Strange Gods Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by River Grove Books

  Austin, TX

  www.rivergrovebooks.com

  Copyright ©2016 Peter J. Daly and John F. Myslinski

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by River Grove Books

  Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover image: ©iStock/TomasSereda; ©iStock/Georgijevic;

  ©iStock/qingwa; ©iStock/jessicahyde

  Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63299-050-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63299-049-5

  First Edition

  To all the good priests, religious, and laity, who toil away in obscurity, without recognition or thanks. They are the ones who keep the message of Christ alive.

  And to the real-life Jack McClendon, a quick-witted Presbyterian minister who died in 2010. He gave us an example of holiness that combined sincerity with skepticism and a wild sense of humor with a passion for justice. He also demonstrated that piety need not be pompous and a dry martini goes well with evening prayer.

  FOREWORD

  We started this book in the dark days of winter, in the increasingly dysfunctional papacy of Benedict XVI. We finished this book in the spring, in the hopeful days of the papacy of Pope Francis.

  It is too early to judge whether the Francis effect will bring any lasting change to the Catholic Church, but we see promising signs. Now, two years into Francis’s papacy, we want to see more than just atmospherics. We want real change.

  There is a terrible divide in the Church. Historically we would call it a schism. It is more than a difference in style or tone. It is a profound disagreement over the purpose and future of the Catholic Church.

  On the one side are those who exalt theory over practice, abstractions over experience, and judgment over mercy. We hope their day is past.

  On the other side are those who see the Church as a sign of love and mercy and a pathway to spiritual maturity.

  Clericalism is an aspect of the sin of pride. It sees clergymen as superior to the laity. It makes possible all manner of corruption, arrogance, and even cruelty, because clerics do not see themselves as accountable. It is antithetical to the teaching and the example of Christ, who said He came to serve and to give His life as ransom for the many.

  The clerical culture depicted in Strange Gods is real. It is pervasive in the clergy and deeply rooted. Unfortunately, we do not see it changing anytime soon.

  We wrote this book not because we hate the Church, but because we love her. We want to see the Church restored to her truest and best self.

  The murders in this book are fictional, but nearly everything else is based on real events. While the characters are fictitious, we have known people just like them.

  There are the corrupt and cruel, like Cardinal Mendoza and the Soldados de Cristo. There are spectacular scoundrels, like Cardinals Crepi and Salazar, who represent the worst of self-dealing and self-indulgence.

  There are also legions of clerical climbers, who rise up the ranks of the clerical ladder for their own sake. Their “strange god” is their career. In their ranks are tragically flawed men like Monsignor Matthew Ackerman.

  But there are also good and great people in the Church.

  There are saints like Father Jack McClendon and Sister Miriam, who remember that the Church is meant to be an instrument of mercy.

  There are people like Cardinal O’Toole who, despite a life spent in the bureaucracy of the Church, can still bring courage and conviction to their work. All they need is the opportunity to be God’s true servants.

  Most common of all, there are millions of people like Nate and Brigid, whose relationship to the Church is similarly challenged. They are intelligent, educated, and capable people. They understand the challenges posed by modern science and culture. They still want to be part of this family of faith, but not part of its foolishness.

  Despite all its weaknesses, the Catholic Church is still mother and teacher to millions of people. It still has a noble purpose and serves a real human need. We hope this book helps her, in a small way, to recover.

  Peter Daly and Jack Myslinski

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We are grateful to so many people who have helped to bring this book to fruition.

  We especially want to thank Ron Amiot, Mary Dwan, Charles Connor, Maureen Daly, and Mary Blaney for reading the first rough drafts of the novel and making many helpful corrections and comments.

  Thanks as well to our brother priests who work in obscurity and holiness, often without much recognition or thanks. They continue to inspire in the same way all goodness inspires.

  We especially want to thank Donna Myslinski, who made wonderful meals and put up with our terrible mess while we spent many hours with books and papers spread all over her dining room. Thanks for being our best cheerleader.

  1

  THE FUNERAL

  NATE WAS IN A HURRY.

  Whenever he was in a hurry, he had trouble with French cuffs and cuff links. Really, it takes three hands to put on cuff links. Most people only have two.

  Nate had to get over to St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the funeral of Frank Sullivan, his old boss. Only a week ago, Sullivan had dropped dead of a heart attack while waiting for a cab in the lobby of the New York Athletic Club.

  Sullivan was a former US attorney general. Everybody, including the vice president of the United States, was going to be at the funeral. The cathedral and the streets around it would be jammed.

  Nate was getting dressed in the modern “uniform” of the Knights of Malta: white tie and black jacket with tails, with a red sash across his chest. With the medal of the Maltese cross on his breast pocket, he looked like a faux aristocrat in a Marx Brothers movie.

  Like Nate, Sullivan had been a Knight of Malta, shorthand for the formal mouthful, the “Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta.” The knights took that name eight hundred years ago when they formed to take care of the wounded and dying Crusaders in the Holy Land.

