Clerical Error

by Declan Finn

  A long silence held. James was jumping at nothing this time.

  Gus broke first. “Well…would you…just this one more time?”

  James sighed deeply. “One last time.”

  On December 20th at 6:00 PM, James was back to square one. It turned out to be a long, cold, nasty month. Cambridge College had held its final examinations week from the 14th to the 19th and that was the last time the faculty would have to show their collective face until the start of class on January 20th. James idly wondered how the administration amused itself between semesters, then realized that he never really ever cared enough to ask.

  The bottom line remains the same, he thought, they’re out and I’m here.

  Gus went out less during the winter. The snow removal services firm he had been permitted to hire by the diocese was as shabby as those in the rest of the neighborhood. James was fearful of travel on ice. As a result, the stories once more grew excessive.

  It was on the thirty-fifth rendition of one story that James put some pieces together.

  The story was simple: at a Confirmation four years earlier, Bishop Lousini personally came to administer the sacrament to those in budding puberty.

  At that time, Lousini said to Gus: “You know, Father Sadowski, I’m not certain that I like the idea of priests and nuns going out together on dates.”

  “Yes, your Excellency, I agree with you,” responded Gus dutifully, and that was that. “I never had the faintest idea what he was talking about,” concluded Gus, as always. “I’ve never been out to dinner with a nun except for those times I’ve taken Sister ’Squillache out after the School of Religion’s Christmas or Graduation parties. And even then I took along her other teachers.”

  James almost burst in his eagerness to express his idea. So he lit his pipe and casually asked, “Who said Louie was referring to you?”

  ”Who else?”

  James raised an eyebrow, surprised that Gus hadn’t considered it. “Tim and Mary Jane?”

  “THAT’S IT,” Gus shouted. “Forgive me, doctor, for shouting.” he quickly added in apologetic tones. Then reverting to his prior enthusiasm at a lower volume, “Of course, that’s it. He was trying to warn me about Tim and the nun. All this time I thought he was talking to me about me. Ah, but that’s a relief. I always get disturbed when people talk to me ambiguously and then expect me to clearly follow the references they’re making.”

  James sighed as he leaned over and finished recording an entry in the baptism book. “Well, then, here’s something unambiguous that should delight you. Maria Gomez’s little baby makes the one hundred and thirtieth baptism this year.” He carried the new card to the card file. “What the hell is she running for, Hispanic Mother of the Year?” He flipped cards in the fine. “Juan, Pedro, Bartolomeo, Margarita, Maria, Juanita, and now little Alfonso makes eight.”

  “With eight, she’s not even in the running,” concluded Gus. “What’s more significant is the 130th. We have an annual report to do on the Spiritual Life of the Parish.”

  James arched his brows. “Oh? And how does one do a head count on the number of sinners and saints in this parish?”

  Father Sadowski ignored the comment. “As you can see from the form, the only thing headquarters is interested in are numbers. How many marriages, baptisms, confirmations, communions, and funerals. How many Masses, how many families in the parish, how many come to Mass.”

  The last hours of New Year’s Eve were spent preparing the annual report so that it could be mailed on January first and relieve the neurosis about the January 31th deadline.

  James turned in early form eyestrain and—except for one explosion (which he assumed was a cannon announcing the New Year)—he slept like a rock.

  New Year’s breakfast was a Luraleen-less meal and James managed to cook bacon, eggs, toast, and coffee without doing major harm to either himself or the kitchen.

  Given the schedules of New Year’s services, it was a working breakfast at the office desk. “Did you hear about the explosion?” asked Gus.

  “What do you mean? I heard the explosion. I didn’t hear about it.”

  James, not having had his morning tea, was as yet unprepared to meet the day in a civilized manner. It showed in his disposition.

  “No, no…Oh, yes, you were off making this fine meal for us. I, however, was trapped by Mrs. Bonati after the first Mass and was given, in great detail, the facts surrounding the explosion which destroyed the Santa Barbara Botanica last night.”

