In God's House (24 page)

Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux had spoken with my secretary, Monique, a few days earlier and requested a Friday afternoon meeting with me at the chancery. I now had Mo call him to advise him that I would not come to the chancery. He was told he could see me in my office at 2:30 p.m. and he was prompt.

I greeted him warmly. “Monsignor, it’s good to see you.”

We shook hands and he settled in a client chair. I sat next to him in the other client chair.

“Well, Renon, I actually have been told by Jon Bendel it might be wise if I did not speak with you anymore. Twice I’ve been told that. But there are other considerations. There are things within the Church and Church structure that have nothing to do with these civil law cases. This is a Church matter I come to you about. I am here to give you this name and address.”

He handed me a piece of diocesan stationery. In type in the center of the page was:

In Moroux’s handwriting were notations of the street address and two telephone numbers.

“I would like for you to call this Father Matthew Patterson and visit with him in person. Apparently Father Patterson is an eminent psychiatrist as well as a priest. He founded Hope House and treats priests, nuns and people in religious orders for a lot of different things there. I believe it would be in the best interest of everyone for Father Patterson to do an evaluation of Father Francis, maybe take over his treatment. At all costs, I would like for you to travel to meet Father Patterson as soon as possible.”

“Monsignor, I cannot do this. If Father Dubois is evaluated and treated by this priest, then Father Patterson could be called as a witness in the criminal trial. No matter how sympathetic this Father Patterson might be to the insanity defense I will rely upon, how do you think it would look to a jury, to the press, to the public? A priest defending a priest? It cannot get much worse than that. There is no need for me to even call him.”

“Well, this really matters. The requests that you go to see Father Patterson have become demands. They come from a Father Desmond McDougall, a canon lawyer at the papal nunciature in Washington, DC, which, as you know, is also the Vatican Embassy. Father McDougall is a prominent faculty member at Catholic University Law School, an author, a redactor of the revised code of canon law. He is the man who vets the shortlist of potential bishops and cardinals in the United States. His influence in the American Church and Rome is great. I need to grant his requests – demands. And he’s demanding you travel to Hope House. All I can do is ask you again. I have done that.”

The old, abandoned college football stadium was only a block from the family home where I grew up. When I was a kid, I’d sneak out at night and run to the field, crawl under the chain-link fence, and climb to the top of a light standard above the press box.
I would spend almost all night up there. In those days it was the tallest structure in Thiberville.

Tonight I waited until it was late before leaving my office and stopped at a package liquor store for a bottle of Pouilly Fuissé. The clerk used a corkscrew, re-corked the bottle and gave me a plastic cup. I drove to the old stadium. Parking my car near the old baseball diamond next to the stadium, I walked along the
bamboo-lined
centerfield fence and crawled through the hole that I had made when I was twelve years old.

I made my way around the cinder track that ringed the football field and was pockmarked as a result of neglect. Walking across the end zone of the grassy field to the concrete-and-brick bleachers stand, I climbed a wooden ladder to the roof of the old press box, now home to hundreds of cooing pigeons. From there I went up a steel ladder to reach the top of the huge lights, where there was a railed platform approximately five by ten feet in size.

I had never told anyone, not even my best friends, about this place. It might have been the only secret I ever kept. When I was a kid, going to this place was a great adventure; it was risky and the payoff was a rush. As a child I came here when I was happy. As an adult I used it as a place of refuge when I was troubled.

I had always loved the night. I loved being alone in the night. There was no place I had ever known where I could be more alone.

As I climbed the rusting steel ladder, I dropped the cup. Once I was on the decking, I pulled the cork and tossed it toward the field, watching it drop on a fifty-yard-line seat just below the press box. I looked down on the field far below. I had once played in an important high school game on this university field. The goalposts I had kicked footballs through were gone. We came close to victory that rainy night. I was run out of bounds at the two-yard line as the clock ran out. When I was tackled, I was pushed into a mud puddle. I thought it was the mouthful of mud that left the taste in my mouth, but that bad taste did not go away for a long time. It was the taste of defeat. I had the same taste in my mouth now.

On the railing was a faded tie of mine. I had knotted it around the steel strut on a night ten years earlier when I’d decided I was never going to wear ties again or do any more work that required a costume of any kind. By the next morning, I had found myself again dressing in a suit and tie. Now, once again, I pulled off the tie I was wearing and tied it next to the other one.

The view into the darkness was beautiful. In daylight, Thiberville was shrouded by the spreading branches of live oak trees that never lost their leaves. Almost all the lights of Thiberville were below the tree canopy; in some directions it was like looking at lights under a blanket. There was only a faint hint of civilization, the things one was aware of at street level. Off to the east the brightly lighted towers of a power plant were shrouded by a white vapor spewing from the tall stacks and falling back to the ground in the still, heavy air.

