A strange and surprising change began to take place in me after Father Docherty’s sermon. For me the encyclical had shown the absurdity of the rhythm method as it sought to consecrate it, and since personally this was such an important issue, I found that the more I pursued what was clearly a commonsense, if rebellious, option, the more my conscience supported it.
At the time I was reading some of those groundbreaking feminist authors who took our world by storm, including the furious young Melbourne woman Germaine Greer. The Female Eunuch, two years after Humanae Vitae, changed the perception we had of ourselves. Warts and all, fury and all, it changed the argument; it created a space in which we could speak. Like all revolutionaries, these women tended to speak with fury. The Female Eunuch was the anti-encyclical. Pope Germaine put a secular spin on our opposition to Humanae Vitae.
That we should see our bodies as beyond the control of the celibate Church still did not come as easily as we wanted. But once the idea had been argued by Greer, it became obvious. I wasn’t rancorous immediately. The alternative proposition I embraced was not in my case accompanied by an angry loss of faith. Considering myself lucky to have got so far, I was at ease with my story, my three children.
Damian was making a similar journey, but he continued to voice a touchy if curiously faithful anger at the Vatican. One mealtime, when we were eating alone after sending the children to bed, he said, “I think we should send the kids to a public school so they don’t grow up as neurotic as us.”
* * *
MORE THAN I would admit to myself, if I was anything in those years, I was a Docherty-ite. Not so much a dissenter from Humanae Vitae as someone who felt validated in standing aside from it. Frank had no desire to be a religious leader, a seer, or a swami (in line with his Indian experience), but had he been a man of conceit he would not have found it hard to play any of those roles. For we are persuaded into our position by both reason and the force of personality, and his unassertive personality was forceful in its own way.
He initiated, without trying to, a benign sort of cult. Damian and I were influenced by him: I was profoundly so, of course—more, as it turned out, than I would have foretold; Damian at a remove. Still, despite his anger, Damian did choose to exercise our contemporary politics within a Catholic framework, joining the Docherty-marshaled groups of parishioners who attended Vietnam moratorium marches and engaged in other forays of conscience. Many of us were paid-up members of the South African Aid and Defence Fund, contributing money to the legal defense of South Africans, white and black, who had been accused of treason. In 1971 we held a vigil to protest apartheid outside the Sydney Cricket Ground on the evening before a South African Springbok rugby tour. Passing drivers honked at us. Some shouted profanities; some encouragement. Father Docherty maintained his Gandhian composure, and so did we.
We continued to be disturbed in conscience about Australia’s Indigenous people, who were subject to apartheid themselves not only in terms of where they could bathe and sit in cinemas, but also with housing and travel; they even needed documents to move about: they complained of them as “dog licenses.” Members of our group had enthusiastically voted yes in the Aboriginal civil rights referendum, even though, because of the realities of urban settlement, most of them had never met an Aboriginal.
* * *
AROUND THIS time my friend Liz Cosgrove, who also attended Frank’s services at Longueville, took up the cause of child sex slaves in Calcutta. She volunteered to run a subcommittee that Frank had set up, which raised money to be remitted to Dr. Deriaya. Dr. Deriaya had remained an efficient activist, working on her liberations of child prostitutes, writing a newsletter, calling around the troops—by now she had recruited women from all over the world.
It was Liz and I who came up with the idea of a weekly meeting with Frank. We asked him if, amidst his studies, he could spare a night a week for a discussion group involving members of the parish.
“You don’t need a priest to preside over that,” Frank told us. “You don’t need a priest to validate your opinions.”
I understood his point exactly.
“We don’t necessarily need a priest, but we need you. Consider yourself a catalyst.”
The first evening meeting was held at our place. It was made up of couples for whom theology and politics were two faces of the one entity. These people were repelled by religion attempting to establish absolutes of conscience, the one strict gate to the vision of God. One middle-aged man complained that in Australia, pious observance and obedience to the law’s letter were considered the measure of the soul. They, like me, were in rebellion against that, against the priestly authoritarianism that had ruled their childhoods. And yet . . . we had invited a priest! What was obvious to Frank, I think, was our love of the Church as a community. We were not theological serfs who accepted the word, any word, of Rome as truth; we were anxious for a new, sophisticated, and transforming theology.
19
* * *
Docherty’s Infatuation
1972
DOCHERTY’S INFATUATION, if that was the name for his profound feelings of attachment, began with an innocent sense of the enrichment Maureen brought to their collaboration, and the feeling he had of intense comradeship in dazzling causes. He had felt desire for other women, but now, for the first time, he confronted the scale of what he had blithely sworn away: his right to a life companion and to a longing that suddenly seemed to him unanswerable and as destined as laws of gravity.
