Faith (3 page)

•  •  •

I
F YOU
aren't Catholic—or maybe especially if you are—you have wondered what possesses a young man to choose that life, with its elaborate privations. I have asked Art this question, expecting the boilerplate Church response, that priests are called by God. His answer surprised me. It helps, he said, to be a child, with little understanding of what he is forfeiting. Love to marriage to home and family: connect those dots, and you get the approximate shape of most people's lives. Take them away, and you lose any hope for connection. You give up your place in the world.

His words startled me, the deep weariness in his voice. We were speaking by phone late one night, a few years back. I have tried to date the conversation, with no success. We are both nocturnal, and likely spoke after midnight. But was it five years ago, or four, or three? Had he already met Kath Conlon and her son?

We became close in adulthood, a fact my younger self would have found surprising. Art had been a fixture in my early life, a regular presence at family gatherings; but our childhoods had scarcely overlapped; we never shared the noisy, grubby intimacy I had with Mike. My younger brother tells a story about his own fourth birthday. (Can he really remember that far back? Or is he merely conjuring up a photo from the family album, one I also recall: Mike sitting regally in his high chair, a chubby potentate; before him a decorated cake, a candle shaped like the number 4.) Art had brought him a toy, a stuffed giraffe with a ribbon round its neck, and Mike knew to say
thank you
even though it was nothing he wanted, a gift for a baby or, maybe, a girl. He had hesitated, unsure how to address the man in black. The aunts and uncles called him “Father.” Yet Art was also his
brother.
None of it had made sense.

I felt a similar confusion. My deeper closeness with Art coincided with my move to Philadelphia and, not accidentally, the end of my churchgoing. It was easier to think of Art as a brother the less I thought about his work, and in Philly I had no contact with priests. I once phoned Art in mid-August and asked, innocently, how he'd spent his day. I'd forgotten it was the feast of the Assumption, though the Holy Days of Obligation had been drummed into my head from an early age. We both knew then that I had left the fold forever. Except for the one time, which I'll get to later, he never tried to coax me back.

It seems, now, that I should have seen trouble coming. But Art had been a priest for twenty-five years; moreover, he had never been anything else. I understood that his life lacked certain kinds of human closeness, but then so did mine. I'd recently placed a down payment on a studio apartment, a large sunny room at the top of an old row house. In Philadelphia it was all the space a high school teacher could afford, and all I could imagine needing, a concrete commitment to the path I'd been following quietly for years. I'd tried marriage—briefly, disastrously—and was divorced with a slice of wedding cake still in my freezer, awaiting our first anniversary. It had long appeared likely, and at last seemed decided, that I would always live alone.

Was it my own loneliness that made Art's invisible? I wouldn't have said he was unhappy being a priest. I was present the Sunday he gave his first homily and I can still remember his ease at the pulpit. Years of parochial schooling had overexposed me to sermons, but Art's were unlike any I'd heard. His style was gentle and humorous, slyly persuasive. He was so thoughtful and engaging that I might have listened to him anyway, even if he weren't my brother. His new life fit him. Singing the Kyrie, he seemed to glow with a deep contentment, his rich tenor filling the small chapel, his eyes closed in prayer. Unusual, and gratuitous, to sing it in Latin: I understood this was a private gift to my mother. I turned to look at her sitting behind me, her eyes full.

How alive he seemed to me then, how exhilarated by his first baptism, first wedding, first midnight Mass. But these are old memories. In recent years he scarcely spoke of his work. Our conversations revolved around family news, the aches and illnesses of our aging parents, Mike's marriage and the births of his three sons. Art never expressed regrets, not explicitly; but of course he had them. Show me a man of fifty who doesn't regret the lives he hasn't lived.

I read over what I've written—
of course he had them
—and am ashamed of myself, the words seem so smug and facile. How easily I dismiss his sorrows, the griefs and losses that haunted him. The truth is that I loved Art, and that I failed him, in ways that will become clear.

For the first few months I tracked the scandal. Soon the reports referred to Art's case only in passing, and I realized that the story was much larger than my brother. At minimum it involved the entire Boston Archdiocese, hundreds of victims, dozens of priests. Day after day, until I could swallow no more, I ingested the queasy details, nicely organized in timelines and bullet points. The reporters didn't strike me as biased, and one could hardly accuse them of laziness. One persistent fellow dogged my poor parents for months. I don't believe, as my mother still does, that the press set out to make Art a monster. The accusations themselves were monstrous. And the evidence either way—of his guilt or innocence—was very slim.

