The elevator doors opened and, as if by magic I was standing in front of a desk at which a plain young woman sat. She looked up from a ledger with an expression of mild curiosity. On the wall behind her was yet more aluminum, but that was an abstract figure of the Risen Christ, which I recognized only because of the legend below it: "I am the Resurrection and the Life."
The sculpture was an unexpected reminder that that building, like the Viliard Mansions before it and like Saint Patrick's and Saint John the Divine, was supposed to be a mere shell, casing, glove of that truth. But what was the Resurrection to me? And what was the Life? They were words from the homily I'd stopped listening to, as easily ignored as the tawdry piece of modern sculpture. I looked away from it, thinking, What complete shit.
"I'd like to see the archbishop, please. My name is Francis Durkin. Tell him I'm an old friend of Michael Maguire's."
The young woman did not see it as her place to screen me. Probably some monsignor in the inner office would do that. She disappeared behind a pair of walnut doors. A moment later she returned, stood at the door and said, to my surprise, "Archbishop O'Shea will see you now."
His office was plushly carpeted, paneled and carefully lit, modern in all respects. A gray hopsack sofa sat adjacent to a polished ebony desk. On a glass and brass coffee table was arranged a selection of the best magazines. The wall behind the desk was entirely glass, and the view of the East River and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was stunning.
Archbishop Timothy O'Shea in black shirt and collar, not robes and skull cap, not even suitcoat, was coming toward me with his hand extended. He was in his early seventies. The crown of his hair was white, longish, setting off his bald head. His skin was tanned and he was not fat. He looked like a cabinet secretary. "My goodness," he said with enthusiasm, "Frank Durkin, how are you? Welcome! Welcome!"
It was not what I expected.
We sat on the sofa together. He offered me coffee, tea or sherry, and I took sherry. So did he.
I raised my glass. "Will you drink to Michael?"
"Of course I will."
We did.
"It's why I'm here."
"I heard you were in a monastery in the Holy Land."
"That's true." I indicated my shirt, my baggy trousers and sandals. "This is Benedictine street garb. I came back today for the funeral. I'm here because I can't believe you won't let him be buried in the Church. I've just come from Saint John the Divine. His family is distraught and so am I."
"I understand. It's thoroughly regrettable." He let his gaze drift to the view. After a moment he said wistfully, "I wish it wasn't like this."
My earlier expectation, of an Orson Welles prelate denouncing permissiveness, attacking infidelity and broken vows, had been off the mark. I sensed at once O'Shea's sadness, and it disarmed me.
He said, "It came as a great shock, Michael's death. I'd always hoped to see him again. I missed him."
All at once my heart flowed toward the man. For a moment I laid aside my argument. Perhaps I should have understood what it was from his side. "You were his mentor. Your gift to him in Korea of that little New Testament changed his life."
"Ah!" His eyes widened and he looked at me with such unwalled unhappiness that I realized I had inadvertently touched a nerve. "That New Testament, my God, what a mistake that was."
"What do you mean?"
He shook his head. "How can I tell you without your thinking...?" He put his glass down and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. When he uncovered them they were red. "I gave him that New Testament the night before a battle. He'd seen action the day before..."
"He blew up that bridge."
"That's right, and I was worried about him."
"That book was just the thing. He said it was what got him through."
"I know, and it made him want to be a priest, and then it made him the best priest any of us knew."
"Well?"
"But when I gave it to him I told him that that particular copy of the New Testament had been my brother's. I said that my brother had it with him when he was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. That was a lie. It wasn't my brother's at all. I had already given my brother's Bible to another GI, and it moved him so that, well, I used the story with other fellows. I gave away a lot of Bibles and I always said the same thing. You could call it a pastoral technique. I wanted them to treasure the book and I thought it was all right to..." He stopped, breathed deeply. "It was an awful thing to do. It didn't matter with the others because I never saw them again, but with Michael, who always treasured that little book, I felt that our friendship was based on a deception of mine, and I was afraid that somehow it would go wrong. And then, of course, it did."
