By Vit Wagner
Toronto Star
August 3, 2009
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/675442
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| Journalist Linden MacIntyre wanted to join the priesthood as a boy. |
Linden MacIntyre recalls sitting in the pew as an impressionable 11-year-old in the tiny Cape Breton village of Port Hastings, listening intently as a visiting Catholic Church missionary held a rapt congregation enthralled with tales of his exotic adventures in Africa, Asia and other far-flung destinations.
The richly embroidered, anecdotal yarns were enough to send young Linden racing home with the breathless news that he, too, had clerical aspirations. His mother, who normally would have welcomed the revelation with delighted pride, was not so easily persuaded.
"My mother, like every mother of Irish-Catholic background, dreamed of putting a kid in the priesthood," MacIntyre says. "Where I grew up, the priesthood was a career option that offered instant prestige and access. It had a high status in the community.
"But she wanted me to go into it out of a profound spiritual motivation, not for the adventure. She told me that I could travel and have a lot of interesting experiences without going into the priesthood."
The advice proved not only sound but also prescient. The 69-year-old, Toronto-based broadcaster has not wanted for excitement during an eventful journalism career spanning more than four decades – from his days as a cub reporter at the Halifax Herald, through 30-plus years at the CBC, including his current perch on the long-standing investigative series the fifth estate. During that time, his reporting has taken him across Canada and around the world, including stops in the Middle East, Latin America and the former Soviet Union.
At some point during that stretch, he also left the church, trading his former piety for a skeptical, agnostic viewpoint. As is the case with a lot of lapsed Catholics, however, it seems the church hasn't entirely left him.
The Bishop's Man, MacIntyre's newly released second novel, is set against the backdrop of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. The narrative centres on Duncan MacAskill, a transient and somewhat conflicted cleric who becomes the bishop's go-to guy for handling wayward priests whose sexual and other improprieties threaten to bring embarrassment, unpleasantness and even scandal.
MacAskill, haunted by incidents that took place during a previous posting in Latin America, is dispatched by the bishop to a parish near his childhood home in Cape Breton. While there, a young man commits suicide amid suspicions that he had been sexually abused as a boy. The bishop's first impulse in such cases is denial. If it becomes clear that a cover-up is no longer possible, the offending priest is shuffled off to rehab or, worse, another parish where he is free to transgress again.
"The part of the story that I wanted to get at was not the dirty details of what these guys were doing and how twisted they were, but how the institution dealt with it. That is the huge crime," says MacIntyre.
"If this had been dealt with honestly, openly and transparently in the beginning, it might have been confronted and dealt with in some way. Maybe we would have had a serious discussion about the psychological effect of enforced celibacy. Maybe we would have devised some processes to screen out the perverts who are simply going in to get the uniform and the respectability. It might have saved a lot of people."
Unlike his short-lived designs on the priesthood, MacIntyre says his desire to write fiction is a long-held and abiding ambition that dates back to his love of reading as a boy.
The Bishop's Man, following 1999's The Long Stretch, is the second in a projected trilogy of novels. He also authored the 2006 memoir Causeway: A Passage from Innocence.
MacIntyre steals time in the early morning to write fiction, as well as during summer vacations spent back in Cape Breton.
"There used to be this canard that if you want to be a writer of fiction don't have a day job that requires you to write because at the end of the day you won't want to turn around and do more writing," he says.
"I'm an early-morning riser. I've persuaded myself that you can get more done between 5 and 9 than between 9 and 5. There are no distractions."
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