Art was twenty-five when he left Rome. He had traveled widely across Europe, seen every major cathedral in France and Spain. He returned to Boston with a powerful sense of mission, ready for ordination and all that lay beyond. Aggiornamento had inspired a whole generation. In Rome he’d met priests from Central and South America who spoke movingly of their people’s struggles, the Church’s power to effect social change. Activism was the Church’s future, and Art itched to be a part of it. For the diaconate year, as his classmates dispersed to local parishes, he was sent to a shelter for homeless men in the city’s South End. It was an unusual assignment, uniquely tailored to his tastes and aspirations. Once again, Father Fleury had worked his magic on Art’s behalf.
The South End has since gentrified, filled with posh restaurants and pricy boutiques, but in those days it still belonged to the poor. Each morning Art rode the T deep into Boston. At the shelter he ministered to the maimed and broken, the sick and delusional. There were men back from Vietnam, scarred by combat; lost inmates from state psychiatric hospitals decimated by budget cuts. There were addicts and runaways, boys barely out of childhood who came on buses to South Station and sold themselves on Washington Street. It was a veritable army of the needy, and yet the Archdiocese paid little attention. When Art arrived there, only one priest was seen in the shelters and on the streets. Art knew him by reputation only: the Street Priest, young and long-haired, who walked the Combat Zone in vests and blue jeans, seeking out the lost. The Street Priest’s apartment on Beacon Street was a gathering place for the desperate, the lonely and addicted. On Sunday mornings he said Mass there, with twenty or thirty runaways sitting Indian-style on the floor.
To Art it seemed the stuff of urban legend. He himself had handed out blankets and the Eucharist; occasionally he heard a garbled confession; but certainly he was no Street Priest. In his first week he was mugged at knifepoint. At the shelter he was treated as a curiosity, when he was noticed at all. If the Street Priest was the clergy’s future, Arthur Breen felt better qualified for the past.
In other ways, too, the future frightened him. The celibate priesthood—would it go the way of indulgences and Latin?—was a point of fierce controversy. He’d been a boy at St. John’s when he first heard this debate. At the time it caused him considerable distress. The priesthood had seemed to him ancient and unchanging. That it might, in a few years, transubstantiate, he found deeply unsettling. He’d been prepared and willing, at the rash age of fourteen, 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. It seemed impossible that his Church would betray him in this way, change so profoundly the rules of the game.
He needn’t have worried. The changes never materialized. Amid much fanfare, the new Polish pope visited Boston. He flew directly from Ireland; at Holy Cross Cathedral he blessed the city’s two thousand priests. Later he said an outdoor Mass on the Common. A hundred thousand Catholics prayed in the rain. But in the ensuing years he would move the Church backward, not forward. To Art—a grown man then, and no longer so fearful—this was less reassuring than expected. For the Church, and for him, it seemed a missed opportunity. He wondered for the first time if they’d both made a mistake.
AFTER ORDINATION he was assigned to a parish, Holy Redeemer in suburban West Roxbury. He became a priest—a good one, he felt, though where was the proof ? His effect on the world, on the souls in his care, was frustratingly intangible. He felt keenly his own inadequacies. At first this awareness was constant, and nearly paralyzing. In later years it visited him periodically, a recognition of all he wasn’t and would never be.
He felt it most acutely in the confessional, that chamber of secrets. He was twenty-seven years old, but in most ways that mattered he felt like a child. Ted McGann, at his age, had spent six years in the Navy, had fathered two children. He had married Art’s mother at an age that seemed supernatural, and undoubtedly had women—perhaps many women—in the years before.
Art had known, always, that he was not like his stepfather. In the confessional he learned he wasn’t like other men, either. Men his age had wives and families; addictions, criminal records, mistresses, debts. They lived double and even triple lives, a fact that astonished him. To Father Breen, even a single life seemed a towering accomplishment.
He lived like a teenager in the parish rectory. It was an imposing place, three rambling stories. On the second floor lived a full-time director of music and the two young curates; Holy Redeemer was a large parish, wealthy enough to support a full staff. They lived in a warren of small bedrooms and shared a single bath. Upstairs was a plush suite of adjoining rooms, strictly off-limits. It was the exclusive domain of the pastor, Father Frank Lynch.
In every way Father Lynch lived above them. The whole house rang with his presence: his decisive step on the parquet floors, his manly laugh, his Old Spice cologne. To Art it was like suffering a second stepfather, only worse. Ted McGann’s style had been gruff indifference, but Father Lynch took palpable glee in tormenting him. Father Lynch was Ted times ten. At the dinner table he kept up a steady stream of banter, at the expense of Art or the other young curate—a Filipino named Renaldo Calderon, who spoke halting English and had the advantage of not understanding the pastor’s barbs. This left Art largely alone in his resentment of Father Lynch and his cronies, Father Bob DeSalvo and Father Marty Raab, local pastors who dined several times a week at Holy Redeemer. The three old boys had known each other for years; they’d developed a crude, jocular rapport more suited to a fraternity house than a rectory.
And yet a fraternity boy would enjoy far greater freedom than the young priests did. Ten o’clock was their unofficial curfew; at that hour Father Lynch locked the rectory door, and no one else was allowed a key. Mealtimes were sacrosanct, snacking forbidden. Art earned at that time a hundred dollars a week; he was saving up for a used car. On Monday mornings he took Communion to the local hospitals, driving the parish sedan. Every Sunday night he had to beg Father Lynch for the keys.
It was the old parish system—anachronistic in the late 1970s, a strange throwback. To Art, who still believed he was joining a progressive Church, the clerical pecking order came as a shock. But the Archdioceses of New York, Philadelphia and Boston—the hoary Irish axis—were notoriously conservative, still ruled by the old boys. For Frank Lynch and his ilk there had been no Roncalli, no aggiornamento. The Vatican Council had simply never taken place.
At the dinner table they lamented the liturgical changes: the jazzy new hymns, the hippy-dippy vestments; the ritual exchange of the Sign of Peace, in which the faithful shared greetings and handshakes and sometimes, to Frank Lynch’s disgust, kisses and hugs. “It’s one big communal love-in,” he groused. Bob and Marty chimed in with their own complaints: the infants bawling through the Consecration, the communicants who, imagining themselves invisible, sneaked out the side door after receiving the Sacrament instead of returning to their pews. Not to be outdone, Frank spun a yarn about the teenagers he’d caught playing cards in the choir loft, oblivious to the Mass taking place down below. To Art it was like being trapped at the table with three aging comedians, each trying to upstage the others. It seemed an occupational hazard: priests were used to having an audience, unaccustomed to sharing the floor.
At the table he was like a well-behaved child, seen and not heard. Yet in the parish his responsibilities were ponderously adult. Every Saturday, before evening Mass, he heard confessions. For two hours his parishioners confided their faults and failings; their most intimate affairs awaited his review. That he was expected to furnish guidance seemed utterly laughable—Arthur Breen, who’d known no intimacy of any kind. Yet no one else saw it; the cassock hid all that was lacking in him. It was to the cassock that these good souls confessed. Art imagined sending it to the confessional with no priest inside it, a long black robe dangling on a hanger. In many cases, it would have just as much wisdom to impart.
He felt, most of the time, like an impostor. Over the years he’d had fleeting doubts about his vocation. Always he had pushed them aside. Certainty will come later, Father Cronin had promised; but certainty had not come. Would the Lord have called a man so clearly lacking? He could have chosen anybody. Why would He settle for Arthur Breen?
Of course, he wasn’t entirely useless.