Now when he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes he seemed like the old man he was, the old fox, the old manipulator. I had to stifle my disgust at his trick, his sodding "technique." I felt sorry for him despite myself.
After a moment he said, "It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, when Michael left the priesthood. He was my son."
"I know that. I know that he considered you his father. But you disavowed him before he left. You broke with each other over the war."
"Yes, but he was right about Vietnam. And now I see that he was right even to break the law, even to go underground the way he did. America needed the moral witness, and so did the Church. If we pulled through that period with our soul intact, perhaps it was due to him and others like him. Michael was a hero to many priests. They were destroyed when he turned his back on them."
"I think he felt they'd already turned their backs on him. You had. And so had the cardinal."
He nodded. "It was a terrible time. Some of us were wrong." He fell silent, then said suddenly, "Now, of course, the leading Catholic pacifists are all bishops. The Catholic Church may end up a Peace Church."
"If it does, Michael will have started it."
"That's true. I'll tell you something. If he was alive today, he'd be a bishop."
"No, he'd be a husband and a father."
O'Shea blushed. "I mean if he was still a priest."
"But in any case, at some point he'd be dead, wouldn't he? And it wouldn't matter what he was. He'd still stand naked and alone before God, in need of mercy."
"That's right."
"Well, why can't he have mercy from the Church?"
Archbishop O'Shea did not answer me, and so I asked it another way. "Can you explain to me why Michael can't have the funeral Mass, the last blessing and burial in sacred ground?"
"You know why." His voice was barely above a whisper.
"No, I don't. I truly don't."
"He's excommunicated."
"By whom?"
"By himself. You know how these things work. He violated his solemn vow, and he did so publicly."
"Your complaint is that he didn't apply for a proper dispensation, or what? From what we hear in the desert, priests rarely obtain papal dispensations anymore, and well-known priests never do."
O'Shea was stiffened now. This was ground on which the moves came naturally. "Excommunication follows
ipso facto
when rejection of authority in a solemn matter is culpable, obstinate and externally manifested."
"All right. Grant that. He broke his vow. He's excommunicated. But he's also dead. Isn't it time to lift the penalty? I know there are rules and canons and proscriptions, but there are also exceptions, and rescripts and absolutions."
He shook his head.
"Why?"
"Because the order of the priesthood is at stake, that's why. Pope John Paul has reestablished discipline on the issue and just in time. Priests everywhere were confused and demoralized. Men like Michael by the thousands had let them down, and Paul VI had no idea how to deal with it. His ambivalenceâhis desire to be compassionateâonly made things worse. This pope is not ambivalent." O'Shea gestured easily and I realized that he had retreated to a rote explanation of the Church's position. Did bishops take seminars in how to pontificate on this shit? "The priesthood is the spine of the Church, and it is forever. It is a radical, absolute vocation, and the Church must proclaim it as such. It is not a mere job or a career, an occupation to pursue for a while or for a phase of one's life. It is a sacred compact with God, a Covenant. 'Thou are a priest forever!' That is what Michael's excommunication means, and if the archdiocese is observing it scrupulously it is doing so not punitively, but, as the Constitution on the Church says, 'for the edification of the flock.' Only by a rigorous, one could even say heartless, observance of this point can this truth be protected and understood."
"But many ex-priests receive the sacraments."
"They did not flout authority. When they die their funerals won't be reported in the
New York Times."
"So it's a matter of publicity? Forgive me, but I'm trying to understand. It isn't that he flouted authority, because you just said he was right about that."
"About the war. Not about marrying your wife."
His thrust stopped me. I should have known it would come, of course.
He saw his advantage and pressed it. "I'd have expected you of all people to understand our point of view. There are consequences to human acts. Some acts must simply not be condoned in any way."
"That's how I feel about what you are doing. Yes, Michael took my wife. And no, I don't condone it. But he is dead. She's alive. She is the one who is being punished now."
