Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  I suddenly and for the first time felt that I was the confessor and he the penitent.

  “But how can one tell one’s conscience from what is convenient and comfortable?” I asked, like a true Catholic of my generation.

  “You can tell it’s your conscience if it keeps speaking to you despite all,” he said. “If other choices seem morally absurd. Look, our consciences can deceive us, but they’re all we have.”

  This was wonderful to me. I had heard it in the confessional, the international forum of absolute moral authority, and it suddenly made eminent sense. Within that strict and sometimes tyrannous space, Frank Docherty had set me free. It is true, as orthodox feminism has it, that the history of the confessional is a history of male authority over women’s bodies. And it seemed to me that he somehow knew this and didn’t want to play that trick; perhaps he’d played it once in callow times but had now got beyond it. Frank Docherty seemed a heretic to me, but he’d made me rebellious enough to believe that if I was judged with him and condemned, I was judged in good company.

  5

  * * *

  Docherty Gives His Lecture

  July 1996

  DOCHERTY HAD been invited to speak at the Sydney Council of the Clergy by Dr. Gil Heffernan, a former priest. Heffernan, a man of considerable moral repute, was now laicized and married, and ran the office of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council. Docherty had never met him, but Heffernan had been a young progressive in Melbourne when Docherty himself was a young progressive in Sydney. Docherty had been sent away; Heffernan had taken his expertise as a social scientist into the Social Justice Council, a tolerated arm of the Church generally considered a haven for Catholic lefties, liberation theologists, and ineffectual liberals. To what extent the return to authoritarianism in 1963 by the Vatican after the death of John XXIII had explained the departures of some of the best and cleverest was a question hard to measure, but the losses had been considerable.

  Earlier in the year, Heffernan had read in the Toronto Catholic Register one of Docherty’s articles debating celibacy, and asking whether it contributed to the spate of child abuse cases emerging in North America. He had also read Docherty’s article in Psychology Today, entitled “Emotional Dwarfism and the Abusive Priest,” which was based on Docherty’s research and clinical work at the University of Waterloo, Ontario; and then a speech Docherty had given at Waterloo in which he outlined his findings on how the Church dealt with abuse cases, findings based on his interviews with victims, men and women, who had been sent to him for counseling.

  Docherty’s diocese in Canada happened to have a more progressive leadership than Sydney. He knew this for a fact because its bishop had authorized and supported his research even though his repute was still considered risqué by those who did not understand his true case—which was that as well as giving solace to victims, Docherty also advocated methods more likely to protect the name of his profession in the long run.

  On the bus to town that morning of Docherty’s second day in Sydney, uncertain of his reception by an audience of his fellows, he went over his notes. He was to lecture on abuse phenomena amongst the clergy. He got out near Museum Station and walked across the park towards the sandstone mass of St. Mary’s Cathedral. “Oh, the place where I worship is St. Mary’s Cathedral,” they used to sing in the seminary, “built on the blood of the poor.” Docherty had been ordained here in the year of President Kennedy’s election, a high-­water mark for Irish Catholics the world over.

  He saw a fairly expectant scatter of priests on the pavement around the doorway of the cathedral chapter house, a neo-Gothic hall down the hill from the neo-Gothic exuberance of the cathedral. Surely the entire conference was not taking place here?

  Heffernan met him. After they’d exchanged pleasantries, he took Docherty aside by the elbow. “Look, when we authorized you to come, we thought you’d be given the main venue, which is up the road at the Sheraton. But we got orders from above.” Heffernan put his thumb in the direction of the cathedral. It was a weary gesture. “And we had planned that you would have a plenary session everyone would attend, but, again . . .” He made an apologetic noise with his lips. “You’ve heard about the resumption of the Supreme Court hearing?”

  Docherty had indeed read in his newspaper a short item about a man who intended to issue a writ of damages against the Church for abuse he had suffered as a boy.

  “It’s a young scientist pleading to get the Limitation Act lifted so he can sue.”

  “Yes,” said Docherty. “So the old sub judice considerations ­operate.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry—you shouldn’t refer to it.”

  “Of course. Don’t worry yourself, Gil. Please.”

  “But we all need to hear this—the good, the indifferent, and the expedient of us.”

  “Yes,” Docherty agreed. “But I can imagine the cardinal archbishop would have been against a plenary session. I’m not necessarily judging the man up the hill. And I’m certainly not comparing him to my bishop in Ontario.”

  “Anyhow,” Heffernan said, “you will have a good and interested audience in a Gothic ambience. You’ll be preaching in large part to the converted, I’m afraid.”

  Docherty reassured him. They had paid his economy fare and he would do his best by them, he said. If he could, he would give it back. . . . Heffernan insisted he wasn’t implying that at all. “I’ll take you round to our green room,” he said ironically, as if they were on a television set.

  Heffernan told him on the way that a number of bishops—those who would not be attending his talk—had sent their secretaries or, in a few cases, their vicar-generals. Docherty was part-relieved that by and large he would be speaking to priests and not the hierarchy. Though the priests would, no doubt, be reporting to their superiors, it meant he’d be able to speak more directly.

