“You knew that this guy would hide the L train in the last place the CTA would look for it?” John Culhane asked me as he drove me back to the terminal and my rendezvous with Milord Cronin.
“Moreover, since the Brown Line goes around the Loop, it would easily have access to the Green Line,
as the Lake Street L is now called, much to the delight of the West Side Irish.”
“Why the hell would he go to all that trouble?”
“Doubtless for the same reason computer hackers create viruses. It pleases his ego to outsmart everyone and in a spectacular way. He is arrogant. He intends to flummox all of us.”
“He won’t get away with it.”
“Arguably.”
“And when you learned that he had dumped the driver in an alley near the terminal, you figured he would dump the bishop in the area too. So you went out and found him just as I had figured that out.”
“You had many other things on your mind.”
John Culhane grunted. “The driver is in and out of consciousness,” he continued. “He has no recollection of what happened. The medics say he may never remember, unless he lets us hypnotize him.”
“Even then you will learn little,” I pointed out. “A car across the tracks. Several masked men force their way into the train. A couple of them hold him and another injects him. He loses consciousness. Perhaps the men are Hispanics.”
“A drug gang moonlighting and paid enough not to brag about what they did?”
“The man is a monster,” I sighed. “He is, however, vain. Therefore, he is likely to take a chance that will undo him.”
“Tell me more about this annulment stuff. I don’t understand it at all.”
I sigh my loudest sigh. “Few do. We have failed to explain what the sacraments are and hence the faithful don’t understand what it means when we talk about marriage as a sacrament.”
“An outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace,” he recited the Baltimore catechism answer.
“Not inaccurate, but hopelessly inadequate. A sacrament is designed to reveal something about God, and in that revelation grace, God’s love, is communicated. Thus, the Eucharist reveals the God who gives us food and drink and Jesus to sustain our faith. In marriage, the union between man and woman, pace Saint Paul, discloses that God loves us with a passion that exceeds, but is not totally unlike, the passion between man and woman.”
“Why have I never heard this before?”
“Because we’ve been too stupid to put it that way. In any event, it is patent that a certain amount of maturity is required for a marital union to reflect the implacability of God’s love. Church law has recognized for some time that there are impediments to the reception of the sacrament, such as physical incapacity, meaning inability to consummate the marriage, and the intention to exclude a permanent union or childbearing. In the 1960s, the American hierarchy, concerned about the pastoral problems of divorced and remarried Catholics, persuaded Rome to expand these impediments to include psychic incapacity, which has come to mean the lack at the time of marriage of sufficient emotional maturity to form a union which reflects that which exists between God and his people.”
“At that age who is mature?”
“Arguably. My own conviction is that such maturity is reached only when the couple surmount some critical situation. At that point, divorce becomes unthinkable.”
“So almost any divorce could justify an annulment? Catholic divorce?”
“De facto, that would seem to be the case, though piously our matrimonial tribunals would deny it. Thus we have a solution to the pastoral problem of divorced and remarried Catholics, but one that causes some scandal because perhaps nine out of ten annulments in
the world are granted in America and because the arguments I have just detailed are too subtle for many, especially those who do not want to understand them.”
“So there’s some kind of hearing?”
“And then a pro forma review. Given the pain and the anger and the trauma that accompany divorce, an ecclesiastical annulment often aggravates the tensions between husband and wife. Thus they have one more situation in which to hurt each other. However, when it is over they are free to try again, or at least to start receiving the sacraments again.”
We had parked by the Kimball and Lawrence terminal. Cops were still swarming around.
“Wouldn’t it be easier simply to let them receive the sacraments?”
“Oh, yes. Then the annulment courts would have to close down … . The German bishops proposed this to Rome on the grounds that God wants everyone around the banquet table and were promptly slapped down. In this country, many priests do that in the rectory office.”
“Including you?”
I was not about to go on the record on that one.
“There is another loophole, called the ‘internal forum’ solution. If a person who wishes to remarry for one reason or another is unable to obtain an annulment, she or he may still argue that there was never a real sacramental marriage. When that argument is presented to a priest, he may say that if such be the case, then that person has the right in the natural law to contract a new marriage and continue to receive the sacraments. This is called “internal forum,” which means that it is a private, almost secret, decision, valid but not publicly ratified by the Church.”
