Our Lady Of Greenwich Village

by Dermot McEvoy

  It always amazed Cyclops that the Mafia would hire the Westies to do their dirty work. For all the intermarriage between the two nationalities, there remained a deep schism. The Italians, by personality, were solitary figures, more comfortable at home with family, while the Irish were gregarious gladhanders.The Italians aspired to be Westchester Republicans, while the Irish knew there was a little bit of John F. Kennedy in each of them. It was an odd business arrangement.

  Masie Scully didn’t even have her own apartment. In each daughter’s railroad flat she had a room, and she ruled the two households as if she were Pope Masie I. She went to mass twice a day. She ignored whatever Westie work her sons-in-law were involved in, and generally dictated the lives of her two families. She had even named the two children. Benedict was named after Pope Benedict XV, who had been Pope during the Troubles. Young Benedict hated the name, especially when the neighborhood kids called him “Benny” and implied that he was the only Irish Jew in the neighborhood. In fact, his nickname as a kid had been “Briscoe,” after Robert Briscoe, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin. Benedict had actually been glad when the boys down at the Daily News had given him the obvious nickname “Cyclops” because he hated his childhood moniker so much. Later he would explain Benedict away by saying that he was named after the Pope by his grandmother because “he gave good encyclical or something.”

  Seán Pius had been named after Masie’s murdered husband and Pope Pius XII, the Teuton-loving Pontiff of World War II infamy. But Seán Pius, younger than Benedict, had gotten off much easier with the neighbor kids. To them he was the popular “Johnny Pie,” the handsomest and smartest kid in the class.

  They were complete opposites. Cyclops was a character right out of Angels with Dirty Faces, while his cousin would be more comfortable singing in a Bing Crosby-led choir. Cyclops would go to Vietnam and return to a job as a copyboy at the Daily News. Johnny Pie would go off to college, then to seminary and graduate school. Cyclops was street smart; Johnny Pie knew which fork to eat his salad with. It was extraordinary that they could come from such a close gene pool. But there were two things they shared: a Hell’s Kitchen toughness and an extraordinary Irish willingness to resist.

  “I been reading your stuff on Jackie Swift,” said the monsignor. “Very interesting.”

  “Yeah,” said Cyclops Reilly, “I’m keeping a close eye on the creep. What’s it to you? Or are you calling on behalf of the Cardinal? He didn’t fall for Swift’s Virgin shit, did he?”

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” said the monsignor. “We’re having a press conference at St. Vincent’s tomorrow. The Cardinal is going to endorse Jackie Swift for Congress....” He paused to let it sink in, “. . . because of his Right-to-Life stance.” Reilly whistled at the end of the phone. “I know Billy Eminence will be there because it’s his beat, but I thought you should know about this because of your interest in Swift. Just in case your name slipped through the cracks and you didn’t get an invite.”

  Cyclops Reilly’s mind was racing now. “Yeah, thanks, Johnny Pie. I really appreciate this.”

  The monsignor continued, “The Cardinal is also going to bring along the Reverend Chester Cockburn, who’ll also endorse Swift.”

  “That nut from OFF who picketed the vet’s clinic?” asked Cyclops.

  “Yes, that’s him,” said the monsignor. “His Eminence wants to present a united front on abortion.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to talk him out of shit like this, Johnny?” asked Cyclops.

  “Not this time,” continued the monsignor. “This comes from higher up.”

  “Higher up?” said Reilly. “You don’t mean The Dour Slav?”

  “I don’t mean anything, Benedict,” said the Monsignor, suppressing a smile at his cousin’s unique sobriquet for Pope John Paul II. “You can take that any way you want. But if I were you I’d look into the background of Reverend Cockburn. You may want to ask him a few questions at the press conference.”

  “Does this have anything to do with your special work for the Cardinal?” asked Reilly.

  “Yes, it does, Benedict,” replied Burke. “See you there?”

  “Yeah,” said Cyclops Reilly. “I’ll be there.”