Later, he remembered this desire as having a specific beginning. It was a dull day in the print room of the monastery and Maureen was helping him compose, type, and print stencils calling on parishioners to join Catholic students at Sydney University in a demonstration against Vietnam. Joe was sleeping on a sofa in the room. Maureen typed earnestly and not entirely competently, he noted, and he saw like a revelation the unique way she compressed her lips when addressing herself to the next word. Within this instant he felt confused by her childlike application, charming in a grown woman. He was enchanted, too, by the fuzz of hair at the nape of her bent neck. It was an unutterably wonderful and compelling phenomenon. What it commanded of him was, he felt in a rush, adoration and a career of cherishing. He felt chosen for the task and fortunate to be called to observe and honor the movements of a person so elevated.
He wondered, could meditation contend with this new hectic conviction? As a man on the island of rationality against which tides of natural enchantment were rising, he knew he was being subjected to an unavoidable impulse, a delusion that was realer than the world and was the fuel for a long-running sexual devotion. This was not his woman, and the child in the print room not his child; he was nonetheless convinced of his ownership. Maureen’s marriage to Damian seemed a side issue. Or if it were large, its scale did not at that moment need to be considered. Her marriage, and the child on the sofa, were for now remote, and she was present. Her occasional attention to Joe irrationally yet convincingly seemed to Docherty a thing of delicious significance, a proof of her exorbitant quality rather than of prior fidelity.
He worked as well as he could while she made a call to the Vietnam Moratorium organizers, and then as she briskly reported to him and they went through the list of events she had been working on at the typewriter. She will go soon, he thought, and felt frantic despite himself, as if something pressing must be said before that. She raised her head from the stencil she was incising with her typewriter keys, and he saw her gaze. She looked away and then back, and, as if understanding him, exhaled, her shoulders slumped. Like an orphan, he thought. Then she smiled weakly and began typing again.
When she was leaving, she briskly gathered her belongings and the boy and his toys. She did not look at him. She said, head down, “Frank . . . I know. I know what you feel. I feel it myself. What do you think will happen?” She had reddened and her lips were contorted but still she enraptured Docherty.
He could tell her things he couldn’t manage to tell himself. “I know what will happen. Rationally, only one thing can happen.”
Joe lay heavily asleep in her arms.
“Is there a rational level?” she asked. “I hope so. It’s a bad joke—the priest and the woman of the parish.”
“But it doesn’t seem a bad joke to us, does it? You have three children, and a good husband. That makes this ridiculous on one level. But something in me says, ‘So what?’ ”
For it seemed to him, suddenly, a physical law, akin to gravity, that they should be together. He had the idea, banal when perceived in others, that this was ordained: the great obsession that his priesthood existed, in part, to prohibit and counsel against.
She kissed him for a second. It was almost like an assault. It might have been a foredoomed absurdity when he muttered in her wake, “I love you.” Yet it seemed to him an utterance of the law.
20
* * *
The Case of Sarah Fagan, 3
Early 1970s
WHEN SARAH remembered the expressions of special friendship between Father Leo Shannon and her, she remembered they often did not involve her body but instead his instructing her how to pleasure him. This form of friendship ran for months, and at no stage did she persuade herself she felt anything but flattered, though the daring of it all took her breath. She remembered a sense of election more than sexual feeling, and the illimitable affection she had when he emitted the white fluid. For in the seconds beforehand he was like a pathetic creature: he had descended from the altar to become a whimperer, in the way Christ had descended to face his redemptive sufferings with tears of blood.
He assured her many times at every encounter that there was nothing wrong with their sessions of friendship and that she need not mention them to any confessor. And yet, by a kind rule applying only to the closeness of soul they felt between them, he authorized her to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, the Communion host.
She did not seek his Masses. One week the monsignor would do the early ones and Father Shannon the later, and the following week the order was reversed, and she did not take particular notice of this rhythm of priestly duty. But her mother wanted to be at Father Shannon’s Mass, and when Sarah received Communion from his hands, he seemed inadvertent, as if she were simply another communicant, another schoolgirl. She was unspecial at the altar rails, where he was at the summit of his power, but special on the Thursday afternoons in the parish office when he was bound to her. The other girls he had mentioned were sent away to deliver this or that letter and then go home. They were simply tokens.
At school, Mother Alphonsus boasted that girls made up half of the Sydney Law School. A study of the state’s medical schools offered similarly pleasing statistics. She suggested to clever Sarah Fagan that she ought to apply for a scholarship for further study. Yet, for reasons mysterious to outsiders, the convent had presented itself to Sarah as a personal means of escape. There, she would be one of a number of sisters, and she was sure she would never again be called on to be as intimate a friend in spirit and body as she was to Father Shannon.
As soon as Year 11 ended she expressed her ambition to him. One more year of high school education, and then the novitiate!
“Which order?” he asked her.
She said she had not quite decided, and he promised he would look into possibilities for her.
“Our friendship has now been perfected,” he told her after a December session, one of what he called “particular friendship.” “You will become Christ’s now, and you will need your time free in the coming year for study.”
This was true enough, but she felt immediate pain at the idea of being once more simply an ordinary parishioner and student.