“A lot of priests do this sort of thing?”
“Actually the priest has no authority, he is merely a consultant. The person makes a decision in conscience
and in theory could do so without a priest. The Vatican would like to have the priest act as a kind of judge, imposing conditions and perhaps arguing against the act of conscience. But it is a long way from Rome to most rectories.”
“I see.”
I doubted that he did. However, bright man that he was, he would be able to explain it to others.
“The parish priest’s concern is with the spiritual welfare of his people. He can be quite creative in getting around those rules which he finds impede that welfare. Sometimes this attitude leads to abuse, sometimes not.”
“Where does Bishop Quill fit into the picture?”
“Normally both the husband and wife are delighted to have some sort of closure to their failed marriage. However, a few are unable to comprehend the enormous change in the Church’s attitude towards divorce that is latent in annulments. Some feel that the Church is taking away their marriage. Some argue that their children are made illegitimate—though the annulment decree legitimates them if that is the real worry. Some say, I know I had a real marriage—though the argument is that it was real but not sacramental. Finally, some are so angry at their sometime spouse that they want to prolong the agony to punish the spouse and perhaps the replacement spouse. There is a retired Franciscan named Father Innocent—really—in the western suburbs who directs such aggrieved parties in the appeal procedures. So they choose to appeal the decision to Rome, to the Sacred Roman Rota, on which Bishop Quill served with notoriety, if not with distinction.”
“Oh?”
“He reversed with gusto, if not convincing arguments, every case that crossed his desk. One can imagine how the other party and possible substitute spouse reacted to that. They had thought it was all over and
they are back to ground zero. Some just walk out on the Church, arguably not without reason.”
“No appeal?”
“There’s always the possibility of an appeal to the Apostolic Signatura, which is the church’s Supreme Court, or to another tumulus of the Rota, if anyone wants to bother. In fact, I understand that on every appeal Bishop Quill was reversed, which is perhaps why he was sent to Chicago.”
“What a mess … Why is the Church in the legal business anyway?”
“For a long time it was the only legal force in Europe. For a couple of centuries all the popes were canon lawyers. We remain in it from force of habit. The Greeks are much more tidy about these matters. Decisions about remarriage are made in the local parish.”
“The implications here are that someone whom Bishop Quill hurt by his decisions might have set up this plot to discredit him.”
“That might be the case. In truth, however, it is an extraordinarily baroque form of revenge.”
“We should find out who in Chicago suffered from his reversals?”
“That would be one way of proceeding. I cannot promise that the results of such a quest would be successful. It is one thing to hate a man and to want revenge and quite another to elaborate such a twisted mechanism for discrediting him.”
“Maybe the guy is a computer hacker.”
“Or woman.”
“How could a woman think up something like this?”
“How could a human think up something like this?”
At that point a sergeant approached the Commander’s unmarked car with some more news. Having ascertained it was not relevant, I disembarked from it and proceeded across Kimball Avenue to the delicatessen,
where I purchased two deluxe pastrami sandwiches and two iced teas. I had just returned with these treasures in hand when the Cardinal’s black Lincoln Town Car pulled up.
“What do you have there, Blackwood?”
“Lunch, two deluxe pastrami sandwiches of the sort that one can find only in the few remaining authentic Jewish delicatessens in this city. Enjoy, it’s good for you.”
“No chicken soup? Hey, this is good. Don’t tell Nora that I’m eating it.”
“The protein is also good for you.”
We had just finished this gourmet meal when the driver pulled into the emergency entrance of Augustana Hospital. The media folk were placed to prevent our entrance. Milord Cronin, with his ruby ring and his emerald pectoral cross, waved aside their questions and slipped through them. Invisible as always, I ambled along in his crimson wake, though the only cardinalatial sign he wore was a red thread around the gap that revealed his Roman collar. It was enough.
“You stay here, Blackwood,” he said to me in the lobby, “and sniff around.”
It was an accurate, if unflattering, description of my work.