And whose fault is that? a small voice asks me. It isn't God's voice or my brother's, but the voice of my own conscience, which I have ignored successfully for some time. I have kept Art's secrets. My excuse until now has been loyalty. Art asked that I tell no one, and I have kept my word.

Two years have passed since the events of that spring—a calendar spring, equinox to solstice; three months that, in New England, can feel like summer or winter. My parents still live in Grantham. On the surface their lives are unchanged. But my mother no longer attends daily Mass, or cleans the church rectory or pours coffee at parish dinners. On Sundays she sits alone in a rear pew, her head bowed. (My father won't set foot in a church, but that's nothing to do with Art. He hasn't been to Mass in years.) Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, Ma prays only for her Arthur, that God in His mercy will forgive whatever he has done.

Lately I visit Grantham without seeing my parents. I've never done this before, but then I've never had any reason to go back beyond guilt and a vague sense of obligation. Now I sleep on the foldout couch in Mike's finished basement, waking at dawn when my three nephews clamber down the stairs to play video games at high volume. I pay visits to Art's former church and rectory, and to those who knew him at that time: the church council; the parish housekeeper; the few diocesan priests willing to talk to me, only one of whom Art might have called a friend. We meet away from their rectories, at Dunkin' Donuts outlets deep in the suburbs, at diners, at bars. It is a function of my upbringing that I find it unsettling to drink with a priest. Certainly my mother would be mortified at the thought. Recent events have done nothing to dim her admiration of these men, and yet her encounters with them—at Legion of Mary bake sales, the annual Christmas luncheon of the local Catholic Daughters of the Americas—are fraught with anxiety. Three years ago—just before Art's disgrace—she attended a celebration of his silver jubilee. She beamed with pride through the anniversary Mass. Yet according to Mike, who sat beside her, at the dinner afterward she was nervous as a cat. Introduced to a series of friendly men in clerical collars, she flushed and stammered, stricken with embarrassment.

What she fears—I know this—is exposure. Of her own sins, real or imagined; her and my father's secret shames. After I have told Art's story, it's possible, likely even, that she will never speak to me again. Foolishly maybe, I hope otherwise. In my fantasy we sit together in her quiet kitchen, just us two. I open my heart to her and lay it on the table between us. I am still child enough to wish it were possible, adult enough to know it isn't. We are too much ourselves, the people we have always been.

T
HE BIBLE
offers four accounts of the life of Jesus, told by four different writers: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. God's Beatles wrote in different languages, in different centuries. Each saw the story in his own terms. Matthew had a particular interest in Jesus's childhood. Mark cared mainly about the endgame, the betrayal, crucifixion and death. Only Luke—who never met Our Lord—mentions the two famous parables, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. John's gospel is full of miracles and revelations, the raising of Lazarus, its own charmed poetry.
I am the Light of the world. I am the true Vine. Abide in me.

The story of my family likewise changes with the teller. Ma's version focuses on the early years. (Each year at our birthdays we were treated to our own nativity stories—Art the preemie, Mike the breech birth, myself the induced labor—as though she were trying to decide, once and for all, which child had caused her the greatest misery in coming into the world.) Mike's gospel is terse and action-packed; like the apostle Mark, he cuts to the chase. Clare Boyle's tale, if she'll tell it, is full of innuendo and hearsay. Like Luke, she merely repeats what she's heard.

Art was our apostle John.

For most of my life, I have refused to take part in the telling. In some way this was an act of rebellion. I was eighteen when I moved away from Boston, and I'd had enough of the McGann family lore. But recent events have changed my thinking, and I offer here my own version of the story, a kind of fifth gospel. The early pages borrow heavily from other accounts. The miracles and revelations will come later, the stories never before told.

So, to those who remained loyal to my brother, and those who didn't: here is his story as far as I know it, what Art told me at the time and what I found out later, and what I still can't verify but know in my heart to be true. In many cases I have re-created events I did not witness. There was nothing sophisticated in my method. I simply worked out what certain people must have said or felt, a task made easier by the fact that the two leading men were my brothers—one who confided in me, if belatedly and selectively; the other so deeply familiar that I can nearly channel his thoughts. This isn't as extraordinary as it sounds. It's mainly a function of his consistent character that in any given situation, I can predict, with dependable accuracy, what Mike would say and do. As for the other actors in the story, I have done my best, relying occasionally on the memories of people who may have reason to mislead me. Where their recollections seem dubious, I have noted this. In the end I believe that I have reported events fairly. So much has been spoiled and lost that there is no longer any reason to prevaricate.

