Bishop as Pawn Read online

  FOR JAVAN

  PROLOGUE

  Bishop Ramon Diego was dead. And the priests were having a party.

  On the surface, this may seem cavalier, even inhuman. But actually, the bishop’s battered body had not yet been discovered.

  Besides, it was not exactly a party. The occasion was the quarterly meeting of Detroit city priests.

  Although the gathering was a regularly scheduled event, not all the priests of the entire archdiocese of Detroit were invited.

  Four times each year, the priests assigned to parishes within the actual boundaries of the city of Detroit got together to: pinpoint problem areas in their ministry; share solutions or at least attempted solutions; enjoy each other’s company; gripe, and gripe some more.

  This also was an excellent opportunity to surreptitiously case any newcomers to the presbyterate of Detroit … although almost no priests were any longer volunteering to serve in the inner city.

  Some thought a natural differentiation existed between suburban ministries and priestly experience in the dying and dangerous city of Detroit proper. Others felt that priesthood was priesthood, that suburbanites had souls, and that Detroit was neither dying nor dangerous.

  Even though this party was of, by, and for inner-city priests, by no means was every one of them in attendance. In all, there are about 150 priests assigned to Detroit city parishes. These dinner meetings were movable feasts. It just so happened that tonight’s party was hosted by the Cathedral parish. Tonight only about forty priests had gathered for the light dinner and refreshments at Blessed Sacrament.

  Now, as the hour neared 10:00, only ten of the original forty-some priests remained.

  Besides these few, there was the service crew—the caterer and two seminarians—who had prepared and served the buffet meal. Now they began removing the leftovers and cleaning up the kitchen.

  “This ain’t bad,” Pete, the caterer, said. “I expected a real crowd.”

  “‘A real crowd’?” Mark, one of the seminarians, echoed.

  “Wait a minute …” Charlie, the other seminarian, said to Pete. “You don’t think the guys who showed up tonight are all the priests we’ve got in Detroit?”

  “Well … yeah. We got a lot of food left over,” Pete replied. “And, what the hell: How could you run a church in a big city like this with … what?… less than fifty ministers?”

  “Priests,” Mark, who was ever on the lookout for a possible convert, corrected. “You a Catholic?”

  “Naw, Greek Orthodox … but I don’t work at it.”

  Perfect, thought Mark. All Pete had to do was make a lateral arabesque to become Greek Catholic, or Uniate, and he would be in union with Rome, so to speak.

  “Our priests drink too,” Pete said.

  “What?”

  “Booze. This is just about the way we’d set up for an Orthodox party. Our company’s handled a few. Surprised me at first; I guess I just took it for granted that priests didn’t drink.” Pete smiled. “Course for a while there, I didn’t think they went to the bathroom either. But” —he indicated the sideboard well stocked with bottles of liquor and mixes—“your guys drink too.”

  Mark leaped to the defense. “You didn’t see any of ‘our’ guys get drunk did you?”

  “Well … the guy who came in late looked like he had a snootful.”

  “Okay, but he sobered up pretty quick, didn’t he? Soon as he got some food in him.”

  “I guess.” Pete dumped the bones of some picked-over chicken in the garbage bucket. “Your guys don’t dress up much.”

  Mark would have preferred a less adversarial conversation. But he was grateful for any opportunity to pursue a religious theme. “You mean they’re not all in uniform—clericals. Well, remember, Pete: They’re all priests and they all know each other. No need for a uniform.” He sidestepped the fact that in any case clericals were no longer worn anywhere near as often as had been the custom some years back.

  “Well, then …” Pete hesitated. “… I guess I can ask …”

  “Anything, Pete.” Things were looking good, Mark thought, for a possible eventual conversion.

  “Was the bishop here?”

  Charlie guffawed. “One of the reasons these guys get together is to roast the bishops. So the bishops aren’t invited. And even if they were, they wouldn’t come.”

  Bishops … Pete wondered. “You got more than one?”