  “Does this have anything to do with your special work for the Cardinal?” The sentence had curiously bounced back into Monsignor Burke’s mind after he had hung up the phone on his cousin.

  The “special work” was routing out pedophiles for the Cardinal and it had earned him his red stripe. Being a lawyer, he had been assigned to negotiate with the families of the abused. Negotiate was a euphemism. Badger, intimidate, twist, coerce was more like it. If they didn’t take the money and run, he often ended up cross-examining them in court. Make the victims the predators so the archdiocese could save a little of its dirty money. It had made him sick to his stomach. Once, while talking to his cousin about a family matter on the phone, he had let it drop how much he hated his job, being the Church’s persecutor of innocent victims, all children.

  “Fuck you,” said Cyclops Reilly, “it’s your own fucking fault.”

  “Benedict,” Burke had said icily, “how is it my fault?”

  “It’s your fault,” replied Reilly with vitriol, “because if you don’t like doing it you should tell your superiors the truth.”

  “And what is that truth, Benedict?”

  Reilly had had enough. “Look, you smart prick, the truth, if you really want to know, is that the Church should just get rid of these guys, not rotate them. If you didn’t have these cocksucking scumbags as priests you wouldn’t have a fucking problem.”

  It was as clear as that and the tirade had changed Seán Pius Burke’s life. He went into the office of the monsignor who ran personnel in the New York Archdiocese and told him straight: “Your problem is not these children and their parents. Your problem is your priests. Why don’t you eliminate your problem?”

  The monsignor had hemmed and hawed, but Burke had put it in writing and sent it to the Cardinal. The monsignor was furious when the Cardinal told him about the letter. He was furious until the Cardinal told him what a great idea Father Burke had. The monsignor went back and told him he had the blessing of the Cardinal. “What are you going to do?” asked the monsignor.

  “I’m going to round up the usual suspects,” Burke had replied without humor.

  He pulled the personnel files of every priest in the archdiocese and red-dotted those who had had problems with sex and children. Then he had the Cardinal send a letter inviting all of them to lunch at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie. The Cardinal told them how wonderful it was to see them and that he hoped they enjoyed their lunch. Then he got up and walked out the door.

  Seán Pius Burke stood up and looked at their mostly Irish faces and their soft, well-padded bellies, and he went at them. He was no longer the smooth priest with the law degree and the answer for everything. He was now the kid out of Hell’s Kitchen who knew how the game was played. “Listen up, you cocksuckers.” A hush fell over the crowd. Burke picked up the foot-thick personnel files from the table and slammed them down with a thud. He could see Adam’s apples bouncing up and down behind Roman collars. “The party is fucking over. Do you understand? Over. I am going to get rid of as many of you bums as I can. And the ones I can’t get rid of, I’m going to hound night and day. I am your worst fucking nightmare. Is that understood?” There wasn’t a sound in the room. “Good day, gentlemen. Enjoy your lamb chops.”

  Soon after he had told his cousin Cyclops about the meeting. “You going to get rid of all of them, Johnny Pie?”

  “Impossible,” replied Burke. “They’re too embedded. I’ll get rid of as many of them as possible and put the fear of Jesus into the rest of them.”

  “Do the best you can.”

  “Thank you, Benedict.”

  “For what?”

  “For showing me the light.” For once, Cyclops Reilly was mute.

  Burke went to work at a job that no one wanted him to do and
soon learned what an impossible task it was. It was impossible because he was sabotaged at almost every juncture. There was a massive conspiracy of the cloth underway. Everyone was in denial. It seemed that every pedophile priest had a rabbi. And that rabbi had a rabbi in Rome. He soon noticed a disproportional number of priests had been sent down to New York from Boston. They were in as bad a way for clergy as New York was, so why were all these guys suddenly showing up in New York? It didn’t take Burke long to figure out that it was Bernard Cardinal Law up in Boston and his two pimps, Bishops Thomas Murphy and William Daly, who were doing the dirty work. Burke had enough problems with his New York pedophiles, and now Boston was sending him theirs.

