Clerical Error

by Declan Finn

  “Good morning. How can I help you?”

  “Are you a priest?” asked the small, white-haired Italian lady, peering at him suspiciously from behind her trifocals. She had the bone structure of a parakeet, an almost translucent frailty covered by the black dressings favored by widowed Italian grandmothers.

  “No, I’m not a priest,” replied James in truthful innocence.

  “Where’s Father Sadowski?”

  “He’s not in the house at the moment. Can I help you?”

  “I’ll wait for him.”

  James showed her into the front parlor, then unlocked the common room, and sat. He no sooner opened the paperback of Peter Straub’s If You Could See Me Now (a paperback, habitually in his left rear pocket, being part of every morning’s dressing), when he heard someone pounding up the stairs from the basement. Expecting Luraleen, James was surprised to see Sadowski.

  “There is a caller in the front parlor. She wants you and didn’t tell me what she wanted.”

  Father ducked out and returned with the lady, whom he introduced as Mrs. Bonati, then sat down at the desk and proceeded to fill out a Mass card and enter it into the register of Masses for the coming week.

  After she left, James groaned. “That’s it? She needed a priest to book a Mass and get a card filled out?”

  “Have you ever been to one of those parties where someone is talking to a guest who’s a doctor?”

  James nodded. “Happens to me all the time. They’re usually disappointed when they find out that my doctorate wasn’t in medicine and that I couldn’t write a prescription for them.”

  “Exactly my point. If they do find a physician and mention that their Valium ran out, the odds are good that the physician will write out a prescription for them then and there.”

  James rolled his eyes. “Remember Father? I teach medical ethics. Of course I’ve know of that kind of stupidity. That’s why we had that malpractice insurance crisis not too long ago, and I hope it scared more quacks out of such reckless nonsense.”

  “Now take it one step further: which is worse? Breaking a promise or a contract?”

  James had lost his taste for word play this morning and wished he could find a way to get Gus to whatever point he way trying to make this time. “When I promise, I intend to do something. When I make a contract I am bound to do something by the rewards and penalties in the contract. Unless you are talking about the solemn promises, or vows, or oaths which also have a binding quality like contracts, the promise can just be an act of benevolence with no binding character: like a good intention to do something when I get around to doing it.”

  “So a statement like ‘I’ll remember you in my prayers at Mass’ is a promise,” said Gus in agreement, “but if you formalize it with even a token offering, then it becomes a formal contract. If, in the first case, I forget, then we are talking about a failed act of virtue. But in the second, my negligence has become an act of injustice, a violation of a contract, and an active vice.”

  “Whoa. ‘Token’ offering? I thought the rule was ante up the five or ten dollars or no Mass.”

  “You pay a laborer for his efforts, minimum wage is well over two dollars an hour for casual laborers, and that fee is less than what the city pays its street sweepers. Actually what the bishop sets is the ‘customary’ offering and the pastor can adjust it up or down for his own neighborhood.

  “What it all boils down to is this: day, date, time; enter the request in the book, put a cross after the name, if, like most of them, it’s a memorial mass for the dead. At that point they will ask for a card if they want to send it to the next of kin or suchlike. Those are in the lower right-hand drawer of the desk: display case, color print, and announcement form. Fill it in, slide each into its respective window in the display folder, hand it to them with the envelope, and you’re all done.”

  “You don’t charge for the card?” asked James in a tone of mock horror.

  “Don’t be a wiseass, Professor,” snapped Gus.

  “No insult intended; my parish charges an extra fiver for one of those.”

  Father sighed and relit his cigar. “Different places, different customs. If a poor man or woman comes to Church—or even if he doesn’t, there is something quite conservative in his outlook. There are three dozen practices, maybe more, which have gone on in middle or upper class parishes which would never be tolerated here. For example, there are younger priests who never refuse a Mass request for a specific hour or day. You want the noon Mass on the first Sunday in January? They’ll promise it to you. Tell me how would you feel if you requested a Mass for your—”

  “Grandfather,” supplied James.

