Till Death (16 page)

For now, the two priests had time to relax and enjoy each other’s company.

“It was very kind of you,” Koesler said, “to host our Ursula party tonight.”

“Not at all,” Tully said. “There’s just no end to what I have to learn about this archdiocese. I didn’t know there was a St. Ursula’s parish.” He paused to chew deliberately. “As a matter of fact, I don’t even know much about Ursula. She was a martyr, I presume.”

Koesler chuckled. “Nobody knows exactly who this Ursula was. Most books on the saints list her as having lived in the fourth century. And that’s followed by a question mark. The way the story goes, she was the daughter of a Christian British king. She was going to be given in marriage to a pagan prince. But she was allowed a three-year post-ponement because she really wanted to remain a virgin.”

Tully covered his mouth as he began to laugh. “What would a measly three-year delay do for her if she wanted to remain a virgin?”

“I don’t know,” Koesler confessed. “But that’s the way the story goes. Anyway, she spent the three-year period sailing around—mostly the Mediterranean. Then she and her companions ended up somehow in Cologne, where they were martyred by the Huns for their Christianity.”

“How did the Huns get in the story? And what happened to the pagan prince?”

“No one seems at all sure. Ursula appears to have bought the farm because she refused to marry the chief of the Huns.”

“I guess there is a moral to that story”—Tully continued to enjoy the tale—“virgins should be more flexible. That’s one. And Ursula must have been quite a looker if princes and chiefs wanted to jump her bones.”

“She always reminded me,” Koesler said, “of a story in a lovely little book called
St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies
. The story was about an apocryphal saint called Pudibunda. If I remember the story correctly, it went this way: ‘St. Pudibunda on her wedding night decided that God had called her to a life of spotless virginity. The causes of her death that very night are not known. But the pious may guess at them.’

“And the moral of all this,” Koesler continued, “is that it’s certainly not your fault that you were unfamiliar with this obscure saint. It’s not even your fault that you are unfamiliar with the Detroit parish of the same name. Both the doubtful saint and the obscure parish were tucked away in a corner of oblivion.”

Tully squeezed a handful of potato chip morsels into his mouth, where he chewed them into a gummy blob. When he had swallowed that, he said, “Okay. Now I know what little is known of the saint, and just a little bit more than that about the parish named for her. But what of the club? What was so special about the saint or the parish to have this club named after she … it … them?”

“The club,” Koesler explained, “was in memory of neither the saint nor the parish. Rather, the club was dedicated to the parish’s erstwhile pastor, Father Antonio Angelico. And thereby hangs the story.”

Tully was ingesting the crumbs—all that was left of two heaps of potato chips—much more delicately. “I think we’ve got time for a short story, at least, about St. Ursula’s parish. The management of this place doesn’t seem to be in any hurry for us to clear out. And my meeting’s not till mid-afternoon.”

“Actually”—Koesler had finished his lunch some minutes ago—“you’ll probably get a pretty good notion at tonight’s party of how things were. But maybe I can give you some background.”

“It’d help.”

“Okay. Well, I have no idea exactly when St. Ursula’s was established as a parish. The way the Detroit diocese functioned back then was to anticipate the development of new neighborhoods, buy property in those areas, then wait for the people to build their homes, move in, and start producing families.”

“Excuse me,” Tully interrupted, “but how did the local Catholic administration know where Catholics were going to migrate? What if the diocese made a mistake? What if the property just stood barren?”

Koesler nodded. “A good point. It all worked out rather well for a number of reasons. The priests who were given responsibility for these developments were assisted by Catholic laymen who were experts in demographics. That’s one. And two, they could hardly miss: One community grew almost on top of the other.

“St. Ursula’s, or the property purchased for some sort of new neighborhood, happened to be in a mostly Italian cultural area. As you can imagine with a predominantly Italian section of the city, there were loads of Catholics there. So, they sort of grew up together—the neighborhood and the parish.

