Chapter 24

    If I were, in these pages, writing a novel. I would not do what I am about to do now, that is, spell out something of the grand climax of the long and bitter history of scandal in the Church, both local and universal, that, as I was to come to know it, began with the little episode just sketched. In a novel, as in a play or a film, suspense must be part of the structure, in such a way that there must be a tangible thread of it from beginning to end, so the reader can share the characters' own sense of quest and uncertainty, and thus also share emotionally in the catharsis of the resolution. Perhaps I should not exclude all autobiographies, either, for some adventures can be told pretty much as cliff-hangers, even if they are true. But this is a spiritual work in which the climax was given away at the very beginning. Furthermore, the historical incidents which support the accounting of that climax, certainly a resolution beyond which nothing greater can be attained or received in an individual, took place for the first time almost thirty years ago. (The most recent, in the visual aspect, was two days ago, in the course of some spiritual direction.) Thus all other achievements must be kept in perspective, so as not to disturb the mood necessary for an adequate reading of a work such as this. Moreover, in chewing over the significance of these latest events, I was reminded of one of the fallible ideas of my youth, and it seemed a good time to record it, as the late facts are such a good example of how God eventually, and very fully, answers any question or objection we might be moved to think up.
    After the initial terror of discovering that I was to be a writer, I who had never reaped much satisfaction from school composition assignments, quite quickly began to acquire a distinct mental pleasure in what I understood was the intellectual and imaginative preparation for the day I settled down to a story or two, and never until the rainy autumn Sunday afternoon that I began the first draught of the Yacht Novel did I have any doubts or complaints about my appointed vocation. Nor did I have any dark moments, as far as I can recall, throughout the year or so it took me to finish it, actually in two spurts many months apart. I knew, mind you, that it was only a draught, and would require much rewriting, although I could never have believed that this retelling and retelling would take half-a-century.
    But in my second year at my apprenticeship, when I began writing short stories - ah, sophomores - I found myself fretting over what seemed to be a very negative predicament of the writer: other men did things, writers only wrote about what other men did. To no small degree was this kind of thinking the lamentable result of my then neglect of the study of real philosophy, but I did not know this then, and my complaint seemed to be genuine. I sometimes thought I had been tricked into a second level of occupation.
    In many ways, I think I was done with this complaint by the end of my second year - I'd had a whopping great spiritual experience in my Ontario army camp, as well as a writer's pilgrimage to New York - and if not, then certainly my third year, my first in law school, with its definite intrusions of the dark night that rendered my brain incapable of mastering the legal world as I knew a good student must, was teaching me, albeit obscurely, that I had a vocation within a vocation.
    But now, so many years later, comes the teaching among teachings: the Vatican has taken a resolute and major step against sexually abusive and undisciplined priests, going over the heads of the bishops - who have proven so negligent and incompetent - and placing such matters under the authority of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. The contemplative, who, among other things, prays for the needs of the Church, has seen this need about to be, by canon law, more satisfied than it has been. The lamentable habit of protecting, even fostering, the lack of chastity among priests and even bishops, in future should have a swifter means of correction. Had such a system been in place forty years ago, this diocese might have kept its university and one of its private high schools, to say nothing of its honour as well. How much damage ensues, when hard facts of wrongdoing are not communicated to the proper authorities; how much labour must be undertaken, primarily by contemplatives, to restore or create what should be the ordinary exercise of vigilance and responsibility.
    So it stands to reason and to faith, does it not, that God should have ordered a contemplative into the diocese of Nelson, certainly one of the worst in the country and continent and set the labours of his soul - and the souls of his contemplative associates - against this scourge? But being God, He did not have to explain Himself in full, only give the grace for surviving such a task from day to day. All would eventually be explained in Heaven, of course, and, as the unearthing of scoundrels is, in cases such as these, the job of bishops and police, the daily bread of the man of prayer was to be growth in the spiritual life and help to those who sought the same thing. Yet details from time to time came his way, sooner or later.
    The last of these was just over a year ago. Six months or so after I was told the story that explained the blush, I mentioned it to the Pope, in company with some other considerations: one, thoughts on the proposal to make Louis de Monfort a doctor of the Church - a most excellent idea, in the current collapse of Marian devotion - and the second, possibly a veiled reference - certainly hidden from me - to the events of the Black Tuesday of the upcoming September 11th. It was, again, a half-year or so before the Roman legislation was announced.