  He went to the Cardinal and explained what Law was doing. The Cardinal listened without saying a word. In those days the two Cardinals were known as “Law & Order,” Sweeney being the order part. They were partners in orthodoxy, but Law was closer to the Pope. “I’ll see what I can do,” the Cardinal told Burke after he had finished with his presentation.

  Days later the phone rang. “Father Burke?” It was the Cardinal. “Cardinal Law denies he’s using New York as a dumping ground.”

  “He’s lying,” said Burke, the words jumping out of his mouth.

  “He is a Prince of the Church,” said Sweeney.

  “He’s still a liar,” responded Burke, sure that his career had taken a sinister turn.

  Three months later, Father Brendan Quiver—late of West Roxbury, Massachusetts, but now parish priest at St. Charles Borromeo in Harlem—was caught with his underpants around his ankles and his penis in the anus of a nine-year-old boy who was a student at the St. Charles parochial school. Burke was put on the case. He called the Cardinal.

  “Was he one of Law’s?”

  “Yes, Eminence.”

  “How much?”

  “One point four million.”

  “Pay it.”

  “Yes, Eminence.”

  “And get rid of Quiver. No counseling this time. Get him out of here.”

  “Yes, Eminence.”

  “And forgive me.”

  “Why, Eminence?”

  “Because you were right and this will never happen again. You taught me a valuable lesson.”

  Burke wondered if he was changing anything. It was depressing work. Several months later Burke got a call from the Cardinal, who needed a personal secretary. Would Father Burke take the job?

  “Yes, Eminence,” said Seán Pius Burke, taking the job and the red stripe that went with it.

  After Googling both the Reverend Chester Cockburn and OFF, Reilly still didn’t know much. He learned that OFF was created after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. They were active in picketing abortion clinics, and the home office was in Buffalo, New York.

  Buffalo, New York. Reilly picked up the phone and called his friend Joe Barry, reporter for the Buffalo News. “What say you from the mistake by the lake?” inquired Reilly of Barry.

  “Fuck you, Reilly,” said Barry to his old friend.

  Reilly got right to the point. “You know a guy called the Reverend Chester Cockburn? He’s with this anti-abortion organization, OFF.”

  “You mean Chester the Molester?” said Barry.

  “What?” said Reilly, suddenly very attentive.

  “You heard me right,” said Barry. “He’s one of those born-again Christian types that hates everyone,” said Barry.

  “Like who?”

  “Like the blacks, the Catholics, the Jews . . .” said Barry.

  “Sounds like he belongs to the KKK,” said Reilly.

  “Well, he’s pretty good at baiting. He’s cooled his act recently. Tries to play the man of God. He’s had his own problems in the past.”

  “Problems?”

  “That’s where he got his nickname,” said Barry. “Let’s just say that if he has one more child molestation charge, he gets his own parish!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You never heard of the GodScou✞s?”

  “GodScou✞s?” said Reilly. “What the hell are the GodScou✞s?”

  “That’s his front organization,” said Barry. “They’re like fundamentalist boy scouts for God. They sit around the campfire and sing hymns.”

  Cyclops Reilly started laughing. “Are you thinking what I am?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Joe Barry. They were both a couple of cynical Harps.

  “I can just see it now,” said Reilly, “hymns, marshmallows, and sodomy—all by the light of the silvery moon.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  “I can’t help it,” said Cyclops. “I’ll never forget what my old man said: ‘Any guy who works forty hours a week and wants to spend his weekend sitting in some swamp with a bunch of eleven-year-old boys is not right.’”

  “You should inspect his closet,” said Barry.

  “For what?”

  “GodScou✞s’s underwear, methinks.”

  “Jesus,” said Reilly. “But is that all you have on him? The fucking GodScou✞s?”

  “He’s got a rap sheet,” said Barry. “He got booted as associate pastor about ten years ago over a child molestation allegation.”

  “What happened?” Reilly asked.

  “Some kid in the parish said they used to pray together, then later they would seal the prayer with a blow job,” said Barry.

