Boy Crucified (8 page)

St. Joseph’s was a large apartment building, four stories, set back off the road with a large, tree-heavy front yard and a small parking lot in back. Daniel pulled around the building and stopped. It always felt like home, no matter how many years had gone by. There had been eighteen brothers and priests living there when I had joined; now there were five. Vocations had dwindled. Young people didn’t want to be Franciscans and priests. They wanted to be rock stars or Wall Street investors.

“What are we going to find here?” Daniel asked, flashing those brilliantly white teeth.

“Answers, perhaps,” I replied. I was finding it hard to adjust to his presence and to his constant stream of questions. I had gotten into the habit of doing everything by myself, my own way, at my own speed, without someone else tagging along.

If it had been anyone but Daniel Qo and his sly, knowing smile, I would have been excessively annoyed. Captain Harlock knew what he was doing when he made Daniel my partner.

I rang the bell on the back door, and we were greeted by an old monk: Brother Bernard.

“Father Ascension!” he exclaimed, using my old religious name and ignoring the fact that I was no longer “Father” anyone, though I had never been officially excused from the priesthood, which required a dispensation from Rome. I had applied, but grew tired of waiting for an answer. John Paul II was a real hard-ass when it came to dispensing priests from their vows. He was too busy canonizing saints. He had canonized more of them than all the popes before him put together. His saint output was astonishing. He was much too busy to tend to that mounting pile of dispensation requests.

Brother Bernard opened the door and motioned for both of us to go inside. He gave me a hug, then took a long look at my face, while I took a long look at his. He was still just as ancient and careless about his personal appearance as ever, yet that light was still bright in his eyes. He had been the porter for St. Joseph’s for decades and might very well be the porter until the day he died.

“Who’s your friend?” he asked, turning to look at Daniel.

“My partner, Daniel Qo,” I said. “Daniel, this is Brother Bernard.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Daniel said, hesitantly holding out his hand as if he wasn’t sure whether the man would shake it or not. Bernard did, offering a huge grin.

“Why did you call him Father Ascension?” Daniel asked.

“That was his name,” Bernard said. “I forgot your real name,” he added, looking at me.

“Thomas Noel,” I said.

“Ah, Thomas, that’s right. Thomas, like St. Thomas. ‘Doubting Thomas,’ we used to call him, when he first came.”

“I can see why,” Daniel offered with a smile.

“I need to see Fr. Cyrus,” I said.

A shadow went over Bernard’s face.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Fr. Cyrus is sick,” he said. The way he said the word “sick” suggested that it wasn’t just a cold or a flu.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’ll let him tell you,” Bernard said. “He’s on the third floor, same room as always.”

Daniel remained behind as I went up the stairs. I paused briefly on the second floor, the whole of which was a chapel. It was here that the brothers said prayers and held Mass. I had spent a lot of time here, on my knees in front of the tabernacle containing the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, pouring my heart out to him, increasingly angered by his continued silence. That’s the problem with God, the constant silence. If God wanted to have a relationship with us, why didn’t He? What was preventing Him? Why were some blessed with visions and divine favors while the rest of us were left to stumble around in the darkness?

I made a face at the tabernacle, surprised at how resentful I felt at that particular moment. The old hurts still had the ability to bite, and bite deep. I was reminded of how deeply disappointing my relationship with God had been, and still was, and probably always would be.

On the third floor, I pushed open Cyrus’s door and found him propped up in bed, a smile on his face. He was very pale, looking haggard and old. He was almost eighty, so perhaps that was to be expected.

“Fr. Ascension,” he said, his voice throaty.

“Fr. Cyrus,” I replied. “Please call me Thomas.”

I went to his bed and knelt down, taking his old, feeble hand in my own. “What’s wrong?”

“Cancer,” he said. “I’m not a young man anymore.”

I felt something in my heart tightening up. Fr. Cyrus was one of the few people from my past that I loved, honestly and truly loved, with all my heart and soul. In so many ways, he was the father I’d never had.

