Crimes of the Father

by Thomas Keneally

  “Beside the point, Maureen! I do not plan to spread this news that my son was poisoned at the root. Paul may. I don’t. Because Stephen wouldn’t have wanted me to. Didn’t you hear me earlier? He felt safe in telling me only after he’d died. He wanted us to know and to forgive him. He didn’t want to be on the front page of the Herald. So, please go! And respect my son, for Christ’s sake, Maureen. No more passing the news around.”

  Maureen hung her head, defeated and bewildered.

  “I’m sorry for the huge suffering that’s come your way, Liz,” said Docherty. “I met young Stephen . . .”

  “I remember that,” she said, suddenly almost indulgent. “It was when I still thought we had a chance.”

  Docherty lowered his voice. “If I can do anything, I’ll be here a few more weeks. Maureen can contact me.”

  “Just go!” said Liz.

  She closed the door briskly and they were alone on the doorstep. They spent some time absorbing their shock before they made their way silently out of the bird-filled garden. Damian was parked at the corner, reading a book.

  “Despite what she says,” Maureen said, “you have to take the letter to the cardinal.”

  “I don’t know exactly what I have to do,” Docherty admitted. “Her reason for not making it known is pretty authoritative.”

  “She won’t know you’ve spoken to him.”

  “If I were to, I’d need two copies,” said Docherty. “As I said, I don’t believe in telling the cardinal without confronting your brother, so I need a copy for him, too. And this Wood . . . I think we have to contact him.”

  “Oh God, what a sister I am,” said Maureen, and seized his upper arm to support herself. Docherty was tempted to encircle her.

  At that moment Damian pulled up beside them. “Forgotten me?” he asked through the window.

  And they had. Maureen’s humiliation and confusion, and their old habit of companionship, had driven him from their minds.

  The Breslins dropped Docherty back to the monastery. He went to the television room and was drinking beer with Eismann when the doorbell rang. Docherty answered it and found a frowning brown-haired young man in a business suit and loosened tie. “Good evening,” said Docherty. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Paul Cosgrove,” said the young man. “My mother told me you’d visited.”

  “I fear I wasn’t very welcome.”

  “I don’t think she realized it did some good.”

  “Would you like to come into the parlor?” suggested Docherty.

  “No. You want to tell the cardinal, don’t you?”

  “I feel I must.”

  “I’m with you,” said Paul. “Leave it to me to persuade my mother, and I take full responsibility for now if you go ahead. Let’s at least see how they react. If they don’t take notice . . . that could be another matter.”

  “Come in and have a coffee?”

  “I have to get back to her,” said Paul.

  “I’ll appraise Monsignor Shannon and the cardinal of what’s in the letter, then. I think it’s the right thing.”

  “Good. That’s what I want.”

  “What about this other man? Wood?”

  “He’s got offices all over Asia.”

  “That’s good to hear,” said Docherty. “In a sense.”

  “Last I heard he was living in Hong Kong.”

  When Paul had left, Docherty returned to his room and left a message at the cathedral for Monsignor Shannon saying he wanted to speak to him on an important matter, something that could have an impact upon In Compassion’s Name.

  * * *

  THERE WAS a desktop computer in the front office of the monastery to allow technically adventurous monks to send and receive emails. Since most of the priests were Docherty’s age or older, the email traffic was low. But that evening Docherty did find a message from a friend in his monastic house in Waterloo, Father Tubby Enright, Yorkshireman and former infantryman in Northern Ireland.

  I wonder how you are traveling in the wicked Antipodes. All here is summer torpor half of Canada has gone to Disneyland. How did the Australians receive your suggestions about handling abuse? I’d love to hear you say that they were wide open to your ideas. Seeing any rugby league while you’re down there? You blokes are the best in the world, as you’re very quick to tell everyone. In the English summer, my crowd are playing a Test series against the West Indies and doing it indifferently. Four Yorkshiremen, though, in the England team! What would they do without us despised northern English, refugees from pit, plant, unemployment and the army. . . . May I say, I regret the papal embargo on the idea of purgatory. I’d like to think Maggie Thatcher could spend a lot of time there. And are you sure in that fancy mind of yours that death itself was adequate Hell for Hitler?

