Stigma: the Rape of Faith: A Southern Novel of Clergy Sex Abuse

By Antoine Nusmun

STIGMA: The Rape of Faith is the story of a charmed—and charming—reprobate, Theodore Roosevelt McGraw, who is haunted by his past. It is the late twentieth century and “Teddy” is immersed in a religious education, whether he likes it or not. As Teddy matures into manhood, he eventually experiences a delayed recall of a violent episode that prompts him to embark down a determined path to achieve justice, despite the Catholic Church’s resistance. Encounters with the divine and the demonic launch him on a journey into an otherworldly American past, and further into the shrouded past of Old World atrocities. What he discovers will test his resolve and courage, against universal opposition, to bring these atrocities to light. The reader will be challenged as well to face outrages at the core of our culture, and decide who—or what—truly bears the STIGMA.

STIGMA: The Rape of Faith is a fictional exposé of the Roman Catholic Church’s historical and current handling of allegations of priestly sexual misconduct affecting minors in its care.

Antoine Nusmun is a classically trained independent scholar, poet, philosopher, essayist, and singer/songwriter. He has traveled widely and held a variety of positions, but his lifelong interest has been the origins of man and his religious practices. Antoine lives in Cataloochee, North Carolina with his wife Constance and a menagerie of faithful pets.

“A transformational novel told with flashes of humor and outrage, and steeped in southern atmospherics, Stigma is thoroughly original and uses a timely theme as a fulcrum for a profound philosophical, theological, and historical rumination. One could say it picks up where Spotlight left off.”
—Tom Sancton,
author of Song For My Fathers: A New Orleans Story in Black and White.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665703628

Antoine Nusmun

Antoine Nusmun is a classically trained independent scholar, poet, philosopher, essayist, and singer/songwriter. He has traveled widely and held a variety of positions, but his lifelong interest has been the origins of man and his religious practices. Antoine lives in Cataloochee, North Carolina with his wife Constance and a menagerie of faithful pets.

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First Archway Edition 2021

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0361-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-0362-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021903937

Archway Publishing rev. date: 03/15/2021

CONTENTS

Chapter 1     The Friends Of Jesus

Chapter 2     The Wages Of Sin

Chapter 3     The Good Friends

Chapter 4     For Failure Of A Second Witness

Chapter 5     The Can Of Worms

Chapter 6     What Truth Is

Chapter 7     Winning The Lottery

About The Author

For my long-suffering mother and father

The puppet might then have told him the whole story; he might have informed him of the disgraceful conditions that had been made between the dog and the polecats; but he remembered that the dog was dead, and he thought to himself: What is the good of accusing the dead? … The dead are dead, and the best thing to be done is to leave them in peace! …

Pinocchio, chapter 22

Carlo Collodi

1862

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CHAPTER 1

THE FRIENDS OF JESUS

Well you’ve grown up all wrong

You come on too strong

Well you’ve grown up all wrong

Well you were easy to fool when you were in school

But you’ve grown up all wrong.

The Rolling Stones

12 X 5

Grown Up Wrong

1964

T eddy McGraw had never been mistaken for a good man. Until that moment no one had ever told him he was a good man.

And it all started with Father Schidt. He was an angry man with no interest in disguising it. He looked over the classroom from his black rim glasses like the students were ripe figs dumb to the coming beaks of hungry birds, intolerable insects, rotting neglect, or fortunate instant transformation. As thoroughly as Schidt and his colleagues had drummed the wisdom of the ancients onto their pathetically blank slates, they neglected - it boggles the mind - to just spit out the one piece of advice a young man needs to hear: This world is well populated by hateful, wicked, selfish, desperate, lying, deluded people, many in direct competition with you; don’t be so stupid as to think you can change any of them; some of them would rather see you dead; seek out experience and learn from it; be wily and resourceful and ready to meet adversity and move on, heroically if possible; the most ambitious these days, for good or ill, and depending on how smart they are, have wondrous gadgetry at their full disposal capable of violent ends. Be alert. You’ll learn.

But he didn’t say anything like that.

What in God’s name were you thinking, my Pretties, he could have said, when we fed you Homer and Virgil, Matthew (John and Paul NEVER) and Beowulf and (here he would have sneered and spat out) Spenser and ‘The Bard’? Perhaps that there is a world of people out there waiting to devour you? No, that would be too obvious. The delights of ancient languages? The beauty of words and the lofty heights of thoughts? Bah! That’s all very fine. But the STORIES reveal that there is ignorance and need, passion and jealousy and vengeance, and fraud and treachery abroad. And the quicker you learn that the better off you’ll be.

Nothing like that. Why spell it out so simply when the whole course of a liberal education would lead you to the German who wrote that God is dead. Which many had believed all along, and wasn’t such a big deal. No, the really big deal was that now, with no Grand Overseer, everything was permitted. Which even more had been trying out for eons, but was now a wave of history sweeping mankind. Even nice people became predatory, justifiedly so. And the already-predatory just laughed harder, knowing the neophyte scoundrel was the easiest of prey.