“It is very rare,” he told her, “that God allows a friendship like ours, but He always sends us a signal when it has reached its close.”
Sarah was about to leave, and was gathering herself to stand, when there came a tentative knock on the door.
“Wait, please,” he said. Then, “Well,” like a family doctor as he stood up at his desk and ushered Sarah to the door as if it were the end of a medical appointment.
Coming into the corridor, she had sight of a window at the back of the building under which sat a girl she knew, a pretty, brown-haired girl named Angela. Year 9. Angela carried sheaves of letters in her hands. Father Shannon must have realized that Sarah had seen Angela: he squeezed Sarah’s arm and said, “My new aide. Since you’ll be busy with studies. But I’ll never again have a friend like you.” He squeezed once more as if to emphasize that this girl would not be afforded the special friendship he’d extended to her.
She nodded, desiring to believe him and managing it. Even so, her mother asked her when she got home teary, “Why are you letting on like that? You’ve got what you wished for. God knows you’ll be a loss to me. You were always my dear girl.”
Over the Christmas holidays her mother remarked that Father Shannon hadn’t called in recently; however, he summoned Sarah and her mother in late December to the presbytery. They entered that atmosphere of calmness and floor polish, and wearing his august cassock, he ushered them like strangers into his office, a place of a different geography to Sarah now that formality had intervened. His body fortified his godly lineaments, the cologne and aftershave, against any of the old special ardor.
He told them he had met with the mother superior of the Sisters of the Holy Blood. Everything Sarah needed, should she choose that order, the order that ran her school, would be provided to her under a bequest from a generous Catholic. The novitiate was on the North Shore in a redbrick cloister amongst eucalypts, and the training, Mrs. Fagan could be assured, was very sensible, since the sisters were a teaching order with schools all over Australia.
* * *
A WEEK later Sarah drove a friend’s car on learner plates to another parish, there confessing in tears to a priest she had never met what had happened, and that it had been a priest, and therefore she was doubly guilty. She was expecting fury. She evoked what seemed an awed silence.
“Did you do anything to encourage this?” he asked, softly even by the standards of the confessional.
She didn’t know, so she said she must have.
“But were you conscious of doing something?” he asked, and the anger began to show now. The irritation at being held up by an inconvenient girl.
“No,” she said, because the confessional was a venue where a lie to say yes in this case would negate the effect of absolution.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Sixteen,” she said.
“You did not tell him to stop?”
“He said it was God’s plan.”
“Oh dear,” said the priest, no longer petulant. He was silent a long time.
It was always a matter of celebration when a Catholic got a lenient confessor and so it was now, for in the end he said, “The greater sin is that man’s, and he must repent of it. There isn’t anything you can do in that regard. But you must be careful now, and you must always be critical of what men say to you. In these matters, they tend to lie. Even priests.”
She was relieved when he continued and did not entirely exempt her from blame. “There must have been somewhere in the back of your mind the knowledge that this was not God’s will. From now on, always allow that voice to emerge.”
It was that good priest, and even now she thought of him in those terms, who had taken the burden from her. He made it possible for her to go ahead as planned. Later, however, she wondered whether her anger would have been called forth earlier if she’d encountered a more severe and unyielding confessor. In any case, at the time she considered herself cured of sexuality. The term “cured” was her own; she rolled it around her mind like a lozenge. She never heard it used by any of the retreat masters, priests who came in to officiate over special periods of
silence, the periods in which mealtimes and recreation were entirely silent as well. She was grateful that this monastic environment still existed. She was able to be sociable but was best on her own. Indeed, she began to wonder if she really wanted to go out into one of the Order’s schools once she had taken the vows. Should she join what they called a “contemplative order,” one devoted to meditation and prayer and the singing of all, not just some, of the Liturgy of the Hours?
Sarah daydreamed, during this time, of Mother Alphonsus, and of the adoration girls had of sturdy, learned women such as she, women who could have been anything but had chosen instead to go amongst uncertain young girls to give them direction and sustain them in faith. From the marks of favor Sarah had already received, she had no doubt this role was meant for her, too.
In her last year of high school, Sarah absorbed herself in her studies, and the memory of Father Shannon sank like a stone to the bottom of her consciousness. Nuns who knew that she intended to enter the novitiate on the North Shore the following year took her aside and warned her about the severity of that three-year experience. Mother Alphonsus herself told her, “Remember to obey the spirit of the rules. Anything more, and the rules might break you.” Indeed, some nuns shook their heads when they mentioned the words “novice mistress,” as if these specially chosen women were the regimental sergeant majors of God.
None of that frightened Sarah; she was determined to go. When her mother became more and more wistful as Christmas passed and the day Sarah must leave home came closer, Sarah hardened her determination. She was not bound to her mother’s destiny. If she waited in that household and grew mature, what might her father do then? Her family confused and angered Sarah, and made her grateful for the sure route of escape she had chosen.