Strange Gods

by Peter J. Daly

  After grade school, they had taken slightly different paths. Kelleher entered the Jesuits. O’Toole entered the seminary for the Archdiocese of Boston. Both later studied in Rome. Kelleher was now a professor of theology at the notoriously liberal Boston College. Wags said that BC stood for “barely Catholic.” Like most Jesuits, Kelleher was an independent thinker who prided himself on his skepticism.

  “Still in the church, I see,” said O’Toole, slapping Kelleher on the back and pointing to his Roman collar.

  “Yeah,” said Kelleher, “for at least one more day.”

  The next man at the table was Joe Dorney, a classmate of O’Toole’s from the North American College. They had been students there in the late 1970s, a decade after the Second Vatican Council. It was a turbulent time in seminary life. People were leaving the priesthood en masse, as if somebody had shot a gun and all the pigeons in St. Peter’s Square took off at once. One of their classmates put up a sign at the seminary gate: “Last one out, turn off the lights.”

  Dorney and O’Toole had taken different paths. Dorney was a “workhorse” parish priest, having spent more than thirty-five years in Chicago parishes. O’Toole was a “racehorse” of a Church politician, climbing the ladder in Church offices.

  The stresses of parish life in the post–Vatican II period made Dorney more liberal, while the office politics of the Vatican had made O’Toole more conservative. Joe had gone home to Chicago and eventually became pastor of the parish near the University of Chicago, St. Thomas the Apostle. It was a famously contrarian place where the intellectuals from the nearby university debated everything in the parish, which was aptly named for doubting Thomas. It was a congregation full of skeptics.

  O’Toole and Dorney were polite, but not chummy. “Good to see you, Joe.”

  “Likewise, Mike,” said Dorney.

  Next in order as O’Toole rounded the table was Father Raymond Schoenhoffer, who had a high forehead and thinning hair. Ray had been the brightest student in their class at the North American College, which had a reputation for bright students. He never went to a parish. After ordination he went on for a doctorate at Yale Divinity School and then taught Biblical Studies at the Biblicum, the Vatican’s scripture school. The “Bib,” as they call it, is full of language geeks and is a school where people tell jokes in ancient Ugaritic or Sanskrit and other people actually get them.

  Schoenhoffer was now at the end of his career. He had gone back to Yale, where he was writing about scripture and developing an avantgarde “theology of process.” Teaching at a non-Catholic school gave him the freedom to say what he wanted. He said some pretty radical things for a Catholic priest, but he could get away with it, because nobody had the language skills to argue with him.

  O’Toole pumped his hand like a politician. “Can we speak in English tonight, Ray?” he asked. “Optimum,” smirked Schoenhoffer in Latin.

  Finally O’Toole came to the man in a necktie, Patrick McMann. O’Toole was actually surprised to see him. He had expected only three friends. But he was glad to see Pat. In seminary, forty years ago, they had been close friends. Pat was an acid-tongued guy from Brooklyn, New York. He was literally wicked smart.

  Pat and Mike were ordained in the same year, 1978. Six or seven years after their ordination, a pedophile priest had been assigned as a pastor in the parish where Pat was the assistant. Pat knew the man was a pedophile because, as an altar boy, he had been molested by the priest on a camping trip to Lake George in upstate New York. Pat went to the bishop in Brooklyn to protest the assignment of the pastor to his parish and to tell the bishop of the man’s crimes. The bishop, however, did nothing. “It’s all in the past,” he said.

  Pat left the priesthood the next year, bitter. Thirty years later, his anger had not abated. After he left the priesthood, Pat had come out as gay, taken a lover, and moved to California from New York, where he was the administrator of an AIDS clinic in Oakland. Pat had done all right for himself. He was a happy man, except when he talked about the Church.

  “Patrick,” said the cardinal, “what a surprise.”

  “Mike,” said McMann, “a surprise for me, too.”

  O’Toole couldn’t tell if Patrick was being sarcastic. He noticed that Patrick had a wedding ring on his finger. The cardinal had heard that McMann had married his male partner, a former monk, as soon as gay marriage had been legalized in New York.