The Shit, as they referred to him, introduced himself to them with a name sounding more gentle, the i sound blurring into more the e sound of shed but still with the emphatic t: Shedtzinger, with the finale as in ginger. He had teeth barnacled with the scum of pipe-smoking. Never in the classroom, but anywhere else he would grip the bowl pedant-wise (surely not as a seaman or sage—more as the guy in rustic tweed) and when he spoke to you down his nose his words had that whistling hiss through teeth clamped on the stem.

And it was always down on them. He ridiculed them randomly with short quips about their home training, their need to carry a handkerchief (Do something about that nose, please), whether their mothers would tolerate such behavior, their inattention and lostness. He berated them with a scoffing, hopeless dismissal when they had not read the material. His insults imposed a sort of spell of good conduct on them, which held as long as his back wasn’t turned.

In private consult with him, which all avoided even if just to escape his foul tobacco breath, he was just as personable. Teddy was once called to his office for counseling. For any of a number of zany, devilish pranks or shows of disrespect.

What brings you to me, Mr. McGraw? He was laid back in his chair, legs crossed, feet up on his desk, reading - at least what Teddy could see of the cover - something called … and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. A genie cartoon of smoke hovered, then vanished when he puffed the words. The spines of De Profundis and The Picture of Dorian Gray, along with Renan’s The Life of Christ and L’Antechrist stood slanted on the credenza behind him.

Well, they sent me. Teddy sat and looked straight at the odd little man, who was all barrel chest and head, like Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney.

Who is ‘they’, Mr. McGraw? still not looking at Teddy. The priest’s greased-straight-back black hair glistened in the afternoon sun’s shaft through the window. Scarlet flecks in the old linen curtains twinkled. White chips of dandruff flecked his hairline. His broad, sharp-featured face and blank black eyes could have been those of a Great Horned Owl (one of the few birds of prey known to relish dead skunks).

The Office, I guess.

That would be the Head Disciplinarian’s ‘office’, I’m guessing?

That would be a good guess.

Schidt lifted his legs off the desk and turned square into Teddy, removing the pipe and revealing a full snarl: Have you always been this arrogant? This egotistical, Mr. McGraw?

Well, when I was about ten a nun told me, in front of everybody, that I was the most egotistical little boy she’d ever come across. So at least that long.

You are one smart ass, Mr. McGraw.

That’s been said too.

The Shit pulled on his pipe and leaned forward at Teddy, speaking out his unholy breath: Where do you think you’re going to end up, Mr. McGraw?

I don’t know. I’m not sure at this point.

Let me offer a little forecast, son. You continue seeking out attention in these idiotic ways and you will be a big bright target for every quiet rule-bound rodent out there, some of whom are rats. Your superiors, your brethren, your lovers, your ‘help’. You should prepare to be loathed and excluded. Then smiling, Like me.

Motes of dust wandered, twinkling in the still sunlight. Time brewed and steeped. Teddy fixed on the brown leak-stains on the ceiling.

And this is our RELIGION teacher! ran through Teddy’s mind. The last refuge of the apostate—teaching God to the godless.

Is that all, Father Shit?

It’s ‘Schedt’, McGraw! he barked. Yeah, get outta here. And don’t have occasion to come back.

This was the Shit.

Otherwise, with rare exception, no one ever let them forget how special they were. The school itself was peculiar enough for the late twentieth century, dragging along - for its honors students (like Teddy) - the medieval tradition of a classical education, complete with Greek and Latin and the classics. It was widely hated, like the Yankees or the Falcons are, but in its case for all the doctors and lawyers and politicians, writers and scoundrels it produced. Thinking back to his past, Teddy could quickly name a dozen or more just from his own class. And then there was the past, history: a dictator here and there, major leaguers, statesmen, authors, white-collar and other known felons—even a pope. The order itself – the Friends of Jesus - yet preferred a less public role as teachers of the exceptional, the wealthy, and the promising poor. But the role they most coveted was that of counselors and confessors to the movers and shakers. Which is what got them in ill odor with the public in the first place going way back. As hypocrites wearing the black but sniffing the purple, preaching submission to the rabble and saving the elite with the law of expediency.

The word the educated branded the order with was casuists, the word first appearing in the English language a few decades after the order was formed. In common parlance, it was the losers’ way of saying they tell the powerful whatever they want to hear. If they didn’t coin the phrase situation ethics they glutted the market with it. It was the Hallelujah Chorus to a king’s ear when he heard that he could be as ruthless as he liked and not be doomed in Calvin’s rigged game if he could just drain that 3-pointer at the buzzer. A sort of Houdini Calvinism, without the worry of constant self-doubt. You pencil in the answer before time’s up, you pass. Do whatever the hell you want, just make damn sure you have me there at the end to wash your heart. To make sure, as Eliot wrote, that on whatever sphere of being/The mind of a man may be intent/At the time of death, it was the drop-kick Jesus Hail Mary winner. (And the time of death is every moment), Eliot continued. Which is especially true of the ever-paranoid rich, so the Friends were welcome flies in the throne room all the time. Hence the generous charitable contributions, the offerings of firstborn. To be practiced in this art. And so the pump is primed in saecula saeculorum. In later years Teddy gave little besides his firstborns.