  Mark leaped at Pete’s interest. “There’s only one main bishop. He’s called the ‘ordinary.’”

  “The others are ‘extraordinary.’” Charlie laughed again.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him. The others are called ‘auxiliary’—‘helping’—bishops. Detroit’s a big, important territory; so it’s an archdiocese. So the ordinary is an archbishop. Except our archbishop is a Cardinal.” Mark obviously relished the title. “Cardinals elect the Pope!”

  “Would you all mind stacking these boxes?” Pete veered from the topic; the sooner they could pack it in here, the quicker he could get home.

  “Then, see …” Mark continued while obediently stacking boxes, “… the archdiocese is divided into five regions, and an auxiliary bishop is responsible for each region—with maybe an exception for our newest auxiliary, Bishop Diego. He’s supposed to look out for the Hispanics.”

  “I sure thank you fellas.” Pete, balancing an improbable pile of boxes and gear, exited without further formality.

  Charlie smiled at Mark sympathetically. “I thought for a minute you had him there. Maybe next time.”

  “If we’d had all the guys here—maybe then Pete would’ve been impressed. Or, if more of the guys had been wearing their clericals … Look: There’s about ten guys left and only one of ’em is wearing a ‘collar.’”

  Charlie snorted. “He probably wears a Roman collar in the shower.”

  “Huh?”

  “Name’s Koesler, Father Robert Koesler. He’s pastor of Old St. Joe’s downtown. I did some work for him last summer. Took census in his parish—almost everybody there lives in a highrise, or an apartment or a condo. A nice guy, but definitely ‘old school.’”

  “Oh, yeah …” Mark brightened. “I remember him. Isn’t he the … uh …?”

  “‘Detective priest’?” Charlie grinned. “I guess some people think so. But he doesn’t. He told me all he’s done is just supply some information to the police from time to time. No big deal, according to him.”

  “Oh …” Mark’s attention turned to another related consideration. “Now that I think of it, how come this isn’t open to all the priests? When Cardinal Boyle has a general meeting everybody shows up.”

  “I don’t know …” Charlie grew reflective. “There is a difference. Even when there’s a general meeting, the suburban guys hang out together and the same for the city guys. Must have something to do with their territory. I guess it’s the difference between first, second, and third world countries.”

  The two young men, now almost done, were packing away the untouched food, which would be distributed to the needy tomorrow. Charlie chuckled. “Reminds me of something my aunt told me a while back.” Charlie’s aunt was a nun who had a penchant for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people.

  “You know how in the old days if the nuns did something wrong, they had to confess it to all the other nuns in their convent? They called it the Chapter of Faults.

  “Anyway, a priest used to say Mass at the convent once a week. The nuns took turns making him a pretty damn good breakfast after Mass. Well, one morning when it was my aunt’s turn, the priest left some bacon and eggs, which my aunt promptly scarfed down. But then she felt guilty. So at the next Chapter of Faults, she confessed, ‘I ate Father’s remains.’”

 
They both laughed.

  “By the way,” Mark said, “who’s the new guy?”

  “What new guy?”

  “The one who came in with the Ste. Anne’s crew?”

  “Oh … okay … I can’t think of his name right now, but he’s about to become a Detroit priest. Didn’t you see the announcement in the Detroit Catholic?”

  “I must’ve missed it.”

  “He’s a Maryknoller … an older guy.”

  Actually, the priest in question was a Maryknoll missionary, or, more technically, a member of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America.

  “I always thought that a missionary vocation would be sort of thrilling,” Mark mused. “You know: China, Africa, Japan, South America—exotic places. Why would he want to work in Detroit?”

  “I don’t know.” Charlie shrugged. “But it’s gonna take him a while.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause the Maryknoll order has to let him go before our archdiocese can ‘adopt’ him. It’s a regular process … something about ‘incardination’ and ‘excardination.’ I asked Father Kerin, but he said we’d study it later in Canon Law.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just like all the questions about sex and marriage …”

  “‘We’ll study it later,’” they said in unison.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  “I’m being sued,” Father Bert Echlin stated.

