In his latest novel, The Bishop's Man, Linden MacIntyre tackles the disturbing topic of sexual abuse of children, a subject easily given to theses and tirades, lectures and judgments, all thinly veiled as fiction. MacIntyre, his engrossing tale told through the eyes and experiences of Father Duncan MacAskill, sidesteps these pitfalls to deliver a serious examination of the theme with the page-turning energy of a thriller.
The book is set in the mid-to-late 1990s; the 50-year-old former Catholic missionary in Honduras and former university dean is assigned by the bishop to his first parish, Stella Maris, in tiny Creignish, in southern Cape Breton Island. The place is familiar to the priest, being a stone's throw from Long Stretch Road where MacAskill grew up. "I was a priest in a time that is not especially convivial towards the clergy ... [but]had achieved what I believed to be a sustainable spirituality," he observes early in the story.
His new assignment proves less a homecoming than spiritual crossroad. In the lonely glebe house of that tiny rural parish, MacAskill encounters the cold hard facts and consequences of the life he has lived, both in the priesthood and in growing up as the son of local drunk, and in the process discovers for himself the solace of alcohol as a substitute for a church whose foundations seem to be moving out from under him.
In the 1970s, long before his benign exile to Creignish, his bishop had banished MacAskill to missionary work in Honduras. He was sent away to forget. Newly ordained and a young priest still strong in his faith in the church, he accidentally walked in upon a scene involving a widely respected priest and a young person. He reported what he believed he had witnessed to the bishop, who tried to dissuade him from pursuing the matter but failed to do so. MacAskill was assigned to the revolutionary hot spot of Central America for two years.
Upon his return, he was assigned a new role as a dean at St. Francis Xavier University, the trusted right arm of the bishop, whom MacAskill loves and trusts like a father despite their earlier disagreement. He become's the bishop's man, a troubleshooter skilled in cleaning up any mess made by other priests that threatens to embarrass the church, whether it is to still the gossip of a pregnant housekeeper in some parish or silence the spiritually darker matter of sexually abused young people in another.
In this role, in which he excels, Father MacAskill is the priest other priests most hate to see arrive at their door. He has been nicknamed the Exorcist, the Purificator, a one-man inquisition who, in the vernacular of his Central American experience, is able to make troublesome priests "disappear," dispatching them to distant parishes or to an Ontario rehab centre. While the church is rocked from Newfoundland to British Columbia by charges of sexual abuse, between the bishop and MacAskill, rumours in the Antigonish dioceses where they serve are quashed.
Shortly after MacAskill's assignment to Creignish, 19-year-old Danny MacKay, whom he has befriended - and, in the important intricacies of Cape Breton family trees, a boy to whom he is distantly related - commits suicide. A whispered accusation in the confessional names Father Brendan Bell as the cause, and MacAskill's life takes on a sense of horror.
Years earlier, young MacKay had become close to Father Bell, a troublesome Newfoundland priest whom MacAskill made "disappear" by getting him assigned curate to the parish in Port Hood. The abusive priest has already moved on and out of the priesthood, but MacAskill is haunted by the thought that, in his role as the church's fixer, he was the catalyst that set in motion the terrible tragedy of Danny MacKay's suicide.
His efforts to get to the truth bring him into confrontation with the bishop, whose sole purpose is to protect the church, regardless of the carnage some of its priests have wreaked upon the young and vulnerable. When MacAskill argues that the church has a responsibility to the "victims," the bishop rages:
"'Don't use that word in this house,' [the Bishop]shouted.
"'What word?'
"'Victim, for God's sake. Don't make me sick. ... They'll get over it. ... We can't let a bunch of misfits and complainers undermine the Sacraments.'"
As he dwells upon the role his vocation has led him to, setting him constantly amid the moral corruption of bad priests, MacAskill reflects, "So many ... priests are clever, funny men. The freaks are so rare. But they're the only ones I really know. How have I managed to spend twenty-seven years in this ministry and known only the bad ones? Why was I never part of the wider community of funny, clever and perhaps even holy men?"
With the passing years in Creignish, MacAskill confronts the truth of his role in the church, as well as the other ghosts from his past. The dysfunctional family dynamics of growing up on Long Stretch Road resurface and, through a series of journals, so do mysterious events in Honduras involving a woman, Jacinta, and a Central American priest, Alfonso.
With The Bishop's Man, Linden MacIntyre keeps his unwavering and award-winning investigative reporter's eyes on the most disturbing crime in our society, the sexual abuse of children. The victims themselves, with the exception of Danny MacKay, don't appear in the story, but they permeate it from the opening chapter to the unexpected shock of its concluding revelation.
While there is redemption of a sort within The Bishop's Man, this is not a book about redemption. It is a story of contrition.
Frank Macdonald is a Cape Breton writer and the author of A Forest for Calum.