  It was Nate’s first funeral as a knight since he had been asked to join the group a year ago. Both Nate and Sullivan had joined the knights for the same reason—contacts. It was a great way to network with other rich and powerful Catholics.

  Today it is an exclusive “LinkedIn” for Catholic laymen powerful in politics, medicine, the military, or business. The Knights of Malta raise a lot of money for Catholic causes, especially for the Vatican. So, when they die, they get noticed by the Church hierarchy. A cardinal would say the funeral Mass. As a former colleague of Sullivan’s, Nate had been selected for the honor of being a pallbearer, to carry Sullivan’s casket in and out of the church.

  Still fumbling, Nate called down the hall of their Park Avenue apartment to his wife, Brigid, who was reading in their library. “Brig, come in here and help me get these damned cuff links on.”

  She shouted back sarcastically, “Coming, master.”

  A few seconds later, she appeared at the bedroom door. “Do I have to come in and dress you, too?”

  “Just help me with these damned cuff links,” he said impatiently. Their fourteen-year marriage had deteriorated into a se
ries of brief and sometimes irritated exchanges.

  “Why don’t you wear the cuff links I got you from Turnbull and Asher?” she asked, pulling out a tiny drawer in a mahogany chest in their dressing room. She took out gold cuff links with onyx centers.

  “OK,” he said, “but hurry. There will be a lot of security at the cathedral. I have to get there early.”

  “I don’t understand you and your fascination with that crazy Church,” she said. “You could pray for Frank Sullivan right here if you wanted to.”

  Even though they had both been raised as Catholics, Brigid had long ago stopped going to church. Like many women, she found the religion misogynistic and patriarchal.

  “I have to be there, Brig. And don’t start on the Church,” said Nate. “We don’t have time for that argument today.”

  She snapped the cuff links on his wrists. As she held up his morning coat, she said, “Do you want me to call the car service?”

  “No,” said Nate. “Traffic will be terrible around the cathedral. It’ll be quicker to walk.”

  He smiled at her. “How do I look?” he asked. He didn’t really wait for the answer. He knew he looked splendid.

  Brigid looked at him all dressed up like a nineteenth-century diplomat. She had to admit he looked good. Nate was handsome in that Kennedyesque sort of way—lots of caramel-colored hair, a toothy grin, and a swimmer’s build.

  “You better run, or they won’t let you in,” Brigid said.

  Nate walked across the marble foyer of their Manhattan apartment and called the elevator. “See you this afternoon,” he said.

  As the polished bronze doors of the elevator closed between them, he gave a little wave. It was what passed for affection between them these days. They both felt there should be more.

  Out on the street, Nate hurried down Park Avenue to 50th Street, crossed toward Fifth Avenue, and slipped in the side door in the south transept of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Secret Service had set up a security checkpoint there and was screening the early arrivals through metal detectors. Men in suits with earpieces were standing in pairs, talking into their sleeves.

  Once in the cathedral, it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. Automatically, he stepped to the holy water font just inside the door, dipped his hand in the marble bowl, and blessed himself.

  In the center aisle of the cathedral, Nate saw a group of knights, dressed like he was, in formal regalia. They were gathered at the foot of the steps leading to the high altar in the sanctuary. As he walked toward them, he scanned the pews for faces he might know. Funerals like Sullivan’s were not just liturgies of prayer for the dead, but networking opportunities.

  The group of six pallbearers included two other knights who, like Nate, were federal prosecutors. There was also a doctor friend of Nate’s who was a cardiologist at Columbia–St. Luke’s Hospital. The others Nate did not know, but they looked to him like finance guys. They were all professional men, accustomed to being in charge and unaccustomed to the silent service of a pallbearer.

  As Nate joined the group, he heard a little commotion coming from the front pews nearest them. The vice president, a gregarious Irishman from Delaware, was arriving, shaking hands with everyone in the vicinity. Nate knew him vaguely. Though they were not the same age, they had both attended Georgetown Law School in Washington, DC, and had met each other at alumni functions. Nate left the group for a moment to shake the vice president’s hand. The two men exchanged pleasantries about priests they knew in common from their Jesuit-run alma mater. Once the vice president entered his pew, Nate rejoined the other pallbearers.

  Under the direction of a bossy young priest dressed in a black cassock and lace surplice, the knights were lined up in the center aisle, in two rows of three facing the rear of the church, toward the Fifth Avenue entrance. At the main entrance of the cathedral, the seldom-used great bronze doors had been thrown open, a sign of the significance of the occasion. Sunlight streamed in through the opening. The pallbearers waited awkwardly for the priests and the bishops and finally the Cardinal Archbishop of New York to emerge from their vesting rooms in the subterranean sacristy, below the high altar. In their white ties and tails, the knights looked like the march of the penguins.

