Enforcing Terrible Secrets

A transition from journalism to literature is not always easy or successful, but The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre proves definitely that it can be done. MacIntyre, for decades the CBC’s voice and face of fresh disasters on the fifth estate and other programs, has written one previous novel (The Long Stretch) and
a memoir (Causeway: A Passage from Innocence) before creating this fictional work centred on the grim topic of priestly pedophilia and set in the author’s native Cape Breton. So the book is no barrel of monkeys.

However, the author gives us strong characters set on a sturdy stage and a novel with a sound structure of many twisted strands of plot brought together at last in a satisfactory way. The novel’s winning of the Giller Prize this past fall indicates definitively that hacks can indeed turn into artists.

Father Duncan MacAskill is called back to a small parish near his birthplace and hellish childhood in Cape Breton after several years of acting as the bishop’s “enforcer,” as rumours of child abuse by the clergy threaten to circulate more widely. He is supposed to be the bung in the bishop’s leaking bung holes. How long MacAskill’s wrenching between personal conscience and clerical duty can stand the strain is the main tension in the novel.

Using the enforcer’s point of view to tell the story is an interesting choice by MacIntyre. As the church’s fixer and all-purpose tool, MacAskill is able to recall scenes with abused children and their families, scenes with sneering perpetrators and scenes with the bishop—the official voice of the church in his diocese. In addition to these less than happy memories, MacAskill is troubled by recurring thoughts of his own difficult family life, the whole mixed up in the stew of a tight-knit Cape Breton community where “everybody is more or less related.”

Eventually, the pressure drives MacAskill to the bottle and he is sent off to a Catholic centre in Ontario for the 40-day Lenten cure for alcoholics, child abusers, chastity slackers and other straying allsorts. His roommate at the centre is an ex-priest and gambling addict who takes him out walking on the Niagara Escarpment and talks to him of matters that will tip the scales of his mental struggle later on.

MacAskill returns to duty in Cape Breton with his alcoholism apparently in remission, but by now adverse publicity for the church has continued to rise and a clever reporter is rooting around a number of the enforcer’s old cases. The bishop’s bull-like determination to protect the church at all costs also rises to new heights.

Against this sort of line in the sand we may be sure of how MacAskill will go, but there are plenty of footpaths and cliff faces to grasp our attention. We are not certain of the conclusion until it comes, and when it does come it is all the more satisfactory because of our lack of complete certainty.

Because of the location, the situation and the granite relics of Scottish Catholicism, this might fairly be called a Gothic novel, although it has all the ingredients of today’s headlines. This is where MacIntyre’s long experience in journalism is brought to bear on his literature, but the miracle is that the seams do not show … for the most part.

One of Father Duncan’s early assignments as a priest is decades earlier, when he is sent to Honduras. There he meets, among others, some freedom fighters, including the fierce and beauteous Jacinta. For some distance into the book, we are taken back and forth in time and place, a device that fortunately does not last. A decade or more later, back in cooler Cape Breton, Father MacAskill buys an old boat and renames it “Jacinta.” What are we to make of all this except that our hero is sexually straight and sacramentally strong?

This Newfoundlander reviewer’s insular ire was foolishly raised early on by the author’s several references to Newfoundland as North America’s cesspit of priestly pedophilia—with Boston and the aboriginal schools chucked in for makeweight. In fact, the stones of Mount Cashel boys’ orphanage where the Irish Christian Brothers committed abominations have been carted away, and in that sorry place in St. John’s there now stands a shopping centre.

Michael Harris, a newspaper editor in St. John’s back in the day and the author of Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel, an account of the horrors there, said recently that Newfoundland may have been in the forefront of causing church, government and other officials to make a clean breast of scandals and put them in the open before they could fester and burst. Now a radio talk-show host in Ottawa, he said he has tried in vain to get the bishop of Ottawa on his program to speak on the subject. He claimed that the comparatively early exposé and aftermath in Newfoundland have loosened up not only the church, but Newfoundland society in general.

A decade ago, for example, religious schools were amalgamated into secular schools, although names and religious symbols still grace many of them. We may take this as, perhaps, a sign of Newfoundland communalism: live and let live, or us against the world. Curious, now, is news that Italy of all places is being pressured to take crucifixes out of its classrooms.

The shocking business of priestly pedophilia in this province is not yet over. This past fall, a prominent priest and long-time union leader was due to appear in court the next day on charges of child abuse, when he was found dead in his house. The police say they do not suspect foul play. Sometimes it is hard for anyone to fictionalize reality in Newfoundland.

Much of the agony, both here and, it seems, in places like Cape Breton, occurred because of the brutal determination of the church and many government officials to protect the church ahead of the victims. Since this is a main pillar of MacIntyre’s book, perhaps he did hold on to his journalistic notebooks after all. If so, he did what all good writers do and took raw materials and turned them into solid literature. It would certainly be unfair to take The Bishop’s Man, a work of fiction, as any real reflection of subsequent moral or social events in Newfoundland or any other province. The reviewer, as an ex-newsman, can only admire and envy this work the more. Just after reading a pre-publication copy for review there came news that the bishop of Antigonish had been taken up on charges of possessing child pornography. Before a twinge of insular Newfoundland smugness could rear its ugly head, it was further reported from Nova Scotia that the bishop is a Newfoundlander.