In God's House (50 page)

The air was cool as Cardinal Kruger strolled through Rome, dressed in civilian clothes. No one recognized him. Actually, few outside of the Vatican had ever heard of him. He was deep in thought. When he passed the Swiss Guards at the Vatican City gate, he looked back at the Basilica of Saint Peter’s. He could almost see a horrible monster looming outside in the dark, waiting to enter the Vatican in the morning, alongside the American cardinals.

Kruger had spent the afternoon reading summaries his staff had cobbled together from the internet, a sampling of recently published news articles in several languages, most of them emanating from America. The press apparently got their information from the lawyers who were suing the Church. Fortunately, the lawyers seemed to know nothing beyond the facts of the individual cases they were handling. Cardinal Kruger was relieved to find the media knew but a fraction of the story and was not even close to discerning the real truth. Together with various cardinals around the world, Kruger had publicly denied that clergy sex abuse was a widespread problem, saying the situation had been exaggerated by those enemies of the Church who owned major media outlets. He was unperturbed when many Jewish publishers and media moguls took offense at his remarks.

The cardinal mulled over possible responses to the worldwide storm he sensed was on the horizon. He had been confidentially informed by Bishop Garland Franklin that the situation on the
west coast of America was far worse than what had been exposed on the east coast. Some were predicting the cost of settlements in Los Angeles and San Diego could approach a billion dollars. Contingency plans were being drawn up for certain dioceses to sell off their assets and even file for bankruptcy. As he strode along the pavements, Kruger shook his head in dismay. He could not believe the American problem was going to become the Vatican’s problem in the morning.

That the media was fixated on new, breaking cases involving pedophile priests, new lawsuits being filed and the financial fallout from the claims was a lucky thing, Kruger thought. Until now, with the exception of Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston, the media had not shone a light on members of the Church hierarchy and their failings.

Kruger knew of scores of potentially explosive examples that were lying in plain view yet were somehow invisible to major media. Seven years earlier a cardinal in Vienna had resigned for having sex with young males and the Vatican had not even investigated the case. Thousands of pornographic images had been found on computers in a seminary in Austria. On Kruger’s desk right now were complaints alleging the worst kind of abuse by an extremely prominent priest, the founder and lead figure of one of the richest, most influential and conservative religious orders, headquartered in Mexico – a valued friend of the pontiff, and an untouchable inside the Vatican.

For twenty years, it had been Cardinal Kruger’s responsibility to deal with these matters, and he had dealt with them by doing his duty to Holy Mother Church as he understood it. In accordance with Church law, the 1962 dictates of Pope John XXIII, and the oath he’d taken to do all in his power to avoid scandal to the Church, he had either ignored or rejected the mountain of complaints. This would not reflect well upon him were it to become public knowledge. He knew that. Whatever chance he had to succeed the pontiff and sit on the throne of Saint Peter would be lost. But who would find out?

Though he was not a bookish man, Kruger knew his Church history. He knew he was by no means the first who’d had to face these problems. He doubted he would be the last. For nearly 1700 years the Church had weathered this storm. Cardinal Hans Kruger would not be the one to allow the Vatican defenses to be breached. As far back as the fourth century, shortly before Emperor Constantine formally recognized the Church, a document issued out of the Church Council of Elvira in Spain had stated that priests who had sex with young boys were to be deprived of communion even on their death beds. So widespread was the problem that for six hundred years the penitential rule books compiled by medieval monks included details of penances for clerics who committed sodomy with young boys – penance that was to be commensurate with rank, with high-ranking bishops facing the harshest punishment. There had been further public condemnations of clerical debauchery in the eleventh-century
Book of Gomorrah
, in the influential twelfth-century
Decree of Gratian
, and again in 1215, at the great Fourth Lateran Council. It was no secret that the depraved sex lives of priests had contributed to the worst crisis the Church ever faced, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. But Luther, Zwingli and Calvin had been wrong to see a connection between celibacy and the perverted sexual conduct of priests.

