Bin Laden's Bald Spot: & Other Stories

Pinching Bernie

133 pinching Bernie You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. Check this out: Bernard Francis Cardinal Law, archbishop of Boston for almost twenty years, during which probably a thousand kids were raped by priests and Law knew about it but kept shuffling the rapists around from job to job and denying everything and writing letters that were total bullshit about how he knew the guys real well and saw into their hearts and their hearts were as pure as driven snow, this was while they were raping kids in sacristies and chapels and hospital rooms and classrooms and basements and cellars and billiard rooms and rectories and cabins on lakes and cars and the houses of prominent donors and beach cottages and the backs of school buses and once even in a convent, well, finally Bernie gets ridden out of town on a rail, you know, the people in the archdiocese weren’t going to take this evil crap anymore, and Bernie has to vamoose from his palatial residence so fast that the coffee was still warm when the cops got there, Bernie gets rushed to the airport by true believers and put on a plane to Vatican City from where he cannot be extradited because it’s its own fecking nation, that part of Rome where His Holiness the late Pope John Paul who was otherwise mostly a decent guy coddled and protected Bernie the Patron Saint of Rapists, well, Bernie, in the ancient way of churches and colleges and corporations , gets promoted, can you believe it, and now he’s the boss of a 134 | Bin Laden’s Bald Spot beautiful old church in Rome, and key member of more committees and councils than you can count, and a venerated elder statesman in the Church Eternal, although he never sets foot outside the Citta del Vaticano, because he knows full well that if he sticks a toe outside the magic circle someone will grab it and haul his sorry ass out of heaven and stuff him in a jail cell in Boston so fast he wouldn’t be able to spell the word criminal, which is what he is. But that’s all background. The story I want to tell you is what happened to Bernie after he vanished from the front steps of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, which you remember was a huge deal in the papers last year, THE ABSCONDED ARCHBISHOP !, PRELATE PINCHED?, DID CARDINAL’S SINS COME HOME TO ROOST?, that sort of headline, but no one ever found Bernie, so the Italian and American police and investigators finally officially concluded that he is probably deceased, perhaps by the hand or hands of people personally affected by the rape crisis when Bernie was the Catholic king of Boston, but more probably by criminals of one kind or another in that ancient jungle called Italy, but I am here to tell you that Bernie is alive, and I know where he is, and I know what he does all day every day, and after many months of wrangling with his minders I finally have permission to tell you and only you about what happened, because they are finally convinced that telling certain selected influential people about what happened to Bernie will somehow be a good thing, which I think is true, so here we go, although some names have been changed for obvious reasons, and I am going to have to ask you to keep this to yourself after I tell you the story, for reasons you will certainly agree are totally excellent reasons, you know what I’m saying? f Let me back up a little here. Bernie started out as a regular guy. He was actually born in Mexico, son of an Air Force guy stationed in Torreon, which is smack in the middle of the country, like two hundred miles west of Monterrey, you know Monterrey, where ev- Brian Doyle | 135 eryone eats baby goat, that’s the favorite dish, and there’s music all over the place every hour of the day and night? Totally great city, I love Monterrey, not one but two great soccer teams there, the Rays and the Tigers, baby. Great city. Anyway, Bernie’s smart as a whip as a kid, and eventually he goes to Harvard, and then joins the priests, and gets sent to Mississippi , where he edits...