  McMann explained that he was in Rome for an international AIDS conference. “Glad you’re still at it, doing great work,” said O’Toole. He was sincere about that. With all of O’Toole’s involvement with the church in Africa, he knew of the huge need for AIDS treatments and research.

  The five men sat down and ordered a new round of drinks. Having all lived part of their lives in Rome, they knew their Italian wines. “How about three bottles of the new Frascati?” suggested O’Toole.

  “Shall we have the carbonara in honor of Cardinal Stritch?” asked McMann slyly. O’Toole winced. This was not the evening to recall the killing of cardinals.

  Before the food came, O’Toole gave a rather lengthy and formal blessing. Schoenhoffer interrupted with a critique of his language and theology. McMann kept repeating, “Thank you, Jesus.” Finally, Joe Dorney, the only real parish priest, put an end to the foolishness with a definitive “Amen.” O’Toole enjoyed their disrespect. Cardinals don’t have many friends, and it was good to be around people who could just call him by his name.

  After the waiter cleared out of the room, the doors were closed, and the five men settled into serious conversation.

  “How are things, Mike?” asked Kelleher.

  “Tense,” said O’Toole. “You heard the news about Manning.” They nodded. Even McMann appeared somber about it.

  “Who did it?” asked Schoenhoffer.

  “We don’t know,” said O’Toole, “but things are worse than we thought.” He looked around to see who was listening and leaned in toward the round table. The others leaned in a bit in imitation. “I want to put you under the ‘seal.’ You, too, Patrick. You’re still a priest, you know.”

  McMann grimaced.

  Secrecy is the standard operating mode of the Vatican. It is a form of control. Closely held information binds those who share it together into a clan of confidants. But Vatican secrets never held for very long. It was said that a Vatican secret was something that you only told to one person at a time.

  “I was with the pope today when Ranieri told him about Manning’s murder. It seems that it might be part of a pattern. We now have had six suspicious deaths of cardinals. This one is the most recent and notorious.” O’Toole explained about the suspicious deaths of the other five cardinals. There was stunned silence at the table after he finished the grim litany. Joe Dorney was the first to speak.

  “Damn it, Mike,” said Dorney, “you could be next!” Realizing what he had said, Dorney blushed and added, “I’m just saying. God forbid.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” said O’Toole. He was more than a little relieved to talk about his fear openly. “But it seems to me that they’re only killing papabile. I’m not a likely candidate to be pope, so I’m safe … At least from everyone except you liberals.” He waved a hand in the direction of Schoenhoffer and McMann. They chuckled.

  “The pope wants me to find somebody to investigate this for the Holy See,” continued O’Toole. “The local police around the world are looking into their own cases, but the investigations are stovepiped. No one is putting all the pieces together to see if there is a pattern, at least not yet. The Vatican does not really have anybody who could do this investigation. The Swiss guards are mostly decorative. The Vatican police are not detectives. They’re really just a security force. The Holy Father asked me to find someone in America who can help with this. We have to move fast. The press will jump on it soon enough, and we need to know what is happening first.”

  Without thinking, the five men around the table leaned farther inward. They were now literally a conspira
cy, a “breathing together.” They spoke barely above a whisper.

  “Who is the Judas here?” asked Schoenhoffer.

  “What do you mean?” asked O’Toole.

  “Who hates the Church enough to do this?”

  “Who doesn’t hate the Church?” sneered McMann. “Seems to me there are legions of candidates. Let’s see: gays, feminists, liberals, liberation theologians, poor people, scripture scholars, Protestant evangelicals, or anyone with half a brain in his head.” He waved his fork toward the ceiling, signaling the infinite.

  Patrick was on a roll. It seemed to O’Toole it was pent-up anger. “After what he said about gay marriage, I would have done Manning in myself, if I’d had any guts.”

  O’Toole wondered if Patrick was joking. There was a little gasp at the table. McMann realized he had gone too far. Manning’s death was too raw.

  “I don’t mean that literally,” he said. “Just that there are millions of people who are angry at the Church, some of them enough to commit crimes. There is no shortage of suspects.”

  The mood had turned tense, and O’Toole was not accustomed to such blunt talk, especially at meals. Curial cardinals seldom hear any opinion that does not agree with their own. Flattery is the most common form of discourse and deception in hothouse environments like the Vatican. Aides to bishops and cardinals are more courtiers than they are advisors.

