In God's House (32 page)

Behind his back, among Vatican personnel, Cardinal Hans Kruger was known as The Fuhrer. His power was more feared than respected. This man was certain he would be pope one day. To that end, he took a keen interest in influencing the selection of new cardinals, men who would be eligible to attend the conclave and vote in the next papal election in the Sistine Chapel.

Kruger modeled himself on historical figures, taking different pages from a lot of lives. There were things he wanted sole credit for that were the product of the combined efforts of many, and he always arranged it so he appeared to stand alone when it suited him. When he had to do things that he believed would not reflect well upon him, he acted through straw men. The tallest straw man, the one Kruger most often used to act for him in untraceable ways, was actually only five feet tall in shoes. This was Cardinal Niccolo Paginini, who originally came from a small fishing village in Sicily.

Cardinal Hans Kruger was born to great wealth. His mother’s family had large holdings in heavy industry plants along the Rhine near Cologne. His father also came from a prominent family on the Rhine; he had chosen a career in the military, graduating with honors from the Military Academy and rising to the rank of general charged with command of Panzer tank divisions. While German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel earned distinction heading the famed Afrika Korps, General Kruger
prepared battle plans for Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

As an only child living with his mother and a number of servants on a large estate close to Koblenz in the Moselle River Valley, Hans had been indulged, given every thing he desired. The housemaids and other servants referred to him with deference from the time he was a toddler. From birth he was accustomed to having his way and being treated like royalty.

Those who tended to the livestock and animals, including a string of six majestic horses from Andalusia properly referred to as Pre-Pura Raza Española, addressed the boy as Master Hans.

As he exercised them in the indoor arena on the family land, he learned the art of using his seat, legs and feet to drive and direct the horses. He trained them not to walk or run, but to canter in three beats, to the right, left, in circles, serpentines, pirouettes. Working with the mounts required great patience and skill, especially for a child. He never tugged the reins with his hands, but intertwined the leather straps with the combed mane. It was a lesson in learning how to control great power without appearing to be doing anything at all.

When not riding, hiking or rowing on the river, Hans learned to play chess from both his parents and a butler. Before he was ten years old he was winning matches against everyone in the house as well as a professor who lived in the village. His understanding of the complex chess matches he never lost was far beyond that of a normal child and indicative of a well-developed, multifaceted intellect.

With no siblings – and no classmates either, because he was privately tutored in the family home – Hans never had anyone of his own age to talk to. He developed what would become a lifelong habit of never sharing his thoughts and feelings, engaging only in internal dialogues with himself.

His father was rarely at home after the war commenced, and Hans was only twelve years old when plans were being finalized for the invasion of the Soviet Union, things he knew nothing
about as he busied himself riding horses, rowing on the river, developing the lifestyle of an outdoorsman. Over the radio he heard the propaganda disseminated by Goebbels about the war and the evils of Jewry, and when he accompanied his mother to Koblenz for a doctor’s appointment or shopping trip he noticed the lines of raggedly dressed poor people queuing for bread and other morsels of food. He thought Goebbels was right about everything he said in the broadcasts. Like him, he felt great sorrow for the poor who lined the sidewalks of Koblenz, and he hated the bombers that flew overhead on their way to destroy factories along the Ruhr and the Rhine and in the other cities of the Reich.

In the summer of 1940, Hans was eagerly waiting the time when he would be eligible to join the Hitler Youth League. He was fascinated by the Führer, and was impatient to become one of his future Aryan supermen. Hans identified with the movement and wanted to be a part of it as soon as possible. He also talked often of his dream to serve in a tank battalion under his father’s command when he was old enough to enlist. But his father, General Kruger, was never a believer in the Nazi Party. He refused to allow his only child to talk about joining the Youth League or enlisting in the military in his presence.

When Hitler issued secret orders to his Generals to prepare the attack on the Soviet Union, General Kruger, like most senior career officers, knew the war was lost. He decided to get his son as far out of harm’s way as he could. Hans was sent to northern Italy, where the regional German commander was his father’s closest friend. It was left to the commander to find a safe place for the child.

The place the commander found for Hans was a Catholic seminary in the hills north of Sienna. It was here that Hans lived and studied until it was safe to venture outside the walls. During the war, the monastery walls were invincible. The Vatican had entered a concordant with the Nazis. There was no chance Nazis would enter a seminary and search for a German to conscript or have reason to believe a German would be found in such a place.

Hans Kruger’s path to his powerful post in the Vatican had been a straight line. As a teenager he had mastered Latin and three other languages, and had undertaken all the courses necessary for ordination as a Catholic priest. He became one of the youngest men in history to take holy orders. His education was informal. He was taught by monks rather than university professors.