    The information that was passed on to me, some forty years after the event, and this because it was generally known that I had been involved as much as I could be, with police, the courts, and the journalists, in dealing with the clergy - quite numerous in the Nelson diocese - who had been charged, finally, with sexually abusing the young.
    From a certain point of view, this activity might be seen by some to be fairly extensive, and it is a fact that over the years, especially in the decade or so following the revelations first emerging, in Canada, in the archdiocese of Saint John's, Newfoundland, I was from time to time pretty busy about it; but the most important work was in the praying, for it was in this, by the laws of the spiritual life, that I was given the deepest misery. This was profoundly true even before the attaining of the seventh mansion, but it was much more so subsequently. Christ indeed came to earth to suffer. I had run into the devil before the Easter of 1973, and that was unpleasant enough, but these incidents were still only certain degrees toward the raw, naked, horrors that were the final bequest of the fully mature state. For the first time in my life I had to see, and to some extent, share, the spirits of perversion, although I was not given the satisfaction of being able to identify the actual human exercisers of these spirits and point them out to the police. God, it seems, had no special wish to see the diocese of Nelson cleaned up before the rest of the Church.
    Could this have happened? Probably I shall never completely forget how to turn the possible scenarios of correction over and over in my mind, not entirely uninfluenced by memories of earlier successes in helping the authorities catch a felon, albeit in much less serious issues than the molestation of children. The first was an assault, the second an attempted fraud, the third a robbery. In all three cases it was pretty much the result of being in the right place at the right time.
    But, as equally important in the matter of law and order, and the protection of victims, in those earlier instances - all on the lower mainland - the powers that be were doing their job. One very efficient pair of the juvenile detail of the Vancouver police, an alert Dun and Bradstreet credit investigator, and quick acting little squad of Burnaby RCMP. And in the last case - I think this is relevant - there might not have been an arrest had not the entire episode began with a kindly officer bending the rules in the first place to offer me a ride as I was walking the Lougheed Highway in the middle of a rainy night.
    But in Nelson, there was not this kind of efficiency, and my participation in it, until the morning of February 14, 1988 - a Sunday - when a Nelson police corporal called our home to ask my wife to ask our four daughters, all graduates of Saint Joseph School, if they had been victimized by the Reverend John Frederick Monaghan, former pastor and vicar general of the diocese. At that point I was able to go into gear, and stay there, on and off, for the next five years, by which time all the criminals except two had been rounded up, tried, and sent to prison. The victims had finally come up with the simplicity and courage to complain to the police, and the police and the press had finally realized that there was a problem.
    The two who had not been put behind bars were the pair I started with, the university president and the bishop, and they remained free and uncharged because they had not in fact been accused of sexual activity by any victims young enough to have them put away, or simple enough to carry a provision of information all the way through to the courtroom. They remain severely guilty in my mind, however, of conspiracy to maintain Father Monaghan in his predatory position. In the spring of 1967, as I was preparing to leave classroom teaching for more obscure forms of sharing my mystical life with mankind, both my principal and a member of the school board told me about the results of an inquiry arranged over allegations of that time brought against Father Monaghan.
    Monaghan was sent to Father Aquinas, the university president. Father Aquinas declared that Father Monaghan was a good and devout priest and the sister principal was an over-anxious nun, and the adjective is a euphemism for what he actually said. Father Aquinas was recommended, of course, by Bishop Doyle. Nor was he the only faculty member with an interest in attacking the reputation of a sound religious concerned with the morals of Nelson Catholic education personalities of that time.
   To this day the province's attorney general has declined to make a full inquiry into Bishop Doyle's dereliction of duty. This could be because a thorough examination of the history of the last forty years of the diocese would show that, in His own mysterious ways, God was warning all the authorities all the time, and all the authorities were too stupid or too involved in their own sinful behaviour to pay attention. This may seem hard and judgmental, and if it is, then I have to be sorry; but it may also be the most logical comment on the thought patterns of professionals in the Canadian province widely recognized to be the least religious in the nation, perhaps priding itself the fullest on the so-called separation between Church and State.
    At the very least, British Columbia has not been the easiest or most productive province for a mystic's practising his profession, as far as it affects the ordinary needs of provincial society. Future legislatures, police academies, law, medicine, and journalism schools might do well to take note of the realities of the mystical life, and thus learn to co-operate with the unusual graces of God rather than resist them.