  “—and when you got there you found the Mass was being offered for him and three other people?” Gus proposed.

  “I’d be puzzled and a little hurt.”

  Gus nodded. “My parishioners would be furious. The attitude is that ‘It’s my Mass, bought and paid for.’ ”

  “So why do they do triple-headers?”

  Gus puffed out a cloud of smoke. “Some of the younger guys argue that mathematical reasoning applies to theological propositions. If the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has infinite value because it is mystically linked with the infinite sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, then infinity divided by three is still infinity.”

  James nodded his head slowly, “I can see the reasoning, but it seems that they are selling the same thing three times. Like that Mel Brooks film about Broadway.”

  Gus sighed. “In any event, the best way to handle the Mrs Bonatis of the parish is to dress in darker clothes, insist that they tell you what they want, and, so long as it isn’t against the sacrament of confession, go ahead and do it for them: a mass booking, a copy of their baptismal certificate, and so on.”

  Gus took a breath, and James saw an opening to get to the topic he wanted to move onto ever since the priest came back. “About Tim—”

  “Dinner’s ready,” came Luraleen’s bellow from the basement.

  Gus leaped on the distraction. “Do you mind if we talk about it later? I want to walk it out, take some time to think about it, and then we can talk. OK?”

  James was not happy with the delay, especially with the more controversial materials still in his own bedroom, but he nodded in agreement before they went downstairs.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  TUESDAY AFTERNOON ANALYSES

  EVEN THOUGH IT WAS CALLED DINNER, THE midday meal was consumed in silence. Black eyed peas, rice, beans, and soggy cornbread continued the cook’s cavalcade of carbohydrates. James’s hunger overcame his taste buds: he even used the syrupy cornbread for dessert while watching in amazement the digestive powers of his friend.

  “Luraleen, get the door until two, please,” bellowed Sadowski into the back as they started up the stairs. James followed him up to the second floor, where Father used what must have been the original 19th century key to open his own apartment’s door at the top of the stairs.

  The door opened onto a vestibule with a door on each wall. Straight ahead, the door to the bathroom stood wide open. The door on the right was slightly ajar showing the shelves of a linen closet. Father was unlocking the door on the left, gesturing him into the bedroom.

  The bedroom was walled with bookcases, the perimeter only broken by a double bed, a dresser which looked original to the house, and a set of metal utility shelves which contained some old cases for hi-fi records.

  An archway led from this back-corner bedroom, to the center room of the pastor’s suite of three. This Gus used as his study. Here the bookcases went to the ceiling as opposed to the bedroom cases which only went as high as the window sills. Only an archway perpendicular to each of the outside walls, one from the bedroom and the other to the front room were clear. The window had books piled under it and the door on the opposite wall which led to the outer corridor and stairs was blocked with six foot tall bookcases. The central space in the room (what was left after you took a foot from each wall for the depth of
the bookcases) was occupied by one large desk with the light from the window streaming in over the occupant’s shoulder and two old-fashioned and over-padded club chairs set between the front of the desk and the blockaded door, facing the sunlight.

  Father settled into the desk chair with a sigh while James computed the age of the set as something once suitable for a 1930s executive.

  “Until today,” Gus began, the chair creaking under his weight, “I’d have said I’ve seen it all. As a group, we priests probably have all the problems statisticians would attribute to any similar group of men aged twenty-five to seventy. All types of problems. Maybe fewer than the general population, but all the same types of problems nonetheless. But this one is totally new to me. I’m at a loss for what to do. The differences that Tim and I have had only make this harder.”

  “Differences,” James echoed in a flat, neutral voice. Somewhere between that morning’s conversation about the rules of the parish, and the time James spent cleaning up Tim’s dump, he realized that any solution to this problem could only come from one place: Gus’s own concept of what might be possible. Once he decided that, his plan was to draw out the older man in much the same manner as a psychiatrist. He sat quietly and willed himself to blend into the bookcases, something he was rather good at.

