Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  Escape was so frightening, however, that we were delighted to meet Damian Breslin and a few of the other boys from the university students union on our first day at sea. Damian, then and since, represented safe ground to me, and he and the others shared our objectives: not only to see the Tower of London, but to get to our grandparents’ villages in Kildare, Killarney, Tipperary, and Cork. It was as if at that stage of the development of the Australian personality we almost believed that half our soul had been left behind in the Northern Hemisphere, and we must find it.

  I was unprepared for the scale of the great British damp and frigidity. I thought we had those things in the Australian winter and that it would be at worst a variation in scale. It was meteorological murder. But I liked the fraternity of it all over there—the shared squalor, the competitions to find another shilling for the gas heater, the warming of our conversation over flagons of South African wine, which I, who would later become so politically exacting about that place, drank as though it were an unambiguous form of sunlight, barely understanding the term “apartheid.” I worked in a school in Peckham; Momo, who stayed in England in the end, as a physiotherapist at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

  Momo, Damian, and I went, with a sense of belonging and equally of not—a sense we were already used to from our London experience—by the Fishguard Ferry to Ireland and were surprised by the enhanced squalor and gloom of Dublin, and its little River Liffey we’d read about in Ulysses. It was a river that ran as hugely in our mythology as the Nile. My grandfather’s rendition of “The Foggy Dew” had done it—he had been, as Protestants accused us of being, a Cork republican. “But the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey’s swell rang out in the foggy dew . . .” Yet the river through Dublin made Melbourne’s much-mocked Yarra River look like the Mississippi. Child beggars who put out their hands and called jovially, said in your wake, if you ignored them, “Fook you, mister! Fook you, miss!” Nuns at Bethlehem College had told our class that the Irish never took the name of the Lord in vain. We had been told that they combined that abstention from cursing and blasphemy with their saintliness and their scholarship. We couldn’t see much of that in autumn Dublin, though.

  The cold and the gray followed us as we clung to the idea that we would find the true Irish, the ones further west. And in a sense we did when we stayed in farm bed-and-breakfasts. These people seemed far more familiar to us than the British, and there was in each case a warm welcome for Australians, if you endured the hours of rain and mist between destinations. We encountered the Irish kindness that all travelers wish to bring home from that squalid, dim, wonderful place. A farmer who offered us a whiskey toddy, made according to his own recipe, said one night, “Sure, if you don’t have it you won’t know what you’ve missed out on!” The following night he outdid himself. “I been takin’ this stuff three months for me cold, and praise be to Jesus, it hasn’t done me the slightest good.”

  We went north by bus, and in Galway City found people still singing the songs of our grandparents. We attended a solemn high Mass, and Damian and I argued whether the fondlings and all the rest we had been up to in the deep nights, creeping to each other from separate rooms, were serious enough to keep us from taking Communion.

  Generally we decided they were, but the most important point, which confirmed and gave me a sense of my unarguable destiny as a Catholic, was something I saw on a roadside in Donegal. On the Donegal coast, which, though gloomy, was magical and bespoke something ancient and somehow familiar to us, something our ancestors saw and thus shared with us, we saw a Mass stone. I could understand who I was then. That poor wet stone, with a fading Mass sign “IHS” scratched in it, represented the map and history of my faith. Mass said by a priest on the run in Ireland’s penal times, when the faith of our fathers was forbidden by law, and celebrated on that stone in front of the barefooted, shawled, and huddled poor, with gales threatening from the Atlantic and a lookout on either hill to scour for dragoons coming to punish this outlawed ritual. This stone is my inheritance, I thought. An inheritance of the oppressed, too. How could I let the people who stood here, hungry and ill-clothed and yearning for peat fires, go from my life? How could I sunder the connection with them and their strife?

  In no way did this stop Damian and me fornicating, or near-­fornicating, that night in Glencolumbkille amongst the holy stones. “Fornication” is an overcolorful term for our sometimes inconclusive and partially achieved ecstasies. I, who had escaped the Sydney suburbs, had fallen for a boy from those same suburbs.

  A year later, we returned to Sydney and were married, and quite quickly had two children, Niall and Rosie.

  Certainly Damian and I were not so 1960s as to be unfaithful to each other, though we both had ample chance at this hectic time, when marriage was considered not only a stale entity but a doomed one. But the sexual rule I was sure would be changed, and that I longed to see changed, was the long-held proscription of contraception. The benign John XXIII had put in place a commission into birth control before dying in 1963. Paul VI would make the ruling on the matter, and women looked forward to it with confidence.

  There was method to my sexual conservatism in the free-range orchard of love that was the 1960s. The doctrine of original sin, the most reliable doctrine of all the Church’s catalogue, the doctrine of my own fallibility, told me that I could not tolerate an open marriage—that it was a condition available only to a kind of saint in a perfectly equal partnership, in which the partners lacked any sense of grievance against each other, any ammunition to use in hours of rancor. Perhaps it only worked in those not given to rancor in the first place. The much talked about “open marriage” was in fact a condition that required extraordinarily trusting and calm natures on both sides, the sorts of natures people believed we were achieving at the time, and that many people believed could be achieved by walking through the gates of clarity—by dropping acid; that is, by tripping.

