The mother hands the Pope a notebook listing one thousand boys and girls who have been injured in the Boston archdiocese alone. An Inquisition found that the Pope before he was Pope had obstructed justice in the case of the priests who had committed the gravest of all the sins on earth. Before he was Benedict, he was Joseph, and when he was Joseph, he ordered bishops should be protected by the Pontifical Secret. The sexual abuse of children is somehow allowed to be hidden by the Pontifical Secret in something called the Obstruction. To reveal the Pontifical Secret is to risk excommunication. Until the child-victim reached eighteen years plus ten more years, the gravely sinning priests are protected by the Secret. So if you are a child of nine, for instance, the offending priest gets an extra nine years until the child reaches eighteen, plus ten more, for a total of nineteen years in all before he has to worry. By then the nine-year-old is twenty-eight. Cases such as these are of a delicate and grievous sort.
The Pope, of course, does not have children in the way that mothers have children. The mother wonders whether under the category of Secrets there might be a Secret Neutering Process for those in the church who harm children, and for those who protect them. Neutering is not really so bad given the magnitude of the trespass. There is a Biblical logic to the reasoning. The prim Pope blushes. The mother gently takes his hand and says that this way, the problem of the privates might be resolved once and for all. Bunny Boy, she tells him, her cat, seems to have made his peace with it.
THE POPE APPEARS again on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base and is met by the War Crimes President. They are accompanied by the millions of children they have put in harm’s way, both grown and ungrown, both alive and dead, and also the many who are somewhere between the two: not really dead, not really alive anymore, but in a perpetual half-state, thanks to the Supreme Power of the Men.
Is a slow death better, or a fast one? A complete death, or a partial one?
The children are gathered a few miles deep and many, many thousands of feet high, standing one atop another ad infinitum. From a bird’s-eye view it’s all pretty awful. The Pope and the President on the tarmac walk hand in hand. How puny they are from this vantage point. The Pope, a holy man, has shuffled known perpetrators into fresh dioceses and has put the interests of the Church above the interests of children. The President meanwhile, unprovoked, is the instigator of unimaginable violence and suffering. The red carpet is seepy and spongy with blood. The two Fathers gingerly tiptoe across it while the children trudge behind. The children’s skins, peeled back by firebombs and the lips of doughy priests, bleed easily. Who will protect them? the mother wonders. The Pope has instructed the Faithful to pray in perpetuity to cleanse the Church of Predators. The children wonder who, if not he, with staff and crown and lamb and beneficent smile, will be on their side?
The child also wonders while questions are being asked, whether the Pope has seen her lamb, perchance.
The Vatican has said that every parish should designate a group of people to pray in a kind of relay for the Church to rid itself of scandal. Prayer will take place in one parish for twenty-four hours and then move on to another so that there might be continuous prayer. In the fourteenth century, to rid the world of the Black Death, the Church instituted a similar policy of Perpetual Prayer.
From the very depths of darkness the men shake hands — over the bodies of the maimed and dying or not quite dead, or the definitely dead children. The two Fathers are in a friendship trance. Even though they are quite tiny on the TV screen, and in real life they are in Washington DC, which is quite a ways away, the mother puts up her black umbrella anyway for protection. She has been made custodian on earth of this very child, and she will not let her down. Not on her watch will a raft of unbearably lonely priests take her away under the guise of the First Scrutiny or the Sanctification or Special Intentions. Not on her watch will the President remove the children in a coma on a stretcher to a place off camera where they will be left to die, counted with deepest regret as collateral damage. The soul alights strangely, and the souls of children flutter at the Andrews Air Force Base. Sometimes we sense the devil where the devil does not belong — under the Pontiff’s hat, or hiding wedged in between the lines of the Constitution, that remarkably shiny document, the sleeping Congress nodding off. There might be glimpses of the devil in a wink or a pat or an embrace. A clever devil has been known to hide in a glass of golden ale, or an anthem or a cliché or a prayer — things we are almost but not quite numb to, the devil hides there.
There is always the threat of invasion to guard against. Every single child who has ever lived is aware of this. Those both dead and alive. And all those sentenced to Limbo: they are beautiful, but they are neither here nor there.
The question might be, why let a fetus through if in only a few years, this is what you are going to do? The Pope does not know. The Pope is happy to confess to all he does not understand under the category the Mystery of Evil. He has also been known to attribute it to the Dark Night of the Soul, but never mind, let us meditate on the miracle of cats.
Bunny Boy, who in a certain sense is crimeless, has lived happily enough with the Neutering Process.
The War Crimes President has insisted that an enhanced interrogation technique called waterboarding is not torture and so. . He fidgets now wondering what the mother, who has always been a problem solver, has in store.
The Pope holds a small Frozen Charlotte and a cat and a glass dome. Under the glass dome is a little model of Vatican City. The little dome glints in the sun.
You’ve got to hard-wire certain rituals into a child early; otherwise they might not take. You’ve got to take advantage of the Genuflect Reflex while you’ve got it, as it is only so long before the Genuflect Reflex dissolves into cake.
Mother Teresa is now known to have doubted everything. For one year she had God visions, but then she never saw or felt God’s presence again. Only that God was a desert. She wanted God with all the power of her soul — and yet between them, there was only a terrible separation.
25
TO ELIMINATE THE gray wolf, those going westward in the Great Western Expansion introduced mange into the wolf population. For forty days they waited for the mange to take and then set out on their way. A wave of suffering preceded them, and a wave of suffering was left in their wake. The suffering made a sound pitched just above the hearing range of the adults, but all the girls could hear it, and it made their trips in the covered wagons excruciating. Many of the girls in this weakened condition became susceptible to cholera and other catastrophic illnesses. Perhaps it was a kindness to die, they thought to themselves, by the side of the road rather than endure the intolerable screeching in their ears.
The adults forged on, having buried their girls by the side of the road, and were praised for their courage and stamina in the face of the last images of their daughters holding their ears. They continued with even greater resolve. Their girls will not have died in vain. Native plants, native animals, and finally native people were in the way of the great westward progress to Hollywood. The wolves lost fur in patches all over their bodies. Mangy wolves, without fur, are susceptible to freezing to death in the winter or catching fire in the summer. Like fire, however, and young girls, the gray wolf can never really be extinguished. Like fire, you cannot snuff out a girl or a wolf. But no matter, the pioneers did not allow this to deter them. The mother and the child closed the book. The history lesson for the day lay heavy in them. What could she do, the child wondered, for those children who were already dead over a hundred years?