The HolyPhone Confessional Crisis

by Charles Brett

  “You are right. Sorry. I will do it now.” Less than a minute later Caterina sat back looking pleased with herself. “All done. This will be delivered by tomorrow morning at the latest, possibly this afternoon. I paid for the urgent service, which was not that expensive.”

  “Now Davide, do you want to start?”

  Tuesday, the Vatican

  Nelson entered his breakfast room, pleased to see Michele returned from his investigations.

  “Has he found anything? Have I set off a parallel but now unnecessary investigation?” he mused to himself.

  He must make time to see Michele as soon as practical. He would consult with Father Federico to see when that could be. Not today because not only was his schedule full with a long Curial meeting with the His Holiness but he also wanted to find out from José Antonio whether there had been any progress, though it was rather soon for this to be a reasonable expectation.

  “Good morning, everybody. Please help yourselves as usual and sit down. When you are ready I will ask Father Federico to start proceedings. We’ll have to be rapid for I have an audience with His Holiness immediately after.”

  Michele was often nervous at these gatherings. Today he knew that he wasn’t really prepared and hoped he wouldn’t have to answer any direct questions at breakfast.

  The good news was that the Curial meeting scheduled for later was likely to run into the afternoon, so the chances of having to see da Ferraz privately were small, at least for today. A small blessing but it did give him another night to come up with a creative way to mislead without being demonstrably inaccurate.

  The breakfast was brisk, pleasing Nelson and Michele, if for different reasons. Father Federico brought it to a close and Nelson stood up to give his blessing to all there.

  He turned, saying, “Michele, it’s good to see you back. Your travels were useful? Might you liaise with Father Federico about a time to come to see me? Father Federico, if you could set this up in the next couple of days that would be most kind.”

  He left the room.

  Michele was relieved he only had to nod. Now he could agree a time with Father Federico and might get lucky and put the appointment off until the day after tomorrow.

  Two extra nights to think would be much better than one, though whether that would deliver any solutions he was no clearer to knowing. He felt bothered in many ways. There were da Ferraz’s worries. There was Miriam and even Inma. He remained sure that neither had noticed him watching them coming in together off the beach. Inma’s figure was unbelievable, something he was also having difficulty forgetting. But, if Inma had looked good and much better without her normal clothes, Miriam was everything that he remembered. If anything she looked fitter and without that spare weight caused by sitting too much in a bank.

  The old itch was refusing to go away, meaning it was probably time to start thinking about his own future and closing down the redirection. He could then work on and persuading Miriam to join him. He was already wondering if there might be a faster way to extricate them all without risk. This was definitely the dimension to work on, in parallel to what he must provide to da Ferraz.

  Tuesday, Monteverde

  “Where do I start? This has been puzzling me all night as I tried to get my head around all I heard. I think the easiest way is briefly to describe what I saw and was told yesterday. Afterwards you can ask me questions and we can dig deeper.”

  Conor and Caterina nodded.

  “I met with the VCCC Operations people. By the way, I will use VCCC as shorthand, rather than the Confessional Call Centre. I know that the Vatican does not like it but it was my original idea.”

  He smiled almost proprietorially.

  “These Operations people are professional and know what they are doing. They run a tight, modern, computer-based call centre system provided by a reputable software house running on standard blade servers located within secure premises inside the Vatican. Currently this supports some 750 call centre seats, occupied by nearly-qualified priests, recently-ordained priests or older priests awaiting re-assignment to another parish. Interestingly, any priest below the level of a bishop can be asked to staff the VCCC, especially at times of peak sinning. Damn! I forgot to ask when these peak periods are. That would have been interesting. For another day …”

  Caterina looked puzzled. In contrast, Conor grinned at Davide.

  “Okay, back to what they told me. It turned out that the key number in all this is the time it takes to hear a confession. Stop, stop, stop! I am going off down a side track, though I suspect it might be an important one. Make me a reminder to come back to this.”

  Caterina continued tapping away on her laptop, taking notes.

  “Back to basics, then. Let me restart by describing what happens when a sinner calls the VCCC via the Santofonino from a confessional in a church. The call was originally a standard mobile voice call, just like you and I make to each other. Increasingly, for developed countries, this is done by the Confessional App that runs on the Santofonino using Voice over IP, which is directly embedded into the Confessional App. The advantage to the Vatican is that over IP it does not cost as much as paying for each traditional confession call. This may be another area to investigate but the Vatican has such good arrangements with mobile telephone companies that my suspicion is this could be a red herring. The Vatican – once it realised how successful the Santofonino was becoming – bought bulk minutes in advance, which it calls off as needed. When more minutes are required, a new competitive negotiation occurs, making me think the telephone cannot be part of any problem. They change irregularly enough to prevent predictability.