  “Most of our differences have been over money. Tim has no idea where money comes from. The subsidy we get from the bishop pays for Luraleen, the handyman, and the fuel bills. I’m supposed to pay for everything else. I found money to customize his bathroom because he wanted it modernized in pink tile.”

  Gus cringed, and James could her overtones from his own mother – also a child of the Depression – at the incredulity at spending the extra money on customized frivolities. Though James cringed inwardly at the color choice.

  “The first couple of times Tim’s van was burgled, the parish chipped in to supplement the insurance. But when I ran out of money, he called me an Oreo and told me that he had a ‘greater ethnic consciousness’ than I did.”

  James blanched. That was so many types of stupid, on so many different levels of stupid: racial politics, inter-parish politics, inter-diocesan politics. If all politics were local, Father Tim must have been really bad at it. James had never seen Father Tim Lessner, but had assumed he was white up to this point. He tried to imagine a white Catholic priest not only throwing racial insults at another priest, but trying to claim some sort of superiority at being better and somehow blacker than a black priest.

  And if Tim had been dumb enough to level that charge in public, then James could have only imagined how well that would have gone over

  “It seems that my major defect by current lights is my desire to be a priest first and every other label second,” Gus continued. “I’ve done nothing more or less than every other group in America: get good at something and then brag about where you came from. So Anthony Quinn finally tells everyone he’s Mexican, Jose Ferrer does ads for his Puerto Rico homeland, and that guy who invented the Mustang for Ford brags about his Sicilian parents, what was his name? Iacocca? Something. Jackie Robinson was the first black man in pro ball and I was the first black man ordained for this diocese, despite the antagonism of other blacks who couldn’t understand why I was Catholic, much less why I wanted to be a priest.”

  Gus paused for a moment. “What the heck, let’s lay out the whole messy thing.

  “First, we have a priest in this diocese named Charles Pastore. Charlie was ordained for a religious order. They lent him to the diocese to run a small black parish no one else wanted. The man is a walking joke. His family passed for white; he at most had one great grandparent from Africa, at most an octaroon, grew up in the suburbs and only discovered his ‘negritude’ since it became fashionable … say about ten years ago. Of course that was the mid-sixties, when clergy were fashionable if they participated in civil rights marches, so an order not dedicated to the black mission field was overjoyed at their belated discovery of trendiness.”

  James couldn’t see the relevance to anything. “So?”

  “So, last year we—sorry, my Parish—had an Afro-American Awareness Week for the grammar school kids.”

  James nodded slowly. He considered the ethnic demographics of the neighborhood and said, “Good for you?”

  Gus’ voice dropped dangerously low and angry. “An event to which I was not invited. Pastor Pastore was. And Tim never told me he was coming, or that it was even happening. I was left standing at a major event in my own church at loose ends and trying to explain why I wasn’t doing more during the ceremonies to the diocesan reporter who was called to give the event more publicity…”

  Gus grew more tense as he told the story, and clenched his teeth by the end, before bursting out, “Damn that nun!”

  James blinked. What nun? “There’s a nun who’s a reporter the newspaper?”

  “No, the one Tim’s dating,” growled Gus, with no attempt to sound anything but angry and disgusted.

  James said nothing. He wanted to ask if this was yet another order from the Bishop or just a tribute to Gus’s own broadmindedness. But he realized that that would only break the flow of his friend’s mental processes, so he let the silence drag out.

  When Gus began again his voice was more reflective, as though talking to himself. “I think Tim is one of the reasons why I don’t drink in the rectory anymore. He’s probably why I drink more than usual when I eat out. I’ve watched him climb deeper and deeper into the bottle since his mother died two years ago. I’ve pushed to get him out into a nice middle-class parish where he wouldn’t feel pressured to save the whole inner city all by himself. My own classmate in the Personnel Office has this ‘we know best’ attitude based on an interest-inventory he filled out when he was still in the sem.”