“It’s not serious, is it?” I asked, knowing the question was stupid.

He shrugged and smiled. “Look at this,” he said. He showed me the business card I had given him on my last visit, several months ago. “I dug this out. I was going to call you. Just haven’t felt like getting myself downstairs. I wanted to make sure you were… okay.”

The way he said it suggested he wanted to make sure I was okay so he could die in peace, so a loose end could be tied up. It would probably not occur to him that I would have appreciated being notified that he was sick so I could visit and try to offer help.

“I’m fine,” I said. “You know you don’t have to worry about me.”

He smiled as if he knew this was a lie, which of course it was.

“A lot of these gray hairs belong to you,” he said, chuckling, pointing at his head. “Why don’t you sit on my bed? I wish I could get up, but I’m tired. What brings you here?”

Now that I knew he was sick, I didn’t want to say. I sat on the edge of his bed, frowning down on him. I hadn’t expected this. What else was going to go wrong? I had always thought Fr. Cyrus was going to live forever, was always going to be there, whenever I needed to hear his voice or see his ancient, wrinkled face.

“How are things at the police department?” he asked.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “Are you sure you’re up to some conversation?”

“I don’t look that bad, do I?”

“No,” I said, lying. “I just didn’t know you were sick.”

“Fire away,” he said.

“You have to keep it to yourself, but we’ve had a bizarre death, which I’m investigating. A boy was crucified, after a fashion. He seems to have been involved with a Catholic cult. I was wondering if you knew anything about groups like that.”

“Catholic cults?”

“The boy’s parents said he met some people from this group over the Internet. The people told him things like ‘the Pope is a heretic’ and that their group was the only true Catholic group left on the face of the planet and other outrageous stuff like that.”

“The Pope is a heretic?” he repeated.

I nodded.

“If I had to guess—I’m assuming that’s what you want me to do—I would say you’re looking for traditional Catholics. After Vatican II in the 1960s, there were a lot of changes in the Church, and a lot of Catholics fell away. Some of them formed ‘traditionalist’ groups, wanting to keep the Latin Mass, not wanting Mass in English. There was a bishop in France who made quite a name for himself by setting up a traditionalist seminary and churning out traditionalist priests. Archbishop Lefebvre. You should look into that, as a place to start. Before he died, not too many years ago, he defied the Vatican and consecrated four bishops to continue his ‘work’.”

“So these traditionalists don’t agree with Vatican II?”

“That’s partly it, yes. There’s a lot of those groups out there, especially here in the US, although there are some in Europe. The ones in Europe tend to be a bit more intellectual. The ones over here tend to be a bit odd. Extremists, disobedient, argumentative. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about them.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Mostly scandalous stuff. Some of these priests and bishops get themselves involved with right-wing causes, or drugs, or sex scandals, all sorts of things.”

“When you say right-wing causes, do you mean things like the Jewish World Conspiracy?”

He nodded, chuckled. “All that kind of nonsense—conspiracies, the John Birch Society, the ‘Church has been infiltrated by communists’. All of it nonsense, start to finish, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it. Anyway, they’re not the first group of people to break away from the Church, not by a long shot. After Vatican I, there were dissidents who broke away because they did not believe in papal infallibility, which had been defined at Vatican I. They also had problems with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which was also proclaimed at about that time. So they broke away. We call them Old Catholics now. Of course, you have the whole Protestant thing, the Anglicans, all the rest of it. Vatican II produced its own unhappy people, and they were just the latest in a long line of what we used to call hell-bound heretics. Now we just call them our ‘separated brethren’.”

He fell silent and seemed to be trying to remember something.

“We had a group come by here, maybe five years ago,” he said, frowning. “Can’t remember who they were. But they were traditionalists. They wanted to buy St. Joseph’s from us. Offered us a ridiculously low purchase price. We sat around the table and laughed about it. They wanted to set up some traditionalist nuns here, or something. Of course we said no. But we were impressed by them. Two of their priests came, wearing cassocks, like the old days, with Roman collars. Knew their theology, weren’t shy about sharing it. Knew Latin. All their seminarians are taught Latin. They were respectful, but you could see they were looking down their noses at us.”