  James remembered the tour and exhibition of Gus embarrassing the Voodoo store down the street. “Ouch.”

  “I’m sure that those of my parishioners who leave colored candles burning on the side altar woke up this morning firm in the conviction that Thunder-Rumbler … Chongo … had taken suitable revenge.”

  “And did he?” teased James.

  “Did I tell you I tried something new this morning?” responded Gus, once again changing the subject. “While you ducked down to the kitchen, I processed to the back of the Church and personally wished whoever would take my hand a Happy New Year.”

  “So?” responded James. “I think I know you better than that by now. If you want me to coax you to drop the other shoe, consider you so coaxed. Your storytelling skills are almost as lacking in suspense as your sermons.”

  “That hurts. At least you’ll never see five years of sermon journals in my room. As I must have told you, that is a sure sign that their owner is an atrocious preacher…but at least he’s trying.” Gus relit his cigar.

  “Father.” James said through clenched teeth.

  “Oh, yes. One of the officers from the station house had worked on it during the night before coming to the first Mass. He prefers to believe that the juju woman who ran the store got too far behind on her protection payments. Maybe she thought that seven blue candles in the window were more powerful than la famiglia.”

  “Which explanation do you favor, Wotan or the Godfather?”

  “Does it really matter what either of us think? Neither version has the least bearing on either my salvation or yours. I do not have to actively disbelieve. I prefer to just cultivate indifference.

  “For example, your arrival in February overlapped with a nine-day run of pink candles in front of the Mary altar we don’t use anymore. Obviously, someone was doing a Santeria novena for a beloved. My only concern was to keep it away from the altar where we keep the Blessed Sacrament, lest the rest of the congregation believe I worship Mumbo-Jumbo for a hobby. My vicar lived in an area surrounded by middle class parishioners who have ‘outgrown’ such things in their third-generation in America. I’m sure Marty is getting re-educated at his new pastorate over at Lepanto about the power of the ‘native superstitions.’”

  James was not going to let himself be distracted by the condign justice meted out to the useless vicar who let Gus swing in the wind with Tim. “Those candles? You said Blue candles burn for protection and success? I would if those might be related to Father Lessner’s death.”

  “Let the dead stay buried, professor,” sighed Gus deeply. “The police have dropped it. Tim’s sister is quiet, and in case you’ve forgotten, you and I were their best suspects after the monialis.”

  “Now you’re doing a Sherlock Holmes.” It was Gus’s turn to be confused. James amplified. “He had been fooled thrice by men and once by Irene Adler who has remained enshrined in the literature as The Woman. And here you go calling Mary Jane ‘The Nun,’ as if the Latin will make a difference… Putting distance between you and her?”

  Gus’s response was so deceptively soft in its delivery that James knew this was going to be the last word out of him on this subject. “Does it matter, doctor? What good would be accomplished, what good would it do for my peace of mind or my blood pressure, if I referred to her fully and freely by all the epithets I think she so richly deserves?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY:

  RULES FOR A SOLUTION

  IT ALL SEEMED TO BE OVER AND DONE. The rest of
James’ residency was filled with the details he expected but none of the new data he had looked for. In keeping with Cambridge College (New Jersey)’s pompous use of British terminology to designate the Spring semester, the “Hilary Term” had begun.

  By the end of March, everyone looked forward to the Easter break, which generously included all of Holy Week and all of Easter Week. On March 28th, the Administration of The Cambridge College for Women decided to announce that Friday, April first, would be considered a “triple cut” for those students who cut-out without attending the last day’s class. The long holy day-scarce Lent had caused many of the students to use their permitted absences as ‘mental health’ days. As a result, scarcely five of the six hundred undergraduate women could have taken the Friday off without incurring the dreaded “F-over-cut” on the permanent transcript.

