He felt needlessly cruel. He didn't want to stir up the demons of ancient guilts; he knew their many guises too well in his own sleepless nights. "Holy innocents." That was what he and Seraphina had been encouraged to be, each in his or her own way, both in their own generations. Holy innocents had a way of discovering years later that they had been neither.
"They say the family's disintegrating now," she was saying. ''Nonsense. These hidden flaws were always there. We just denied and ignored them."
"Like the problems of priests," he put in.
Her voice grew sharp, even fearful. "What problems did you have with the priesthood, Matthias?"
"None," he said with a relieved laugh. "I had problems with myself, with my reasons for hiding within the priesthood. I admit that I was literally swaddled in that 'holy innocence' you mentioned. I craved it, I sometimes think. I was even worse off than you; I never saw the seeds of trouble sown in the seminary. The church was so rapt with the ideal of the priesthood that no one thought to wonder that some young men who would choose a sexless life in the modern secular age might have a natural barrier to an ordinary, lay life of marriage and children."
"I've never talked with a former priest. That shows you how sheltered I am, so don't apologize. Matt. And don't blame me for being . . . curious. What was so . . . rotten about the church's pattern of screening for the priesthood that all these awful cases are hitting the newspapers now?''
"Unholy innocence. In seminary, the emphasis was on suppressing the sex urge, on desexualizing, and even demonizing women. No one was sophisticated--or honest--enough to admit the existence of other sexual preferences, other ways of being sexual. In a way, pederast priests, or gay priests who were not celibate, could almost convince themselves that they were worthier than heterosexual priests who were not celibate."
"Didn't you wonder about gay seminarians, at least?"
"No. We were all so young, so feverishly dedicated to the vision of a religious vocation, so determinedly neuter. I've read the memoirs of other ex-priests. Some express a fear of being gay, but I never even noticed that. We may have made crude celibacy jokes among each other, but we only discussed the real nitty-gritty of our sexuality with our spiritual director. What about nuns?"
Sister Seraphina reared back at the very thought. "No one has ever asked me that. We are almost all elderly now, I fear, and the aged achieve a neuter state so naturally, at least we nuns did. And women molest children far less than men, perhaps only because we are reared to be more law-abiding than from any moral superiority. I do think the role of motherhood is more intense and therefore less likely to be abused in such perverse ways. But what do I know about that? Or you? Perhaps I fool myself with the veil of innocence again. Still, I think I would know.
Nuns live communally; we may be more docile by upbringing. We have not the priest's temptation to move alone through the church, to make solitary decisions."
"Oh, pastors may look like they lord it over their flock, but, believe me, priests are not the free agents you suspect they are. Nor bishops. Not even the Pope."
"Have you lost your faith. Matt?"
The question was timidly put, coming from Sister Superfine, but it was the most serious issue yet. He paused before answering.
"I don't think so. I recognize that I had a true religious vocation. I understand that finding it once was my salvation. I will never lose respect for the many dedicated religious I knew, no matter what the headlines read. I will never judge a brother, or a sister." He could feel his lips trying to smile. ''I am impatient with bureaucracy, with hypocrisy, with lack of tolerance, and sometimes the aisles of Mother Church seem jam-packed with all three. I recognize all the modern conflicts: the church is patriarchal; its institutionalized sex-phobia has caused endless crisis in the lives of laity and celibate clergy. I'm not decided on every shade of these issues. My conscience may ultimately decree a position that puts me outside the doors if those inside them can't accept what I must be. I don't know yet."
Seraphina shuddered. "Such . . . questions you raise. I'm glad I'm retired, waiting as usefully as I can until I'm called to the place where there are only answers. I still don't understand why you left."
"To do that, you'd have to understand why I entered the priesthood."
''And--?" Her ungoverned eyebrows lifted quizzically, like an ancient, anxious terrier's.
Matt had never seen Sister Seraphina at such a genuine loss. It made her look very old.
He answered in a rush, like a seven-year-old kid making his first confession. He was surprised by how practiced it all sounded,
"I entered the priesthood to become perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect. I entered the priesthood to become the perfect Father. I entered to avoid sex and marriage and children because I was terrified of all three. Don't worry, I have never broken a priestly vow, but not because of my faith or strength. How could I be tempted by what terrified me? I am named for the apostle who replaced Judas after the betrayal and death of Christ, yet I found myself finally walking away from the shoes of the fisherman at the age of His death--thirty-three."
"But why, Matt? You were a model student, and devout even as a boy, the perfect altar boy, in fact. Was it perfection ... was it--?" Sudden suspicion enlarged the pupils of her eyes to matte black. Her voice became a whisper. "Matt, as an altar boy, you weren't ... abused. By Father--?"
He shook his head. ''That would have been almost easier to overcome."
''Easier. Dear Lord, Matt, what? My ignorance paralyzes me. I was your teacher. I was so proud when I learned you'd entered the priesthood, and now you tell me that decision was an escape that had begun to form when I knew you as a little boy. What had I failed to see?"
"Don't blame yourself. Catholics always blame themselves too much. I told you that none of us even saw our own situations then. Remember Mary Lou Zyskowski?"
"Oh, that impossible red-headed girl! Always in trouble and so sullen and stubborn about learning."
"I ran into her again--at a therapy group. She was sexually abused by her older male cousins all through grade school."
Sister Seraphina was too numb to wince. She just shook her head.
"None of us noticed, student or teacher," Matt assured her. "She didn't even understand then what was wrong herself."
"We never dreamed families could go so wrong back then. And the Family, the Father, was sacred. You didn't ... meddle."
"Too many people still feel that way. She remembers you kindly, by the way."
"Me? How did I come up in a therapy session?"
"You nagged her into going to the convent for summer reading lessons after sixth grade, remember? She screamed and kicked all the way, but says now that if she hadn't gotten good enough at reading to survive in high school, she would have never made it."
"Well, we tried. Sometimes we gave extra attention to kids from large families who were ignored, or railed at. And I suppose even we suspected some unbearably ugly truth beneath the facade. Some children were accident prone, always bruised, always bruising themselves. One did wonder and try to be as kind as possible."
"What about the kids who never showed anything," Matt went on, "whose parents were too cagey to paste them in the mouths? The kids who feel impelled to protect their parents from the physical evidence that these mothers and fathers don't know how to love? Then, when the kids finally recognize and admit the abuse, they are disbelieved. They have become their own worst witnesses."
"Kids can live amazingly bitter lives and say nothing, can seem to be paragons of behavior,"
Seraphina said, nodding her head. "Who would think that Mary Lou Zyskowski appreciated those lessons she came to with dragging feet and sour temper? And the child can go in an opposite direction, pretend to a perfect life. In fact, one would almost think--"