A Prayer for John Fernandez

In the late 70’s, Catholics were actually

studying the Bible—a really radical idea.

The Church had never trusted us around the Bible,

like those warnings on the back of a TV set:

“We strongly suggest you not open this up

if you don’t know fuck about it…”

I was part of a Bible discussion group led by

a young, tall, thin-as-a-rail curate with the brooding

good looks of the young Montgomery Clift.

The women of the parish had dubbed him

“Father What-a-Waste.”

We had people in that group were

always trying to trap him into heresy.

Father was a Vatican II person,

all about forgiveness, reconciliation,

disciple of John XXIII’s aborted attempt

to open the windows of the Church.

He had an air of sad sanctity, as though

wearing a hairshirt under his cassock and collar.

I remember somebody saying of him,

“For one who has no darkness in himself,

he has the best understanding I’ve ever

come across of the darkness in other people.”

I also knew Father from CCD,

the longest hour of my week,

trying to pass on what few nuggets of

truth I had picked up along the way

to a handful of hormonal public school boys

who saw my classroom as a holding cell.

The only way I could maintain

any illusion that learning was taking place

was by sending my discipline problems

to Father What-a-Waste.

One night when they were giving me

a really bad time, I gave them an ultimatum,

the next kid who opened his mouth

would be sent to Father’s office.

And of course the next kid that did was

the best kid in the class, John Fernandez,

all the hard kids had the street smarts

to know I wasn’t kidding.

John didn’t want to leave my room,

I had to haul him out physically.

Father happened to be patrolling the hall

at that moment, took custody of John from me

a second before I might actually have struck him.

Another time Father was visibly upset

when he arrived at our Bible discussion group.

One of the women prodded him gently,

and finally he admitted that he’d just caught

a boy to whom he had entrusted his keys

borrowing quarters from the Coke machine.

He felt deeply betrayed. Someone asked—

with only the slightest hint of taunting—

if Father had forgiven the boy.

After a long pause he said,

“Give me three days.”

In one of these Bible sessions

we talked about the forgiveness of sin;

how could murderers be forgiven, rapists?

Father saw their crimes as products

of a long string of decisions

where maybe the only decision on the string

that involved free will was the first one,

and maybe in God’s eyes

that first decision had no moral content,

yet made, determined everything that followed.

Somebody demanded to know

what Father What-a-Waste’s definition of sin was,

and I wrote down his exact words,

because I had a vague but urgent sense

that something important had been left out.

I went home and studied it and came back

the next week primed to nail Father.

I asked, “If that’s your definition,

then what’s the difference between a sin

and a life-mistake, like taking the wrong job,

or marrying the wrong person?”

As I look back it’s apparent

that both of those examples were issues I was just

beginning to deal with in my own life.

And I know this story would be so much better

if I could only reconstruct his definition,

but you’re going to have to trust that my logic

was ironclad, I knew I had him,

his definition didn’t allow for any difference

between a sin and simple wrong turning.

But apparently I didn’t have him,

because he’d obviously thought this through before,

and he answered simply, “There is no difference.”

That shut me up real quick, plus gave me something

to wonder about down all the years since.

Father What-a-Waste got his picture in the paper

recently over a report that the institute that deals with

pedophile priests had discharged him as

an untreatable sociopath, and that set me thinking again

about him and the difference between a sin

and a bad life-decision.

I know he must have done

the kind of things he was accused of;

there’s no room for any mistaken identity,

no legal technicalities

to compromise my judgment.

I know my church was guilty

of a hideous and hypocritical mistake

in handling this and other cases like it,

a mistake and an institutional sin

and a crime against nature.

I’m thinking it’ll take about

a hundred years of penance and mortification

and amending its ways,

confessing that it doesn’t know

fuck about human sexuality

before this church can presume to

any moral authority whatever.

But I also know that Jesus

is still Jesus, and this is still my church,

that wrong in one thing doesn’t make it

wrong in everything—though this one’s

going to take take a lot more than three days to forgive.

And I still believe that Father What-a-Waste

was a good and maybe even holy person

when I knew him, though the reason he was

so understanding of the darkness in others was

he did indeed have a darkness of his own,

growing very slowly, like a prostate

cancer he’d been told that he could heal

with magical thinking and organic foods,

a cancer that eventually consumed

his entire beautiful spiritual being.

And I wonder what that first

and almost innocent decision was

that sent him down his terrible road

to untreatability.

I pray for him every day.

I pray for all the priests, especially all the many

who never laid a hand on anyone,

so humiliated, so unjustly.

The worst kind of guilt-by-association,

yet the most natural.

I pray for the victims;

it must have been as if

God himself was abusing you.

I hope you get enough out of the Church

that you never have to worry about money again.

I hope you may be able finally to forgive,

because only then will you know yourself healed.

And I say a special prayer for John Fernandez

whom I had to drag out of his seat,

and for all the discipline problems

I handed over to Father What-a-Waste

from my CCD class.

Most prayers are aimed at

things we cannot know about the future;

this one is for things that

I don’t want to know

about the past.