  “The nun?” reminded James. “There was a nun somewhere? Sandwiched between Tim and a reporter?”

  Gus groaned out a pained sigh. “Sister Mary Jane Neuhaus-- shoulda been called Nuthouse The young biddy was sent to me by her order five years ago. Another freakin’ activist. Marches, protests, pick a cause, any cause…damned backstabber… the order is split along age lines, so they elect a superior because she’s middle aged and she – wait for it – once taught a leadership workshop!” he roared incredulously. “Mary Jane disrupted this nice middle-class parochial school where she was assigned as educational consultant. Nobody had the decency to tell me that part until after I accepted her assignment here! Even then I only found out on the grapevine what she did!”

  James was almost afraid to ask (but did, anyway), “What did she do?”

  “ Mary Jane set up one of those ‘learn at your own rate’ programs that kept the teachers so busy with paperwork that no teaching got done and the kids got progressively stupider. After three years as ‘educational consultant,’ the reading scores were down … by three years. They had literally learned NOTHING. Their solution? They sent her to me!”

  Oy, James thought. “No advanced hints of the train wreck she was?”

  Gus waved it of angrily. “Oh, I knew that her ‘Special Project’ died, but I was not told that it was her idea in the first place. That parish was so divided, the Bishop had to clean out the entire rectory. There had been only two men there that I knew well enough to ask. One of them went away for three years as an Army chaplain. The other went out on loan to the diocese of Fairbanks, Alaska!”

  James grimaced as this rabbit hole just kept getting deeper and deeper. “Her and Tim?”

  Gus scoffed, disgusted. “Since the inner city remains the Bishop’s favorite locale for ‘zealous young folk to work off their excess energies,’ the Mother Superior adopted Bishop Louie’s practice and applied it to Mary Jane, sending her here. For Tim it must have been love at first protest. They’ve been out together—in civvies, of course. Dining, drinking, dancing… God help me, but I’m starting to sound like my Southern Baptist great-grandfather… until all odd hours of the night. I remember a ruckus some months back when Tim brought
Mary Jane home so drunk that she set off the burglar alarm in the convent.”

  James’ eyebrows nearly went into his hairline. “And her superior said nothing?”

  Gus laughed humorlessly. “So long as Mary Jane is not out there picketing them, the convent is content to leave her alone. These particular Jennies teach, nurse, do social work, and they really don’t know what to do with her. God forgive me, but I wish Paul VI would vacate the Papal throne and let us elect somebody who didn’t think he was Hamlet in a Roman collar. It would be so nice not to have unanimous dithering where we used to have a clear-cut chain of command. Only money talks to some of the American hierarchy. Did I ever tell you about the school consolidation?”

  James was not certain of relevancy but decided to go with it. “Tell me.”

  “Louie came back from a meeting with his colleagues at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops impressed with the Chicago cutbacks on inner city schools. He didn’t think Catholic money should be spent on those who weren’t Catholic… Only the first part is accurate: he didn’t think. I have never heard of him having an original thought. Even in my summer program, which is all that remains of my school, there is no religion test. It is a service to the people who live within the boundaries of the parish. But because Louie is one of those ‘pastoral’ bishops who came in after Vatican II, he feels he has to be a good ideological liberal. Lacking the guts to close us, he consolidated the inner city parish schools into ‘district schools.’”

  James eyes narrowed ever so slightly. The buzzwords were beginning to not only pile up, but take on an ominous Orwellian overtone every time a new one came up. “Which means what, in practical terms?”

  “It means that all the kids in Kindergarten through fifth grade within five adjacent parishes go to one location, grades 6 to 8 to another, and the remaining three schools are closed. It also means that the school is run by the principal, not the pastor. Based on the upcoming year’s budget, it will continue to run a deficit.”