"She is not entirely innocent, it seems to me."
"Who the hell are you to throw that stone?"
"I'm a member of the Church. We loved Michael Maguire and she took him from us."
"You had already failed him! A deception at the heart of your friendship, yes! But not about a little volume of Scripture. The lie that destroyed his priesthoodâand my marriage, damn you!âwas the one that you priests tell each other, that you are brothers, that you care for one another, that you love each other. You never mistreat each other or exact vengeance upon each other or degrade each other. You only act for the edification of the flock. What shit! You make me sick!" O'Shea was staring at his hands obsequiously, and his willingness to sit there passively in the blast of my anger only stoked it. "Why am I surprised at your rejection of him now? You treat the dead like you treat the living. No wonder Michael began to wither! No wonder he refused finally to shrivel like the rest of you and become a gutless, conscienceless husk, a walking, Mass-saying, golf-playing, war-blessing carcass! A sacred compact with God? Bullshit! You people are in covenant with privilege. Everything is sacrificed to that, especially members who dare to challenge it. Michael woke up, that was his offense. I saw, when he did, what he was on his way to becoming. He fought it from within, but he was losing and he knew it. I saw his loneliness. It scorched him. It dried the blood in his veins. And do you know what? The Vietnam war saved him." O'Shea looked up at me, a look of confusion on his face. He
was
hearing me. But really, I didn't care. This was my moment to say what had happened and I was at its mercy. "The Vietnam war was probably the best thing that ever happened to Michael. It made him remember that he was a man before he was a priest. It made him remember his first ideals, and it forced him to make his compact with people again. The war destroyed his aloofness and his smugness. It brought him back. All he wanted after that was to be a man and a priest both. But it's impossible. You with your fancy new office and your mild regret at what stiffening the spine of the Church requiresâwhat shit!âare the best evidence of that. He was your son, you said. But when the world fell down around his ears, when he needed support and love and solace and strength for that incredible, heroic resistance of his, could he get it from you? No! Or from the cardinal? No! Or from his fellow priests? No! Or from the Church herself? No! Of course he had to turn to someone else!"
"You were his friend. Why didn't he turn to you?"
The archbishop's second thrust. He had no idea why, but it undid me.
B
EGINNING
with Michael's trial, this story becomes Carolyn's story and mine too. She and I were stunned by the news of his arrest, and even before we saw him we knew that it would profoundly affect us. In fact it set in motion the events that changed everything.
Carolyn supported him immediately. It took me longer to work through my good-citizen bias, but eventually I too got the point. By the time his trial formally opened in May 1969âit was the month the war peaked; 539,000 GIs were in VietnamâI had come to see what he'd done as an elegant ethical gesture and I wrote as much for
Commonweal.
My piece on his trial was reprinted in newspapers all over the country. Michael had the article framed, together with an ancient snapshot of the two of us looking like members of the Gashouse Gang.
I was not surprised that so many people were moved by what he'd done. But not everyone was. When he was arrested, the archdiocese issued a statement saying Father Maguire was a previously suspended priest who had acted purely as an individual and in no way as a representative of the Church. The archdiocese would not censure him, but neither would it post his bail.
His bail was set at twenty thousand dollars. Carolyn and I didn't hesitate to post it, though it meant emptying our bank accounts and cashing in our bonds and my life insurance. I had been looking forward to extending an upcoming sabbatical by a year with those savings. I am chagrined to admit it, but I was going to write a novel about growing up in Inwood.
Carolyn and I went to the courthouse together. We delivered the cashier's check to the proper clerk and then went in the company of a federal marshal to the jail. The marshal served the jail-officer with the court order and left. A few minutes later doors clanged and Michael appeared, looking gaunt in his black clothing. Carolyn ran to him and embraced him. Even while he held her Michael stared at me. The desolation in his eyes seemed familiar. When he embraced me in turn, he whispered, "Thanks. It was awful. It was like China."