  One of Docherty’s heretical ideas was that death might be what Hell was. In any case he enjoyed hearing from this sane friend. It was all anyone needed for balance. One sane friend, and a gift for meditation.

  He had not intended to go online, however, to collect his emails. He tentatively typed Brian Wood’s name into the search engine, adding the tag “financial services,” and was rewarded by the Yahoo listing “Wood and Associates, operational and corporate restructuring,” and an address in a new glass tower in Chifley Square. When he clicked on the entry, the company website came up. It was well designed, as only rich corporations and universities, with their many and varied IT specialists, seemed to be able to manage. The website declared:

  WOOD AND ASSOCIATES are a leading corporate consultancy in the southwest Pacific area, with offices in all the Australian capitals, New Zealand, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Our task is to bring to the operational restructuring of our clients innovative solutions for all business challenges—from those offered by changing world and domestic markets to the refining of priorities arising from amalgamations. To this task, our team brings unprecedented energy and concern for the needs of those we serve. Our repute depends on supplying you with models that will suit you in uncertain times and at any level of corporate growth.

  Docherty clicked on “OUR PEOPLE.” No one in the management team looked more than forty-five years old. None was bald except a director who had obviously and willfully shaved his head. No one had gray hair or carried excess weight. Bright-eyed and authoritative-­looking young women were notable amongst management and the board. Docherty knew that his mother, born in different times and under different stars, could have been such a woman—she had the clarity of mind and the will for it.

  The managing partner was Brian Wood, who looked at the camera with authoritative whimsy. His dark hair shone. He looked like a man who rode his bike at dawn and visited the gym in the evenings. His gaze showed no signs of trauma, no acknowledgment of old molestations. His sleeping dogs seemed to lie passive, or had wandered away entirely. Docherty knew the risks of approaching him and did not like to take them. To make Wood revisit his childhood could evoke disabling sorrow and rage, and this young man, if once a victim, had made himself and his corporation into an international force, and most probably had a desire to forget.

  In any case, Docherty dialed the Sydney number. Everything he said after he opted to speak to the receptionist seemed half-demented to him.

  “Hello? I wondered, could I get a message to Mr. Wood? Yes, Mr. Brian Wood. My name is Father Frank Docherty: D-O-C-H . . . That’s right. It’s about the death of a former classmate of his. A Stephen Cosgrove. P-H, yes. Could Mr. Wood call me, I wondered?”

  The woman said, “Mr. Wood is in Hong Kong at the moment. He’s due back tomorrow but he may not be in the office.”

  “If you could get the message to him, I’d be grateful.”

  Conscious of the environmental immorality of printing out the website page—even the forests of Canada, let alone Tasmania, were not limitless—he did so, and then print
ed the letter from Tubby, purely for the self-indulgence of clinging to it as to a talisman.

  * * *

  IN HIS letter to the cardinal, Docherty made the point that in light of the accusation the monsignor was facing, the cardinal himself had a duty to inform the police, even if they already had the letter. It was a duty not so much to inform on the alleged perpetrator as to notify the authorities that children might be imperiled. This was the way the law operated in Ontario, at any rate; he did not know if these things worked in the same way in New South Wales, but he intended to make inquiries.

  Docherty further pointed out that the Cosgrove family, though resolved to privacy as yet, could at any time release to the press the news of the enclosed letter (on which Docherty had blacked out Brian Wood’s name), and thereby the Church’s defense in the Devitt case could be prejudiced. Not that he was concerned, by this stage, if it was damaged, but he did not think it wise to make that point to the cardinal. However, he did tell the cardinal that, rightly or wrongly, Stephen’s mother was outraged that the monsignor was a notable witness for the defense in this unfolding case; and he believed that the cardinal, if not open to the accusation itself, would be open to the possibility that if there were a scandal, the Church might need to abandon its defense and yield to the plaintiff.