  In any case, much of the free-love ethos turned out to be unreliable news, part of the great fancifulness of that decade. A man whispered to me at a party in North Sydney—he smelled of a rather sweet hemp instead of that quasi-industrial odor of tobacco—“I’ve never rooted the sister of a priest before.” The fact that my brother was a priest apparently added to my allure, even though at the time I’d had too much wine. We used to drink Asti Spumante, which seemed to connect us to the glamour of northern Italy, and a Moselle named Ben Ean, which we hoped would endow us with sophistication. Though the madness of that whisper attracted me in a way it shouldn’t have, especially given its bullish, boorish impudence, I did not succumb. I did not, as that American term has it, come across. To come across was to ford the Rubicon, and I didn’t want, and was grateful I fundamentally did not need, to come across. If I started it, anyhow, I might get a taste for it, and we had two children. I was not a free-floating woman.

  If I’d said any of that to my propositioner, I would have been laughed out of the court of the era as too suburban and square. I was a Catholic, but I enjoyed appearing a liberal Catholic—worldly, even anticlerical—looking to the Church to affirm us after the centuries we, with bowed heads, had spent affirming it. Now we were the kind who stood comfortably in secular, multistranded society and said that Catholicism was changing, that there were extraordinary manifestations of liberation theology amongst priests and Catholics in Latin America. In the months and years after his death we spoke fluently of the ways in which Pope John XXIII (God help and remember him) had changed things, had proposed we learn from the world instead of fearing it, and how things would change further still, allowing us fearless travel.

  Damian and I were still embarrassed and unforthcoming with friends about our own sexual travails, our attempts to use the so-called rhythm method, a fussy process of birth control not involving prophylactics, the use of which had been depicted, earlier in the 1960s, as a mortal sin capable of plunging us into Hell’s pit. Don’t ask me to justify such fear, or the ro
le of conscience in all this, or that of reason. Such a rigmarole of taking temperatures and checking the consistency of cervical mucus, unmagical and unerotic procedures. You had to be born when we were, to have grown up with a totalitarian Church as we did, to know why we were such uncool subjects of its sexual admonitions in the age of rock ’n’ roll and flowers in the hair. But the two of us need only look to our family histories to see that fertility came easily to our sort of people, the immigrated children of the Irish peasantry and small farmers. I feel sorry for the apparently unfertile young men and women now who must attend fertility clinics, but by contrast we made efforts between babies to concentrate our sex into the twelve or so days when I was supposedly infertile and thus entitled to have joy without incurring nearly assured motherhood.

  Love, as it is extolled in its classic sense, does not normally await the taking of temperatures. Heloise and Abelard did not let a thermometer and charted basal temperatures stand between them. There was no messing about with thermometers between the Irish patriot of my grandfather’s generation Charles Stewart Parnell (“A great man, Protestant as he was!”) and his favorite squeeze, Kitty O’Shea. But Damian and I, banking the tide of desire, took clinical account of the time of day and month.

  So then what could one do in mercy to each other if the temperature variation did go wrong? One must surely give the poor man some relief. For there is something plainly engrossing and peculiarly innocent in the sight of the man at the mercy of his arousal. But this, too, was against the rules of the Church, which deemed there was only one vas, receptacle, into which seed was meant to flow.

  It became apparent to us that since we’d broken the edicts of God’s Church by taking temperatures, we might as well forget the thermometer, and for a time we did use prophylactics and stopped going to Communion. I know the young now would not think twice about taking Communion while using contraception, or indeed exploring their mutual possibilities in any way they choose. Love has conquered all, including the Vatican. And I myself, knowing what I know now about the men who consecrated the Host and gave Communion, their unfitness for it all . . .

  My older brother rescued me from a lot of mental stress. His name was Father Leo Shannon, and it was confidently predicted that he would end up a bishop. He had the wit to sense from peripheral remarks made by Damian and me, and from various theological arguments Damian had picked with him, that in that period after 1963 we were having doubts about the Church’s dicta on marriage. He surprised us by recommending a confessor to me, a priest who would go easy on me.

  Leo was considered a sensible man by the big end of the Catholic community, the Christian Brothers boys who had become judges and surgeons and received papal knighthoods. He had a gift for seeming to harbor liberal opinions while remaining every inch the cleric, a man of the Vatican way. He was a type—the smooth priest whom the laity felt privileged to speak to; the sort of cleric who was a great administrator of a parish and whose sermons were eloquently unremarkable and concentrated strictly on dogma. He belonged to that school of thought which proposed that the basic doctrines—the Resurrection, the Trinity, transubstantiation, the heavenly status of the Virgin Mary, the sacraments, and the love of Christ and his Mother—were best imbued by plain reiteration, with only an occasional gesture towards modernity, but never Modernism. He was little concerned with the reinterpretation of dogma in the light of Darwin, Freud, the Big Bang, and had none of the sort of theological pizzazz some of us liked in other priests. Leo had a strong liturgical sense, too—he liked the ceremony of it all and honored that, laid stress on it, since in his childhood it had helped raise the faithful above the level of their normal dour and economically straitened lives. “One of the purposes of the Church,” he told me later, “is to bring majesty into people’s lives. The majesty’s been beaten out of every other part of existence.”