Why would anyone go to such lengths to tell this sorry tale? It's a fair question, and the answer is that no one would, unless she'd felt God's presence and then His absence; once believed, and later failed and doubted. A sister might tell it, a sister sick with regret.

Art's story is, to me, the story of my own family, with all its darts and dodges and mysterious omissions: the open secrets long unacknowledged, the dark relics never unearthed. I understand, now, that Art's life was ruined by secrecy, a familial failing; and that I played a part in his downfall—a minor role, to be sure, and a third-act entrance; but a role nonetheless. There is no healing my brother, not now; and Aidan Conlon is a child still; it's too soon to tell what his future holds. So maybe it's for myself that I make this public act of contrition. My penance is to tell this ragged truth as completely as I know it, fully aware that it is much too little, much too late.

T
he story begins on a bright afternoon many years ago, one I remember as though I'd seen it. (This is natural enough in a family like ours, with its canon of approved stories. They are told in the manner of repertory theater: hang around long enough and you'll hear them all.) Imagine the trees tinged with red, a sky so clear it seems contrived, the high blue heaven of tourist brochures. It is the first resplendent day of a New England fall, and Ma's new husband is driving from Grantham to Brighton, his hand on her thigh. They are dressed for a wedding or a funeral: she in Sunday hat and gloves, he grudgingly coaxed into a suit. In the backseat is a battered footlocker from his Navy days, packed with the few possessions a junior seminarian is allowed. Squeezed in beside it is Art, fourteen years old, staring out at a scene that will shape the rest of his life: the headquarters of the Boston Archdiocese and its famous seminary, St. John's.

The decision to come here had been his alone. From the age of ten he'd served as an altar boy. Two mornings a week he'd met Father Cronin in the vestry at St. Dymphna's, helped him into his chasuble and alb. At the altar Art genuflected, lit candles, carried cruets. At Consecration he rang the bells. The sound never failed to send him soaring, a feeling that was nearly indescribable: a sweet exhilaration, a spreading warmth. In those moments he'd sensed a transformation occurring, before him and inside him. Bread and wine into the Body and Blood. An ordinary boy into something else.

In the confessional Father Cronin posed the question.
Have you ever considered it?
They discussed at some length what a vocation felt like, how you could ever be sure.
Certainty will come later
, the priest promised. And one Sunday after Mass, he invited Ma to the rectory for a chat.

Now, washed and waxed for the occasion, Dad's car passed through the stone gates. A few others were already parked behind the dormitory, a cavernous brick building perched atop a hill. Ted hefted the trunk to his shoulder and with much grumbling hauled it up three flights of stairs, down a long corridor to the cell Art would share with a boy named Ray Cousins. (I do not invent this: in those days at least, seminarians, like prisoners, slept in cells.)

Like all others on the third floor, Art's cell was small and square. In it were two narrow beds, two wooden desks. The floors were bare; metal blinds hung at the one window. There were no rugs—a fact my mother emphasizes in the telling—and no curtains. No trace, anywhere, of anything soft.

Dad set down the trunk. Ma was uncharacteristically silent, her eyes welling. It was the moment Art had dreaded for months.

“I'll be fine,” he said, embracing her. “I'll write you.” Briefly he shook Ted's hand.

I
SHOULD
say a few words about that campus, which figures so prominently in the life and ministry of my brother. How those buildings came to be is a story in itself. For the nearly forty years that William Cardinal O'Connell ran the Archdiocese, Boston was the capital of Catholic America, and in his eyes it deserved a
facciata
as grand as the Vatican. “Little Rome,” the local papers called it, the hills of Brighton dotted with monuments: the seminary's neoclassic library and exquisite chapel, the elegant palazzo where the Cardinal slept and the ostentatious mausoleum where he sleeps now. At the entrance of each building was carved the Cardinal's own motto,
Vigor in Arduis.

Strength Amid Difficulties.

It was, in every way, the house O'Connell had built.

Art was barely a teenager when he arrived there, and for twelve years it was—not his home, exactly, but as close to one as an aspiring priest was allowed. Later I would visit him there. Together we walked its landscaped hills, its winding footpaths. Art showed me a shady grove of cedars that hid a secret: a round swimming pool, long drained, its cement cracked. The pool was twelve feet across and five feet deep. Cardinal O'Connell had ordered it dug for the summertime refreshment of his dogs, two black poodles that, like the seminarians in their black cassocks, suffered from the heat.

