by Jim Stark
Sutherland searched the room, the eyes, for remorse, for horror, for guilt, for shame, but mostly he saw fear, and bitter resentment. These men already know the dimensions of this thing, he said to himself. They know the facts, but they're reacting like politicians, wondering how to defend, how to bob and weave and duck out from under responsibility. What ever happened to the imitation of Christ?
"Offenders typically have fifteen or twenty victims before they are caught,” he went on, “and the fact of having been abused greatly increases the chance that the victim will himself become a sex offender later in life. The numbers grow exponentially, as does the human cost of our silence, our indifference. And the victims of these second-generation offenders are also on our collective conscience, as will be the victims of their victims, as they in turn spread the virulent disease that has festered for decades in the bosom of the Church."
It suddenly struck Bishop Sutherland how difficult it must be for these men to fully internalize the message he was sending. They had spent lifetimes being professionally holier-than-thou. Some of them were more wicked than the worst of those they forgave so clinically in the darkness of the confessional. Cognitive dissonance, he remembered from his university days. Denial.
"No one would argue against compassion and understanding for the clergy who have gone astray,” he emphasized, “but frankly, I'm a lot more concerned with the people they hurt ... the kids, and their families. I am here to inform you that I will make one mighty ruckus in the press if we don't find a way to bring this ... this filthy business ... to an end. That is what we are here to do, and I assure you, that is what we are going to do."
Sutherland had reached the part that the CACB would probably not be able to accept. In a way, he knew how this meeting had to end, but that was no reason to back away from duty. He braced himself and carried on.
"I called this emergency meeting because I have a plan. It's not a nice, comfortable plan, but this is a hellishly uncomfortable problem. I'm prepared to admit that my plan will be extremely controversial and very painful. However, I am certain it will work, so unless one of you can come up with an alternative plan that is more palatable but no less effective, then my plan it shall be!"
He shocked himself as much as anyone else with the loudness of his voice, but this confrontation was long overdue. There was nothing to be gained by sugarcoating the pill or hiding his determination.
"Job one is to find out who among us is involved in this sort of thing. The problem is, the priests and Brothers who are assaulting children lie to the rest of us about it. They go to confession, as every Catholic must do, and in their confessions they neglect to mention that they are abusing those they are supposed to protect and nurture. By so doing, they have abandoned their vows and chosen to live in sin. In a real sense, they are no longer priests or Brothers. The roles they play within the Church have become little more than theatrical performances. Either that, or they have deluded themselves so successfully that they can no longer be considered sane."
Eyes were beginning to shunt and roll, some rather wildly. Spirits were stinging. The word “sane” rocked souls. Time to inject some perspective.
"There is no massive cover-up here,” said Sutherland, “no Church-wide conspiracy of priests and bishops who knew what was going on and did nothing. Most of us didn't know much, and felt distanced from the problem. That's reality. But this mess has been dragging on for almost five decades. Some of us knew, and did nothing. All of us knew to some extent, and none of us did enough, obviously. That is the problem we face, and we are now obliged to ask all Catholic clergy, ourselves included, the classic questions that are the signature of every scandal inquiry: What did you know, and when did you know it?"
He was surprised they'd let him get this far. He was invoking memories of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Great Foreign Currency Scandal, and he hadn't even told them his plan yet. Well, he thought, I haven't been lynched so far, so I go for broke.
"Our mea culpas are important,” he said, “but the question of who the sex-offenders were, and are—that is critical. We must begin with a grip on basic reality, and we can't even connect with reality unless we break through the curtain of lies that protects the despicable men who are attacking our children. These men are not only sinners, they are criminals. The Church is just not a criminal organization. If we are to avoid the public perception that we are corrupt, we must expunge from the Church the cancer within.
"There is one reliable way to find out whether someone is lying or not,” he said softly, “and that is with a lie detector. I have researched these devices, and while they aren't perfect, they're pretty darned good. I propose that once every six months, every priest and Brother in the country must go to confession with a superior from his own order or his own diocese, while hooked up to a lie detector. We will have to train priests and bishops to operate these machines, and we have to start cooperating fully with the police when we learn—"
"Pardon me,” said Bishop Doyle as gently as he could, “but I find I must rise on a point of order.” And rise he did.
Well, here it comes, thought Sutherland. A barely audible hum slid around the room as legs shifted and cassocks shuffled. The chairman decided to sit for his sentence.
Bishop Doyle cleared his throat, pressed praying fingertips to his mouth, and resumed his intervention. “While the CACB has no formal process providing for the recall of a chairman, I find that I must move non-confidence in your leadership, Bishop Sutherland. It is my very strong feeling, and a feeling I'm sure is shared by others here, that what we are hearing is not only poorly thought out, but the product of a psychiatric or personal problem in the mind of the person who is supposed to facilitate our collective discussions. Unless you have forgotten, it is not the role of the chairman to dictate policy. This is especially true when the policy being advocated could bring shame and even ridicule down upon Mother Church itself."