Cardinal Kruger knew all this, but for the last two decades he had felt confident that no journalists or editors in the secular press would ever do the hard work to discover, translate and interpret the documents drafted in Latin that provided the proof of how deep-seated a problem it was. Now, however, the Pope was inviting just that kind of scrutiny by summoning the American cardinals to Rome, involving the Vatican in the scandal.

Cardinal Kruger had walked a long way by the time he reached the Forum. He stood quietly, looking down on ruins which once represented the bastion of an empire that was supposed to last
forever. The few remaining columns and fallen stones were now a wasteland, a home for hundreds of feral cats.

Far behind him, across the Tiber River, was the formidable Tuscan colonnade, the pillars of the Piazza San Pietro that circled the plaza in front of Saint Peter’s Basilica and Vatican City. The Roman Catholic Church was one of the most powerful empires to ever exist on earth and it too was supposed to last forever. The Catholic Church, the one, true apostolic Church ordained by Jesus Christ, had survived for two thousand years and claimed a legion of over a billion followers. It was now under attack.

For a moment, Cardinal Kruger considered the obvious parallels between the two empires. If the true extent of the sins of the Church were ever to be known, Kruger knew the foundation of the Church, the pillars that supported it, its moral authority, could weaken, crack and crumble like the ruins of the Forum.

Kruger began to think like the future pontiff he was sure he would soon become. In his mind he did a quick rundown of the many attempts and failures of previous popes to deal with this problem, not least the constitution,
Romani Pontifices
, issued by Pope Pius V in 1561, and his
Horrendum
of the following year, which also addressed the “sin against nature that incurs God’s wrath”.

In seeking to enforce secrecy about the true state of its internal affairs, the Church had two powerful tools at its disposal – excommunication from the Church, and the less drastic, more nuanced
mentalis restrictio
, or “mental reservation”. Kruger knew he would have to use these weapons judiciously. Mental reservation, a sort of moral lying as defined by moral theologians in the Middle Ages, was particularly powerful. Though the concept had never been approved officially by the Church, through the ages many had relied on it. To avoid bringing scandal to the Church, one could lie and at the same time tell the truth. The truth was told to God, mentally reserved for God only, and the lie was spoken for human ears.

The ultimate procedural manual for dealing with cases
involving clergy sex abuse had been developed just a few decades ago, by Pope John XXIII in 1962. This was a model Kruger respected and intended to reinforce. The American Church clearly needed reminding. Pope John XXIII had sent the sixty-nine-page document to every bishop. He instructed them to keep the document in the secret archives of their diocese and to never comment publicly on its existence. The instruction also imposed a strict secrecy on those priests processing cases of clergy sexual abuse in diocesan tribunals. The 1962 edict mandated that everyone aware of such cases was bound by the Church’s highest degree of confidentiality, the “Secret of the Holy Office”.

A recent document written by a high-ranking canon law scholar in Rome, released in an official Vatican publication, stated that under no circumstances was a bishop ever permitted to report crimes committed by priests to secular police authorities. The document went further, advising bishops never to divulge information about a priest who had sexually abused children, because to do so would injure the good reputation of the priest. Kruger had read the reprint of this document on the front page of
The Sunday New York Times
and wondered why this correct interpretation of canon law was newsworthy in America. A sin against the Church was the worst sin, and to substitute secular law for Church law, or to injure the reputation of a priest and bring scandal to the institution, were sins against Holy Mother Church.

Cardinal Kruger decided he would issue a letter to every bishop in the world reminding them of the threat of excommunication contained in the document issued by Pope John XXIII, a pope who had already been beatified and was slated to be canonized as a saint of the Church. No one should speak of these things outside of official Church channels. He would decree this.

As the cardinal turned up his collar against a strong wind that carried the cries of cats from the Forum, his concerns were not institutional, but personal. As a child, Hans Kruger had hundreds
of toy soldiers. The army games he played were serious ones, pitted against his father, General Kruger of the Third Reich. His father had taught him the technique of the feint, where a commander would intentionally expose a large section of his force to the enemy, sacrificing them and allowing them to be cut to pieces so that the most valuable elements of the army could retreat safely, hidden from enemy fire.