  In manipulating the faculty, Sister President chose to use the carrot instead of the stick. On March thirty-first, a mysterious breakdown of the posting machine in the Treasurer’s office occurred. (Said machine was a nineteenth-century device bequeathed to the college in 1930.) This breakdown resulted in a one-day delay in the printing of the faculty paychecks, until that same Friday, April Fool’s Day.

  Father Giovanni (“Jack”) Jones of the Theology department could not be depressed by the news of pay delay. He was too full of his plans for spring skiing in Wyoming. Paolo Mellini of the Art Department listened gravely to the bitching of Edward Szabo and Homer Wellington—both historians, both Lay Faculty Association negotiators—then shrugged his shoulders most eloquently and tried to turn the conversation elsewhere.

  When James joined the lunch table, Kristin Lagkvist was talking about the “English Lit Professor’s All Purpose Machine for Producing Publishable Papers.”

  “It’s all too terribly simple. The administration or the chairman assigns you to teach ‘Beowulf to Donne’ at the same time as ‘American Authors.’ Six month later you publish The effect of Chaucer on Melville, The Influence of the Utopia on Emerson, and A Reference to Donne in O. Henry. This adds three lines of publications to your CV and, who knows, some of the cross-referencing may actually be true—in which case, you have published ‘significantly.’”

  James laughed at the table, as was expected, but he was still mulling over on the way to class.

  The class was “Ethics in the Professions,” a generic title necessary to cover the fact that the college had too few students in any given major. The time had come to shake the students up a little.

  “As you know,” James began, “we have beaten medical and legal ethics to death for the last two months. Business ethics is for after the break. So today we are going to examine the ethics of the clergy—No, I do not expect any of you to become priests, and if that day comes I shall become a Druid.”

  “Funny, you don’t look Druish,” snarked a student in the front row.

  James shot back, “Thank you, Cathy. At least we’re even. There are days you have come to class not even looking human.”

  “Ooh, naaasty,” the other students racted.

  James rolled his eyes. “As I was saying—”

  “Why not women priests?” called out another from the back.

  James shrugged. “I don’t know, Jennifer. I’m not a theologian, thank God, but Catholicism seems to be reluctant because of Jesus’ own behavior as reported in the Gospels.”

  “You mean He only ordained Jewish men.”

  James nodded. “When He also had His Mother available—and Mary was technically a better candidate for ordination than the Eleven turkeys her Son actually chose,” James quipped with total accuracy. “The Jews would have accepted a female Judge like Ruth or Esther, but not as a priest.”

  “The Jews were chauvinists.”

  James shrugged again. “I will agree that it took a miracle named Cornelius, a vision for Peter, and an Apostolic Council before Gentiles were allowed in. That’s chauvinism.”

  “The Jews were still Male chauvinists, even as Apostles,” called another.

  James gave a nod, as though considering it, then another shrug-like gesture. “Probably, Maria, but the pagans had goddesses and priestesses. The Early church could have gone gentile ‘all the way’ if they’d wished. But the one thing they would not do was be assimilated by playing ball with the opposition and becoming one cult among many. Today a Catholic is still defined by some of the things they won’t or shouldn’t do.

  “As to femininity, it took the church nearly a thousand years to recognize the gentle, nurturing, motherly side of God—and even then they used the cult of the Virgin as a cover lest they seem effeminate. Deeply conservative because they think they have something to conserve which (1) isn’t of their own creation, (2) which must be carefully conserved in its purest form, they still recognize that we are all passive before the activity of God and write accordingly. The mystic? Seems to be a passive female carried away by her lover’s blandishments…

  “And you are trying to distract me from the issues I wanted to talk about.

  “To return to the topic of professional ethics, we have seen that there are cases where even your own personal physician or attorney must violate confidentiality and turn you in to the authorities, if, for example, you had communicable smallpox or were planning to commit a crime. Most doctors will report a gunshot wound unless they work for the Mob. Most lawyers will report a crime in progress. Under what circumstances will a Roman Catholic priest divulge what you’ve told him in a sacramental confession?”