Maybe it really did make sense that there was a military patina cast over the academy. Uniforms and drills, steps on the ladder for those who had seen the light of order, were a joke to Teddy’s platoon. They were absolutely riotous when the Friends brought in Marine Colonel Roger Krater, Retired, who was to whip the Junior ROTC program into shape. The good-hearted old-school grunt was so benighted as to take all this soldiering stuff seriously. Humorlessly. The poor guy got fed up with their wisecracks and carrying on as if he wasn’t even there and stopped short one day. He looked at them from his worst hurt and shook his head slightly, slowly from side to side: There’s something wrong with you guys. There was silence. By that time they knew it too. Something wrong with the whole class. When Teddy dropped sports (which gave him a pass from drill) for acting, chipping away at his father’s heart, he did not return to platoon duty. Lighting up a Marlboro, he slipped out the basement doors an hour early and walked alone in a vivid glimpse of life unfiltered, colorized as it were. As the barks of commands faded out, he beat the rush and was the first to his car. Nobody missed him. Least of all the faculty.

Where had it all gone wrong? These boys had been recruited by no more devious means than their fantasies of pride in being part of so holy a local tradition. A good nudge from status conscious parents fed those fantasies. But with an appalling lack of ceremony these twelve year olds were ripped from the wombs of their nunnery schoolhouses and deprived of a graduation year. When their blindfolds were lifted, they found themselves in a grim, penal foundry out of Piranesi, where men were supposed to be forged, dire wolves stirring a monstrous, noxious cauldron.

They ate hospital food for lunch; and Teddy, whenever he could get away with it, accepted his plate with a kind thank you and forgot to pay, pocketing the change for smokes. He and his fellow newbies sat apart from the raucous scrum of upperclassmen, like fools imagining they could avoid torment. But it came anyway, often in the form of senior jocks towering over them and extorting food. One recurring instance of which would happen on Mondays, when red beans and rice was served with fat smoked sausage links (it was the only decent meal ever offered; in fact, half the student body got food poisoning one Friday from bad shrimp creole [or was it the milk?] and couldn’t look at, or hold down, food or drink for days). Hey kid, the all-state linebacker would freeze them, you want your bull dick? They’d look at each other stunned and offer up their plates without a word. Taking one for the team they called it.

After such menacing repasts they welcomed return to the sanctuary of Father Madere, the classroom where he taught them everything but math. So they wouldn’t be squashed like cockroaches in the chaos of room changes for different classes. And this good father was surely good, a benign halfway buffer between the maternal patience of nuns and the bullying cynicism of the likes of the Shit.

At certain moments Madere would leave off from Hammurabi, or one of Earl Nightingale’s radio talks (Madere cracked himself up reading aloud printouts he apparently subscribed to), and fondly scanning the faces on all their fragile eggshell minds, he would lean his long turkey neck over his desk and quaver in a mystical, prophetic hush:

Now you boys might not understand what I’m tellin ya just yet, but in time you’ll see. Mark my words, little ones. His voice would rise in pitch and he would smile. Surely he knew things they didn’t.

How do you knuckleheads think you got here, HUH my boys? he umpphed. He was comical in his wonderful self-confidence, entertaining as only a TV gadget salesman could be, and with all of the wild gestures in speech. He had mastered his shtick over decades of now transfixed captive audiences, many of whom loved him for his passionate engagement with what he was doing. Preparing them for doom. Some got goosebumps; all were hypnotized.

Each one of you has God-given talent placing you at the summit of your age group. (Who wouldn’t be thrilled to hear this from a Master?) In this school your talents will be developed in a unique way; you’ll be able to appreciate the finer things in life, and you’re going to have an honest-to-God edge over all the nitwits out there when it comes to doing something of value.

His bony arm hung in black, the long condemning finger would point out the window, and some saw the pagan chaos that camped outside the gates. They fell for it, of course. Some were intrigued. They were a people set apart. They were convinced of a superior destiny, and it colored every facet of their behavior. They were the moral and intellectual creme de la creme. They swallowed it whole, and it took little time to nurture their ruling passion: to ridicule everybody and everything.

It wasn’t merely an epiphany that nothing was sacred, it was the fanaticism of a new sect cavorting in ecstasy around the vile fetish NOTHING IS SACRED. Mimicry was only the beginning. If it had stopped at the usual teacher-aping and nerd-mockery, or the casting in permanent stigma unfortunates like Theophile the booger-eater (caught mid-snack),