Doyle paused to give his words a chance to register in the hearts and souls of his colleagues, most particularly in the heart and soul of Steve Sutherland. “You would be procedurally within your rights to refuse to call a vote on my motion of non-confidence,” he continued, “but if I inform His Holiness that we probably had near-unanimity for this resolution, I think you know that the Pope will have your collar. Therefore, I respectfully and humbly request that you call a vote, immediately."
Humble my butt, thought Sutherland.
Bishop Doyle sat, slowly, painfully, as if to underline the overwhelming regret he was suffering at feeling spiritually obligated to stab Caesar.
"I find myself obliged to second this unhappy motion,” said Bishop Pietro Malini, the man who had become the center of the storm at the Caughy Commission. It was clear that a broken jaw and a black eye at the hands of Joe Farley had taught this prelate nothing.
Sutherland rose to face his accusers. “I would have preferred some discussion first,” he said. “However, since you insist, I will call a vote.” He watched as eyes widened in disbelief. “All those in favor of my proposal, please stand,” said Sutherland.
He knew full well that the vote Bishop Doyle had demanded had nothing to do with consideration of his lie detection plan, but he wanted the CACB on record on that issue first. Once the question had been called, they could do nothing about it except to stand ... or not. No one wanted to get into a debate over the chairman's deliberate misapplication of Robert's Rules of Order. There were weary thoughts and tortured feelings for a once-great leader who seemed bent on torpedoing his own credibility—and his career. No one stood.
"Very well,” continued Bishop Sutherland, “I ask all those in favor of my resignation to please stand."
One by one, with heads hung in a pounding silence, twenty-four men rose. Their eyes were aimed anywhere but at Sutherland's eyes, and once they had all visually confirmed the unanimity of the vote, they sat down again.
"Gentlemen,” said the chairman in his last official act in that capacity, “I accept
your decision, and I bid you farewell. However, before I go, I want to tell you something.
"Yesterday, as you undoubtedly saw on the television news, I sat in on a session of the Caughy Commission. In her testimony, an elderly lady by the name of Barbara Farley said, ‘The gal-danged Church is a dad-gummed joke.’ Think about that. Think about where the Church will be if that opinion comes to be widely shared.
"I gave you a good policy option today. You rejected it for all the wrong reasons, and then you rejected me. I'll give you two weeks to come to your senses, then, if you fail to change your views, I go to the press. And now, if you will excuse me, it seems that I must leave."
Bishop Steve Sutherland walked proudly and solemnly out of the meeting room and down the hall to the suite where he'd been staying. Then he closed the door, called a cab, and sat on the bed, staring at his packed suitcases.
He had dreamed his fate the night before, stood helplessly in the stationary external glass elevator of a business tower in Vancouver, looked out at the Pacific ocean, and seen the water rise higher and higher above the horizon, twenty yards, fifty yards, one hundred yards, twice as high as the office tower, three times as high, seven times as high. The tidal wave hit with such force that the city was swept off its base, lifted, crushed, mangled, and then spit back out as the wave receded into its basin. Then, abruptly, there he was, alone, dry as bagged flour, picking his way through twisted metal, broken brick, human bodies, and gasping, thrashing fish. Everything was shiny, and the world smelled of plankton. Oddly, he found himself fending off questions from a group of wet reporters, all shoving their microphones at his mouth.
"How come you're not soaked, or dead?” they asked.
"How the hell would I know?” he asked back.
"Did you make this happen?” they demanded.
"Yeah, right! Me and Moses! We got a way with water!"
Weird, he said to himself nervously. The crazier your dreams, the saner you are, he remembered hearing somewhere.
He removed the trappings of the Church and put on his favorite jeans, his weathered plaid shirt, the “stompin’ boots” he'd worn for so many summers at Catholic Youth Camp, and his baseball cap. As he stood there, pondering the finality of this move, he couldn't prevent tears from creeping into the corners of his eyes. He brushed them away and shook his head free of sentimentality. Under the grief, he felt good, much healthier than those who were right now trashing both his game plan and his reputation. They would know that they were in for a major fight, and they were undoubtedly preparing to tell the media of their profound concern for both his spiritual condition and his mental state.
Sutherland sat back down on the bed and retied the laces on his boots, looser, and he wondered what kind of displaced hostility had led him to tie them so tightly the first time around. He also wondered what kind of scandal it would have caused if he had ever shown up at his Calgary cathedral on a Sunday and said mass dressed like this. “Can't be done,” he said lightly. “God's got taste."
It felt worrisome to find himself joking, albeit mildly, about God, about Catholicism, about faith. This is going to take some time, he said to himself. I have to learn to think for myself. I have to learn to think, period. I have to rediscover the world, life, me.
He guessed that in spite of having packed his bags ahead of time, he hadn't really believed it would come to this. After all, he hadn't thought things through to the next step, to what he might exactly do if the meeting did go as badly as it had. “Well, the big questions will have to wait,” he said to himself aloud—a habit he'd had all through childhood, and dropped the day he was ordained. “Let's start with the little ones."
He had a key to the Sutherland's family cottage out in Norway Bay, and he had a friend he could talk to, really talk to. At least he used to able to, in the 1980s. It seems like only yesterday, or last week, he thought.
