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	Smothering the Scandals: Linden Macintyre Pens Powerful Novel about Priestly Sexual Abuse. By Paul Gessell Canwest News Service August 7, 2009 http://www.canada.com/Smothering+scandals+Linden+MacIntyre+pens+powerful+novel+about+priestly+sexual+abuse/1873824/story.html Finally, well into his 60s, Linden MacIntyre became a priest, or as close to a priest as the self-described agnostic dared to be. As a boy, growing up in the Cape Breton community of Port Hastings, young Linden often thought about becoming a priest. Priests got to travel. They did good works. They had respect. It was better than being a miner or lumberjack. Instead, MacIntyre became a journalist and made something of a name for himself as a crusader. You can catch him on CBC television, as co-host of the hard-hitting investigative program The Fifth Estate. Along the way, MacIntyre also became an author. And, yes, the man can write. His books include the childhood memoir Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, the novel The Long Stretch and now The Bishop's Man, a fictional account of a priest known as The Exorcist. Duncan MacAskill earned the ominous nickname because his bishop, a particularly vile man, dispatches him to smother scandals when complaints arise about priestly sexual abuse. MacIntyre initially had some reservations about creating the very conflicted Father MacAskill, wondering if he should be appropriating the voice of a priest. But the more MacIntyre thought about this writing exercise, the more he became convinced he had the right to appropriate that voice because priests are, after all, only human, forced to confront the same issues and dilemmas as other people. ``And suddenly I was there and I felt perfectly comfortable in being there and conversation and the dialogue just sort of flowed.'' MacIntyre had, in essence, become Father MacAskill, a complex character torn between his obligations to protect the church and to protect the victims of wayward priests. The unnamed bishop in the novel has no such conflicts. In fact, the bishop chastises MacAskill for using the word ``victim'' to describe children sexually abused by a priest. ```Victim.' Don't you dare use that word in front of me, do you hear me?'' the bishop shouts at MacAskill at one point. ``You're with us or against us,'' the bishop continues. ``Victim, for God's sake. Don't make me sick.'' The bishop's preferred word is ``complainer'' to describe abused children and their angry parents. ``They get over it,'' the bishop says of the damaged children. ``They're young. If it wasn't this, it would be something else. The dope. The cars. The promiscuity.'' Throughout the novel, the bishop is the evil puppeteer controlling the lives of deviant priests and the ``complainers'' who need to be silenced so the newspapers and the police learn nothing to cause a public scandal. The bishop is, frankly, one of the most chilling villains in Canadian literature. The Bishop's Man is largely set in contemporary, rural Cape Breton. This is hardscrabble territory MacIntyre mined to great effect in some of his earlier books. There are even characters from the novel The Long Stretch who appear in The Bishop's Man. A third novel, also involving some of these characters, but principally MacAskill's sister, Effie, is in the works. MacAskill is, as the author hoped, all too human. His heart is usually in the right place. He engenders admiration. But he drinks too much. He craves intimacy with a good woman. He finds it increasingly difficult to dispatch errant priests to some faraway parish, where they will likely, once again, abuse children, seduce the housekeeper or become a drunk. This angst-ridden hero of the book also carries painful guilt from experiences many years ago when, while living in Honduras, he had an affair with a woman. That relationship resulted in the death of another priest, who was also his best friend. The book begins as MacAskill is sent to a rural Cape Breton parish close to his own hometown. He soon encounters a cast of wounded characters in the community, becomes embroiled in their various family dramas and faces temptations of his own. A disturbed young man MacAskill was trying to counsel commits suicide. The priest fears this drastic action was the delayed response to abuse from a pedophiliac priest he had dispatched to the area several years ago to stifle related scandals in Newfoundland. MacAskill plays detective to track down the suspected abuser, eventually discovering truths more horrifying and more complicated than he had first imagined. MacIntyre said he read a great deal and talked informally to several priests, including personal friends from his youth, to research the issues at the heart of the book. The result is a novel with the ring of truth. We have all read news accounts of the church trying to hush up sex scandals. The Bishop's Man is perhaps as close as we will get to eavesdropping on the private conversations we were never meant to hear among clergy or between clergy and ``complainers.'' It's a disturbing book but a book for our times. There are bound to be those in the Catholic church who will be greatly offended. But it's an issue that needs to be aired. Fiction is just one way of doing that. So are the kinds of documentaries MacIntyre and his colleagues broadcast on The Fifth Estate. MacIntyre says he is not ``angry'' at the Catholic church. But he is ``disappointed.'' He wants more attention paid to the puppeteers in the church hierarchy who have failed to bring solace or justice to the victims of sexual abuse. ``We've made so much,'' says MacIntyre, ``of the particular offenders and the particular acts of deviance and the destructive effect that deviance had that we have not made half enough of the hierarchical responsibility, the failure of leadership, the tendency to place the image of the institution above the interests of the sick priests and the people they were victimizing.''
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