First thing Sunday morning, Warren and Susan drove Granddad Jack to church for the Lent mass. Neither of the Jones had been to church since their excruciating annual visit to midnight mass. The priest had again thanked Mr Potter for making the accompanying carol service so memorable and again speculation in the car on the way home had centred around how the hapless organist managed to butcher the same carols every single year, without any evidence of improvement.
Warren had been so pre-occupied with the case that he’d almost forgotten that Sunday also marked Mother’s Day. A reminder from Susan the previous evening gave him enough time to buy a bunch of his mother’s favourite flowers to place on her grave. He’d also bought some of Nana Betty’s favourite blooms, to spruce up her plot.
The bidding prayers opened with a general request for the Lord’s help and protection for those who did God’s work, and a more specific appeal for His assistance in finding those responsible for the murders in Middlesbury. Warren doubted that the prayers were inspired by his presence – he imagined similar petitions were being made up and down the country – nevertheless, Warren’s face had been on television and there were enough members of the congregation who knew him, for him to keep his eyes down-turned, avoiding any curious gazes. He imagined he could feel the curious stares burning into the back of his head and he resolved not to linger any longer than was necessary when the service ended.
The service passed in a blur, the readings and gospel forgotten as soon as he heard them. The familiar routines of the Catholic litany, usually a source of familiarity and comfort for even an occasional church-goer like Warren, seemed hollow and insincere. The message boards on Survivorsonline contained allegations about dozens of priests, but surely they were only the tip of the iceberg? And whilst it appeared that Father Daugherty had been the unfortunate victim of a malicious allegation, that was certainly the exception rather than the rule. Warren had been to too many seminars and briefings about abuse to be under any illusion that the majority of victims were telling anything but the truth.
He found himself staring at the priest’s back as the elderly celebrant prepared the altar for the Eucharist. How many apparently normal priests were secret paedophiles? How many led clandestine second lives, exploiting the shame and embarrassment of their helpless victims and the wilful ignorance of their fellow church members to commit such despicable acts?
Surely it was only a small percentage? According to some reports, the proportion of abusers in the church broadly reflected the proportion of abusers in the general population; but such data was hard to verify.
But that wasn’t really the point.
Warren had been brought up like all Catholic children, to regard priests as God’s representatives on Earth. After all, if you couldn’t trust a priest, who could you trust?
As an adult, he’d learnt that even priests are fallible. The things he’d witnessed in the line of duty had left him cynical when it came to human nature. He’d long grown out of such childhood naivety. And yet here in his childhood church, surrounded by people he had known all his life, enveloped in familiar comforting rituals, he felt transported back to that childhood.
The betrayal made him feel sick, and it made him angry.
Around the world, over a billion people had been baptised as Catholics. Some, like Bernice, followed the church’s teachings, barely questioning them, whilst others paid lip-service at best.
So why were he and Susan even here? They rarely, if ever, attended Sunday service, unless with her parents or with Granddad Jack. Were they here for their own sake, or just because it was ‘what was expected of them’? Were they being hypocrites?
He remembered the six months before they got married; they’d attended church every Sunday thus ensuring the church wedding that both of them had dreamed of. How many times had they been back since then?
He knew without question that their children would be baptised. But would they be doing it because they wanted them to become full members of the Catholic Church, or again, because it was expected of them? Or because the nearest primary school to their house ‘Required Improvement’, but the Catholic school further down the road had been rated as ‘Outstanding’ by OFSTED?
A cynic might shrug and say, ‘so what?’ Play the game to get what you want. Giving up an hour every Sunday morning was a small price to pay for a beautiful church wedding. Attending a few classes and having a priest pour water over your bewildered child’s forehead was worth it to get them a decent education – and a damn good excuse to have a party afterwards.
But what about those other expectations? The automatic assumption that a priest and his actions were, by definition, sanctioned by God, and that even questioning them was sinful, was what had allowed abuse to flourish in an organisation that should have been on the forefront of preventing it.
Then there were the implacable dictates that even married couples avoid contraception, or shun IVF, even though neither option had even been conceived of two thousand years ago. Warren still felt angry at the pain Susan had gone through over the summer when Bernice had described their plans to use IVF as ‘ungodly’. Bernice had eventually apologised, after Susan had made it clear that she would play no part in her future grandchildren’s lives if she didn’t back down. But they still avoided broaching the subject with her.
Warren was angry, because if ever there was a time that Susan needed her mother’s support it was now, and he resented the unnecessary barriers that inflexible doctrine had built between them.
At the pulpit, the priest was talking about God’s mercy and his love for all of his children. Warren tasted bile in his mouth.
If God loved all of his children then why had He allowed Gary Hastings, himself a practising Christian, to come to such a brutal end, leaving an unborn child that would never know their father’s touch, and a fiancée who would never walk down the aisle with the love of her life? If it was all part of some master plan, too divine for man to comprehend, then count Warren out.
Looking around the church that he had grown up in, Warren found himself coming to a sobering realisation.
This might be the last time he set foot in here.
And he didn’t know whether he should be upset or relieved.