It was a sound strategy, one that Kruger remembered well. The only element of the Church that was now exposed to its enemies was the legion of pedophile priests who acted out of a dark pathology or illness. The damage being done to the Church in America seemed likely to continue, and would probably spread to other countries. But it seemed most of the bishops and other members of the Church hierarchy, including the Curia in the Vatican, might remain insulated from the scandal. Kruger had engaged in chess matches all of his life and well understood the tactic of sacrificing pawns to protect bishops.

The cardinal turned away from the ruins of the Forum and walked back toward Vatican City. He directed his thoughts to the Pope’s failing health. The Vatican had finally issued public statements about the pontiff’s medical condition and the world knew his demise was imminent.

The successor to the present pope would have to be strong – strong enough to stand up to the enemies of the Church, strong enough to deflect criticism away from the bishops, the cardinals and the pope himself, and to direct it instead at individual sick priests. He knew he was such a man and that he could and would be the next pope. He had the votes of the College of Cardinals tallied in his head.

Cardinal Hans Kruger knew history. He knew why the Roman Empire collapsed. As supreme pontiff, he would not make the mistakes of the Roman emperors.

Morning came fast. As I picked up my change on the dresser, I held the light-copper-colored tin medallion the turbaned taxi driver had handed to me in Boston eighteen years ago. I had carried the medal in my pocket every day. I clutched it tightly in my left hand and slipped it into an empty pocket.

As I started for the door, Julie picked up my tie off of the bed and handed it to me. I laid it back on the bed and shook my head.

Julie had a plan. The day before, we had returned my rental car and kept the one she’d picked up in New Orleans, a Volkswagen Beetle that she referred to as our “getaway car”. We would leave the Thiberville courthouse immediately after the hearing and drive the short distance to a friend’s secluded weekend home in the Atchafalaya Basin. We would spend a week there resting before returning to Europe.

When we were checking out at the desk in the lobby, the clerk handed me a package. It was about the size of an 8x10 photo frame, wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied with string. I admired the bow, and looked at the printed lettering. It made me smile to see how my name was written. Her handwriting was still as bad as mine.

As Julie drove toward the courthouse, I gingerly untied the string and pulled back the tape to open the wrapping. Sasha had painted the old stadium at night. She had signed it, and on the back she’d written “The First Place”.

The courthouse hall was crowded with victims of Francis Dubois who were now adults, and their families and friends. I recognized the giant Poppa Vidros, the guy who held the shotgun on me in the Courville’s front yard. He was leaning against the wall near a bank of elevators, talking with two smaller men.

I looked away from Poppa Vidros, but my stomach tightened. I had walked through a metal detector on the ground floor, so I did not think the big man could have got to this floor with a gun. But I was sure somewhere on the street there was a jacked-up pickup truck and in the truck was a loaded gun.

Most of the media was still congregated downstairs, where the new DA was holding court before television cameras.

When Mo stepped off the elevator and started walking toward me, I crossed over to her. She took both of my hands and squeezed tight, smiling nervously.

“You really didn’t have to come.”

“I want to be here, Ren. I want to see this end for you. The last time we went through this, people wanted to kill you. I want to be with you… ya know,” she lightly punched me, “in case someone blows you to kingdom come.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Oh come on now, you love gallows humor.”

“Not as much as I used to.” I glanced back to the elevators at the far end of the hall. Poppa Vidros was not in view anymore.

Mo and Julie walked into the courtroom with me just before ten. It was packed, but it seemed not many wanted to sit too close. We made our way to the empty second row. Francis Dominick Dubois was seated at the counsel table, his back to me. The orange jail jumpsuit was oversized. His cuffed hands were in his lap, and I heard the shackles on his ankles when he turned his head around to speak to one of his lawyers. That unnerving smirk was fixed on his face.