  “Once the call from the Santofonino passes to the VCCC it arrives at the call centre system. This is a standard package like that used in most customer support call centres around Europe. As mentioned earlier, the software comes from a well-known company and was installed by an Italian service provider with a good reputation for honesty and reliable delivery. As you will probably both know, call centre software is customised for the specific requirements of each buyer. In this case the front end customisation was relatively minimal. The call arrives and is randomly assigned to a priest who is available.

  “In the VCCC the priest sits in a standard call centre cubicle. The call is routed to his screen and headphones. On connection to the sinner the priest starts with the standard confessional prompts — something like, ‘Say the sins that you remember. Start with the ones that are most difficult to say. Remember that in order to make a good confession you should confess all mortal sins, according to kind and number.’ Or something like this — which are displayed on the screen for him to read. Afterwards the sinner starts recounting his or her sins while the priest enters codes for each sin, according to lists shown on screen, via the keyboard into the VCCC system. I will return to this later.

  “One impression I had yesterday is that the call centre software is remarkably simple. One reason is that, apart from the codes for sins, there is no record made of what the sinner is saying, nor is there any computer processing to match to customer records or logistics or product details as might happen in a commercial call centre. It was rammed into me that a fundamental premise of confession is anonymity. This is faithfully carried through in the VCCC. There are no details entered about the person who is confessing. Thus there is no connection to any databases. Additionally, there is none of the ‘this call may be recorded and used for quality purposes’ stuff. I was assured that there was absolutely no recording of what a sinner said. On the other hand I don’t think I was given a wholly straight answer about listening in.

  “My suspicion is that management, who have to be senior clergy, can review ongoing calls for quality, but this wasn’t ever formally confirmed or denied. Whether this offers any opportunity for wrong doing we may want to consider. But remember that the confessor hearing a confession has no idea where the call is coming from. In that sense it’s more anonymous than in a church where the priest almost certain
ly knows the voices and verbal mannerisms of his flock. To me the VCCC, thus far, is straightforward.

  “Now it becomes a little more complicated and the reason for this is what I’ll refer to as SinCodes. By the way, technically they are not called SinCodes. But this is the term everyone uses when there is no senior member of the church present.

  “Once the sinner finishes confessing the priest will confirm it via the screen. Using the SinCodes that the confessor entered the call centre software calculates what it thinks should be the appropriate penance. For arguments’ sake let’s say it calculates ten Lord’s Prayers, ten recitals of the Rosary and a reading of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel. With me so far?”

  Conor nodded; Caterina continued typing.

  “The confessor speaks to the sinner and says that the proposed penance is ten Lord’s Prayers, ten recitals of the Rosary, and the reading of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel. He then asks the sinner if he or she would like to make a financial contribution to the church and, if he or she is willing and able to do so, then the penance might shrink. It is up to the sinner to volunteer an amount that the confessor keys into his screen, making a second calculation as to how much the penance might then go down.”

  “Is there scope here for a priest to gain any personal benefit?” interrupted Conor.

  “I don’t think so, but list it as another area of potential concern. The reason I don’t think so has to do with some history in the development of the VCCC. At one point they considered the possibility of using modern voice recognition technology to see if it could predict whether a sinner was richer or poorer. By using this a judgement could be made as to whether the amount being volunteered was generous or modest in the context of the financial means of the sinner. This proved impractical. For example, an enfeebled, elderly rich woman might sound much the same as a poor one. A poor man might have the velvet tones of a rich one. There was, apparently, far too much scope for mistakes. A doctrinal decision was taken, by whom I didn’t ask, that basically said, ‘each type of sin was equal in the eyes of the Lord’. Their words exactly. It doesn‘t matter about the relative wealth of the anonymous sinner, only that a contribution might be volunteered.

  “Another point made forcefully to me is that there is no obligation to volunteer a contribution and any contribution to the church is not a payment to reduce the penance. If you do not volunteer to pay something you simply agree to perform the penances originally suggested. The confessor absolves you and the call terminates. There is, apparently, no stigma in not volunteering. The VCCC priests are trained that they must not leave sinners with any impression that not volunteering is bad or that volunteering payment is better. My impression here was that the VCCC is well set up.”

  “I need a coffee and a break,” Caterina interrupted. “Do we have the means to make some?”

  “Yes, but I warn you it’s not like in a café. It’s the instant tea and coffee and kettle that hotel rooms the world over provide. Shall we see if the Residence can order in for us?”

  “Yuck! I hate instant coffee. No, I need to go to the bathroom. I’ll use my room as Conor and I have already checked-in. I’ll also call the staff to find out if they can arrange something, perhaps with something to eat.”

  Caterina rose, stretched and disappeared.

  “You have to admit, Davide, she is one elegant lady. She does look good in those black jeans and yellow top. It goes well with that white-blonde hair.”

  “I agree, she is good-looking; but she is cold. Those black eyes. I don’t sense much empathy about her. She’s more like a machine than a person. She even seems to prefer them.”