  “Don’t forget the victims of pedophilia,” added Kelleher. “No priest from Boston could leave that out. They probably would be prime candidates for rage.”

  “It is not necessarily a liberal,” said Schoenhoffer. “It could be Opus Dei or that other crazy group, the Soldados de Cristo. Judging from my mail, there are more crazies on the right than on the left.”

  O’Toole bristled a little. “I doubt Opus Dei or the Soldados would threaten cardinals or the pope. They may not like this pope, but they wouldn’t kill him. At least publicly they profess respect for the hierarchy. Maybe they would like to see a more conservative Church, but I can’t imagine they would turn to murder.” There was a moment of silence at the table.

  Joe Dorney broke the tension. “Don’t start off your investigation by ruling out suspects, Mike,” said Dorney. “Besides, what about that Pius X crowd in Switzerland? Holocaust deniers and racists—real nut jobs. I think they could do it. Their founder, what’s his name? Lefebvre. He left the Church over Vatican II. Maybe he would off a cardinal or two if he thought it would reset the ecclesiastical calendar to the 1950s. Didn’t they say publicly that they don’t regard anyone after Pius XII as validly elected? I’d say they are ripe for schism or murder. I’ve got a few in my parish. They are an endless pain in the ass.”

  O’Toole clinked his spoons together nervously. He wished he had never raised the topic of dead cardinals.

  Just then a waiter entered from the main dining room to take orders for dessert. He left the double doors open behind him. A man dressed in clerics was seated by himself at a corner table near the window at the far corner of the restaurant. He was reading a newspaper. The priest looked up from his paper toward O’Toole. After a moment he made his way across the dining room in the direction of their private room, looking right at O’Toole. The five friends looked nervously at the intruder, who extended his hand toward the cardinal.

  “Your Eminence,” said the priest in an American accent. “I’m Monsignor Ackerman, Matthew Ackerman, from the Congregation for Bishops. I just wanted to say that it’s terrible news about Cardinal Manning. If there is anything I can do, let me know.”

  “Oh, of course, I remember you,” said O’Toole, relaxing a bit. “Thank you for your kindness. I think the most important thing we can do for poor Cardinal Manning is to pray for him.”

  Outwardly O’Toole was cordial, but inwardly he wondered if the Vatican rumor mill was already churning, gossiping about his new portfolio to investigate the murders of cardinals. Ranieri could have talked already, and the word would be all over the Vatican Secretary of State’s office by morning. But, O’Toole wondered, how would a lower-level monsignor at the Congregation for Bishops know what was going on? Maybe he was just being paranoid. But Mike O’Toole was starting to wonder whom he could trust. To the outside, the Vatican is opaque, but inside it is a sieve.

  “I may have to call on your services if we need a contact in the Congregation for Bishops,” said O’Toole. He wanted to break off the conversation with the monsignor as quickly as possible.

  “Just let me know,” said the young monsignor. “Good evening, gentlemen.” The priest went back to his solitary corner table and his newspaper.

  The waiter brought the dessert and coffee and a Roman after-dinner liqueur, Sambuca. Then he closed the doors.

  The conversation resumed, but it took a different tack. Talk of conservative factions prompted O’Toole to ask, “Do you think we went too far at Vatican II?”

  “What prompted that question?” asked Kelleher.

  “Well,” said O’Toole, “maybe we let the world set the agenda. We pushed relevancy to its extreme and ended up with irrelevancy. Maybe we need to get back to the eternal. You know, maybe we should run a tighter ship, trying to do less in society. The Holy Father has laid plans for Vatican III to tighten things up.”

  “That’s pure bullshit!” said Schoenhoffer. “The problem is that we didn’t go far enough at Vatican II. The whole world, except for maybe the Taliban and a few Islamic crazies, has found a way to include women and accept gays into their societies. We can’t even accept divorced people coming to communion unless they get an annulment, which we make impossible.

  “Look at my students at Yale,” continued the professor. “They think Catholics are nuts on anything to do with sex. They don’t hear us at all. They just walk away. Even their parents are ignoring us. Ninety percent of Catholic couples use contraception, and we tell them they are going to hell for it.