“All rise.” The bailiff opened the door and the judge entered. It was Judge Thomas Weir, the most scholarly of the judges in the
district. I knew he would render the right decision, based on the evidence he heard.

The new, young DA spoke out of turn before the judge was ready for him to proceed. “Your Honor, we call Renon Chattelrault and announce our intention to qualify him as a hostile witness to allow us to cross-examine him.”

As the judge pounded his gavel I rose from the second row and walked through the wooden swing-gate and inside the railing.

Judge Weir said, “I want all counsel in my chambers. We will stand in recess for fifteen minutes.”

The lawyers and court personnel walked out with the judge, leaving me alone inside the rail with two court bailiffs and Francis Dubois. With my back to the angry stares of the crowded courtroom, I stood to the side of Dubois. He looked up at me. “Hi Renon.”

I pulled out a chair and sat next to him. He looked like an old man, the way his father looked when I had met him. He was unshaven, sweating, his hair matted flat on his head.

“I didn’t do this, Renon,” he said, as his chains rattled a bit. “You know I didn’t do this. Why would I have lied and withheld one name?”

“I know. The man claims it’s recovered memory under hypnosis, and he said you forced him with a gun. I know it isn’t true. Francis, I’m tired of seeing you in courtrooms. You need real medical help. You need to find some peace, live in peace.”

“I don’t have any money to get medical help. I don’t have insurance. And nothing has ever helped me. If the judge lets me out of jail, I am going to my brother Bobby’s farm in Flatwoods, Texas. Ya know, by Beaumont. Nobody can find me there either. I will get some peace.”

We were interrupted by the lawyers filing back in and I walked to the witness stand and took my place.

“So help me God,” I mumbled, completing my oath.

From the elevated witness stand, I could see that every seat in the courtroom was filled. Whenever I averted my gaze from the
hate-filled glares of Dubois’s victims and their families, my eyes would fall upon Francis Dubois himself, his expression fixed in a smirk. Finally, I noticed Julie in the second row, a face I could focus on. She looked composed, amazingly serene.

As the only witness, I was in a position to not only play God, but to be God. I held the ultimate power over the life of Francis Dubois. I had the power to assist the DA in condemning him to life in prison. I held the power to give Dubois his freedom.

The new young district attorney had been a college basketball star. He was so tall that when he stood before me on the witness stand, he blocked out my view of anyone but him. He fumbled with the plea agreement, had me authenticate it as the true document and introduced it in evidence.

I was not listening as the DA went through the motions of marking the agreement as an exhibit, allowing the judge to read it and handing it to the court reporter to be filed in the record. The noise of their voices was blocked by the blood pumping through my arteries, eliminating all sound but the sound of my interior dialogue.

I had to lie. The district attorney’s interpretation of the plea documents was skewed, but if I agreed with his reading of them, Dubois would remain in jail awaiting trial on the 1983 rape charge. I knew a local jury would convict Dubois and a judge would sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole or probation. There would never be another child injured by him, never be another Will Courville.

All I had ever wanted to do when I worked with Des and Matt was save children from sexual abuse by priests. Now, at last, I had the power to protect children from the worst kind of sexual predator. I had to lie about the document. It was the only way children would ever be protected from Dubois.

As the DA moved back to the counsel table, I could see Julie again. I looked into her eyes and saw the goodness that defined her being, and asked myself what Julie would do if she was in my place that morning. Would she swear to tell the truth and then proceed to lie under oath?

The United States’ justice system is based on the precept that witnesses who come before the court will testify truthfully. From the moment the District Attorney asked his first question, the truth came out almost as an involuntary reflex, against my will.

“Do you recognize this document?”

“Yes.”

“Is this your signature?”

“Yes.”

“Is it not a fact that the language of the agreement is to the effect that your former client agreed he would receive medical treatment during his period of incarceration?”

Again, I could not stop the truth from spilling out. “No. I think the document is clear that this is an option, and not a requirement.”