“Father Angelico was the second pastor. By the time he got there, things had shifted around. The parish still comprised a majority of Italians. But Polish families had moved in until they had become a solid minority. And before Father Angelico died, the parish went from almost exclusively Italian to about forty percent Italian, forty percent Polish and ten percent black. By the time Father Angelico was no longer, African-Americans made up almost the total population.

“Back when Angelico was thriving, the relationship between pastor and assistants differed from parish to parish. All Church law had to say about it was that the assistant was ‘below’—
subest
—the pastor. And some pastors took flagrant advantage of that positioning.

“Some pastors were very good shepherds—good to their parishioners, good to their employees, good to their assistants. Some of them were very poor managers. Of course they weren’t supposed to be managers; they were supposed to be ‘other Christs’—
alter Christus
. But a few of these guys were small-time tyrants. They were notorious. And among them was Angelico.”

Father Tully sipped his beer. The bottle had a long way to go before it would be a dead soldier. “I’ve heard that from time to time. But it’s always in the context of history—like this type of pastor went out with the Ice Age.”

Koesler eyed several small potato chip crumbs that Tully apparently had missed. Tempting but not compelling. “Funny,” he mused, “I’m just running the presbyterate—as we are called from time to time—through my mind. It used to be that I could freeze-frame on certain pastors as fitting the infamous mold. That doesn’t happen any longer.

“Not that I think that human nature has changed that much. It’s more that there are fewer rear ends to kick.”

“You mean,” Tully said, “that the object of their sadism—the vanishing assistant—is not around to be brutalized?”

“Something like that. But in the days of yore, pastors—at least a handful of them—could be a menace.”

“Didn’t they ever pick on anyone but assistants?”

“Of course. I can think of one—now in that great offertory in the sky—who had the ushers puncture the tires of every car parked on or over the yellow line in the parking lot.”

“Outrageous! The following Sunday there were no improperly parked cars because no one went to Mass there?”

“You’d think that.” Koesler nibbled on one small potato chip crumb and was disgusted with himself. “But those were the days when territorial boundaries were vital. Most parishioners, even the ones with punctured tires, would attend
their
parish no matter how tyrannical the pastor might be. And, if it came to the point where they really had had it, they would still need a letter from the pastor to ‘switch parishes.’”

“What if the guy hopscotched over his pastor and didn’t bring a letter from Daddy? If he just went to another parish to sign up there?”

“Then the priest of that parish was not supposed to permit him to join.”

“Seems preposterous!”

“By today’s lights, definitely That was a different time.”

“I’ll say. Personally, I’m happy all my folks—that used to be your folks—show up of a Sunday. It’s nice if they register. But that’s entirely up to them.”

“Yep,” Koesler agreed. “That’s the open-ended approach I favored. But getting back to the original thought, hardly anyone today would consider causing needless insult to the faithful. The same pastor, the one who had tires punctured, was refinishing the interior of his church. Turns out he received only a partial delivery of the new pews he had ordered. So he put all the spanking new ones in the church’s main section, and left the old, shabby pews in an old side section, and had parents with small children occupy that space.”

Tully was shaking his head. “What a winner! He could solve the priest shortage by cutting back on the number of Catholics belonging to parishes—thus reducing the proportion of the faithful compared with the number of priests left to go around. Didn’t these guys ever take on someone their own size?”

“You mean pastor to pastor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Rarely. But when it did happen it was like a couple of bulls, a couple of lions having at it. No, the butt of choice were the assistants. They were a well-defined target.”

“And you?” Tully beckoned the waitress to bring the bill. Waving aside Koesler’s attempt to pay, he studied the bottom line briefly then slipped some money on the table. “Keep the change,” he said. It would be a generous tip. The waitress could never again bad-mouth stingy clergymen.

“And you, Bob? Did you ever serve with any of these guys?”

“Well, of course, there was Angelico.”

“I mean beside him.”

“No, thank God. I don’t even have to knock on wood. I’m well beyond the stage of having anything even remotely resembling that happen to me.”

“How was it with you and Angelico?”

“Different than anyone he had living with him before or after.”

Tully was smiling. “Because?”