The town was asleep. More than a hundred thousand people in Thiberville knew nothing of the truth about the diocese that was tormenting me.

My clothes were moist from sweating during the climb and the high humidity. As a child, I used to wonder how it could be so hot at night when the sun was not shining.

I set the wine bottle on the platform and watched as clouds obscured the stars. Looking back at the football field, I thought again of that rainy night long ago, and of the other Friday nights we had played on the freshly cut grass. Even then, winning had always been everything to me. In those football years, there were only two times we lost. As a lawyer, I had lost only one trial. I could count every loss in my life.

My first loss was when I was six. I saw my puppy run over by a car. The feeling I had when I buried him was the same feeling I had whenever I lost anyone or anything. But never had my heart ached like it did tonight. Losing Kate and the children made me more aware of my heart than ever before and my heart felt like it really could break.

Without my family, what else was there in my life? I had a bishop and a monsignor averting their gazes from a priest who defiled little kids. Unable to do anything for the child victims, I was losing there too.

And I was also feeling the loss of my faith.

As an altar boy, I had been happy serving Mass. I had felt I belonged to something that was about God and goodness. It was the Church that made me want to be good when I was young. Now, as I sipped dry white wine, I felt the enormity of the loss of my faith, a faith I was unaware of until it was lost.

Maybe I had always been what some call a “cultural Catholic”, one baptized and raised in a Catholic community. The only God I had known was a God given to me, explained to me by religion teachers in the twelve years I attended a Catholic school. Sure, I questioned a lot of things as I grew older – like eating no meat on Fridays, or confessing sin to a mortal man – but I had faith in God and the Church, and had always believed both to be one and the same: a repository of goodness.

I’m certain I once believed priests were superior spiritually to lay persons. Tonight I knew I believed none of that. Now that I had knowledge of what the Church was really like on the inside, I knew my faith would have to be deaf, dumb and blind for me to continue to believe in this institution made of mortal men, some whose sins were worse than those who confessed their sins to them.

My hatred of losing, the very taste loss left in my mouth, was probably the core force of my being, the reason behind almost everything I did. It wasn’t an epiphany, but an insight I’d never had. As I looked over a town asleep and down on an overgrown, abandoned sports field, somewhere deep inside I realized that I was losing everything that mattered to me. I worried I was losing myself. The taste in my mouth was not something wine could wash away.

On Saturday morning, we told our children that we were separating and that I would be living in a townhouse in the city that Kate had fixed up for me. We told them the family house would eventually be sold and that they would move somewhere else with Kate. Actually, Kate was the one who did all the talking. As she announced that we were separating, Sasha broke in two before our eyes. She began crying, sobbing, screaming “No, No, No”, and hyperventilating to the point where she could not catch her breath. It took a half-hour to calm her. The boys were quiet. Shelby looked away, through a window, and Jake hung his head, staring at his jiggling legs. When the conversation ended, the boys left. They went to Shelby’s jeep and drove away. Sasha walked out in the pasture and sat down in a field of wild flowers.

That afternoon we received a phone call from our friend who ran the country grocery store up the road. He said that Sasha had walked in with her little bank of coins and tried to buy lottery tickets. It was against the law to sell lotto tickets to a child. When Kate went to pick Sasha up at the store, she told Kate she was trying to win enough money to buy her house and keep it.

The rain and freezing December temperatures caused all the leaves of the cathedral’s live oak to become encased in ice. The bells in the steeple competed with loud claps of thunder, sounding out like dull drums banging in the sky. The thunder and bells reverberated in Monsignor Jean-Paul Moroux’s skull, which had been hollowed out by a tall bottle of Russian vodka the night before.

The previous evening Moroux had locked the weather outside and stayed in his home. He’d sat in front of the fireplace with a glass in hand and a bottle of vodka and bucket of ice on the sideboard. When the fire faltered, the monsignor walked over to the Nativity set with its large straw figures. He burned the shepherd and then tossed in the lambs to keep the flames going.

In between shots of vodka, Moroux whittled away at his latest African mask, using his small woodcarver’s knife and occasionally applying his special woodburning tool. Carving African masks was the only endeavor that fulfilled him – and something he kept secret from everyone else. Usually he carved and burned the masks at a workbench in the attic of the Old Bishop’s House, but it had been too cold to work up there on Friday night.

The monsignor loved the beauty of African faces. In his Paris university years, he had come across a lot of Africans in the cafés he frequented, something he had never experienced at the backwoods Acadia Parish farm of his childhood, and he had some African photography books. The masks he made varied from the
warlike to the ceremonial, though none were lifelike. The current face was a funeral mask, exaggerated and angular.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, Moroux polished off the last of the vodka. Sucking the blood from a knife-wound to his finger, he used his free hand to rake wood shavings from the top of his desk, dumping them in the wastepaper basket. He gently placed the mask out of view, in the well of his desk.