  “Never,” shouted Vicki.

  James gave another, “in consideration” nod, and looked over the class. “What if he leaves the priesthood?”

  “Never.”

  “What if he’s accused of murder? Can’t he defend himself?”

  “Well…” Vicki faltered.

  James pressed the attack. “What if you were accused of murder and he let you be electrocuted knowing all the while that Cathy did it? Hmm?” He was met with a sea of confused and bewildered women. He sighed. “He may use no information in any way, shape, or form, by word, deed, gesture, expression, or what we’d call today body language.

  “Forget priests for a moment. Go back to the general principle: even a confidence from a friend, a so-called natural secret, could only be divulged if you thought you had a good chance of bringing about a greater good, like reconciling your friend with her other friends. Within the priest’s domain, a theology of salvation, what greater good is there than one person’s eternal happiness? Or on a less exalted level, would any of you ever be caught dead in the confessional if you thought there was even the proverbial snowball’s chance that it would ever come out?”

  “How about to prevent the President’s death?”

  “Good try, Monica, but no cigar. That case came up over three centuries ago. Remember Cardinal Richelieu from The Three Musketeers? Even if he wasn’t as bad as the movie suggested, no one I know of has ever nominated him for canonization. They tell of an episode in which King Louis XIV, the Absolute Monarch of France, put the question this way:

  “ ‘I am the State. My son is too young to rule. If I were assassinated, chaos would follow. An assassin seeks your blessing in the confessional but you refuse. You are also my Prime Minister. Are you not obliged to inform me of this plot?’ ”

  James paused for effect.

  “It may have been that Episcopal rascal’s finest moment when he replied, ‘No, my king. My only obligation is to remain standing between you and him.’

  “In countries less generous than ours, that silence has sometimes meant the priest’s death. And, of course, it would be quite legitimate to have recourse to those methods we have seen for preserving a secret without telling a lie, which are…?”

  One student: “Ambiguity.”

  James nodded.

  “Silence.”

  Another nod.

  “Changing the subject.”

  Another nod…

  And then silence.

  James prodded. �
��And the technique beloved by Irishmen and Psychiatrists?”

  “Answering a question with a question?”

  James continued the lecture with some of the John-and-Mary cases he’d picked up from Father Sadowski’s old seminary text, which taught how to hear confessions, and had just about exhausted his supply when the class bell rang.

  The next hour was the General Ethics course and he drummed up his enthusiasm for the Great Paradox lecture. “We’ve spent most of the course looking at Natural Law Ethics. You recall that the morality of an act is determined by a combination of the object, the intention of the actor, and the circumstances surrounding the activity. A killing can be an accident, because homicidal intent is absent. Or, it can be self-defense, which is an appeal to circumstances. So far, we’ve spent most of our time examining ‘objective evils.’ Now let’s consider the great paradox found only in human nature: evil and innocence can coexist at the same time, in the same act, in the same person.

  “If we are going to be true to whatever we know of human nature, we must keep a firm grip on both ends of a very, very long stick. At one end are the activities which are undoubtedly evil in themselves no matter how much empathy is brought to bear at that end of the stick. Murder, blasphemy, adultery remain evil, no matter how many excuses we make up for the person doing them.

  “But look now at the other end, for that is the realm of the subjective. Yes, I know I’ve said that conscience is a con-scientia, a thinking-with, those laws of God and society which serve our good and the good of our fellow earthlings. But what are we to do with ignorance, emotion, fear, habit, and all those internal dispositions which might not only mitigate our responsibility for what we do, but in some cases might eliminate responsibility all together?

  “If you were pushed off a building tall enough, you’d die, but no one would call it a suicide. Likewise a careful driver might kill a child who runs into the street. A tragedy, yes. Traumatic, yes. But even if feelings of guilt are present, no sober person would judge the driver guilty of murder.