I
N MINOR
seminary, order was paramount. The boys lived according to an ancient template, a sixth-century invention. Benedict was not yet a saint when he fashioned it. Forever after, it was known as the Rule.

The Rule governed the boys' movements. The seminary day was punctuated by bells. There were bells for sleeping and waking and morning Mass, for meals and study and sports. Six classes a day, each an hour. Each opened and closed with a prayer.

At first bell the boys rose and dressed. An upperclassman handpicked by the rector made his way down each corridor, singing out the morning greeting:
Benedicamus Domino.

The boys sang in answer:
Deo Gratias.

The day's first class was Latin. The teacher, Father Fleury, had studied in Rome. He was young and fair-haired and wished himself elsewhere—among the ruins at Ostia Antica; kneeling before the Sacrament at Santa Maria Maggiore; walking along the Tiber, breviary in hand. In a few short years the Latin Mass would be abandoned, but at St. John's at least, the fact would go unacknowledged. The curriculum would not change. Why learn Latin if the Mass was said in English? If the boys wondered, they gave no sign. They declined and conjugated and asked no questions. Father Fleury corrected them rigorously.

In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.

A bell rang.

The boys processed to algebra, then history. The noon bell called them to chapel. In silence they walked to the refectory for lunch. A hot meal always, meat bathed in slick gravy—unappetizing fare, and yet they'd have killed for more of it; the invisible cooks, by ignorance or design, misjudged the hunger of growing boys. The priests sat up front at a long table, the rector at the center. At his elbow was a brass bell. If he rang the bell after the blessing, talking was forbidden. A seminarian would read aloud from scripture. A hundred boys chewed and swallowed.

A bell rang.

English came next; then biology. A bell rang for afternoon rec. The gymnasium had tall mullioned windows, as the dead Cardinal had ordered; they'd been covered in chicken wire to protect the fine glass. The boys suited up for basketball, a game Art had once avoided. (In Grantham it was a sport for tough boys. A Morrison or a Pawlowski might take out your eye.) But like everything at seminary, sport was mandatory; and Art was no longer the smallest or the shyest. Day after day the boys raced across the court, a crest painted at its center:
Seminarium Sancti Joannis Bostoniense 1884.

A bell rang.

The boys showered and dressed, for dinner, Rosary, Spiritual Reading. At eight o'clock came the Grand Silence. Until breakfast the next morning, talking was forbidden. Not a word would be spoken in the corridors.

The routine was fixed; it deviated for no one. Like those before him—
more majorum—
Art lived by the Rule.

H
E TOOK
to this new life with great enthusiasm, a sunflower turning its face to the sky. He loved the orderly days, the mornings in chapel. The silence nourished him; his soul expanded to fill it. Every moment of the day became a prayer. The buildings themselves thrilled him, their high vaulted ceilings—to draw the eye upward, said Father Dowd; the mind closer to God.

Father Dowd taught the boys music. He was the youngest of the faculty, a brand-new priest, only eight years older than the senior boys. The other priests treated pupils with a certain disregard, knowing that half would leave before graduation; that a scant 10 percent would eventually be ordained. But Father Dowd was not dismissive. He was known to have favorites. Those boys who sang out joyfully, who were not struck deaf when singing harmony: his work was made bearable by such pupils, the Arthur Breens and Gary Moriconis who could still hit the high notes. That first year, unspoiled by puberty, Art sang like an angel. In class, after his solo, Father Dowd had said as much. “What I would give for a dozen Breens,” he told the boys, his eyes misting with pleasure. Arthur Breen could sing anything. His voice was God's gift.

“Such a pity,” Father Dowd told the class, “that it has to change.”

He launched, then, into a history lesson. Centuries ago, a voice like Arthur Breen's would have been preserved by castration. The
castrati
were the superstars of their day, the
primi uomi
of early opera. They sang with otherworldly range and power, the darlings of popes, cardinals and kings.

Listening, Art had blushed scarlet. From that day onward he avoided Father Dowd's confessional, a choice easily justified: Father Dowd's line was always the longest, his favorite boys—Ray Cousins, Gary Moriconi—at the head of the line.