  It was on these reasoned grounds that Docherty expected an earnest reply. He was uncertain whether he should add to the letter that by pure happenstance he had met another person who claimed to have been preyed on by the monsignor. He spent some time weighing whether this would give greater credibility to what he wrote, or less, but in the end he feared it might allow the cardinal to suspect he was actively collecting evidence against Shannon as some form of clerical vendetta. He decided it would be best to mention it only when the cardinal made contact. He felt that he had already wandered far from the comfort of guidelines—given that Liz Cosgrove had not wanted her son’s letter shown to others, and was skeptical of the value of doing it; and the taxi driver, Sarah, was just as uncertain about where to take her outrage. Sarah did not want her name mentioned yet. Whereas, in the case of Stephen Cosgrove, names could not be avoided, and the accusations were pressing enough, he felt, to override all etiquette.

  18

  * * *

  Maureen Breslin After Humanae Vitae, 1968

  AFTER PAUL VI’s encyclical, I went to Father Docherty’s confessional again. I had a foredoomed sense he could do something for me. My situation was that I could see no way to disobey the encyclical and remain a Catholic, and if I did not remain a Catholic, I would be spitting on my ancestors’ Mass stones of Donegal.

  When I told Frank I was there to talk about the encyclical, he said, “A lot are. Others have been driven away by it, too.”

  “Is there anything I can do but obey?” I asked him.

  There was a silence. I had a fancy that he had vacated the confessional, gone off to consult further authorities. Then he said, “It throws a different light on everything, doesn’t it?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m still asking for enlightenment on this business,” he said. “There is no doubt that an encyclical is authoritative. You’re quite right—the way the Church has developed for good and ill, the Church we live in, makes us acknowledge that.”

  Still, I had nothing to say.

  He launched into an almost annoying disquisition, in which he appeared to think history had reached an interesting point rather than an impasse for the flesh and spirit, mine and Damian’s.

  “The idea of basing the moral law on the natural order is something I haven’t thought about a lot, and that hasn’t been emphasized in my experience. It’s a little like politicians who speak of ‘the will of the people’—they’re often the least worthy to invoke it. But let’s look at the natural order of things. There have been plenty of changes in the natural order—interventions—which have been considered lawful but have changed the essential nature of things. The creation, for example, of hybrid plants by the biologist monk Mendel. Why wouldn’t the Vatican see that as an interference with the natural law? I don’t know the answer. I admit I can’t come to a confident conclusion either way.”

  He sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “You don’t need a lecture, you need relief. Look, I think we have to wait for the dust to settle, as it will. In the meantime, my counsel is to take account of the encyclical, but also of your conscience. Nothing you have said seems indulgent or malicious to me. I will absolve you without penance.”

  “But no one else except you has ever told me to follow my conscience,” I said. “I still feel that relying on it is a crime.”

  He laughed sympathetically. “In any system of rule there’s a tendency to emphasize certain matters and de-emphasize others, and the Vatican is a system of rule, as well as a spiritual realm. But if you look at doctrine, you’ll find the Vatican doesn’t quite agree with you that your individual conscience is no good for anything. It’s just that at the moment they’re trying to regain authority—they feel things have gone too far, with home liturgies and liberation theology and the rest. Still, the fact they want to reassert their authority doesn’t mean that what you decide in good faith is invalid. If our conscience is not to be believed, why are we given such a faculty? By the way, forgive my asking, but did you have any problems with the births of your children?”

  “I was weak, I’m afraid. I ended up in hospital with postpartum blues after the last one.”

  Frank breathed out audibly. “That’s an important factor in your decision. A factor the Pope doesn’t take account of in the encyclical, as far as I’ve read.”