As I heard myself testifying about the true meaning of the document that Dubois, Sean and I signed in the fall of 1985, so many years ago, I knew what the consequences would be. I knew that by nightfall Judge Weir would enter an order enforcing the plea agreement and all of its provisions, including the grant of immunity for crimes Dubois committed prior to 1985. Francis Dominick Dubois was again going to be a free man.

The judge called for a recess to consider my testimony and formulate a ruling. I sat still on the witness stand while everyone filed out of the courtroom. When only the two bailiffs, Dubois and I remained in the courtroom, the bailiffs flanked Dubois and walked him toward a side door.

As Dubois passed the witness stand, he said, “I knew you would get me out of this.”

He looked back one last time with that same expression that had unnerved me since the day I met him. I sat paralyzed on the witness stand, alone in the courtroom, unable to will myself to leave.

Slowly, I pulled myself to a standing position. In the back of my throat, I tasted bile.

When I walked out into the hall, I realized an electrical storm had knocked out all but the emergency lights. There was more light coming from the narrow windows than the dim fixtures. I squinted, trying to find Julie in the crowd. I knew the judge would soon be returning to the bench to enter an order freeing the prisoner and I wanted to be on the road before that happened.

As I slowly navigated my way through the crowd, I was blocked by the immense presence of Poppa Vidros. He gave me a hard look, then gazed at the rain outside the window. He sucked hard on his cigarette.

The big man said, “Is the judge going to free him?”

I nodded.

“You know where he’s gonna go?”

I nodded again. “Flatwoods, Texas. He will be going to a farm owned by his brother Bobby Dubois. Flatwoods is somewhere around Beaumont.”

Poppa Vidros dropped his cigarette and mashed it with his big boot. With his hands jammed in the pockets of his raincoat, he turned slowly and worked his way through the crowd to the elevator.

Julie drove our getaway car from the courthouse on wet roads to the outskirts of Thiberville, turning onto the Interstate, bound for our hideaway in the Atchafalaya Swamp. I felt empty. The news broke on the car radio that the judge had quashed the indictment pending against Francis Dubois and he was to be released from the parish jail with immediate effect.

Three days before we were to leave Louisiana, the biggest news story of the Dubois saga broke. First, the Associated Press put a condensed news item on the wire, two abbreviated paragraphs
noting that the infamous serial sex abuser, former Catholic priest Francis Dubois, had been murdered in a small town in east Texas.

The next morning the Baton Rouge newspaper carried a full account on its front page. In the center of the article was a photograph of the front of Lizzie Johnson Primary School. In the lower left hand corner was a mug shot of Francis Dominick Dubois taken when he was last booked in the Thiberville Parish Correctional Facility. In the tight head shot, he appeared to be unshaven, sweating, his hair matted flat on his head, and his expression was the same smirk I had seen so many times since I first met him in Deerfield, New Hampshire, eighteen years earlier.

Dubois had been seen at the Lizzie Johnson Primary School in Flatwoods, Texas. He had been leaning against a chain-link fence, watching second-and third-graders play in the schoolyard during recess. Shortly after the bell rang and everyone returned to their classrooms, several teachers had reported hearing three explosive noises in quick succession. Rushing outside, they saw a dirty white pickup truck in the distance, speeding away down the Farm to Market Road that ran alongside the school. Beyond the description of the truck being white and dirty, they could offer no further details.

It was only when they turned to go back into the school that they saw the corpse. The shotgunned body of Francis Dominick Dubois was still almost erect, the traumatized teachers reported, its bloodied mass of flesh embedded in the chain-link fence. What was left of his skull dangled from the spikes on the top of the fence.

I crumpled the newsprint and tossed it in a wastepaper basket. For a long time I was still. Then I retrieved the article, walked onto the deck of the house that overlooked the wide Atchafalaya River, and put a lighter to the newspaper. The burning paper rose a few inches into the air. Dubois’s face was consumed in flames as the newsprint disintegrated into ashes.