While Hans was living in Tuscany, his mother and all her family perished in an Allied bombing raid on Cologne. His father ended up in a mass grave near Stalingrad. Hans was orphaned by the war, and the Roman Catholic Church became his only family, his life. Immediately after taking holy orders, Hans Kruger was assigned to the Vatican. His entire career had been spent within the walls of the Holy See. He studied and mastered the byzantine politics of the Church, became a cardinal at a young age, and by the mid-eighties ruled much of the Vatican hierarchy with an iron fist.

Cardinal John Wolleski was summoned to the offices of Cardinal Hans Kruger by a messenger. Wolleski was in the Vatican library, where he had commandeered a long rosewood table and stacked it with piles of books he had ordered for his research. The elderly cardinal pulled off his reading glasses, laid them on the pages of an open book, and followed the messenger. He thought it odd that he had not been given an appointment with Kruger but was being commanded to meet him at once.

Kruger did not appear like a man in his late fifties. His erect military bearing and lean, muscular frame was that of a much younger athlete. Though the cardinal was easily the most controversial figure in the Holy See, no one challenged his power.

Cardinal Wolleski walked into the grand office and found Cardinal Kruger standing near a bookshelf. “Thank you for coming, John.”

John Wolleski was not given to phoniness of any kind. “It did not seem I had a choice.”

“You know why I sent for you? Of course you know.”

“You’re going to have to tell me, Hans.”

All politeness ceased as the veins in Kruger’s face became pronounced. When he spoke English, it was with the German accent he had never lost. “John, I almost sent you to the infirmary first. To have your head checked. Do you realize what you have done in having the Holy Father involve himself in this situation in North America? Do you realize what a breach of protocol it was to discuss this with the Holy Father? Do you understand what you have done?”

Wolleski nodded that he did.

“There was no reason for you to bring this matter to the attention of the Holy Father. Everything should have been done to keep this from him. This is not the kind of news that we give the pontiff. He has more than enough on his plate. These things are for others. It is our business what happens in the Vatican, not the business of a retired American cardinal.”

Cardinal Wolleski was impassive, unable to remember the last time anyone had used this kind of tone when addressing him.

“We have reports of this one situation that exists in North America. There is only one active case, John. It involves some priest in a province called Louisiana in the south of the United States. The diocese involved has reported several times to the papal nunciature in Washington and those reports were forwarded here to my office, where they belong. There is no problem mentioned in the reports by the bishop. Now you want the pontiff to rely on the writings of three hysterics.”

“I have confidence that what they have written is true.”

“There are two things you must know. These things are exclusively under the jurisdiction of my office, Cardinal Paginini and whomever else I choose to delegate to. This does not involve the Holy Father. It should have been my sole decision whether something like this merited the attention of the Holy Father.”

“I want to say—”

Cardinal Kruger raised his hand. “You have said enough
already in your secret, private meeting with the pontiff. There is no problem in the United States. It is only one priest.”

Cardinal Wolleski shook his head in disagreement.

Kruger continued, “The Holy Father’s head is filled with enough odd notions. He’s even talking about some kind of apology to the Jews. He doesn’t need to be involved in this situation.”

“Hans, why don’t you meet with the Holy Father and tell him these things yourself? And tell him you think his idea about apologizing to the Jewish people is an odd notion.”

“You know I cannot do that.”

John Wolleski wanted to leave. He had a very low opinion of Kruger. During the war Wolleski had fought Nazism in Italy, helping smuggle Jews from Rome onto boats that would take them to Palestine; after the war he had watched as the Vatican assisted Nazi war criminals to escape Europe. He did not want to be fighting a man he considered a Nazi in the Vatican now.

“This thing is not the Holy Father’s problem or the Vatican’s problem,” Kruger reiterated. “This is North America’s problem, John.”

“The Holy Father is concerned and he has acted. It is not for anyone, not even you, to question his actions.”

“The Holy Father did not act of his own accord. He did this thing after you brought him a hysterical report from America. The American Church alone has to take care of the American Church.”

“This is not about the American Church,” Cardinal Wolleski said.

“This is only about the American Church.”

“This is about children.”

“American children. They are not the children of the Vatican,” Cardinal Kruger said.

“This could become a huge problem. It is the Vatican and the pontiff’s problem.”

“In having our Holy Father appoint someone to monitor the situation in America, you have taken the hand of the Holy Father
and pressed it in ink. You have placed Rome’s fingerprints on this. It is not Rome’s problem. No one is ever going to make this the Vatican’s problem,” Cardinal Kruger said.

