was stricken.

  “Were you abused?” She had heard Tim talk about Father Pat a few years earlier, well after the boys had grown up, when a story first broke about sixth- and seventh-graders at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Following gym practice, the priest would instruct the kids to strip off their clothes, line up naked in front of him on the stage, and wash their genitals with a bucket of water and soap he provided. Tim’s family, like ours, lived within a Frisbee toss of the church. Tim’s parents had served as Eucharistic ministers. His father was chairman of the lay council. His mother volunteered at school. They were Catholic to their core, the pillars of the parish.

  “Did you get naked in front of Father Pat?” she asked Tim now.

  “Yes.”

  “Did Father Pat touch you?”

  “Yes.”

  He had said, in the years-ago conversation, that “nothing affected me,” and that he was not a victim of this predator. Tim seldom lost his temper or let things get to him. He had a gentle, playful spirit. He was clearly upset now. Something in the latest story of the suicide victim, and that note, “What happened to me destroyed me.” He put his cereal bowl aside and left the house in a hurry. Hours later, police arrived on the doorstep. Tim was dead. He’d lain down in front of a train.

  My brother was devastated. “I lost my best friend.” My brother was also one of those boys in the gym, told by the most trusted adult at school to clean his genitals in front of him. My brother was never touched. But once, Father Pat came by the house to check on him after he’d come home early from school, feeling sick. “He’s in bed, but I don’t think he’s asleep,” my mother said. The priest went into my brother’s bedroom and talked nicely to him, the words of a man who’d spent his adult life grooming children. The priest reached under the blankets. My brother jumped up. “What are you doing?” The priest dashed out of the house.

  My brother had not told our parents about that episode or the genital cleansing until the other stories made it into the press. But one of our best friends did try to get the word out on Father Pat. Rita Flynn was a mother of eleven, whose kids were all gorgeous, gregarious, and had ancient Gaelic names. Our families were very close. She was the most devout person I knew growing up, emanating goodness. She also had a master’s degree in psychology from Loyola. Everyone adored her. When her eighth-grade boy told her about the naked cleaning in front of the priest, she took the story to the senior pastor at Assumption, the Reverend William Skylstad. He said he would talk to Father Pat about it, later reporting back to this mother that it would not happen again. He said he had “remonstrated” his fellow priest.

  By this time, Father Pat had been abusing boys at our parish for two years. His crimes, unknown to all but a small circle of victims and clerical enablers, went much deeper than what happened in the gym. He took children to the lake cabin, which had a hot tub, told them to strip, and tried to fondle them. At that same cabin, Father Pat took a boy into his bedroom. My brother’s friends remembered, much later, the horror of watching a door close as the child was led away. He also brought a twelve-year-old boy into his bed at the parish rectory, while Father Skylstad slept one floor above him. He took another boy on his boat, and let a second man rape him. The assailant shot himself after news of his abuse broke.

  When these violations finally came to light, Patrick O’Donnell was revealed to be “a serial pedophile,” as one court document put it, passed from parish to parish. A total of sixty-six people accused him of child molestation or rape. A third person had killed himself, after sexual assault by Father Pat, but before the dam of revelations burst. He got away with hurting so many children because he could count on the protection of the church. He’d been recommended for the priesthood even after abusing two students at St. Thomas Seminary in Kenmore, Washington. The faculty board noted that O’Donnell had “a special interest in youth,” but had been “cautioned about an over interest.” At his first posting, just days after his ordination as a priest, O’Donnell went after a boy. The incident was known to the diocese of Spokane. Still, he was named director of the Catholic youth ministry. He arrived at our church after several complaints of predatory abuse from the parish he had just left. But families at Assumption were not told that a sex offender had been placed in their midst, a man who would be welcomed into their homes, given the care of their children. Nor were the police informed. And by the time O’Donnell’s past caught up with him, through civil litigation, the statute of limitations had run out on his crimes. He would never go to prison.

  At one point, church leaders thought they could cure O’Donnell. They sent him to Seattle for “aversion” therapy. While there, he continued to destroy people; at least eight victims later came forth from the churches where he worked in Seattle. He also got a PhD in psychology, and a license to practice youth counseling. His dissertation was about how adults could gain the trust of children.

  O’Donnell was removed from his ministry in 1986, after the allegations were too numerous for the church to ignore. In a court deposition, he said he couldn’t remember the number, or even some of the names, of his many victims. “I felt sinful. I felt I wasn’t a good person, wasn’t a good priest,” he said. “I feel very bad. An
d I’m sorry.” A few years later, again under oath, he admitted molesting at least thirty children, but said it could be as high as sixty. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said in 2008. “I don’t expect forgiveness.” He retired to live out his days in a small town on the shores of Puget Sound. The senior pastor at Assumption, the Reverend Skylstad, was promoted up the ranks, to chancellor, to bishop, and then to president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He retired in 2010. At each stage, he professed ignorance of O’Donnell’s crimes.

  The diocese was forced into bankruptcy, and nearly became the first to be liquidated in the United States since the Great Depression. The church sold some assets, raised money, and settled with 180 victims for $48 million. The money is small compensation, and small justice. It does not bring back the three lives that were taken, or restore the hundreds that were ruined, or end the generational ripples of sorrow still to come. Assumption was just one church, and Spokane just one town. But the pattern of abuse, the people who would never be able to repair themselves because of betrayal, happened in Boston, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Los Angeles, Tucson, Chicago, Milwaukee, anywhere that large numbers of Catholics lived, more than $2 billion in settlements. And it happened in Europe and South America and Africa and Australia. Apologies, high and low, have come and gone with the admissions. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.