BishopAccountability.org
	Priest Gets a Tough Assignment By Paul Gessell Montreal Gazette September 19, 2009 http://www2.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/saturdayextra/story.html?id=df0eab05-9cb5-47f4-a82f-48e41cc3b9bd As a boy growing up in the Cape Breton community of Port Hastings, young Linden MacIntyre 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 it, 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. Father MacAskill is 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. The bishop's preferred word to describe abused children and their angry parents is "complainer." Throughout the novel, the bishop is the evil puppeteer controlling the lives of deviant priests and the "complainers" who need to be silenced. The bishop is 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. 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, and craves intimacy with a good woman. He finds it increasingly difficult to dispatch errant priests to some faraway parish, where they will probably, once again, abuse children, seduce the housekeeper or become a drunk. 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. 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.
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