Of Art's teachers, Father Fleury was the most inspiring. He spoke often of his travels to Rome. The splendors of Vatican City he called
our patrimony
. Every Catholic ought to visit as often as possible. To his pupils it was a stunning admonition; in their working-class neighborhoods, Rome might have been Neptune. Art listened in fascination. His Latin vocabulary doubled, then tripled, so desperate was he to please Father Fleury. It was a task that demanded considerable effort, the priest's attention was so clearly elsewhere.

Adult indifference, its power to motivate children, is old news in Catholic circles. My own mother practiced a version of this approach—by natural inclination, I suspect, more than by design. Father Fleury's disregard was, to Art, oddly reassuring. He was unused to flatterers like Father Dowd, confused by male attention of any kind. With his stepfather, indifference was the best you could hope for. If you did anything to attract his notice, there would be hell to pay. But unlike Ted McGann, Father Fleury wasn't volatile or angry, just preoccupied with other matters. Art lived to impress him. Years later he would recall the time he scored a 99 on a quarterly exam and was rewarded with a rare smile.

He had made no errors, but Father Fleury did not award 100s. He subtracted one point, always, for original sin.

Art had never had a father. When Ma's first marriage was annulled—literally
made into nothing—
Harry Breen was expunged from the record. Art was the awkward reminder of a union that had, officially, never been. Now, suddenly, he had more fathers than he knew what to do with: Father Fleury, Father Koval, Father Frontino, Father Dowd. They taught him more than Latin and history, algebra and music. By word and example they taught priestliness: ways of speaking and acting; of not speaking and not acting. Restraint and discipline, obedience and silence.

For a shy boy, these formulas were a help and a comfort. Art didn't miss his old school, the rough-and-tumble Grantham Junior High. St. John's was a haven from all that frightened him, the alarming interplay of male and female, that intricate and wild dance. Like many boys he feared the opposite sex. But even more intensely, he feared his own.

A certain kind of boy unnerved him, hale athletes, confident and aggressive. At seminary such specimens were blessedly few. From the first it was clear that a range existed: alpha males at the one end; at the other, the distinctly effete. Both extremes were, to Art, alarming. Like Latin nouns, the boys came in three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. He placed himself in the third category, undifferentiated. In the seminary at least, it seemed the safest place to be.

Matters of sex, of maleness and femaleness, were in this world peripheral. He felt protected by silence, grateful at all that was left unsaid. Once, at a Lenten retreat, Father Koval had delivered a steely sermon, exhorting the boys to keep their
vessels clean
. To Art, at fifteen, the words remained mysteriously figurative, vaguely connected to all that had distressed him in his old life: at home, the nighttime noises from Ma and Ted's bedroom; at school, the fragrant and fleshy presence of girls.

The life of a celibate priest. Father Koval had compared it to climbing Mount Everest: the outer limits of man's capacity, a daring test that few were brave enough to attempt. The rhetoric was aimed at the boys' nascent machismo; to Art, who had none, it rang false. A better comparison, he felt, was a journey on a spaceship. A priest was isolated and weightless. He existed outside gravity—the force that attracted bodies to other bodies, that tethered them to God's earth.

A
RT GREW
up in this atmosphere, outside gravity. Troubling questions were answered for him, and he accepted these answers in gratitude and relief. So when he graduated from high school and entered the seminary proper, he was unprepared for the sudden change in the weather. That September a new rector was brought over from Rome, a strapping, ursine priest named James Duke.

The previous rector had been mild and scholarly, a soft-spoken man with a distracted air. But
Il Duce
was another sort entirely. He exuded, by priestly standards, an air of raw masculinity; and surrounded himself with others—Father Noel Bearer, Father Stephen Hurley—of the same type.

The new regime seemed, at first, comically harmless. Their demeanor struck Art as clownish, a self-conscious parody of manliness. Then came the warnings—repeated with ominous frequency—against
particular friendships.
This injunction was not new. Close friendships violated the spirit of community; they were contrary to the Rule. Under the old rector,
particular friendships
had seldom been mentioned; now, suddenly, they seemed a matter of great concern. No suggestion was made, ever, of illicit affections between the men; but everyone was aware of the subtext. Art found himself avoiding his best friend Larry Person, who shared his interest in music. They no longer rode the T into Boston to hear Sunday concerts downtown. Smoking in the courtyard between classes, Art took notice of who else was standing at the ashtray. Groups of three or four were acceptable. Twosomes were inherently suspect.