Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"I've seen the frustrations of parish life, Father."

"Yes, came, saw and left. Not like Caesar, were you? No conquering, just accounting, and accounting for yourself and your parish to the bishop, who hardly knows your name unless you become involved in some untidy abortion fracas or sleep with a teenager or disgrace your cassock by slopping a little liquor on it."

Matt winced at the corrosive tone. "Will the bishop have to hear about you?"

"Has already, I suppose. Spies everywhere. 'Father Hernandez is tippling a bit nowadays, Your Eminence. Perhaps you should send him somewhere to dry out.'"If only that were the worst of it!"

Matt sipped from his glass again, wondering whether he should probe for some indiscretion with a woman or with the abortion issue. Father Hernandez answered that himself.

"Women were never my weakness," he announced with boozy satisfaction, almost as an ordinary man would boast the opposite. "Not sex, and never the bottle, until lately. Did Sister Seraphina tell you about those odd calls to poor old Monica and the late Miss Tyler, who was so generous despite my lamentable lack of tact toward cats?"

Matt nodded. Father Hernandez leaned forward over his desk, clutching his glass in both hands.

"Do you still observe the sanctity of the confessional?" he demanded, staring into and through Matt's eyes, his gaze as piercing as laser light.

"I left officially; I didn't just walk away like some do. I . . . underwent laicization. I'm not a priest anymore. I can't observe what I can no longer practice."

"You can treat anything I tell you with the same seriousness, can swear to keep it eternally secret, as privileged information, even as a lawyer or a psychiatrist must do."

"The obligation no longer has the spiritual element," Matt objected.

"But if I asked you to . . . revert to that degree of confidentiality, would you?"

"I would have to," Matt answered unhappily.

He hated being asked to perform as a quasi-priest again, but he also understood that those were the only terms on which Father Hernandez would accept him as a confidant.

"If you were my confessor," Father Hernandez went on,

"I would have to begin my confession, 'Father, forgive me, for I have not sinned."

He laughed at Matt's partly appalled, partly puzzled expression, then sighed long and deeply. "You know about the convent getting anonymous phone calls? I have been getting letters."

"Letters?"

Father Hernandez disappeared behind the desk as he bent to wrestle open another old, and sticky, drawer. He surfaced with a large manila envelope, but before opening it, he refilled his glass and nudged the tequila bottle in Matt's direction.

"I'm fine," Matt said, indicating his almost untouched glass and registering the irony of the expression at the same moment. He was not fine, and neither was Father Hernandez.

"All right." Father Hernandez gulped more white lightning, then licked his lips. His hands came down hard on the plump manila envelop. "First, these are lies. I believe the term is 'damnable lies.' But we don't call Satan the Father of Lies for nothing. Lies can undo a life."

Matt nodded.

Father Hernandez sighed again, shakily. "I can hardly bear to show another human being such lies, but I'm sick of swallowing them by myself and saying, doing, nothing to defend myself. I think you will see why I can do nothing.

Nothing. But this." His hand waved at the bottle. "It's a coward's way out, and no way out at all, but it slows my mind from eating at itself so I can pretend to function. Every time I say Mass, I hope I will receive the grace to face this, and every time, I gain only enough strength to keep up the mockery. Now I understand why even Our Lord asked His Father to take the cup of His coming sacrifice from His lips in the Garden of Gethsemane. If what is in these letters becomes public, I will be crucified."

Matt steeled himself to receive the envelope Father Hernandez passed over the desk. Gethsemane again, Where Christ went to contemplate his foreordained suffering and death. And yet the act was not foreordained, according to church teaching; Christ could have refused; that was what made the fruition so significant. Matt never thought for a moment that Father Hernandez was exaggerating his situation.

He drew the rustling bundles of paper from inside the envelope as if they were snakes. He opened one white, business- size envelope, unfolded a crisp piece of typing paper and read.

He read three before he looked up again. Sweat crystallized on Father Hernandez's anxious face. He watched Matt like a child gauging a parent's reaction to a bad report card, uneasy but defiant, afraid but proud.

"And there's nothing to this?" Matt asked.

"Nothing. I swear on the Cross."

"Nor the charges about your previous appointments?"

"Nothing, there or here, then or now. You know what will happen if this . . . garbage becomes public."

"A media circus maximus."

"Bring on the Christians," Father Hernandez intoned with bitter drama. "Bring on the priests."

"So it should be," Matt said, his tone stern as any archbishop's. "Child abuse of any kind is a heinous offense. The sexual abuse of children by the clergy is unspeakable. I confess that I can't imagine how any man of God can shut his eyes to such acts, yet several have been proven to have done just that."

"Not me." Father Hernandez's dark eyes glowed like embers as his fist pounded his chest, not in the humble throb of a mea culpa, but in the emphatic rhythm of a Spanish dancer. "And now it has become fashionable to allege such things. You know how disturbed minds leap in when such ethical chasms open up, swallowing even the innocent. I am innocent!"

Matt spread his hands. "If so, you would be cleared, ultimately."

"Perhaps. And I say only perhaps. But the stigma." Rafael Hernandez held up his pale, damp palms from the glass they curved around. "Stigma. We know where that word comes from, from the nails through the wrists and feet; the stigma is the Crucifixion.''

Matt nodded.

"You know the position the church faces on such matters nowadays."

Matt nodded again.

"What would you have me do?"

Matt said nothing.

"If I went, as I should, to the archbishop, he would be forced to take the most stringent of actions. There would be publicity. Now, the church is anxious to demonstrate its eagerness to root out what it once covered up, and rightfully so. Yet mistakes can be made when such zeal is employed, when an institution of any kind is fighting for its integrity, its reputation. There is a new Inquisition at work."

Matt could not deny that.

"You talk to people on that hotline; you must speak to many disturbed souls, some quite unappealing. What do you think of the writer?"

Matt moved the three envelopes through his hands as if weighing them. "The police could do a better psychological profile. Yes, I know why you feel they mustn't be involved.

I'm no expert on anonymous letters, but I'd say an organized person did this. They seem to be printed on a laser printer, which rules out the ancient clue of the uneven typewriter keys. I sense someone intelligent taking almost a vicious pleasure in the perversity of the charges. Does the writer never ask for anything?"

"Nothing!" Father Hernandez clutched his head instead of his glass, his face taking on a distracted look.

"Then it could be a crank, some disaffected parishioner, or even an anti-Catholic bigot."

"I know what it could be. I also know what will happen if the letters are made public: a full-scale investigation, no matter how unsubstantiated the charges. After that, neither I nor Our Lady of Guadalupe will be worth much. Matthias, I have been a decent priest, perhaps not the brightest or the best, or the humblest, but to the extent of my abilities, I have been faithful to my vows and have tried to be of service to my parishioners and my duties. I don't know what to do. Perhaps this . . . correspondent will tire of baiting me and stop."