  Father Ernie Bell snorted. “If you lose, you’ll have to borrow money to pay off.”

  “They always think we’ve got an infinite pile of money back of us,” Father Henry Dorr said.

  “Well, we have, in a way.” Father Frank Dempsey chuckled. “If any one of us gets into enough trouble, they can always sell the Sistine Chapel.”

  “Who’d want it?” Echlin wondered.

  “Why? What are you getting sued for?” Dorr asked,

  “My sidewalk.”

  “You got a sidewalk?” Dempsey joked.

  “I got a sidewalk, okay,” Echlin said. “It looks like it got bombed. I mean, I’m used to potholes in the streets. But in the sidewalks?”

  “So it’s an eyesore. What’s so different about that?” Dempsey shook his head. “If people in this city sued over eyesores …”

  “A woman fell on my sidewalk,” Echlin said.

  “Fell?” Dorr said.

  “Fell, or took a dive. Anyway, she’s suing. After I got a call from her lawyer, I walked around the parish. I’ve got the best sidewalk in the neighborhood.” Echlin half grimaced. “I think I got spoiled by my previous parish. In Monroe, if you got problems you get a notice from the city: Either you fix it or the city fixes it and sends you the bill.”

  “Welcome to Detroit,” said Dorr.

  It was nearing 10:30. The quarterly meeting of the city priests was winding down. The catering crew, having cleared away the food, had departed. The liquor supply and a few priests remained.

  Much of the evening’s conversation had centered on the city in which these priests lived and ministered. They griped about the mayor, one Maynard Cobb; about the Common Council; about city services, or more realistically the lack thereof; about the provision for snow removal, which was the periodic but fairly dependable forty-plus degrees of temperature; about street lighting, which was spotty at best; about city pockets where police protection was intense in contrast to the larger stretches of the city pretty much left to shift for themselves; about the erratic mass transit boondoggle; about the pervasive presence of drugs with their concomitant violence, which was all too frequently fatal, and at the very least overwhelmingly vitiating.

  These were all “safe” topics. Practically every gathering of two or more citizens in metropolitan Detroit, whether in the suburbs or the city, griped about the selfsame things.

  Members of the select group of priests who called themselves the “hard core” of the core city were easily as concerned about Big Brother as they were about their wounded and limping city.

  Big Brother was embodied by the various layers of Church bureaucracy, which seemed to these priests to be obsessed with how they were functioning liturgically, canonically, and socially.

  Some few of their colleagues were aligned quite frankly with Big Brother. Thus, in these meetings, conversation was steered along “safe” paths. That way there would be nothing to report; even bureaucrats complained about the city and its many failings.

  However, once those who felt some allegiance to the power structure were not present, the “hard core” group felt more free to talk about what interested them: their Church and their ministry.

  But tonight, their aim was to discover just where this Don Carleson fit into the scheme of things. Their technique, traditionally, was not a frontal assault; rather, they would sound out the newcomer on his opinion of and approach to some of the points of common interest to them all.

  Two more priests checked their watches, shrugged, and headed for home. This left the four who had been assessing the sad state of city maintenance, Father Carleson, and Father Koesler.

  Ernie Bell had arrived about forty-five minutes late for the meeting. It was evident that he’d been drinking, and while the meal had sobered him somewhat, he still had not completely recovered.

  “So, Don,” Dorr began, “you’re a Maryknoller. Where were you working before you came here?”

  “Oh, just an insignificant diocese in Central America. Nobody’s ever heard of it.”

  “What brings you to Detroit?” Echlin asked.

  “I’m tempted to say Northwest Airlines. But I know you’re serious. So, I didn’t come here blindly. I checked out the major dioceses in the States and this one seemed most promising.”

  “This one?” Dempsey’s tone suggested skepticism. “Pound for pound, we’ve got more problems than any other metropolitan diocese I can think of.”

