FATHER STEPHEN MONAGHAN HAD always loved everything about being a priest, from the obligatory recitation of the Holy Office to the exaltation of celebrating Mass to the petty details of parish maintenance. He had loved it in the 1950s when he had entered the seminary and everybody seemed to be traveling in lockstep to a drummer pounding faintly against an ancient skin in Rome. He had loved it in the years since the Vatican Council seemed to have reduced everything to chaos and confusion. Father Stephen Monaghan had never been confused. Years ago, he had taken Holy Orders to serve God. He was still serving God. In the old days he had served God in a cassock. Lately he did it in Levi’s 501 jeans. In the old days, it was the better part of pastoral care to seem to be an autocrat—even if, like Father Stephen, you had no talent for it. He had pretended to be an autocrat and further pretended not to notice that his parishioners were pretending right along with him. In the new days it was the better part of pastoral care to pretend to be a democrat. Father Stephen did that a little better than he had played the autocrat, but not much, and his parishioners were still pretending right along with him. It helped that most of his parishioners these days were nuns. Father Stephen Monaghan liked nuns. He liked modern nuns and traditional nuns, tall nuns and short nuns, old nuns and young nuns. They liked him back. If there was one thing Father Stephen Monaghan came close to not liking, it was hearing confessions. Some priests didn’t like hearing confessions because they thought it was boring. Others didn’t like hearing confessions because it got them depressed. Father Stephen didn’t dislike it, exactly, because it was so central to the role of a Catholic priest and he loved being a Catholic priest. It just made him uncomfortable. Sometimes he told himself that this was humility. Too many priests fell victim to the superiority complex engendered by being put in a position where other people were obligated to reverence you, whether you deserved it or not. Father Stephen Monaghan was brought up short every time he had to listen to the earnest struggles of men and women far more dedicated to the search for perfection than he could ever be. This morning, he was listening to the struggles of Sister Domenica Anne, a tall, forceful woman in her late forties with a face like a Valkyrie and hands the size of china saucers. He had known Sister Domenica Anne for years, so he wasn’t afraid of her. He had known from the moment he met her that she was more intelligent than he was, so he was used to it. What he couldn’t get used to was all this pacing that went on now that most confessions took place outside the old confessional box. Father Stephen Monaghan hadn’t been particularly enamored of the old confessional box, but he had to admit now that it had had its advantages for the concentration. Sister Domenica Anne kept bopping back and forth, back and forth, with her arms wrapped across her chest and the veil of her habit whipping in the wind. It was enough to make a seasickness-susceptible man dizzy.
It was nine thirty on the morning of Monday, May 5, and Father Stephen and Sister Domenica Anne had been out here in the rose garden for over half an hour. The rose garden always reminded Father Stephen of the little patch of flowers his mother had grown every spring in the fifteen-by-fifteen patch of green behind the triple-decker house in New Haven where they had rented the middle floor for all the years of his growing up. Sister Domenica Anne’s confession reminded him of the three other confessions he had heard since just after dinner last night. There are priests who belong to religious orders or who are assigned to orders of nuns on a regular basis. Father Stephen had only begun shepherding religious women when he was sent to St. Elizabeth’s two years ago. He knew very little about religious orders or how they were run. He knew less about the interior lives of nuns. He was, however, a man of great common sense, and he had a hunch. There was about to be a great deal of trouble on the campus of St. Elizabeth’s College.
Sister Domenica Anne had stopped her pacing momentarily. She had her back to the wind, so that her veil was blowing up behind one shoulder and the long skirt of her modified habit pressed against the backs of her legs. Father Stephen rubbed the side of his bulbous nose and wished he wouldn’t think of her as a harbinger of the return of the Amazons. The Amazons would probably look like wimps next to Sister Domenica Anne.
“So the thing is,” she was saying, “it’s not the effect on the Cardinal I mind, because I think the Cardinal could use a little shaking up, I think they all could. But we’re in the middle of an enormous project here, costing millions of dollars, and in spite of the fact that we’re not a diocesan institution, we’ve had a lot of help from the Chancery. And I know I’m supposed to have patience, and charity—”
“You keep talking about how it’s you who’re supposed to have patience and charity,” Father Stephen said. “You never mention Mother Mary Bellarmine. Isn’t she also supposed to have patience and charity?”
“She isn’t my problem.”
“What?”
“Her patience and charity aren’t my problem,” Sister Domenica Anne said helplessly. Then she went back to pacing again. “Father, I know what you’re trying to tell me. I know the woman is impossible. Everybody says the woman is impossible. But it’s maddening. You think you have control of yourself—”
“Do any of us really have control of ourselves?”
