“You preached those atheistic sermons… “

“Sermons about atheism, Terry, not atheistic sermons,” he said, correcting his friend Dolan.

“A bit of both, from what I heard,” said Dolan. “Whatever you preached, it was tricky stuff. And now you can’t preach at all and are looking for another spot.”

“Houlihan’s making me look for another spot.”

“And you are supinely going along with it. Why?”

“You mean, why don’t I take it to the priests senate and push it to an emotion-filled conclusion where the archbishop stands up and plucks the heartstrings of his more impressionable clergy, saying he’s not a bastard and never was one?”

Dolan shrugged.

Devlin was on the ropes. He’d gotten very public about things a priest usually keeps in the closet. If he didn’t believe in God, as much or in the way he was expected to, he was to consult a spiritual counselor and work it out somehow. “Dark night of the soul” and all that would be the standard diagnosis. He’d buckle down and go to work on his problem.

But he’d gone public, and in the pulpit, no less. Not that he said, “I don’t believe.” But that he took unbelief seriously, preaching about it as a problem that ought to be addressed. He had bet on people being out there ready to grapple with the problem, and cherishing a sermon that focused on it.

To some extent it worked. People paid attention, but he figured out later that they had done so largely because his sermons came from the heart. They would pay attention to anything that arrived in that untoward manner.

As a preacher he normally assumed a role, circumscribed, defined by custom, leaving not much room to move around in. But he had jumped the traces, done the unexpected, and was paying the price.

First, Houlihan, through his vicar Crowley, had shut him up. No more preaching, no more hearing confession (small loss that, in an age of unrepentance), no more saying mass publicly. No more performing publicly as a priest in any way at all.

There he was, pastor of a big parish, in his presumed prime as a dispenser of the sacred mysteries, shelved. Very strong medicine in an age of a severe shortage of able-bodied and willing priests. Surprising to, since Archbishop Houlihan, troubled presider over a troubled archdiocese, had held back on suspending some pretty flagrant violators.

— — — — — — — —

Joe Maloney, for instance, had refused a dozen assignments in a row, jealous of his conscience’ prerogatives in matters of ministry. He drove a cab to make ends meet and stood up in various stockholders’ meetings, announcing himself as Father Joe Maloney from the Chicago archdiocese, brandishing like a whip his moral convictions against Wonder Bread because it was sold by a conglomerate that also made missiles.

Naval Intelligence wanted Maloney sat on in the worst way and made its position clear to the archbishop through a civilian agent in its employ, a zealous traditional Catholic from Devlin’s parish.

But was Maloney ever suspended? No. He was attacked in various devious ways and found himself one day with his hospital insurance revoked. But his archbishop never found the nerve to do publicly to him, a truly troublesome priest, what he did to him secretly.

Neither did he ever against publicly discipline the even more flagrant abuser of priestly immunity, Father Alexander Gorman, who flayed the archbishop in newspaper columns and wrote prurient novels featuring priests and bishops in compromising positions. Devlin was waiting for Gorman to go on television and disaffiliate from the hierarchical philanderers he had created or at least say the devil made him create them.

But Gorman never did this, and his books sold well. Devlin couldn’t help compare himself as rebel with Gorman as rebel. He wondered whether he, with his incipient atheism, was ages behind Gorman with his probing of sexual exploits by priests and bishops, or ages ahead of him. Was the great unexplored area sex or unbelief?

Clearly the two were not on common ground. Gorman’s characters seemed to believe in God the more they horsed around, but he, Devlin, was having trouble believing without doing any horsing around at all. Maybe he, Devlin, ought to horse around, he thought, in order to regain the faith of his childhood.

What was it Gorman called God? The old fellow? Devlin would have to try that approach. He knew there was no future for him in Uncaused Cause or any other of Thomistic argumentation. Anyhow, he sometimes yearned for the days when that kind of talk flourished. This made him of antediluvian tendency, he realized. But Old Fellow? That was a bit much for him.

Meanwhile, he had the problem of where to stay. Any self-respecting fox had his hole to curl up in, but Devlin, for all his alleged atheism, wondered if he was about to imitate the Son of Man in the matter of having roof over head. Well, they would never put him out on the street, he reasoned. But if he was restless at St. Denis before he found an outlet in quasi-atheistic sermons, he was restless after Houlihan stopped him from preaching them. He’d been tempted to jump ship before the sermon breakthrough, and he was tempted again now it was plugged up. What to do? He didn’t know.

— — — — — — — —

Meanwhile, Tom Skelton’s interest in “fuck” went beyond his awareness of how black kids used the word, of course. Firmly identified with his family as he was, being sustained there and glad to be part of it, he was less inclined to go looking for kicks elsewhere. He was a square kid, in the sense that he was backward when it came to sex.