  “No, Vatican II wasn’t the problem. The only problem with Vatican II is that it only did half the job,” said Schoenhoffer with finality.

  Joe Dorney jumped in. As the only parish priest at the table, he felt he needed to say something for the priests in the trenches. “Maybe priests are killing the cardinals. Priests certainly have plenty of reasons to be angry at the hierarchy, especially their own bishops. Look at our seminary class, Mike. Over half our class has left the priesthood, mostly because of celibacy. We are impaling the Church on a cross of celibacy for no reason. They are talking about a Eucharistic ‘desert’ now in Ireland. They have nobody to celebrate Mass. Maybe the reason that priests are so angry is that they see their lives going down the drain.

  “And don’t get me started on the Irish referendum on gay marriage. That was the final nail in the casket. Nobody is paying attention to us.”

  Dorney continued, “Look at my diocese, Chicago. Like most of the Midwest and Northeast, we are circling the drain. All over the United States we are closing functioning parishes, because we won’t ordain married men or women. All around the Midwest, we have priests pastoring two or three parishes. You have ’em in Boston, too, Mike. You’ve got pastors who have two and three parishes, while you guys over here in Rome say private Masses in your private chapels.

  “I know priests who have a funeral every day, five days per week, for years on end. We have married deacons running parishes across town from me, because we have nobody else to run them. Why can’t we just ordain the deacons and make them priests? Just because they go to bed with their wives? This is insanity. We are letting the ship run aground for want of a crew. I’ll bet ya there are more than a few angry priests who would like to get a gun and shoot a bishop.”

  Dorney took a breath. He was just getting started. “On top of that, we have all these luxury-loving bishops wasting money on themselves. My cardinal lives in a fourteen-million-dollar mansion, for God’s sake. Why does he have to live like a greedy CEO? We have parishes that can’t even pay the light bill, and he has a chauffeur! A chauffeur! Can you imagine?”

&n
bsp; As he ended his speech, Joe realized he might have gone too far. Once again, there was an awkward silence. Even among old friends, the divisions in the Church cut deep.

  Patrick McMann jumped into the void, anxious not to let the fire die out. “I think it all goes back to the Church’s attitude toward sex,” he said. “Nobody takes the Church seriously anymore about this. The Church is hung up on women and married men because of sex. The Church is hung up on gay people like me. But we don’t care. Gay people are just walking away. All my friends have. I don’t know a single gay man who goes to church anymore, unless they are priests or monks.”

  O’Toole flinched a little at the reference to gays in the priesthood.

  “The problem is all the women who want to be priests,” said O’Toole, trying to make a joke out of it.

  “No, Mike,” countered Patrick with a smile. “The problem is the priests who want to be women.”

  Everybody laughed at the turn of phrase. Talking to Patrick was like sparring with Oscar Wilde. But there was a grain of truth in it. Too many priests loved to dress up in fancy vestments. They may not have wanted to be women, but they dressed up as much as Edwardian dowager countesses.

  “Back to the crimes,” said Dorney. “I know some people in Chicago who could help with your investigation.”

  “Don’t think I want to bring the Chicago police into this, Joe,” said O’Toole. “We don’t want to rough anybody up.”

  “Very funny, but I was thinking of someone who could follow the money,” Dorney said. “If someone is doing these killings, they probably are not doing it themselves. They are probably hiring somebody. Generally it’s best to follow the money trail.”

  Kelleher injected a thought. “Say, Mike, don’t you know Bill Tracy from the Knights of Malta? Remember him? He’s a Boston boy. He went to BC High with us. I would think that the former head of the CIA could point you in the right direction.”

  “Not a bad idea,” said O’Toole, making a mental note to call Tracy as soon as he got back to his apartment. Tracy had been head of the CIA for nearly a decade, and he still got national security briefings from the NSA as a courtesy. At least, that was what O’Toole had heard. The cardinal and the former CIA director shared the same cultural DNA, the Boston bond. Perhaps Bill would know somebody who could ferret out secrets and connect the dots. It would be much better to have somebody from completely outside the Church doing the investigation.