“—you think you can at least be polite to people, and then, there it is, and you can’t even figure out what happened. I mean that. There I am, standing in a hallway in full view of I don’t know how many students, shouting at this woman, and I don’t even know why. I don’t know why. I don’t know what she did. I’m beginning to think I’m losing my mind.”
“How long has Mother Mary Bellarmine been here?”
“For about two days.”
“How long is she expected to stay?”
“To the end of the convention, I think. I don’t believe Reverend Mother General will need her beyond that.”
“What does Reverend Mother General need her for?”
“Oh, to go over the budget for the new field house. Mary Bellarmine is good at that. She’s good at running the whole operation, really, the fund-raising and all the rest of it. She’s done it a dozen times. Maybe that’s why Reverend Mother General had her come in early. So that she could give me some advice on what I’m supposed to do.”
“You don’t think you need advice on what you’re supposed to do?”
“I think I need it desperately. I just categorically refuse to take it from that bitch.”
There was a robin sitting on the perch of the bird-house hanging in the tree branches above his head. Father Stephen Monaghan sighed a little and stretched his legs. He couldn’t tell Domenica Anne anything about the other confessions he’d heard, of course, but he couldn’t get them out of his mind. Bitch was actually one of the milder words the Sisters had been handing him to describe Mother Mary Bellarmine. Last night, a fluffy little old nun—physically ancient, fanatically conservative and almost pathologically repressed—had called the Mother Superior of the Southwestern Province “a world-class cunt.” God only knew what kind of well-buried memory bank that had come out of.
Domenica Anne had stopped. She was looking at him expectantly, as if he held the secrets of the universe in the palm of his hand, or in the notes he wrote in the margins of thick books on theology he read when nobody wanted him for anything else. This was what Father Stephen didn’t like about hearing confessions, this expectation that he knew what to do better than she did herself.
“Well,” Father Stephen said, “I can see how you wouldn’t want to lose control in front of your students. We could work on that.”
“You don’t think anger of this magnitude is a mortal sin?”
“Auschwitz was a mortal sin, Sister. The murder of Lisa Steinberg was a mortal sin. This is more in the line of justifiable homicide—and that does not mean I would condone—oh, never mind. I don’t know what I’m talking about. How much longer do you personally have to work with Mother Mary Bellarmine?”
“Oh, I don’t really have to work with her. She’ll just be around on and off, if you know what I mean. And she’s supposed to sit in on meetings.”
“On many meetings?”
Domenica Anne considered this. “There’s VTZ next week—”
“VTZ?”
“VTZ Corporation gave us most of the money to build the field house, Father. The wife of the founder is one of our alumnae. Actually, I shouldn’t say they gave us the money, exactly. They gave us their services. They run a construction company, among other things.”
“Among other things?”
“It’s a kind of local conglomerate, if you see what I mean. They own a whole lot of different businesses. They’ll build a lot of the field house for us and then write it off their income taxes.”
“Ah, I see. So no VTZ, no field house.”
“Exactly.”
“So it would be a good thing for you to keep your temper in any meeting with VTZ executives in attendance.”
“Exactly,” Domenica Anne said again.
“Then let’s work on that.”
Domenica Anne blinked. It was so obviously not what she’d expected to hear. Father Stephen understood how she felt. In the old days, he’d never have said anything of the sort. He’d simply have told her to try to keep her temper and then given her an Our Father and five Hail Marys to say as penance. He would have done it in spite of the fact that she hadn’t committed any sin that needed to be forgiven. Now he was supposed to provide some real help with her problem, and he was trying.
Actually, the person he’d really like to provide help for was Mother Mary Bellarmine herself, but she hadn’t come to see him, and he didn’t think she would. It was one of the sad truths of religion that the people who needed it most never came looking for it. It was one of the hallmarks of sin that the world’s greatest sinners often thought of themselves as the world’s greatest saints.
Saints or sinners, all these confessions about Mother Mary Bellarmine were beginning to make him nervous, and Father Stephen Monaghan didn’t like to be nervous.
They’re all closed up in here, he thought, looking around the rose garden as Sister Domenica Anne went on pacing. They’re all shut up in here together. It can’t be a good way to live.
“I keep trying to think of some way to ship her out of here and back to California,” Sister Domenica Anne said, stopping at the side of an overgrown bush that seemed to be growing thorns for Sleeping Beauty’s castle. “If I could just find some way to get rid of her, I could finally relax.”
And that, Father Stephen Monaghan thought was precisely the sort of thing that made him jumpy.