“I suppose that’s all true.” Eileen’s eyes were downcast.
“You can’t ask me to do this!” Lennon’s resolve was showing a chink.
“No, I suppose not.”
“It’s my job!”
“So you’ve explained.”
After a lengthy pause. “What would happen after we published this story?”
“Probably just what I suggested. Cardinal Boyle would have to take some sort of action.”
“Like what?”
“That’s difficult to predict. He might demand that I change the policies of St. Vincent’s to conform with Church directives. Although I doubt that some influential Catholics would be satisfied with that.”
“Would you change the policies if he—they—demanded it?”
“No. I couldn’t. Not in good conscience.”
“If you didn’t, then what?”
“I might be asked to leave the order.”
“Leave the order?”
“Leave religious life. Stop being a nun.”
“He’d do that?”
“I don’t see how he could avoid it. No matter how he felt about it.”
“And what would happen to St. Vincent’s?”
“That’s a prognosis I can’t make with any certainty. In its present state, with the clientele that come here now, I suppose eventually it would close. I know that we are having a difficult time staying open now. But we’re surviving. This is just not a facility for white middle-class suburbanites. No more than is St. Patrick’s a parish for the affluent. That’s not our community. We are doing our best now to relate to our community, such as it is. We are trying to bring a distinctly Christian attitude to this health care facility. And Christianity knows no color, no class, no restrictions in its Christlike love.”
Lennon shrugged and packed away her pen and notepad. “I shouldn’t have asked you any of these hypothetical questions. That was not professional of me. I can’t afford to consider consequences of a legitimate story. If I did, I’d be a basket case in no time. And the public would be denied its right to know.”
Lennon rose and smoothed her skirt. “I hope you understand, Sister. But whether you understand or not, it is my job.”
“I understand, Pat. It’s not going to make my day. But that has nothing to do with your job. You’ve got to be faithful to that. Just as I must be faithful to mine. No matter what happens, know that I will not hold you responsible. The decisions were mine. I made them. Now I must live with the consequences. Maybe it will not be as bad as I anticipate.”
“I certainly hope not.”
Lennon left the office. She did not look back. She couldn’t.
6
Father Robert came home to Father Harold.
Where else in the world, thought Koesler, as he parked in the garage adjoining St. Anselm’s rectory, would you hear anything like that except in the celibate world of the Roman Catholic priesthood?
A Catholic rectory, mused Koesler; a home for unmarried fathers.
This association between him and Father Harold was somewhat less than a marriage of convenience. It was more a union stemming from desperation.
Definitely, it was not a marriage made in heaven. But few rectory matchups were. In the good old days—in the sixties and before—when there were comparatively lots of priests, men were teamed at the whim of the bishop. Or, more likely, as the result of personnel juggling by the men of the Chancery, with a perfunctory blessing by the bishop.
Now, as the Church was running out of priests, all too frequently parishes were forced to shift for themselves. When it came to priests who would assist the pastor.
Thus it was by a combination of fidelity and luck that Koesler had managed to secure the parish-sitting services of Father Harold while Koesler played chaplain at St. Vincent’s. Fidelity in that Koesler faithfully led a group of St. Anselmites to an annual retreat at the Passionist Monastery. And luck, since the Passionists happened to have a surplus Father Harold for the first few weeks of the new year.
From frequent association, Koesler knew Harold quite well. He was a large man in his sixties, only slightly balding, and always, when on call, garbed in the religious habit of the Passionist order.
The Passionists had been founded in the early eighteenth century by St. Paul of the Cross for the purpose of preaching retreats and missions. The Passionists remained faithful to their roots as well as, and frequently considerably better than, any of the other old religious orders. But once in a while a Passionist could be cut from the herd to pastor a parish or, in this case, baby-sit one.
Friendly and reservedly gregarious, Harold hailed from somewhere out west—Oklahoma or Texas. It was never dear exactly whence. His theology was anchored squarely in the pre-Vatican II Church. A fact that left him a bit nervous, a condition betrayed by his darting eyes. He never quite knew when what was to him an innocent dogmatic statement might draw anything from good-natured laughter to derision to, at rare moments, agreement. So he seldom volunteered conversation. Mostly, he reacted to questions from others.
Koesler entered the kitchen from the connected garage. He heard some at first unidentifiable noise. It was television, the local evening news. He remembered now: Father Harold watched television a lot.
“Hello!” Koesler called above the TV noise. He placed on the dining room table the burger and fries he had picked up on the way home.
“Hello there, Father.” Harold greeted him warmly and moved from the living room to the dining area. Thus, as usual, he would be able to watch TV and keep Koesler company while he ate.
“What do we have on the evening news?” Koesler placed his hat and briefcase on the seat of a chair, draping his coat and scarf on the back of the chair.
“What?” Harold was able to focus on only snatches from both Koesler and the TV. But he was able to recall from his subconscious what he had missed from each medium. From experience, Koesler knew all he had to do was wait. “Oh,” Harold predictably continued, “it’s that skirmish they had the other night over at Cobo Hall. They’re just beginning to identify some of the people they arrested. Mostly kids.”
“I guess that’s who you’d expect to find at a rock concert.”
“What? Oh, yeah. I suppose so. Ought to be home. Only trouble when they’re out that late. Unsupervised.”
“I suppose.” It wasn’t worth arguing over. Koesler opened the foil that protected his steaming burger. Others came home to a prepared meal, he thought. Oh, well, this is considerably better than nothing.
From his briefcase he took a soft-cover booklet entitled, Ethics Committees: A Challenge for Catholic Health Care. Sister Eileen had lent it to him. He had paged through it earlier. He wanted to read a couple of sections more carefully.
“How’d things go at the hospital today?”
“Pretty good. I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. It can’t be much different than making sick calls in the parish, eh, Father?”
“No, not much different. “ It was wildly different. Koesler did not care to seriously interrupt Harold’s evening news.
The ethics brochure contained a brief history as well as an explanation of the ethical directives. Koesler felt a twinge of parochial pride to learn that the first U.S. Catholic code of medical ethics, in 1920, was a reprint of the Surgical Code for Catholic Hospitals for the Diocese of Detroit. This basic code had been revised, in effect, only twice: in 1954 and again in 1971.
Briefly he wondered about updating such an important document only twice in more than sixty years. Especially since those years spanned a unique knowledge and information explosion, particularly in the field of medicine. The wheels of the Church grind exceedingly slow, he thought, but really!