A Family Tale of Churchly Woe, by Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2011

A Family Tale of Churchly Woe

By Sam Sacks
Wall Street Journal
May 10, 2011

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703859304576307560498005444.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Jennifer Haigh's fourth novel, "Faith," is a compassionate portrayal of a Boston priest who has been accused of molesting an 8-year-old boy. The truth of the accusation is unclear until the end, but even so, the premise is a risky one. Given the hair-raising revelations of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal, why would anybody want to read a seeming apologia for the priesthood?

But Ms. Haigh—through sleight of hand, a compelling array of characters and top-flight writing—is remarkably successful in making us want to read on. "Faith" is so emotionally rich, and its story so deftly delivered, that we're absorbed even as the novel leaves lingering doubts whether Ms. Haigh has truly confronted the blight of clerical abuse.

"Faith" concentrates on the family of Mary and Ted McGann, an old-school Irish Catholic couple living in retirement along a windswept stretch of Boston Harbor. The novel is narrated by their adult daughter, Sheila, who has begun looking into the "alarming events" of 2002 concerning her stepbrother, a priest named Arthur, and a "single vile accusation, still unproven, that made a ruin of his life." Sheila conducts her storytelling as if it's a court inquest, based on accounts she has gathered after the fact and on her own recollection of family history.

Arthur is Mary's son from a teenage romance; his father disappeared early on. With Ted McGann, Mary had another son—Sheila's brother, Mike. Arthur kept Breen as his last name, and he grew up feeling like the outsider of the McGann family. He believed himself destined for the church from an early age, Sheila says; he was an altar boy at 10 and entered seminary at 14.

Sheila tells us in fascinating detail about Arthur's strict seminary life ("At eight o'clock came the Grand Silence. Until breakfast the next morning, talking was forbidden"), his ordination and his three decades as a priest. But the salient point about his life, she says, was his extreme isolation—in his mind and in the minds of others. As a child she thought that priests seemed "other than human, made of different stuff than the rest of us." When Arthur was ordained, she was a teenager—and thought that he, too, had been "transubstantiated" out of the normal social sphere.

Being a priest, it is explained, is not only a matter of celibacy (a promise, not a vow, Arthur once told Sheila) but also of chastity—attaining purity in mind and body. Even as a young seminarian, Arthur tried to scrub himself of defiling human traits: "Like Latin nouns, the boys came in three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. He placed himself in the third category, undifferentiated."

Ms. Haigh brings a sure hand to describing both the midcentury Boston of Arthur's upbringing and the more contemporary city rocked by the church scandals. She uses local and historical touchstones to fine effect, from visits to a Brigham's ice-cream parlor to the omnipresent Red Sox games on TV. More importantly, Ms. Haigh illustrates the declining role of the church in the Irish-Catholic community.

The diocesan men's club into which Arthur was initiated was the pillar of his mother's world (she listens to the radio to hear the archdeacon recite the rosary), but to unbelievers like Mike and Sheila the church was merely a vault of hoary family traditions. Arthur feels increasingly superfluous in this changing climate, and with no human connections, "he was a beggar at the banquet, unable to refuse love of any kind." With the parish women, he acts like a helpless but privileged child; and fatefully, with a recovering drug addict named Kath Conlon and her young son, Aidan, the priest behaves like a surrogate husband and father.

Kath makes the pedophilia accusation that precipitates the story. Because her charge that Arthur abused Aidan comes amid hundreds of others accusing priests of abuse, Sheila tells us, the church simply suspends Arthur and tries to keep him out of sight until a financial settlement can be brokered. The news makes the papers and devastates the McGanns. Mary believes in her son's innocence but is too old to help him. Sheila's brother, Mike, a tough Southie kid who has married and moved to the suburbs (if "Faith" is made into a movie, he'll probably be played by one Affleck or another), tracks down Kath to try to get the truth from her—but ends up becoming romantically entangled. Sheila visits from Philadelphia, where she lives, but finds it difficult to comfort Arthur with so much as a hug: "Even when he is your brother, there is something strange about touching a priest."

The secrets of Arthur's behavior with Kath and Aidan are eventually described in a series of surprising, if melodramatic, disclosures. It doesn't spoil the plot to say that as those revelations approach, it becomes apparent that Ms. Haigh, to ensure that the reader's sympathy remains intact, is distancing Arthur from the sordid, real-life sex-abuse cases of the church scandal. Sheila says repeatedly that she is telling his story to push against the culture of silence that surrounds the clergy. It is a little disconcerting that, in her mind and in her offered accounts, the principal victims of that silence are the priests.

In the end, despite the book's trappings, "Faith" is less about sex abuse than about the existential crisis that the church faces in the wake of the scandals. The priesthood has been shorn of its mystique; a calling that once evoked reverence is more likely to stir scorn or unease. As one of Arthur's colleagues tells Sheila: "In the current climate, any human interaction is suspect." The picture that emerges from this engrossing novel is of a vocation broken beyond repair.

Mr. Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the Review section of the weekend Journal.