The friend was his old high school buddy, Randall Whiteside. He thought back to the many lunch hours they had passed together, alternately discussing girls and God. He remembered the football games they had won together, the mud and the blood, the sock-hops after, and the never-ending stream of boyhood tales about sexual conquests, real and imagined—almost all imagined, truth be told. He remembered clumps of boys smoking cigarettes, standing on street corners one block from the school, as the rule demanded, turning their right hands into beautiful girls through some universal trick of the male mind.
Well, the problems are a little different now, he said to himself as he stood and checked out his image in the mirror. I hope you're really there for me today, Randy. You just landed the unenviable task of getting an ex-bishop back on his feet.
He looked at his watch. It was 3:00 p.m. He made the decision to get settled out in Norway Bay before seeing Randall Whiteside. At least that way I won't seem homeless.
He dialed the private line of his old chum. “Hi there Sandy,” he said to the plump private secretary who never failed to offer him a chocolate whenever he visited Whiteside Tech. “It's Steve here. Is Randy in?"
"Yes, but he's awfully—"
"Has he ever been too busy to see me?"
"No, but—"
"Tell him I'll be over in about two hours, okay?"
"You're pretty nervy for a bishop."
"And you're pretty nervy for an executive secretary."
"There goes your chocolate,” she laughed. “I'll tell him."
Bishop Sutherland, former bishop Sutherland, pulled the curtains aside, looked out the window, and saw that his taxi was already at the curb, waiting. He made it to the front lobby without incident, ignored the nun-receptionist, pulled the cap down to his eyes, and lowered his head. Then he marched out the front door of the CACB and past the reporters so quickly that none of them recognized him. He was free, free at last.
He got in the cab as the driver put the bags in the trunk, and he turned his head away from the occasional glances of reporters. “Norway Bay,” he said as the engine kicked in and the car eased into traffic. “I might be ten minutes out there, then I'll be coming back to the city, to the Whiteside plant in Kanata. You take plastic, eh?"
Chapter 10
THE INNER CABINET
The Right Honorable Louis St. Aubin had his slippers on, as was his custom whenever he was in his office at 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of Canadian prime ministers. The inner cabinet would be arriving soon, with all their pet projects and way-too-high ambitions. He put his pipe into its black clay holder, hoisted his heels up onto the teak desk, and let his head sink into the back of his tilting chair. Then he moved his glasses up onto his forehead, above the bridge of his nose but not too far from home, ready for instant recall.
The sweet smell of oriental tobacco hung in the air and seemed to massage his memory. He had been in office eight months, and the Liberal Party of Canada was still basking in the afterglow of the landslide victory they'd scored last September. However, the honeymoon with the electorate was almost at an end. The Party's rating in the polls was slipping as the Conservatives and New Democrats scored points on a whole range of niggling issues in the daily House of Commons free-for-all known as Question Period.
St. Aubin was content with the quality of the men and women he had in cabinet, but he wasn't at all sure they would measure up in a crisis, such as the next time the dreaded separation-jitters shook the province of Québec, and the nation. In the absence of major problems, Canada seemed to have made an art form of dithering, with Judeo-Christian morality tut-tutting the government from one side and surly Uncle Sam kicking its shins from the other.
"It isn't that Canada is ungovernable,” said the former teacher of law who ruled the maple roost, or tried to. “But God damn, it's a pain in the ass at times. It must be fun to be a dictator."
"Give it a rest,” grumbled his humor-impaired chief of staff. Ralph Dellaire was stretched the length of the sofa and wasn't in the mood to play brain games with his friend. “We'll get through the agenda in an hour and slip o
ver to the Oaks for a quick nine before supper. I called Joe Latimer. He opened up the back nine. There's a bit of snow left behind the green on the seventh hole and in a couple of bunkers. I've already arranged for an RCMP perimeter, and I had Betty call your wife and tell her that you'd be tied up for a few hours."
The two men closed their eyes as if on some unspoken cue. In a matter of minutes, urgent and not-so-urgent affairs of state would scream for their attention. Catnaps had become an essential survival strategy at number 24.
Dellaire had been attending an indoor golf school all winter, and he was mentally organizing his thoughts ... straight left arm, nice smooth acceleration, full release, stay connected. What was that other key that Latimer always emphasized? Oh yeah ... seven o'clock-one o'clock, swing inside out, trust the club head to return to square, swing out to the ball—gets rid of a slice in no time. “Work was invented for people who don't know how to golf,” he mumbled. He remembered reading that bit of wisdom on one of those tacky wall plaques they sold in the pro shops.
His mind went back to the day he had first seen Darlene Trahan perform at the Meat Shop, down in Lowertown. He wondered what it would be like to see her on the Oaks, swinging a golf club, naked as a jay. Louis would have a freaking seizure, he chuckled inwardly.
The Prime Minister was thinking of nothing at all. In fact, he was counting backwards from one hundred, silently numbering his exhalations, a homespun technique he'd been using for decades to help himself fall asleep. Even when it didn't work, it cleared his mind of the competing demands for his judgment and allowed him to rest ... to droop, if not to dream. He'd only counted down to forty-seven when his secretary quietly opened the door and whispered that the inner cabinet was ready and waiting in the conference room.