  While they waited, Nate looked at the cathedral. Glancing up at the great gothic arches inside the church, it occurred to him that St. Patrick’s was oddly placed, a medieval temple plunked down right in the middle of Manhattan, arguably the most godless place on the planet.

  Nate took a kind of proprietary pride in this place, even though it had been dedicated in 1879, about a century before he was born. After all, St. Patrick’s was the product of his people, the working-class Irish. Thousands of Irish washerwomen and dockworkers of nineteenth-century New York had built this grand church with their little sacrifices. John Hughes, the Archbishop of New York in the 1850s, chose the cathedral’s Fifth Avenue location with an important purpose. He wanted St. Patrick’s to be a stick in the eye to the English “swells” of Protestant New York. He wanted the Protestants to have to walk past the cathedral and be impressed by it, even envy it. The building was meant to scream at them, “Irish immigrants built this!” Hughes made his point.

  Even in the twenty-first century, immigrants still made St. Patrick’s their own. Every day thousands of people stopped in for “a visit,” as Catholics call an informal chat with God. No longer were the new arrivals Irish. Now they were mostly Latino and African. Nonetheless, they were still the poor.

  It was one of the few places in pricey Manhattan where a poor person could sit down for free. No policeman would ask you to move along. Whether they were kneeling upright or hunched over in the pews, ordinary people could talk to whatever God was out there. They could tell the divine presence about their broken hearts and shattered dreams. On happy occasions they could thank the ineffable mystery for prayers answered: a job found, a baby born, or a loved one cured. In a city hopped up on caffeine-induced stress, St. Patrick’s was a sort of decompression chamber.

  Churches always filled Nate with awe. As a boy, growing up in the Charlestown section of Boston, the nuns had instilled in him a reverence for Catholic churches. “Jesus is present there in the tabernacle,” they told him. He believed it still with the simplicity of a child. And while this cavernous building dwarfed his parish church back home, the language of the architecture and the feeling of reverence were the same. Both churches had the same smell of incense and candle wax breathed into their stone walls by an endless round of solemn Masses and perpetually burning vigil lights.

  Nate looked up at the magnificent stained glass windows, forty feet above his head. The thousands of pieces of broken bits of colored glass reminded him of the broken hearts who had sat silently in these pews. The figures in the windows could hardly be seen from where he stood. Their identity was known only to God and the artist, he guessed. Looking to his right, Nate saw an elderly man in one of the side-aisle chapels lighting a candle on the stand where the vigil lights burned in ranks before the altars of the saints. To Catholics, these candles were not magic. They were wordless prayers that persisted in petitioning heaven for days after the supplicant left the church. To Nate it all made perfect sense. Catholic religion is tactile and sensual. Prayer is expressed in gesture and substance as well as words.

  Nate’s contemplation of the cathedral was brought to an end by the arrival of two long lines of white-robed priests who formed up behind the pallbearers in the center aisle. The procession would start as soon as the cardinal appeared.

  * * *

  On the crypt level, twenty feet below the high altar, His Eminence, Cardinal John Michael Manning, the Archbishop of New York, was vesting for the funeral. He stood at a large dressing table in the sacristy facing vestments that had been laid out before him.

  Cardinal Manning was called “Tubby” by the priests of New York, at least when they were among themselves. At nearly three hundred pounds, Manning was a cheerful package of pio
us platitudes. He never had anything original to say, but he always said it cheerfully.

  Manning was wrapped in the scarlet watered silk of a cardinal’s cassock. In such a bright red dress, he was a dramatic sight, like a New York City fire truck that needed a large turning radius.

  Standing at the dressing table, the cardinal was momentarily indecisive and irritated. He vented his frustration on the two flunky monsignors, Kelly and Krakowski, who were helping him get dressed.

  “Is that it?” he asked. “Just these two vestments? Don’t we have anything else?”

  The priests ignored his questions and pulled the cardinal’s white alb over his head and down his body to cover his red cassock.

  “Should I wear the white or the purple chasuble?” the cardinal asked the two monsignors who were at his ankles, tugging on the hem of the alb.

  He answered himself, “Purple is more conservative.” Manning’s natural inclination, like most bishops, was to be conservative in all things.

  “What would the Holy Father wear?” he asked the mute monsignors. Cardinals always take their cues from the pope. That’s how they get to be cardinals.

  Manning’s dithering over costume was not unusual. St. Patrick’s is several blocks off Broadway, but it is no less theatrical. Costumes were important to Manning. Like many clerics, he believed that clothes did make the man.

  Kelly and Krakowski looked at each other with shared impatience. “Just wear the white one, Your Eminence,” said Monsignor Kelly. “All the concelebrants are already upstairs. They are all vested in white. We have to hurry.”

  Manning put out his arms. The monsignors placed an ornate gold and white stole around his shoulders and then pulled a heavily embroidered matching chasuble over his head. They didn’t bother with the cincture, a rope belt meant to symbolize purity. Getting a cincture around Manning was too much trouble. Besides, nobody could see it under his vestments.