In Saint Stephen’s at the Saturday service, amid the sounds of the church bells, thunder and soaring organ music, Monsignor Moroux unsteadily followed in the footsteps of an altar boy carrying a crucifix. Every priest from the diocese was there. In procession, they entered the cathedral from the sacristy and slowly made their way down the center aisle and around to a side altar furnished with a statue of the Virgin Mary and a
life-sized
Nativity set. Even Bishop Reynolds was present. The priests of the Thiberville diocese were celebrating a feast day, a highlight of the liturgical calendar, which some still called “A Holy Day of Obligation”; a day commemorating one of the miracles in the Catholic faith. This was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

In this season of Advent, as Catholics around the world celebrated the anticipation of the coming of Christ, the Diocese of Thiberville went on the offensive in a public relations battle. The expensive and intensive four-tiered media campaign had been the idea of Joe Rossi.

A few days before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Rossi had convened a meeting that even included Bishop Reynolds. Rossi held the floor. “This is our season. We got everything to sell and we gotta sell it. Sell the smells, sell the bells. The smells and bells.”

Rossi paced the room, almost dancing as he shifted his hefty girth from one side to the other. “Look,” he said, “one little pipsqueak named Zeb-a-dee-dooh-dah got him a little typewriter and that trashy little weekly paper is treating him like he’s one of
those reporters who brought down the Nixon presidency. We gotta bury that stuff. Now is the season. It’s our time of year.”

Archdiocesan legal counsel, Tom Quinlan, had brought in a top advertising firm from New Orleans to mount a television, newspaper, radio and direct mail campaign. It was a campaign designed to make everyone feel good about the diocese, to remind them of the good works of Catholic charities.

When the advertising agency had showed them rough footage for a preview, Rossi had almost had a heart attack. Halfway through watching the video tape, he flipped on the lights and fumbled with the remote control. He could never figure out how to shut down the monitor, so this time he just pulled the plug out of the wall.

The young people with the agency were aghast. Joe said, “I’m gonna pull the plug on all of you, on the whole damned project. What you got here in this film is lots of pictures of priests. We can’t have no priests in the film. We’re not gonna show priests in television commercials. You hear that? You got that? No priests. You can show churches, altars, schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, the Church doing good things, whatever – you don’t need to show no priests in the pictures. Lay people, the faithful, good loyal Catholics. No priests. Now ya’ll come back next week with film to show us that got no priests.”

After the agency people left, Rossi had mumbled to himself and the room, “Who knows if any of the priests in the film are gonna end up having jail mug shots like Dubois one day? Who knows anymore? We ain’t gonna be picturing priests. I don’t want to make a hero of somebody who could bite us on the ass. Priests are our problem.”

Priests were their problem. It was no longer one priest. Nobody knew how many other priests would be exposed, but already things seemed to be approaching critical mass.

Zeb Jackson had been running wide open for a couple of months, writing big stories nearly every week. He had the cover story in
The Courier
four times in eight weeks.

Everytime Zeb’s editor gave him the cover of
The Courier
it was because his article was unmasking and naming yet another pedophile priest in the diocese. The growing list of diocesan priests who were sexual predators was shocking enough, but the interviews with their victims were horrifying to read. Each cover story ended the same way with an offensive, insulting comment issued to
The Courier
in writing by Lloyd Lecompte, diocesan media director, “The diocese does not wish to comment on allegations raised by Mr. Jackson. Yours in Christ, Lloyd Lecompte.”

By Christmas week, Daryl Dessiré, publisher of the
large-circulation
daily
The Thiberville
Register
, was outpacing even the paid media campaign of the diocese, regularly firing his big guns. The
Register
ran full-page stories accusing
The Courier
of being a haven for a yellow journalist, scandal monger and, worst of all in those parts, an outsider from New Orleans who wanted to hurt the Thiberville community in order to promote himself.

Not satisfied with their attacks on journalist Zeb Jackson and on the weekly he wrote for, the
Register
ran a Sunday page-one editorial attacking me as being an obstructionist who was causing pain to the good people of Thiberville, Bayou Saint John and Amalie by prolonging the inevitable finding of guilt against Father Dubois. The unsigned piece stated it was in my power to honor the children, Church and community by bringing an end to this. It was vintage Joe Rossi dressed up in the prose of Jon Bendel. As Bendel was the attorney for both the newspaper and its publisher, he had complete control over the content of stories relating to the diocese and Father Francis Dubois.

The main thrust of the offensive launched by the
Register
was in a series of stories and editorials headlined “Church Not On Trial”, which repeatedly asserted that there was no proof in the public record of wrongdoing by the bishop or his vicars. This was true. There was no proof in the public record of wrongdoing by the bishop or his vicars.