His hardened member, for instance, was something to be tolerated and put up with, rather than indulged. He hadn’t discussed it much with anybody, what to do when it rose, seeking attention. The priests he knew were not inclined to discuss the matter. Unlike kids he knew who attended the local Catholic boys’ high school, he was not exposed to to systematic moral education in the matter. His CCD, religious-education classes at the home of lay parishioners, was all about self-realization and helping out in nursing homes and steered clear of moral guidance except in a very general sense.

The public schools were diffident in the matter. Sex education encountered more pitfalls than the good fathers, sisters and brothers ever dreamed of in their cloistered halls. Tom had attended St. Denis grade school, but he’d heard the rumblings when the neighborhood public elementary school (which his younger brothers and sisters attended) had considered sex education for its sixth-graders. He heard his father discuss it at length one night.

Assorted Catholic, Protestant and Hindu parents from the multiracial, polyglot village community had gathered with the school principal and the volunteer crew of the three women, one a former nun, who were to spell things out for the children. The women had no abortion case ready to present when that issue arose. They had no hard line against premarital sex or masturbation or several other taboo areas, and the protesting parents did not like the idea of discussing those things as if they were neutral and not taboo.

The three women, on the other hand, were of a more positivistic bent. That is, they were willing to discuss the subject with a bit of detachment, in good liberal fashion. They were also of a counseling bent. One was a teacher, another had been one, and the third, mother of one of the sixth-graders, was married to a psychologist. Their views were not those of a dispenser of moral edicts. These were for the parent to produce, or the minister or rabbi or whoever else was in the business of dispensing moral wisdom. They weren’t.

They did tell stories about rampant sexual ignorance they had encountered in the young and made it clear they wanted desperately to dispel it. Tom’s father went to the meeting out of curiosity, with Nate Goodman. Neither had strong views on the matter. Both were impressed by the three women and the argument that was dished out in the classroom could be hashed out at home for its moral content, or discontent.

“Civilization is full of discontents, you know, Ted,” Nate Goodman told Tom’s father.

“You just read that in a book somewhere, didn’t you?” responded Ted, who knew it for a Freud title and nothing else.

The principal took an enigmatic stance throughout the two hours or so of discussion involving thirty or so parents and the three volunteers, offering a clarifying comment now and then but otherwise staying clear of flak and fallout. He supported the classroom discussion, that year at least. (Teachers did not do it the following year.) But in discussion he held back, favoring the program without being too much identified with it. His eyes darted back and forth from over a full mustache which added a few years’ appearance to his youthful face. But in general he kept his mouth shut.

Nate Goodman did not.

“I wonder if the nonreligious character of the public-school setting doesn’t undermine its credibility in these matters,” he offered after the first volley of objections had been absorbed or deflected by the three women. “I mean, if a priest or rabbi were doing the instructing, some of the parents I’ll bet would go along with it. What do you think?”

He looked around at the parents he had in mind, but they gave him stony stares. The three women, recognizing at least a neutral voice in the midst of criticism, looked hopeful at Nate’s comment but said nothing. They weren’t about to buy his logic, since it would send them packing while some ordained cleric, probably a man, took over. Nate didn’t have anybody in mind, though he would have enjoyed seeing his old friend Pat Devlin in the situation. Devlin would have sent those kiddies away with more questions than when they came in. Nate was just talking off the top of his head, however, pursuing the subject rather than a solution to the problem. No one took him up on his thesis.

One of the parents did make a memorable contribution. Preferring to drop the whole idea no matter who did the teaching, he observed that the human race had been getting along for three thousand years without sex education and could continue to do so.

Ted refused to look Nate’s way after this parent spoke, for fear the look in Nate’s eyes would make him burst out laughing. Instead, he looked straight ahead, affecting a glazed look, only imagining what Nate would do with the man’s observation afterwards.

Among other things, he would certainly be noting that the parent in question should not judge the human race’s pause potential for self-education in these matters from his own highly successful experience. He did in fact make this observation after the meeting.

“He did say human race, didn’t he?” Nate asked as they walked out of the building after coffee and cookies in the teachers’ lounge. “He said the human race had done all right so far, so why change it now? Right?”

Ted, safely out of the charmed circle they had sat in for the discussion, bent with laughter.

“Oh boy. Reminds me of the story Pat Devlin told me years ago, when he was in seminary. They were going over the things that could make a marriage no good from the start. So the church could annul it, you know, that sort of thing.

“The case in point was ignorance, where after a year of marriage the couple went to the priest and said they’d had no kids and wondered why, and the priest found out they didn’t know what their equipment was for.”

“What’d the priest tell them?”

“How to do it, I assume,” said Nate. “Geez, I can just see it, this priest spelling it all out for them. What he learned in the seminary class”

“What class?”

“Where they explained how the equipment worked. Pat told me about it.”

“In case they —” Both started in at once, then finished it together: “ever had to tell —” Both stopped to laugh at their idea of the priest fresh from seminary explaining to the couple married for a year what it was they were supposed to do.

Nate had to stop, he was laughing too hard.

— Next, chapter 4 —