“Because I was the first—and the last, as it turned out—who wasn’t an assistant. I was ‘in residence.’ I was the newly appointed editor of the diocesan paper. He didn’t really know what that entailed, how much clout I had with the administration. It was all lost in the mist of ‘down-town.’

“I think the poor man may have suspected that I was sent to spy on him. It was unlikely he could be charged with anything that resembled misfeasance of any kind. He didn’t steal any of the parish’s money. If anything, he squirreled it away against a rainy day.

“He had no problem avoiding sexual misconduct. He distrusted, even disliked women and boys and girls”—he chuckled—“just about everyone, for that matter, except the men he drafted into the ushers’ guild. Them he handpicked.

“He took no chances with the weekly collection. None but the consecrated hands of a priest could touch the Sunday collection. So, with three priests counting—the pastor, his two assistants, but not me—the money would be banked sometime Monday afternoon.

“Outside of sheer general crankiness, his principal vice was the demeaning abuse he inflicted on his assistants. He never gave any indication that he considered anyone sent to work with him as fully human, let alone fellow priests.”

“They weren’t allowed to exercise their ministry?” Tully wondered.

“They were commanded to exercise
his
ministry. Or, at least, what he considered his ministry.

“Take this for example. The two assistants were not supposed to leave their one-room chambers—at all!—except to say Mass, to take devotions like Perpetual Help, to answer emergency sick calls, to bring Communion to shut-ins, to give instructions to converts … you get the picture.”

“Wow! They might as well have been prisoners.”

“Exactly. I was many times his junior. I didn’t feel it was my function to get in the middle of this mess. Over the years, I have come to have second thoughts: I should have intervened. Of course, the chancery downtown knew what was going on. They should have corrected him—no matter the cost. But, for whatever reason, I should have gotten involved. It was a major failing on my part. The best I could do, I thought, was to form the Ursula club. It may not have been the best idea I ever had. But I think it did some good.

“Originally it was intended as a haven for priests and nuns who had spent any time at all under Father Angelico’s thumb. We had no dues, no rules or regulations, not even a clubhouse. Just a get-together to lick wounds, let off steam, find comfort from shared misery.

“Many years ago most of the membership consisted solely of those priests who were actively assigned to the parish. After a guy had moved on, he tried to forget, and once he’d been reassigned, he rarely needed a group to get over the experience.

“Nor did any nuns belong to the club. First off, they would never have had a chance to escape the convent to gather with the rest of us. Secondly, most of the nuns of that order probably thought that Angelico was a saint.

“But as is usually true, time heals all wounds. And Father Angelico has, for lo these many years, passed on to his eternal reward—or whatever. Now, only a few who were contemporaries attend. It’s more a social event dedicated to keeping tabs on each other and, inevitably, recalling the stories of the way it used to be. Only in retrospect were the good old days actually good.”

Tully checked his watch. The afternoon’s clergy meeting loomed. “By the way,” he said, “thanks for inviting my brother and sister-in-law. They’re looking forward to it.” He stopped and smiled. “At least Anne Marie is.”

Koesler smiled. “I know you want to include them in everything you do … as much as possible.”

Oddly, Koesler had known Zack Tully’s brother and sister-in-law longer than Zack had. Father Koesler and Zoo Tully had collaborated in solving several murder investigations and had become friends. Through Zoo, Koesler had come to know and appreciate Anne Marie for the treasure she was.

In subtle ways, Koesler, Zack, and Anne Marie were trying to interest the detective, a Baptist backslider, in things Catholic. They were careful not to push too hard. For none of the three conspirators was it essential that Zoo convert. If it happened, it would be a tasty frosting on the cake.

“I just hope,” Tully said, “that they won’t feel like fifth wheels. After all, they’ll be the only ones there who won’t be alumni—or alumnae—of the parish.”

“Well, not really,” Koesler responded. “Just so they won’t feel like outsiders, I invited another couple who were never affiliated with the parish or with Father Angelico.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Tom and Peggy Becker. They’re friends of Rick Casserly. Matter of fact, Tom and Rick were seminary classmates. Tom left the seminary something like three years before ordination.”