  There was, in fact, a hulking Western Australian bishop sitting in the green room in shirtsleeves but wearing his collar and purple stock. He rose with fraternal promptness as they entered. He was the chairman of the council, a man with a good reputation, well known for his work with the bored youth of the hinterland towns and for inventive programs for Aboriginals, in which he followed the advice of a council of Noongar tribal elders, without, it was claimed, second-guessing them. This man greeted him, said that the Council was honored to have him here, and asked if Heffernan had been discussing with him “the problem with our betters,” as this bishop called it. Then he said he should get a seat, and without fuss left them. Docherty could hear a lot of talk from the hall. Engaged voices.

  * * *

  HE WENT in and saw the old cedar rafters above, the sconces flowering at their bases, and the pilasters that continued the line of the rafters down to the floor. The room was filling. A few priests nodded at him, but as to a stranger. Many of them were caught up in personal exchanges with an edge of intensity to them. The subjects he was to address put everyone on edge. Him, too.

  The Western Australian bishop led the congregation in a prayer that asked for wisdom and reverence for each other to infuse the session. Heffernan gave a polite tap on the microphone and the audience composed itself. There were laypeople in the hall, Docherty saw, and a number of women, members of the council or its secretariat.

  Heffernan’s introduction was brief: Dr. Docherty, formerly of this archdiocese, was an associate professor in developmental psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. His work gave him clinical access to Catholics who complained of priestly abuse, but also to priests themselves, whether they suffered from depression or psychosexual disorders. The bishops of eastern Canada had taken an interest in his work because of its potential application to the psychological screening of men who wanted to become priests. Dr. Docherty would, he continued, also address the question of the relationship between celibacy and some of the scandalous instances of child abuse being reported from America and Ireland, and
now Australia as well. “I am very pleased to see that these matters are sufficiently important to you that you have attended today. And you will give, I’m sure, a strong welcome back to his home city to Dr. Frank Docherty.”

  Docherty rose to an earnest barrage of applause. After the introductory formalities and a joke about jet lag, he began.

  “I was asked, in part, to speak on the future of celibacy. That is, I was asked to be a prophet. But Five Dock, where I was born, statistically lacks in prophets, and I do not intend to mar its record.

  “In my research, I do my best to investigate whether the training of a celibate clergy has anything to do with this alarming phenomenon of claims of abuse, many of them already proven. Is it good enough for us to tell ourselves, as some do, that acts of pedophilia and abuse occur in all manner of institutions—from the Boy Scouts of the United States and Britain to boarding schools throughout the world—and are not peculiar to the Catholic Church? The Boy Scouts, however, do not claim the authority over faith and morals that the Church does. The scale of the Church’s claims, and the boast that we are urged forth by the love of Christ, compels us at least to consider whether there is anything systemic in the Church to encourage the perpetrator of reprehensible and, by the way, criminal acts against the young. For we should be concerned that these laws offend not only morality, but are subject to the intervention of the state, and we should not content ourselves that the repute of the Church is such in our communities that police forces and justice systems will never intervene. In many cases they already have. Increasingly, we shall not be permitted to continue to deal with these matters exclusively in-house. Indeed, the days when we could confidently depend on applying our own solutions, enlightened or not, self-serving or not, are vanishing.

  “There will be more civil cases. Writs have been issued, for example, against the archdiocese of Dallas, Texas, involving a single complainant. And a number of class actions are likely to emerge in the United States. It seems essential that the Church does not look upon these merely as an assault on its treasure, but as a claim for compassion, a test of its moral standing, and, most significantly for the individual priest, of your and my repute and effectiveness.

  “As for criminal prosecutions, in Canada charges are in the process of being laid against Christian Brothers who have been accused of pedophilia by a number of former inmates of the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s, Newfoundland, during the 1950s. Police were slow to react to these accusations, but the media and groups such as the National Abuse Coalition have since given the victims a forum and a level of support, and solace, they did not previously have. Legislatures have reacted to such initiatives as Congress’s 1986 Child Abuse Victims’ Rights Act, reducing the trauma for victims in testifying in these cases.”

  The mood of the audience was engaged and there were no wry mouths or shaking heads.

  “I am far from being the first to issue such warnings. The American Father Gerald Fitzgerald, a pioneer in treating abusing priests, wrote a series of letters to bishops in the United States in the early 1950s warning them of a coming crisis and urging them to take account of the fact that moving offending clergy to a new parish, or diocese, or country would not reliably prevent them from reoffending.

  “The collapse of the Fianna Fáil government in Ireland due to its lack of cooperation in the extradition of abuser Father Brendan Smyth to Northern Ireland, and the resignation two years ago of Monsignor Ledwith, the president of the great Maynooth Seminary, following a sexual abuse allegation, are signs that more than stopgap policies are needed and that in issues involving pedophilia and abuse, we must make the victims the chief issue—for reasons of both humanity and governance.

  “We cannot blame the media’s appetite for these cases on sectarianism, on doctrinaire feminism, on the theory of the child as it arose during and after the Industrial Revolution. None of this will give solace to the victim or redemption to the Church. The condition of the world is what it is, and our response is sometimes what it should not be. Self-preservation and the protection of assets have figured, in practice, in many North American dioceses, as if they were of more significance than the pain of the wronged victim.

