“I don’t understand. If priests go to the monastery for...what shall I call it, ‘spiritual renewal’, why are they treated so harshly?”
“Janet, the Passion Monastery is not a retreat house and the priests don’t simply go there. They are sent there. I believe I mentioned it to you before I left, although maybe I didn’t make myself clear. The priests sent there are three time losers—alcoholics, drug abusers, child molesters, and so forth. Some of them have broken the law, done time, and are now ex-cons. Their bishops send them there under the pretext...hope, if you will, that all other attempts to reclaim them having failed, the Passion brothers will shape them up or pressure them to resign.”
“Now, I’m more confused. How could they have sent you there? Was it some kind of misunderstanding?”
“Possibly. But it’s more complicated than that.”
“Well, tell me this: How did you manage to leave the monastery? Bishop release you?”
“No. You may not believe this but I ran away. I’m still running. You’re looking at a full blown renegade priest.”
Janet was puzzled. For a moment she wondered if she had completely misjudged the man she had fallen in love with. Steve didn’t seem to be the type to run away from anything no matter how bad. “Steve, you must have found out by now why they’ve been hounding you,” she said, suddenly sitting up, anxious to hear the solution to the riddle that had bothered her for months.
Steve realized he was ashamed to tell her the story. As a priest, a man of God, an intercessor between the people and God, he had always believed, had been trained to believe, he was in a super-normal category. It wasn’t ego—it was a spiritual fact. But here, in front of the woman he loved, in her eyes he would fall a long way down. Despite all, he felt he had to tell her.
“Janet, you’ve heard of cloning, of course.”
“Sure. Microbiology is my minor at the university. What’s that got to do with you?”
“I’m one of them. The church found out about it when my mother was on her deathbed. Kind of a deathbed confession. There was a priest in the room who must have gone out and called Bishop Rhinehart. And I get the idea they don’t like having a clone saying Mass, hearing confessions; in other words, a kind of soul-less manufactured machine developed in a lab, if you will, rather than the product of a marital union. A Frankenstein monster acting like a human being.”
Janet suddenly remembered the eerie experience in the Colonial Inn when she had mistaken the older brother, Jonathon, for Steve. “My God,” she exclaimed, “Could it have been Jonathon?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it was.” Steve slowly recounted the story of his mother’s deathbed confession. About his mother’s desire to have another son just like Jonathon.
Janet’s eyes filled with tears. Almost overcome, she turned her head away and gazed into the distance for a long time. When she looked back, she was so sad seeing his crestfallen face, she wanted to take him in her arms and never let go. But they were in a canoe and she didn’t have any way to stand up and move to him.
Later, on shore, she let him hold her in a long embrace that was more than friendly but still not crossing the bounds of intimacy. She was beginning to melt when he suddenly stopped, gently pushed her away and turned to lead her into the house by the hand. She thought maybe he was leading her into a bedroom, but as it turned out, he wasn’t. They sat curled up on the living room sofa for a long time. Although he was almost unable to control the urge in his loins, the thought that he would be taking advantage of her stopped him. He knew he didn’t stop because of his vows. He stopped only because he knew she could be hurt by it. She wanted things he could never give her—a husband and probably children. She didn’t need a dalliance, a romance that both of them would regret later.
They decided to have dinner at the Pine River Steak House, just a few miles from Steve’s house.
“Steve, when you compare cloning to creating a Frankenstein monster, you’re making it sound worse than it really is. Clones are only twins, except that cloning of adult twins makes them many years apart. The difference of course is that the twins are lab generated rather than by natural means. A human clone has all of the attributes of a human being. Why would anyone question that?”
“I’m afraid some of the church hierarchy have questioned it.”
“With what conclusion?”
“No one is quite sure. There are cardinals and bishops pro and con.”
“What about the pope?”
“He hasn’t yet made a definitive statement. I suppose he’s waiting for the Curia to make a full blown study of the issue, which means an answer could be years away.”
“By the way, if it will help your morale, did I ever tell you how handsome a machine you are?” she said playfully. “You really are, you know. Are you blushing?”
“No,” he replied with a grin. I think I got a little too much sun on the lake today, that’s all.”
“About the church,” Janet said with wrinkled brow and a slight frown. “I would think the church would accept that clones are full-fledged human beings. The only difference is that instead of sperm impregnating an egg, cells from an adult are inserted into an egg that has had its DNA removed. Then the egg is implanted in a woman for growth and nourishment. Of course, since adult cells are specialized, the trick is to reset their clock in order to produce a complete being. That’s what the breakthrough was all about. There’s another way to look at it—one could argue that the adult cells are already mated, and in the cloning process are just housed in an egg as an outer covering so they can be put back in a female for growth and nourishment. So I don’t understand the big deal guys like Bishop Rhinehart seem to be making of it.”
“It’s not bishop any more. It’s Archbishop Rhinehart. I hear he just got retitled and is on his way to becoming a cardinal. Maybe he already has the red hat for all I know.”
“Swell,” she said dryly. “Isn’t he the one who’s against altar girls and almost everything else where women are concerned?”
“That’s the one.”