  Carleson shook his head. “You’ve gone through the Council right from its beginning in the early sixties. Most of the other dioceses ducked Vatican II. They’re still fighting their way through it. This thing adapting to the Council and its spirit—like most other things depended on who the bishop happened to be. Your guy—Boyle—has fought his way through it. Still fighting.”

  “Yeah, but they put you in Ste. Anne’s,” Dorr said. “Things are just as poor there as you could have had in the missions.”

  “No.” Carleson smiled. “These people here aren’t really poor. Why, most of them have TV sets. In the Third World, there are just two societies: the extremely wealthy and the dirt poor. And when I say dirt poor, I mean it literally.”

  “So, then,” Dorr said, “that’s why you came back: The missions were more miserable than you counted on?”

  “No, not really. It was the bishops.”

  “Bishops!” Dorr snorted. “You really lucked into it, didn’t you? Getting assigned to Diego!”

  Through clenched teeth Carleson replied, “That’s only temporary.”

  “Temporary?” Echlin chuckled mirthlessly. “Not if he thinks he can make your life truly miserable.”

  Carleson didn’t respond.

  But Ernie Bell did. He almost exploded. Seemingly, the mention of the bishop’s name had roused him. “Diego! That bastard! Diego, that goddam bastard!”

  “What’s the matter with Diego?” Dempsey wondered.

  “You don’t know?” Koesler said. “I thought everyone knew.” .

  “Diego discovered that he could make Ernie’s life miserable,” Echlin said. “And he’s been doing pretty well at it ever since.”

  “How come I didn’t know that?” Dempsey asked.

  “I don’t know.” Echlin shrugged. “It’s pretty common knowledge, at least among the guys.”

  “But Ernie, you speak Spanish. You’re good at it,” Dempsey protested. He looked at the others. “My God, he’s at St. Gabriel’s … right in the heart of the Latino community. Why would Diego give him a hard time?”

  “Where’ve you been, Frank?” Dorr asked. “If you’d get out of the
Afro ghetto once in a while—”

  “And get into your ghetto?” Dempsey interjected.

  “At least get out of your own. What Diego’s been doing—and not doing—is famous … infamous.”

  “Like?”

  “Like he’s supposed to be God’s gift to the Hispanic community.”

  “That’s what he was in Dallas,” Dempsey said.

  “That’s what he was supposed to be in Dallas,” Echlin corrected. “Turns out he don’t like Latinos very much.”

  “Doesn’t like Latinos!” Dempsey exclaimed. “Why, my God, he’s Mexican himself! Why wouldn’t he like Latinos? He is one.”

  “I don’t know,” Dorr said. “Something must have happened to him when they made him a bishop.”

  “Yeah, it happens. It happens all the time,” Echlin said. “Look at Supreme Court justices. Presidents nominate them expecting they’ll follow the president’s party line. But, often as not, they don’t.

  “Or look at our history. Cardinal Montini was a star-spangled liberal until they put a white suit on him and made him Pope Paul VI and he dug his heels in.

  “Or take Danielou. As a theologian he was always in trouble. Then they make him a Cardinal and nobody can find a liberal bone in his body.”

  “So,” Dorr pursued, “why not Diego?”

  “The son of a bitch.” Bell spoke for the first time since his similar blast earlier in the conversation. “Latinos—Latinos who live in this city—live in barrios. Diego ain’t gonna live in a barrio … not again.”

  “He came from one, didn’t he?” Dorr said diffidently, trying not to further rile Bell.

  “Yeah, he came from one,” Bell said. “And he worked in one when he became a priest. But he wanted out. Best ticket out was becoming a bishop. So, he worked his way into getting the red. He’d just about worked his way into the mainstream in Dallas when he got sent here as an auxiliary to Boyle. So he’s God’s gift to the Latinos here. Back in the barrio. But he’s working his way out all over again.”

  “Are you sure?” Dempsey said. “I mean, that’s a hell of an accusation!”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. I know how he ticks. I confronted him with the whole scenario. I had chapter and verse. I could tell him the contacts he’s made already. I could even tell him the contacts he’s planning to make.