Whoever designed the cover for Vows of Silence – The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II, by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner (Free Press, $26.00), deserves the equivalent of an Oscar.

Its iridescent, lovely red suggests to me the allure of unmitigated evil, while the white letters can be interpreted as the destroyed innocence of the victims, children who would never play jacks or hit a ball for a home run, or serve as altar boys with the freedom of heart that was their God-given right.

The gold letters speak of episcopal riches, and the power to hide evil, allowing it to infect more victims, victims who trusted those with mitres on their heads, shepherds' staffs in their hands, and rings on their fingers, to protect them.,

The headless priests in the lower box remind one of the terrible secrecy that protected evil, betrayed the trust of children, their families, and the entire Catholic Church..

The tiny crosses across the top border suggest that, no matter how high one climbs, the cross will be there, whether one picks it up or leaves it for other Catholics to shoulder, which will leave the shirker burdened with the greatest cross of all.

That bar of radiant, gold crosses also speaks of the despair turned to hope as the men abused by the founder of the Lengionaries of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel, saw their stories told with truth and respect by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner.

As soon as I had read months ago that Berry was to be involved with the project, I was sure his collaborator would be of the same mind as the author of Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children.

When I first read the book almost 12 years ago, on a winter's day, totally isolated but for a stalwart deer seeking corn, and the blue jays stealing seeds meant for their more fragile cousins, I could not believe what I had read about the rape of children by Christ's shepherds..

Since I knew questions would be coming that I was not ready to answer, I read all 369 pages again, and at the end, broke down in sobs. The entire book placed me in a world of pain and betrayal, but, also, of dedicated love and service on the part of Berry and those who helped him to ferret out the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

Berry concludes the prologue with these words:

Finally, this is a book about faith – my own, and that of others drawn into a maelstrom much larger than ourselves. The journey of this troubled believer was slowly engulfed by the agonizing quest for justice of people from as far afield as Newfoundland and Hawaii. Pulled along by currents of their lives, I witnessed courage and grace in ways that humble me still.

Throughout his ordeal of sleepless nights and pain-filled days, Berry held himself together, not partaking in the luxury of breaking down under the emotional load he was carrying for so many: the children, families, and all who cared deeply about them.

On the final page, he tells us:

At this juncture, I feel as if a great weight is lifting. Yet there is a sense of evil I know will haunt me to the grave. When I felt its awful chill, I tried to pray, and found my thoughts returning to the Jesuit teachers of my youth. The survival of my religious beliefs owes much to those men and I can only hope that it endures.

Journalists routinely withhold sensitive information ...I have also withheld personal reflections that were too painful to write about. There are angers that rise within a man from a volcano in the soul. Perhaps my reticence comes from a knowledge of those who shouldered greater weights in the uphill struggle of their lives. As a child I was taught that faith is a gift. I know now that faith is an odyssey, and in the darkness of this journey each of us must find a light.

As I read this morning's Chicago Tribune, February 26, I couldn't help but wonder what Eugene Cullen Kennedy would say of Vows of Silence , or if he will even read it. In his column, “Dealing with the sexuality of priests,” he quotes the Catholic League as stating that the number of abusing priests is relatively small, and suggests that the incidence of the sexual abuse of minors is slightly higher among the Protestant clergy than among Catholic clergy, and that it is significantly higher among public school teachers than among ministers and priests.

Those imponderables may give Kennedy comfort; they do nothing for me. I find them as cold and calculating as the bookkeepers at Enron.

I read the entire piece three times in hope of finding a glimmer of the compassion that runs throughout Berry's first book, as well as the second with Renner. The best I could uncover were these lines:

Nobody can deny that expectations on the behavior of clergy are legitimately higher than on those of other men but it would also be hard to deny that the realities of the inner lives and longings of these groupings do not radically differ.

Really, Kennedy? Every man's heart holds longings to rape children? Sorry, I don't think the majority of us would hold with your view. We have a higher opinion of our men, whether clergy or lay. Kennedy's concern is directed toward the misunderstood offenders; not one word of compassion is directed to the pain of a single child. Has he followed Bush's advice and taken up residence on Mars?

I hope Kennedy will read Vows of Silence at least once, preferably, twice.

Then, let him leave his ivory tower at Chicago's Loyola University and travel around the country, listening to the men whose heartbreaking stories are told by Berry and Renner.

