Rabid (83 page)

She didn’t love him.

He might be a cad. He might still be
un donnaiolo.
All that was true.

But he would not hurt her. He had not hit her to escape from her when she had handcuffed him to her bed. He would not hurt her like this, either.

In that way, at least in that way, he was not
un donnaiolo
anymore.

He let that part of himself go. For a moment, he missed being that out-of-control beast because he could blame so much on it, that the women were too beautiful, that he couldn’t help himself, but he felt stronger.

“Call me.” Hormones and blood thickened his voice and he steadied her on her feet before he released her waist. “If you want to talk, call me.”

He opened the door and stepped into the white hallway. 

The door shut behind him, and a thunk sounded through the door, like a body falling against it or a fist driven at the wood.

The empty hall stretched away from him in both directions, and he turned and walked away.

~~~~~

The email was distributed from New Hamilton at two in the morning to computers in the Vatican, where it was dawn, and it contained the same message, Rosetta-like, in English, Italian, Spanish, and Latin.

The computer tech, a novice from Korea, watched the identical email appear in the email boxes of all the users in the server, including V01, the head honcho, and wondered if it was spam or a virus. He scanned it with anti-virus software, but it didn’t read like a malicious program so he let everyone find it the next morning, and the uproar started.

To my Brothers in Christ:

The Enemy is again among us, and It seeks to destroy the Holy Catholic Church by infiltrating us with pedophile priests.

Our lawyers’ advice to deny the abuse, to admit nothing, to cajole or threaten victims to sign away their rights or go away quietly while allowing the abuses to mount by reassigning priests with known pedophilia crimes, has damaged the reputation of the Church and threatens our own souls.

There is talk in America of bishops and cardinals being prosecuted and, if guilty, being sent to prison for not complying with mandatory reporting laws and for facilitating these crimes (accomplice before and after the fact.)

Our policies have also resulted in yet more victims of crimes with stronger civil cases against us. It is estimated that there are at least 3000 priests who have committed crimes against children in the United States. Each pedophile priest victimizes anywhere from a few children to, in the cases of John Geoghan and James Porter, hundreds each. Cases settled out of court cost us $100,000 to $400,000, not including of lawyer fees. Losses in court can cost us up to $30 million per case, again exclusive of attorney fees.

The problem of pedophile priests will likely cost the Church two trillion dollars.

If all the abuse stops right now. If there are no further cases.

In addition to legal and financial liabilities we incur by allowing any pedophile priest to continue in any form of ministry, the spiritual ramifications to the victims are extensive. We are risking the victims’ souls by allowing them to be exposed to the Adversary and his minions.

Thus, I propose the following reorganizations to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Holy Roman Catholic Church:

1) The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Institute for External Affairs must be autonomous, as they were before the reorganization of the Holy Office in 1908. Sometimes, force must be used in service of the truth. Any means necessary to obtain information from those detained and to ensure that they never offend again must be employed. Information is our weapon in this war against the Great Diabolical among us.

2) Pedophilia stems from carnal lust, which in men, as we all know, is insatiable. Any priest, including bishops or cardinals, accused of any paraphilia must be immediately recalled to the Dominican brothers. Any priest sheltering an accused priest or not forthcoming with information relating to pedophile priests must also be detained.

3) Pedophilia is not merely a sin or a crime; it is also a compulsion and an addiction. Penance, heartfelt sorrow, drugs, or electroshock or behavioral modification therapies have no effect. It is incurable. If any of the detained priests ever leave the Dominican monasteries, they will rape more children. It is the nature of the beast that they will sin again, in practice if they can, in their minds if they cannot. They will again betray the grace of ordination. We must give them an opportunity to go and sin no more.

The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a divine gift from God. It allows one who has made a good confession and truly repented to stand again in the good grace of Our Lord and attain salvation. To this end, we should grant the good Dominican brothers full authority to do what they must to extract a good confession and exact proper penance.

As part of the pedophiles’ penance, they should be given the option of a method to go and sin no more and avoid all occasion of their sin. We must take care in the context of the penance. It must be presented and accepted as part of the admonition to go and sin no more.

However, if the verifiably guilty pedophile does not accept the penance, we know that he has not made a good and full confession, and the Dominican brothers should invite him to more reflection and self-inquiry more until he is fully repentant.

4) The Church was created by Our Lord, Jesus Christ, to save souls, not lives. Pedophiles’ sins endanger children’s souls. Even if we are wrong about the nature of reconciliation and the administration of penance and the Divinity does consider the pedophiles to be suicides, we will save the souls of their future victims, perhaps hundreds of souls per pedophile. See the enclosed case studies for details concerning the effects of sexual abuse on victims.

5) We must suspend all operations at all seminaries. Admission standards now are perhaps the most perfectly derived guidelines for rejecting healthy human beings and selecting men who exhibit dangerous personality traits. We reject heterosexual men who might want to have a family. We reject homosexual men who are attracted to other adult men. We admit to seminaries only childlike men who believe in their own partial divinity, who believe that they are beyond ordinary mortals, and who repress their own human sexuality and attraction to any other adult and are thus at the greatest risk to delude themselves that their abuse of a child is not child rape.

Sincerely in Christ,

Reverend Monsignor Dante Maria Petrocchi-Bianchi