  I began to weep. Because I did not believe in the concept he was pushing. On one level, it frightened me.

  There was a silence, which he must have thought impolite to break. He said at last, “The week before the final vote on papal infallibility on 18 July 1870, the Church was still the Church. Had the doctrine been voted down, by American bishops and others, the Church would still have been the Church. A fortnight ago, the Church was still the Church, and your conscience told you it was acceptable for you to take the extraordinary medical advance represented by the Pill. And in a fortnight’s time, the Church will still be the Church it ever was, and your conscience will be the same, as well. You believed only a little time ago, before the Pope spoke, in your individual conscience. And now you’re telling me you don’t. If your conscience was right then, it’s right now. So was it right then?”

  I wasn’t used to having genuine conversations in that cold, salutary place, the confessional. I was certainly not used to arguing for the sinfulness of this and that—the priest in the confessional had been all too willing to do that for me in childhood and through my adolescence. Frank Docherty, the most modern priest, assumed the faithful had something to say for themselves.

  “Might the Pope think you a heretic?” I asked.

  I heard him laugh lowly. “Maybe. No. I hope not.”

  But it remained very hard for me to resist the idea that my conscience was in Rome, that it resided at the Vatican and was mediated to me by bishops.

  * * *

  IN HIS brave preaching at Longueville, Docherty introduced us to the living standards and work hours of the weavers of Bengal. In one of his sermons, he praised Dr. Fatima Deriaya’s work and called her a just Muslim. The normal doctrine, he said, was that people outside the Church were saved because their invincible ignorance was forgiven by God. But surely they might earn redemption not by forgivable ignorance but by merit, and because the same spirit breathed on them, too.

  This was but one of the sermons that would turn out to be reported as heterodox to the cardinal archbishop. It was a mixed electorate we lived in, and some of the old conservatives clung to their fear of rampant Asiatic Communism if we did not “stop them” in Vietnam. So we knew not everyone liked Father Docherty’s eloquent sermons. Now the question was, would he preach on the e
ncyclical?

  On the Sunday eight days after my confession, Father Docherty committed the ultimate bravery of doing that. He was wary, he told the congregation, of laying down the law on marriage. He knew that he understood nothing practical about marriage. Even many married people understood little enough, he said, to laughter. Laughter was not a common reaction to sermons in Catholic churches in those days. I look back once more with astonishment at how cowed we were and how every small relaxation of the spiritual regime refreshed us, just as Father Docherty’s home liturgy had.

  He went on to read passages from Humanae Vitae, and its exhortation that the natural phases of fertility were the only lawful means of contraception.

  “I know just enough, however,” he said, “having taken excellent medical advice, to say that this method cannot suit all parties, and that unchosen conception can be a threat to a woman’s psychiatric and physical health. The Church surely can’t mean that it expects women to immolate themselves. No God of mercy could want that.”

  Then he read a passage from, of all people least designed to impress the conservatives of the parish, Gandhi. A Hindu! Gandhi exhorted those who were going to their deaths to accept it with dignity, a dignity killers did not have. It was a noble thought and Gandhi was by definition a great soul. But did that moral position really work if, for example, you were under the heel of the SS? If you were able to reject death and bring about an escape, had you violated ­Gandhi’s principles? Was, in fact, he exaggerating for dramatic effect? Of course he was. He was exaggerating in the tradition of the prophetic parable. And might not the Pope thus similarly exhort his people in absolute terms since that suited the nature of an encyclical letter while being aware that, appropriately, married people would have recourse to their own consciences and circumstances. Was the Pope, indeed, giving us a counsel of perfection rather than an iron rule?

  Those in the congregation who were not stunned were, after Mass, gathered in the churchyard gossiping or discussing. Docherty had gone one step further than he had gone in his reasoning to me in the confessional. He had brought up the idea that the Pope might exaggerate.