  “Explosive stuff,” said Reilly.

  “Yeah,” said Barry, “but the kid wouldn’t testify in court. His father had the corporation he worked for transfer him to Indiana, and he let everything drop. So they let Chester the Molester slide.”

  “But the church fired him?” asked Reilly.

  “Yeah, the Presbyterians kicked him out,” said Barry. “Landed running. He was made director of OFF soon after.”

  “Wasn’t OFF worried about the allegations about the boy?”

  “Cockburn got everybody to think the boy made the whole thing up,” said Barry.

  “How about his other troubles?”

  “OFF wasn’t too disturbed over that either,” said Barry.

  “What did he do, exactly?”

  “Oh, some do-gooder Catholics were helping some blacks fix up their houses. You know that shit that Jimmy Carter does?”

  “Habitat for Humanity?”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” said Barry. “Well, he makes it out that it’s a Papist plot to get all the blacks—who are all Baptists—to convert to the Catholic Church.”

  “You have to be kidding,” said Reilly.

  “Wish I were,” said Barry. “The bishop up here, Malloy, denounced him as a Catholic basher.”

  “When was this?”

  “Around 1988,” said Barry.

  Reilly—the epitome of the lapsed Catholic—was pissed off. “Joe,” he said, “can you email me some clippings on this guy, pronto?”

  “Yeah, Cyclops,” said Barry. “I’ll email it right down. What’s up?”

  “Read the Daily News on Friday,” said Reilly as he hung up the phone.

  After Reilly read Barry’s emails, the first person he thought of was Abe Stein of the New York Post. Abe had been the Post’s chief court reporter for over thirty-five years, covering the most notorious murders and mobsters the city had to offer. Over the past several years he had covered the Cardinal’s Sunday sermons and news conferences. Abe knew how to frame a story and he had become the Post’s de facto Religion Editor. Since Stein was Jewish, the Cardinal didn’t try to intimidate him like he did the Catholic reporters. Stein had an ingenious way of framing his questions in a way that always made the Cardinal stick his foot in it. Reilly was in a quandary. He didn’t want to share his story with Stein—he might be able to run with the front page with this one—but he didn’t want to be accused, God forbid, of “Catholic Bashing.” Abe Stein could help him out on this. He decided to show Abe only the story concerning the Reverend Chester Cockburn’s encounter with Bishop Malloy. The rest—the Chester the Molester allegations—he would keep for hi
s own ammunition.

  12.

  Aspecter for a guilty conscience. There she was in front of him, floating, high up. Speaking, but O’Rourke could not hear what she was saying. Her arms were outstretched to him, but O’Rourke did not reach out to her, to touch her hands. He didn’t know if he was afraid or not. He tried to see her face, but it was obscured by fog or clouds or smoke; he couldn’t be sure. He thought it was Mary, the Blessed Virgin. Why was she appearing to him? It must be important, but he was flummoxed by her.

  Why was she here beckoning O’Rourke? Didn’t she belong to Swift? That was the political thinking. The papers made it sound like Swift and the Virgin were a gossip item. Were they dating or going steady? It was really blasphemous, but the Swift camp encouraged it. Even the Cardinal knew that the Virgin was in Swift’s corner, like she was a registered Republican.

  She must want something, O’Rourke thought in his dream state. She swirled around again and O’Rourke remembered the Virgin of his childhood. She was the Virgin-in-the-Box. Every kid in the classroom got to take the Virgin-in-the-Box home so the whole family could kneel and say the rosary in front of her. The box was her home and her mode of transportation. Every kid in the first grade got the Virgin-in-a-Box for a night. O’Rourke remembered kneeling with his mother and father in their living room at 349 West Fourth Street. Today that behavior would be considered to be very serious Catholicism, but back in the early 1950s every Catholic family in the parish was extremely devout. Life revolved around the school and the church. Even his father, still in his work clothes, was on his knees and saying the Hail Marys which came out like whispers on steroids; more of a buzz than words. After the rosary was done the Virgin returned to her box and the next day was passed on to the next family.