  The priest whom he recommended was Father Frank Docherty. Leo had heard enthusiastic reports about Frank Docherty from laymen my brother respected. I called the presbytery where Father Docherty was curate and found out that he was a member of an Order named the Congregation of the Divine Charity. He lived at their monastery, but heard confessions on Saturday afternoons and evenings at the parish church. The following Saturday, I drove there to become his penitent.

  We still did all that nonsense then. We knelt like children in the confessional, dimly perceiving the priest through the fine-wire grille when he opened the flap to hear our crimes, and we said the old formula, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” To some of them we should have said, “Bless you, Father, for you have sinned.” But the idea was unthinkable then.

  I told Father Docherty in as non-explicit terms as I could manage that I was back to using the rhythm method but sometimes things went awry and I did not use the proper vas. The pattern of our discourse, as it developed that day, was exceptional by the standards of other confessions I had made in my life. He must have known women; his knowledge surely came from more than a sister and a mother. Because he knew how to talk with women, how to validate their decisions, and unlike so many of his brothers in the clergy, he seemed to like them, in the sense that he understood and countenanced their ardors and honor, their conscientiousness.

  Father Docherty told me, for example, when it was time for him to speak, “You are conscientious to a degree and not likely to make facile judgments. So I think that in all this you must follow your own conscience.”

  I said, “Father, if I may, that sounds very Protestant.”

  He laughed. It was a laugh without an edge to it. “Yes, the old argument about total authority over conscience has traditionally been located in the Church, not in the individual’s soul. But there was always individual conscience, as there should be. Our pope only a few years dead wrote this—I have it on a piece of paper I always carry with me, especially for confessions: ‘Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public.’ That’s John XXIII, of course. Note that he doesn’t say ‘the right to obey all orders that come down from above.’ He doesn’t say ‘we’ll tell you what to do.’ He says ‘in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience.’ ”

  “When did he say that?” I wanted to know. “I wasn’t aware . . .”

  “An encyclical letter, actually, ‘Pacem in terris.’ A few years back. Insofar as the Church is a human institution, too human according to some of us, it struggles towards the light like any other organization. And I believe John XXIII took us as close as he could. Until peritonitis killed him.”

  I had heard discussions like this occasionally, earnest Catholics of democratic temper sipping Moselle and arguing for individual conscience and wondering if that made them Protestants. But I never thought I’d have this kind of exchange in the confessional.

  Father Docherty murmured, “If you didn’t have the right to your own conscience, you would be less than human. You would actually sin against nature.”

  I coughed. Confession, the sacrament of penance, had always been for me the shamefaced muttering of failures, the allotment of a penance by the priest, then fleeing the confessional box and muttering prayers at the back of the church. I was both pathetically afraid and exhilarated by the concept of a discourse in the confessional. I could not help but tell Father Docherty that what he was saying was new for me. “I’ve never heard that quotation before.”

  “Do you think I made it up?”

  “No.”

  “You probably wouldn’t have heard it. We celibate patriarchs tend not to tell people things that might make them more independent of us.”

  Would my brother ever have made a statement like this? Had he even considered the idea? It was unimaginable. But I had not finished arguing, this first time I had ever argued in the confessional box, and now I protested against the right Father Frank Docherty was trying to press on me
. “We were always told the conscience was a fool,” I insisted. “Hitler’s conscience told him to kill Jews.”

  “I don’t think it was exactly conscience that told him. It was doctrine. All the signs are that the Church is now ready to acknowledge the individual conscience. Indeed, if more had had the chance to exercise individual conscience, instead of obeying the state, there might not have been a Hitler. The difference between Hitler and you is that your conscience doesn’t tell you to do the unreliable and the savage. It is telling you to do a quiet, kindly thing. It won’t always do that. But that’s why you’re here. You are conscientious about ­humanity—yours, your husband’s. We must rely on who we are and what we perceive. Anything else, depositing your entire conscience in an ancient institution in Rome, is less than human.”

  So he went on arguing that my conscience should have sovereignty not only over that of a parish priest and a bishop, but also, more fantastical still, over the Vatican.

  Through the confessional grille I could see Father Docherty’s profile. The wire of course made him near invisible to me; this grille that, as I had learned at university, was prescribed by St. Charles Borromeo to prevent Renaissance priests from being tempted into dalliances with sexually confused young women. Young women like me.

  “In the end,” said Father Docherty, “you can only filter these outside authorities—the state, the Church—through your own conscience. We’re always saying that the greatest commandment is love. And what you tell me you did, you did from love, and I wonder how offensive that can really be to a merciful God.”