As Janet returned from the salad bar, she sat down in the booth facing Steve. She looked at him levelly with a trace of worry in her eyes. “Steve, I would think the church’s main concern would be whether the cloned individual was harmed by the process. That’s the real moral issue, not whether a human clone is really human.”
“Nobody ever said that bishops know a thing about science, especially the abstruse aspects of genetic engineering. Some of them are being stampeded by what they read or hear in the media, I suppose.”
“Which brings me to the question—do you know the doctor involved? Whoever it was must have been far ahead of his time since the procedure was done about sixty years ago.” She said this with a slight smile, trying to brighten the mood.
“Just hold on there a minute.” Steve managed to laugh. “What’s this sixty stuff? I’m not even fifty,” he protested.
“It’s a puzzle because Dolly was recent—about 1997, I believe. However, I did read somewhere that experiments with human cloning were performed many years ago. But no one thought they were successful.”
“Apparently one of them was successful. I don’t know anything really about the doctor who did it, but I aim to find out.”
*****
On the drive back to Boston, Janet was still not convinced the Catholic hierarchy would have hounded Steve out of his parish and off to a monastery simply because he was a clone—an incestuous twin. In her mind he was merely a twin of Jonathon. There must have been more to it than that, she thought. But what?
*****
After Janet had gone, Steve sank into a feeling of loneliness beyond words. The euphoria he had felt when he first arrived at the house on the pond was gone. He drove to the small church, knelt alone in a pew and prayed through tears and sobs until he was exhausted. His church had abandoned him. The woman he loved was unreachable. As he looked up, he wondered if God was still there. He prayed individually to each person in the
Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Then he poured his heart out to the Blessed Virgin and finally prayed to Saint Jude, the patron of lost causes. But was anyone listening to his prayers? Because he was not the product of normal intercourse—the prerequisite so often stressed by the papacy—the union of sperm and egg in matrimonial intercourse or even in a petri dish, rather a twin conceived in a lab after a delay of almost twenty years, was he a human being in the eyes of the church? In the eyes of God? Did he have a soul? Was he really an ordained priest? Where was God now that he needed him?
In the following days, he doggedly jogged the back roads of Wakefield, past the small ancient cemeteries, the white clapboard homes—windows framed with black or dark blue shutters, past the ‘moose crossing’ signs, around the perimeter of the pond with laughing children diving off a raft. After his run, he would stop for a soft drink at a mom and pop store.
He ran in early morning and again at night. He ran in the exhilaration of falling rain and the serenity of cool dry mornings and evenings. As he arrived home after a morning run, he would pull off his shirt, kick off his shoes and run barefoot down across the small beach with a headlong dive into the water. He’d do a quick overhand crawl out thirty yards to a buoy and back.
And as the days went by, he steadily regained his confidence and sense of self. He wondered as he ran if the rhythmic drumbeat of feet pounding the ground and a heart pounding in his chest, had more healing power than poring his heart out in prayer.
*****
Steve’s first Sunday Mass had only a dozen parishioners scattered through the pews. Mostly they came from the center of Wakefield where news of the reopening of St. Mary’s had spread by word of mouth.
As Steve donned his vestments in the sacristy and glanced through the door in the direction of the altar, he was pleased to see the bouquets of flowers on the altar that had been brought by Mrs. Winters and a few of the other ladies. He made a point to thank them after the service. The white altar cloth was pressed and draped neatly over the small altar that held two newly polished brass candlesticks and the missal. The tabernacle was small, made of wood painted white with gold trim, but adequate. The nave of the church had been scrubbed bare, the wood grain on the pews reappearing after being hidden for years under layers of grime. On the outside, the front face of the church wore a new coat of traditional New England white paint. The remaining church faces were scheduled for painting in the following weeks. Although an unpretentious structure, plain and bare in every respect, the little church, a million light years from the glory of St. Peters in Rome, was to Steve a humble metaphor for the Bethlehem manger that had sheltered the newborn Christ.
Steve’s sermon was brief and upbeat. He wanted to avoid laying too much on his new parishioners so he kept it light. No fire and brimstone to these good people who had responded to his call. He introduced himself as having been transferred from a diocese in Arizona. When the Mass ended, after hurriedly removing his chasuble, Steve hastened to the front door of the church where he warmly thanked the parishioners clustered outside.
As he shook hands, he overheard old Mrs. Winters, a short distance away talking to a large heavyset woman. “Now that we got a proper priest,” Mrs. Winters was saying, “are you and your friends gonna keep saying Mass in the parlor?”
“Since the church doesn’t allow women priests, we just might,” answered the heavyset woman as she abruptly turned and walked away.
Steve walked over to Mrs. Winters. He thanked her warmly for helping round up parishioners and for the wonderful things the ladies did for the altar.
“Like I said, Father Murphy, I simply explained they weren’t doing this only for the convenience of not having to drive over to Wolfeboro to Mass, but these were things that could be offered up to heaven. These things can guarantee seats closer to Jesus in the hereafter. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, of course,” Steve said, suppressing a smile. Mrs. Winters apparently thought the hereafter would be held in a huge meeting hall, and she wanted a seat up front near Jesus on the stage. “By the way, did I hear you talking about parlor Masses to that woman over there?” he asked. “Who is she, by the way?”