“It is the Church’s problem.”

“The Vatican is the Church and this will never be the Vatican’s problem.”

The Ascot Grill, Desmond McDougall’s choice for dinner, was very different from Café Roma. It was a new, trendy, upscale kind of place frequented by congressional staffers from Capitol Hill.

Matt met me in the bar and we went to a corner table. He told me about his afternoon with Francis Dubois at the Stalder Institute the day before. I chewed peanuts and washed them down with a vodka rocks, looking for an honest response to what I’d heard him say.

“Jesus, Matt… you hugged Francis Dubois?”

“Yes, Renon, I hugged him. Poor guy hung on to me for two minutes, crying. I think it’s been a long time since he had a hug.”

“Yeah – from an adult maybe.”

“You can make a joke about it,” Matt said. “The human touch is important to a dying person. You ever notice that even in the hospital where people lie dying, even the nurses hurry out of the room? No one wants to be near the dead or dying, much less have contact with them. And your client is dying psychologically and emotionally. His breathing is an involuntary reflex.”

I nodded. “What did you talk about?”

“First, I gave him a battery of tests, ones I’ve developed myself over the years. I doubt the results will tell us anything, because the first test I graded indicates he was lying, trying to make the test score read in a sympathetic way. He really wants someone to feel sorry for him. I told him that he did not need
anyone to feel sorry for him because he felt sorry enough for himself.”

“You said that?”

“Yes. I can be kind with these people when I believe kindness is what they need, and I can be brutal too. Psychotics don’t have honesty in their repertoire.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Dubois has multiple personalities? Matt, I’ve seen him come across as two completely different people in the space of a week. I mean really different.”

“Not a chance. When your whole life has been a lie, there is no reference to truth anymore. A sociopath, a psychopath, can morph, change colors like a chameleon. It’s a life devoid of any real emotion.”

“I think I’ve seen him when he was devoid of everything.”

“But Dubois is not like others I’ve seen.”

“How?”

“Sick, Renon. This guy is as sick as they come, maybe worse than anyone I have seen. And I thought I had seen them all.”

“You want to treat him?”

“No, I don’t. There’s a place not far from here where he can get the best treatment, Hannover House. Maybe I can discuss moving him with the staff at Hannover, if you agree. My interest is pastoral. I want to be his priest. I believe I can help him experience some healing spiritually.”

“Why?”

“In my mind I can make clinical judgments about people. In my heart, I can’t judge anyone. God created us all, the monsters too, and the final judgment is God’s, not mine.”

“Let me ask you this – you think I have any chance of finding anybody in the country to testify that Dubois meets the requirements for legal insanity? That he did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time these offenses were committed?”

“I guess you can find someone to say just about anything. Do I think it’s true that he did not know the difference between right
and wrong? No, of course it’s not true. I think Dubois may be playing the game with a short IQ. I don’t think he’s all that smart, but he is sane clinically and legally.”

“You would be a priest to Dubois?”

“I will if he wants that. I know he will manipulate me every way he can. He did a lot of that yesterday. The one truth I am sure he spoke was when he said he believed he has had sex with hundreds of children. The man has destroyed hundreds of innocent lives. And, Renon, he has no remorse.” 

“It’s a big problem for me, no?”

“How do you expect that will play in a courtroom? A Roman Catholic priest has raped hundreds of children and has no pangs of conscience, not the slightest remorse.”

Des walked in, late as usual. After we were escorted to a table and seated, Des said, “Oh ye of little faith.”

Matt shook his head in amusement. “Okay, tell us. What is it that has you so ebullient tonight?”

“Well, first thing is I may have saved my own Scotch-Irish ass. Don’t think the papal nuncio, old Carlo Verriano, can sack me now. The Pope’s on our side. Even Verriano can’t screw with the Pope. Rome is getting with the program. There was an exchange of cables today. Cardinal Wolleski had to have had his meeting with the big guy. The Vatican will appoint a visitator.”

“A what?” I asked.

“Ah, the spaghetti suckers in Rome still use that kind of archaic language. They even still use Latin when they issue communications on sensitive topics.”

Matt appeared unmoved by the message that so delighted Desmond. “Who will this person be and what will his charge be?”

“The specific language will charge him with monitoring the clergy sex-abuse situation in the Diocese of Thiberville and other similar situations in the event they should arise elsewhere. He will also assist in managing all of those situations, and will report directly to the Vatican through the office of the papal nuncio. His
reports will all come across my desk. I tell you, we’re going to get a handle on this mess and clean it up before it explodes. Some kind of way, we’re gonna stop this business, run some priests to jailhouses and hopefully save some kids.”

