I’m sorry if the above picture throws a sinister shadow on one of sweetest verses in the New Testament. But you can hardly blame the Catholics for the sour taste in their mouths when they contemplate priests and children.
Faith, a novel by Jennifer Haigh, tackles the subject of sexual abuse within the Church.
Arthur Breen is a Catholic priest in the South Shore neighborhoods of Boston. His vocation bestows honor on his family of origin. That is, until Father Art is accused of molesting a young boy in his parish.
Haigh offers up her story like an intricately folded piece of paper. I could expect the moment the diocese learns of the accusation, then the priest himself, then his parish, then the media, then his mother and siblings — and yet Haigh, turning over corner after corner of that paper, kept surprising me. She planted important clues (which I missed, but she gave out second chances, too).
Art is present at the most intimate crossroads of his parishioners’ lives. As often as he hears the same sins and secrets, they surprise him, being so far beyond his experience. His soft heart drives him to do good, to help a seven-year-old boy, the son of a struggling single mother.
This boy becomes his accuser.
Did he do it? Are there any clues from his past, from his childhood populated with fathers, both in the church and at home? Which ones helped him? Which ones hurt?
Why did Art want to be a priest anyway? What causes a young man choose this straitened life?
“He’d been prepared and willing, at the rash age of fourteen,” Sheila tells us, “to give himself over to it entirely, in exchange for certain protections. He’d marked it definitively as his safe passage through the world, the only life, perhaps, to which he was suited.”
And is celibacy the problem?
Despite the unsavory subject, Haigh tells her story with skill and compassion. This was a book that made me want to ignore my chores all week.
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