“That’s Henrietta Bergen. She’s a tough one, Father. Yes, she and a few others are pretending to be priests. Since the church didn’t ordain them,” Mrs. Winters added sarcastically, “they must have ordained one another. Maybe they did it dancing around the Maypole.”
“But the Maypole is a pagan concept.”
“I know. I was just funning, Father.”
“But tell me, Mrs. Winters, do these women realize they could be excommunicated for holding non-authorized Eucharistic services? Are they aware that could mean eternal damnation?”
“I can tell you Henrietta’s thought of that, Father, but she says she’s gonna get into heaven even if she has to knock the pearly gates down to get in.”
Steve couldn’t help smiling at the comment; then, taking leave of Mrs. Winters, he walked over to a group standing nearby to urge them to tell other Catholics in Wakefield about the reopened parish. Yet even as he asked the churchgoers to spread the word around the small town, he was acutely aware that there could be repercussions should the word reach all the way to the seat of the diocese. It was really just a question of time he knew; however, he also knew he had several factors working in his favor: for one thing, the shortage of priests had become acute in New Hampshire; diocesan finances had been hit hard by the falloff in collections; further, the bishop heading the Portsmouth diocese had been called away to Rome for an extended period. Certainly a priest from the diocesan seat would visit to interview him, but he was sure he could handle the meeting. His story was straightforward—he had left his parish in Maryland to renew his vows during an extended retreat at a mission house in Arizona. Pick any name but the Passion Monastery. He went on retreat because he thought his vocation was in jeopardy. His diocese had released him. Later, he had come to New Hampshire to begin anew in a small country church. He had learned the diocese could use some help. He had a substantial inheritance from his family and would make no financial demands on the diocese and, in fact, he knew that after a few months, the parish would be contributing to the diocese.
Steve was certain that Cardinal Wollman had earlier requested a review of the church’s position on human cloning by the Vatican Curia. Although it was well known that the church was against human cloning, would the church’s position change somewhat after it had become an accomplished fact as in the case of Reverend Stephen Murphy? Would the Curia conclude that people like Murphy—in a sense, innocent victims—were legitimate humans with God-given souls?
Steve knew that matters such as this that involved fundamental morality and theology had to be thoroughly researched. The answer would be a long time coming.
It was also extremely unlikely that Bishop Rhinehart would have widely disseminated his concern about Reverend Stephen Murphy. Not only would it have been an embarrassing revelation to fellow clergymen about one of his priests by an egocentric bishop who was bucking for cardinal, Steve also knew Rhinehart was the type who had begun a personal vendetta against him and regardless of the position that would ultimately be taken by the Curia, he would work determinedly to remove or dispose of the renegade who had become a thorn in his side. It would be done undercover—quietly and without fanfare. But Steve was buoyed by the fact that Rhinehart would have to find him first.
25
Three weeks after his inaugural Mass at St. Mary’s, Steve decided the time had come to make a trip to the medical center in northern Maine where Jonathon told him he had been ‘conceived’. Since he would be searching for records that went back fifty years, he didn’t have much hope of finding anything, but he felt it was worth a try. For his peace of mind he had to know the full story; he had to track down whatever information might be available.
After the long drive to northern Maine on the New Brunswick border, it proved maddeningly difficult finding the
remote center situated on a back road miles outside a small village. He mistakenly thought he was looking for an establishment along the lines of a hospital. What he saw instead was a small one-story central building surrounded by a conglomeration of outbuildings. It resembled the campus of a community college—a poor community college. He became aware it was not a hospital, not really a medical center—in reality a medical research lab.
Seated in the office of the director, a doctor named O’Neill, a huge, robust, red-haired woodsman of a man in a soiled white lab coat, Steve asked to see any available records concerning himself—Stephen Francis Murphy, his brother Jonathon, or his mother, Larkin-Murphy.
Doctor O’Neill raised his bushy red eyebrows in surprise. “You’re the second person in a couple of years who has asked for these records. Are you aware they date back over sixty years? I had to dig through the dusty archives in our storeroom to find them. It’s pure luck they weren’t just chucked out somewhere along the way.”
It was Steve’s turn to be surprised. “Someone else has been here checking on the Murphy family records?” he asked, but as soon as he asked, he knew it must have been someone from the church. “My parents are dead and I feel certain it wasn’t my brother, so, may I ask who it was?”
“Let see now,” Doctor O’Neill replied as he adjusted his glasses and pored over the visitor file with massive hands that looked more suitable for chopping down trees than handling flimsy paper files. “A priest from the Archdiocese of Washington. Name’s illegible.”
“The name doesn’t matter. It’s enough knowing it was the archdiocese making the inquiry. And the information was released?” Steve asked archly.
“Yes, the archdiocese representative said the child they were inquiring about later became a priest attached to the Washington archdiocese. He was about to be elevated to the rank of Monsignor and they were merely conducting a routine background check.”