  “I don’t disagree. Having her as an understudy for two weeks has already proved painful, and the ‘Mr Laoghaire or silly old git’ routine the other day was only the tip of the iceberg.”

  The two friends started to walk around the tables in the middle, if only to have some movement.

  Tuesday, Nahalal

  Noach felt sick. His visit to his Settler friends had not been good. Their meeting had started well enough when he described how much he was transferring this month. They liked that because it was almost 20 per cent more than previous months. Almost immediately they began discussing how they would spend what they had not yet received.

  This proved different. In previous times there had been no discussion like this in front of him about how they planned to use the money, just indirect allusions to improved security for this or that settlement, or improving a settlement school or medical centre or providing incentives for more buses with guards between settlements and the like. This time had been an eye-opener for Noach. The generalities with positive associations disappeared. Instead outright greed was full and frontal on their faces around the table. One had even talked about the dress he was going to buy his mistress, until given a meaningful dig in the ribs that Noach had seen but pretended not to have.

  Thinking back he wondered if his well-intentioned attempts to support the Settlers was a triumph in self-delusion or, as it now seemed, more likely another typical rip-off of anybody who did not actually live in a settlement.

  After mentioning the problems in the revenue generation their faces instantly turned sour. Within seconds he had ten men in various stages of increasing fury accusing him of treachery, of failing to support the movement, of being a bad Israeli and even of not being a good Jew. Noach remained silent as they yelled themselves into an ever greater storm of vitriol aimed at vilifying him. This was, he reflected then as well as now, one of the less attractive Israeli traits – to think that anger and noise and trying to impose guilt on everybody else was an effective way to achieve your objective. It had been on obvious display here. Clearly what counted was not that the Settler movement might lose access to money that they knew they did not deserve. No, what mattered was that they might have to remove their hands from the cookie jar or their noses from the pig trough.

  Just thinking about what had occurred earlier that day made him feel sick. Experiencing the onslaught had been bad enough. Extricating himself from them had been worse. Noach was forced to grovel. At no point was he given an opportunity to explain what was happening or to remind them that, but for him, they would have none of this money. None of this mattered to these ten: all they wanted was continued access to free untaxed money to spend as they chose.

  They next accused him of taking ‘their’ money; of holding back what was theirs. That was the final indignity. Though he had wanted to scream at them as they were at him, he managed to restrain his temper.

  Noach eventually escaped, though not without more insults and accusations. He returned home without actually vomiting, despite twice thinking he might have to stop the car to get out. His stomach still felt filled with acid.

  If Noach had hoped that his day could only improve when arriving home it had not. Tamar had not forgiven him for failing to tell her that Miriam would be visiting and for letting her stay for so short a period. For the second time in two days she had raised the possibility of visiting her father with the boys. His instinct was this would be a bad idea. But, thus far, he could not think of any good reason to deny it. More troubles loomed.

  Back in his study, however, Noach had the space and peace to consider the implications of what he might have learnt today. Taking a pad of paper and a pencil, he started listing his first impressions if in no particular order. This was a technique that usually served him well for it would help him to structure the deeper analysis that needed to follow.

  The first thing he noted was the sickening sense of betrayal that what he had worked so hard to deliver and to support was an illusion, probably of his own creation. That hurt. Noach liked to think he was a better judge of people, especially of fellow Israelis.

  But that aside about the mistress and the dress, and the reaction, somehow crystallised his moment of realisation. He wondered if they had always conned him or if this was a recent development. He suspected the latter because early on, plus quite recently, they w
ould take show him the various improvements that they said his work had paid for, and how they described was what had always made him feel good.

  His second significant scribble was that he must do some more investigating, not only about what that irritating Michele with his stupid sister-in-law and the horse-faced Spanish woman had raised, but also into whether he could find out where the Settlers had actually spent his money. It could be useful. At least it was an action item.

  The third item was to remind himself that his Settler friends, fortunately, did not know the actual source of the money. All they saw was agreed sums appearing in agreed bank accounts. Could he obtain access to these? Noach thought he could. That might prove interesting.

  Fourthly he …

  Tuesday, Monteverde

  Caterina returned with a broad smile on her face.

  “Cappuccini e dolci are on their way, ordered from a nearby café.”

  “Well done. Certainly better than the dried dust in the packets in the corner. We should think of buying something better.” Conor regarded Davide and Caterina expectantly. “After all, you’re the ones who can speak Italian.”

  Davide and Caterina turned to each other; he used his hand to defer to her.

  “You remember that supermarket we passed coming here, the one I pointed out from the taxi as being one of a small chain with high quality products? That, Conor, is your destination later. You can practice your Italian.” Her smile was different this time, more like that of a hungry dog expectantly contemplating a large steak for its sole consumption.

  Conor looked to Davide. The latter smiled.

  “Don’t turn to me. I’m not going to interfere in any inter-colleague discussions of responsibility. That’s for you guys.”