  “Simply to raise the issue is in some eyes an outrage. It is not my intention to outrage anyone or unsettle men in their vocations. The future of celibacy may well turn out to be more celibacy. There is a sense now, however, that the terms of trade under which a priest plies his tasks have altered. The onus and solitary nature of the priesthood are of a different order than they once were. In towns of old, in Ireland or Poland, or in Catholic cities in the booming New World, there used to be presbyteries full of priests, and a constant traffic of the community. We as children were attracted to the priesthood perhaps by the camaraderie between priests, and between these men and their community, in big parishes and big presbyteries. Those presbyteries are now a memory. The community is at work, men and women fitting themselves to the strict regimen of the new economics. So nowadays presbyteries can seem sterile houses without visitors—I know myself from relieving in them in North America—and often with one priest and none of the former vivifying human traffic. I must say I am pleased to belong and live in the fraternity of my ­order’s house.

  “Many earnest scholars interested in the future of the Church feel the need for new, transparent studies that are open to peer scrutiny. The University of Chicago has conducted one—needless to say, a confidential one—into clerical celibacy. Catholic bishops in a number of dioceses encouraged their priests to participate, for they felt it was time to be realistic about the issue. Let me say, I hold no brief for abolishing celibacy—that is not my business. An old priest once told me, ‘Celibacy is the card you’re dealt, and if you want to play the game, you have to take that card as well.’ Based on the Chicago study, however, more than sixty percent of priests admitted to sexual experience of one kind or another.”

  Now the first mockery, with unease at its base, broke out. “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” someone called. There was a prurient seminarian guffaw.

  “But as the Chicago study also makes clear, that is true only for those who have volunteered to comment on the end of a relationship, however temporary. There are other men who may have pursued a relationship, whether within the priesthood or not, but have chosen not to give evidence. In any case, the study concluded that the great majority of the men who did give evidence possessed a relatively high level of emotional and, if you can bear the far more pretentious term, ‘psychosexual’ maturity.”

  The interest of the audience was restored. There did not seem to be many cynics here.

  “It has been my task,” continued Docherty, “as a clinical psychologist, to treat men who, to use shorthand, lack that maturity; who had it blocked by a number of factors. One could argue that a by-­product of celibacy is the admission into the seminaries of a number of psychosexually immature men, who are encouraged by an outdated system to maintain such immaturity as a defense against homosexuality. And within the traditional system, the sad truth is that adult women were too easily dismissed as a mere temptation, an occasion of sin. Fifty-one percent of the population, that is, written off as an inconvenience to celibacy. Not only does this offend the instincts of democracy, but it immediately turns the entire gender into a series of volatile objects. Further, the acute, often conscientious, sensibility of Catholic confessors to the sin of masturbation created a milieu in which ‘the objectification of women,’ as modern gender studies calls it, prevailed, giving false encouragement to those who were incapable of mature relationships or sexuality.

  “This is the seminary environment in which we were all educated. I look out at you and see honest faces full of commitment and humanity, and it shows me that the innate virtues—call them sanctifying grace, if you like—can survive what many experts are now calling a bad education.”

  Docherty could see many of the priests taking notes.
One cried heartily, “Hear, hear!” He hoped the others were not taking notes in the same way as his right-wing parishioners in Sydney used to record his “political” sermons in order to undermine him to the cardinal archbishop.

  “Herein, incidentally, we have a case for a new kind of education. It is easy to be celibate because of a fear of women. We remember from our earliest instructions St. Kevin, that good Irish mystic at Glendalough in Wicklow, who, when approached by a maiden, cast her over the waterfall into the waters below. If St. Kevin could maintain his virtue only by homicide, better he had given himself to her. The minority of abusers, some of whom were themselves abused as children, suffer from the St. Kevin syndrome: they are attracted to children or the young; they find it licit to use their power to compel them, and at the end they throw them over the waterfall.”

  The best message I can give is near delivered, Docherty thought with relief.

  There had been scandals everywhere, he continued. His audience knew that, and did not need an enumeration of the horror stories. Researchers—and Docherty named several psychologists and social scientists from Europe and the US—predicted that the majority of cases were still to emerge, and that the numbers would astound and humiliate the Church—priests and laypeople. The damage done to the repute of priests by the 4 percent of them who were guilty of these crimes, and the further unknown percentage who sheltered them, could be catastrophic if bishops and their superiors continued to pursue a policy of denial, secrecy, and legalism.

  There were two options, he said. One was to try to silence victims while compensating them in a limited way. This involved the victim signing a confidentiality agreement and guaranteeing not to seek further legal redress. That is, the corporate church could defend itself against the victim the way mining companies frequently tried to do, most notoriously in the United States. The second was for the Church to make peace, as far as it could, with the victims, and to make no attempt to limit their rights. In dioceses in North America, confidentiality agreements were being broken in any case, and when they were revealed by the victims, they made the Church look niggardly, legalistic, and shifty.