~~~~~

Cardinal Piotr Ivanovich recoiled from the description of Luke Dietrich’s rape via candelabra and the pedophile’s ejaculation into a consecrated communion chalice. The paper crumpled in his spotted hands, horrified at the heresy that the priest had committed.

Bishop Tomas Aguirre ran from his computer screen and vomited in the bathroom, retching and spitting last night’s broth and unchewed pasta, when he read the account of John Williams’s obscene reenactment of the Stations of the Cross. His own abuser had raped him in his bedroom while his parents were outside the house, cooling themselves on the porch.

Cardinal Francesco Delfino deleted the email after he read the first few lines. Just another one of those crybabies whining for attention. In ancient Greece it was
de rigueur
for a man to take a boy or a youth under his wing for mutual amusement.

The Pope, however, liked action plans. When he had been assigned to the CDF, he had been stymied by the mystic Pope who wafted within clouds of divine grace but did not understand the reality of cash flow and department politics. To Pope John Paul the Second, the godless Communists were still the enemy. The current Pope’s view was far more pragmatic. Even His Holiness Pope Benedict the Sixteenth, even though he had also headed the CDF, had blinded himself to the enormity of the sin and evil within the Church.

The current Pope, however, was not European. His life had not been a cloistered, mystical existence where men kissed his ring in deference. He had led a
revolución
from a dirt-floor prison cell, a year and half that he still considered his greatest achievement.

This Pope took action and smiled, knowing he was doing the dirty work of God.

Within a month, thousands of priests including Cardinal Francesco Delfino were jailed with the Dominicans in the Italian Alps and the new witch hunts had begun.

Two months later, the seminaries closed.

Six months later, the Reverend Monsignor Dante Maria Petrocchi-Bianchi was in charge of the hunt for pedophiles within the Church.

~~~~~

To some extent, Dante’s memorandum had been calculated. Churches do not survive for two thousand years if they are threatened by bankruptcy.

In the 1920’s, the Vatican was insolvent. Rats were destroying the holy walls of Roma.

The Vatican forged
concordats
with Mussolini and Hitler to help them consolidate their dictatorships for a substantial amount of money.

After World War II, the Church ferried 50,000 SS officers, Ustashe, and other Nazis via ‘rat lines’ to safety and provided them with laundered money, new identities, and Vatican passports, for the money. Klaus Barbie. Ante Pavelic. The Commandants of the death camps Treblinka and Sobibor. Eichmann. Mengele.

The Vatican is like a pauper with a windfall. It jealously protects every penny in its coffers. It remembers what it was like to be poor.

John Geoghan, the defrocked Catholic priest and convicted pedophile, was killed in prison by another inmate, Joseph Druce, and the court wiped his criminal record clean because he was still in the appeals process. Civil suits are harder to wage without a conviction, and they get less money. The Church learned a lesson from Geoghan, and Dante’s proposal swept through the Curia like a fogbank, enshrouding all those trapped in it.

The Church would not waste two trillion dollars to protect a few, inconsequential, guilty priests.

~~~~~

Every time Cardinal Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi signed a gold-embossed arrest warrant or a finding of guilt, he checked his phone, hoping that Leila still had his card, that she might call.

Her abuser, Sean, had recanted his sins readily, under moderate pressure.

The website for her new lab at Columbia listed her name and email address. She must feel secure to have listed them publicly.

Sloan’s lab’s webpage had never made any mention of her, and her scientific papers all bore only her initials and last name.

She must know.

In his wallet, a card bore her phone number and email, though he did not allow himself to pursue her, but holding her phone number in his hand was not pursuit.

He had cut his hair when he had returned to Roma in a practical, close-cropped style that attracted less attention from the lithe, lissome Roman women, in whose every step and bend and curve lurked Leila,
Leila
.

~~~~~