Strange, when Jesus spoke about scandalizing children, he didn't mention anything about statistics, nor about comparing one's sins with that of the neighbor down the road to determine guilt or quasi-innocence. He was straight-out blunt in his warning: 

Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believes in me, it is better that a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)

Sprinkled throughout Vows of Silence are genuine heroes in this demonic saga, heroes among the laity, clergy and episcopate, but none more heroic than Father Thomas Michael Doyle, O.P. It is the likes of him, among others, that sustains one's belief in the basic goodness of God's people in this Church of ours.

As a freshman in a Roman Catholic Seminary in upstate New York, eighteen-year old Patrick Doyle had made up his mind to use his life to help people, and to grow closer to God. Sort of a modern Francis of Assisi, but Doyle never wore armor, and the enemy he would fight was not behind a castle wall, but from the nether world, occupied primarily by men in pristine cassocks, with the whitest of collars and the darkest of hearts.

By 1964, Pat Doyle's search took another turn as he opened a new door, transferred to the Dominican seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, and later received the name of Thomas. We are told that he had a rugged build, and open Midwestern ways. What you see is what you get with Doyle.

While he had been elected as a caretaker pope by the College of Cardinals in 1958, John XXIII bewildered the staid Roman Curia by calling an ecumenical council “to open the windows” of the Church to the world, and the world to the Church.

Vatican II not only phased out the Latin Mass, it proclaimed that rank-and-file Catholics were “the people of God.” Pretty heady stuff, that. Dangerous. Could and did get the laity to thinking that there was something more they could do besides praying, paying and obeying, such as speaking, writing and assembling for the purpose of dialogue, and making up their own minds on the subject of birth control, promulgated in the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, issued by Pope Paul VI on July 29, 1968.

Thomas P. Doyle was ordained May 16, 1970 in Dubuque, Iowa. His father had given him his deceased mother's wedding and engagement rings, which were inserted into the silver chalice he would use in offering the Eucharist.

Eventually, he officiated at both his sisters' weddings, and would see them happily rearing their families. We are told, in contrast, that celibacy to Tom meant “sublimating the sex drive through athletics, marathon reading, intense prayer, and an array of friendships with parishioners and in the Dominican communities.”

When, in 1971, while an assistant pastor at St. Vincent Ferrer Parish in River Forest, a suburb of Chicago, a divorced man asked for help in getting his first marriage annulled, and Tom was able to do so. Request after request followed.

One day, he received a call from Cardinal Cody to travel to downtown Chicago for the purpose of talking over the subject of annulments. Tom was surprised to hear that the cardinal approved of his compassion to the couples involved. A strange friendship developed between the two, prompting the young priest to see in his superior a lonely man whose frequent, violent outbursts precluded many friendships.

Regardless of the pressing needs of the Chicago archdiocese, Cody could always be counted on to find sufficient funds for members of the hierarchy arriving from Rome, or when he visited them in the Vatican Curia, which he did when he flew to Rome twice in a short time – for the elections of Pope John Paul I, and a month later for Pope John Paul II.

Cody had a different gift for young Doyle – financial support to study canon law, and in 1973, sent him to Rome to learn the fine points of Church jurisprudence.

The authors tell us that was only the beginning. He earned a master's in Church law at Ottawa's St. Paul University and a doctorate at Washington's Catholic University. In his spare time, he picked up a pilot's license.

Upon returning to his River Forest parish, Doyle resumed his work on annulments at Chicago's tribunal.

It was in 1981 that his life began to shift into high gear, climbing another rung on the ladder with possibilities for a bishop's mitre and, eventually, the cardinal's hat.

While Cody was not popular in Chicago, he was on good terms with Pope John Paul II. When an opening came up for someone to work in the Washington embassy under Pio Laghi, Father Thomas Doyle was right at the top of the list.

During the interview with Laghi, Doyle was told how important it was that the right men were chosen bishops: no one who favored birth control, a relaxation of the celibacy for priests, or women's ordination would be so favored. It was Tom's job to see to it.

If the young priest could have toed the line, there was no telling how far he could have gone. And that wouldn't have been difficult, except for a little matter of conscience, but conscience was not a little matter for Thomas Doyle.

(To be continued)

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