“And what about those children who’ve already been victimized?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Desmond said, “but the Church has to do the right thing.”

“Who have they appointed?” Matt asked.

“They want the recommendation to come from my boss, Archbishop Carlo Verriano. Ol’ Carlo doesn’t know one swinging dick in this whole country. So he leaned on me.”

“And who have you picked?”

“In Baltimore, there is that auxiliary bishop doing nothing, just sitting around waiting for some old bishop to die and create an opening for him to take over a diocese.”

“You’re talking about Bishop Franklin?”

“That’s the one. Garland Franklin. He’s not only a canon lawyer, he’s a civil lawyer, and his undergraduate work was in psychology. He ought to be able to understand what I’m saying about canon law, what Renon’s saying about civil and criminal law, and he might even understand your screwy head-shrinking stuff. And he’s nearby, in Baltimore. Perfect, no?”

“Perfect, Desmond,” Matt said as he rolled his eyes.

“What? What’s wrong with this?” Desmond said.

“Do you really believe anyone with ecclesiastical ambitions is going to want to get anywhere near this stuff? It will explode Franklin’s career. Franklin will never be bishop of anything if he does the right thing. Worse, anyone you have appointed will be Rome’s man all the way, Cardinal Kruger’s stooge.”

“The cable traffic today was with the office of Cardinal Antonio Marcello, the Pope’s buddy. It was an end run around Cardinal Kruger. Kruger’s out of the loop on this one.”

Matt seemed impressed by that.

During the meal, Desmond and I drank a lot of wine. I even
mixed in a couple of vodkas, knowing the drinks would help me sleep when I got back to the hotel. I felt that a big step in the right direction had been made.
To hell with Monsignor Moroux, Bishop Reynolds, Jon Bendel, Joe Rossi, all of them
, I thought. They had nothing; we had the Pope.
Now the victims will get justice; the priests and the bishops will get what they deserve.

The three of us were pretty drunk when we walked out of the Ascot Grill. Des insisted on driving me to my hotel, saying, “I have diplomatic immunity. I imagine it covers drunk-driving arrests.”

Matt’s car was in a lot across the street. As he unlocked his car, he heard what Des said, and shouted back at us. “You guys are like gasoline and fire.”

It was late, after 2 a.m. Des parked the car near an empty grassy area. “Come with me.” When we got out of the car, everything about him was different. He was as sober and serious as I’d ever seen him.

“Where are we, Des? What are we doing?”

“You’ll see. I come out here every night. It’s the holiest shrine I know, Ren.”

We walked across the wet grass in the light mist.

He said, “I’ve been coming here every night since they unveiled this thing. There are always people here, no matter what time it is. Sometimes when I wake up early, I come over before dawn too. The time of day doesn’t matter. There are always people here.”

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was an eerie sight at night. The long granite wall was barely visible in the mist. When we reached it, Des said, “Touch it. Go ahead. Touch it.” I did. It was cold.

Des nodded toward a knoll with a statue I could not make out in the mist. There were fifteen or more people sitting on blankets and sleeping bags. One was playing a guitar.

“What do you do here? You come as a priest?”

“No. These people don’t need a priest. They need someone to listen. That’s all. Someone who remembers them, what they did, understands what happened to them. They’re broken inside. They come here because it’s the only proof they have of what they did, and the names on the wall did, damn near sixty thousand dead – it’s the only proof their buddies ever lived.”

The 200-foot wall, the listing of names, was overwhelming.

“I brought you here to see something, Ren.”

“Yeah.”

“These people believed, they really believed. They gave everything.” Touching the wall, he said, “These boys gave their lives. They all gave everything – to some belief. It destroyed them. It wasn’t the war that killed them inside. It was losing their belief. You understand.”

I said nothing.

“You walk this wall, Ren. See your reflection in this wall. Think about your beliefs. I don’t want you burned out like those boys on the knoll. I’m going up on the knoll to listen to those guys. I’ll be back.”

I walked along the wall in slow motion. Along the base of the wall were things that had been left by visitors. Des had mentioned that the things were collected at the end of each day; large warehouses were filled with the stuff, he’d said, and no one knew what to do with it.

I reached down and picked up a large teddy bear. A handwritten note was safety-pinned to its chest: “Bear, you know, man, we couldn’t find you, man. We just had to bug outta there. The LZ was hot. We looked, man. Nobody found you. I love you, Bear. Willie.”

I gently put the teddy bear back in place.