“You don’t remember who they were?”

“Can’t remember now, but they bought a property about three blocks down the street from here. Got a sign out front. You could go talk to them.”

Seeing Fr. Cyrus always brought back many memories. After being taken away from my mother, I was sent to a boy’s home, where Fr. Cyrus was the chaplain. Because I was Catholic, he had taken a special interest in me. On my part, I had fallen in love with him—a true-blue crush—despite the fact that he was in his midfifties and not at all interested in me in a sexual way.

I chuckled.

“What?” he asked.

“I was thinking about that time, after Mass, when I took all my clothes off.”

He chuckled along with me.

After serving one of his Sunday Masses, we both went back to the sacristy to get changed. I went a bit too far and took off all my clothes, my horrible erection impossible to miss. I told him I loved him and wanted him to “make love” to me. I all but begged him to molest me. What I needed, and didn’t know at the time, was for someone to touch me, to hold me, to reassure me. I went at it in the only way I knew, a crude, stupid, bumbling way.

“I had such a crush on you,” I said.

“I knew that.”

“And you were very nice.”

He had merely told me to put my clothes back on. Afterward, he had hugged me for a long time, rubbing at my hair, telling me that he loved me like a father, and that I didn’t need to do anything silly to get his attention. I cried. He knew what I needed, even though I didn’t. Despite what I had just done, he told me I was a good kid, and that God loved me very much and always would. He even signed me out of the home that day and took me to lunch at McDonald’s. Then we went to St. Joseph’s and I sat in his office and told him everything about my life, everything my mother had done, some of which he already knew, most of which he did not. I had gotten myself so worked up that he made me lie down on the couch in the brothers’ living room, and he sat with me, holding my hand, until I fell asleep.

“How are you doing?” he asked very quietly.

I could never lie to him, so I didn’t answer.

“You heard from your mother lately?”

“She stabbed me yesterday with a syringe.”

“What on earth for?”

“She just got out of prison. She wanted money. I said no.”

“And that’s the one thing you never get to say to your mother, isn’t it?”

It was indeed.

I looked at him, not taking my eyes away. I didn’t want to be sitting here talking about my problems. “What can I do to help you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just be happy, Thomas. That’s all. Just find some way to be happy, and to love God again.”

“I’m trying,” I said.

“The last time we talked, you were going on about the Hare Krishnas.”

“Yes. I like them.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that. They’re quite serious about their beliefs.”

They certainly were.

“Maybe someday you’ll come back to us,” he said, putting a hand on my arm, reminding me of another old hurt, his hope that I would return to the Franciscans, would be a priest again, would be his brother in religious life, that my disappointment with God would end.

“Come back and be a priest,” he said. “Come back and be what you are, and stop fighting it.”

Stop fighting!

“I can’t,” I said.

“With God, all things are possible.”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I tried very hard not to cry. I was very tempted to drop everything and return to the Franciscans, to run from life again, to flee from the perps and wackos, to flee from the madness of life, to retreat to some cloister where I could just pray and think nice thoughts all day and not have to participate in the world’s problems.

It was so very tempting. But it would be wrong, just as it had been the first time. It would be even more wrong now.

I offered a shy kiss on the cheek before leaving, wondering if I would ever see him again.

X

A
S
Fr. Cyrus had said, a traditionalist group had bought a property three blocks down the street. It was named St. Benedict’s Convent. We parked in front and were greeted by a nun in full regalia, reminding me of why nuns are often called penguins. Only a bony face was visible through the layers of black cloth that surrounded her face, head, shoulders, and body. A large rosary hung from her waist. Black plastic glasses added to the effect.

“We’re with the Kansas City Police Department,” I said, introducing Daniel and myself. “We’re doing some research on traditional Catholic groups. Is there someone we could talk to?”