“We’d get killed,” Father Doheny said.
“Exactly. Which is what would happen to us if we declared bankruptcy, as well. Never mind the little problem that a court would be reluctant to grant us the relief, and with good reason not to do so. All the usual routes of financial recourse lead to the same place, and that’s a resurgence of the nastiness The Scandal brought us to begin with. Which means we’re just going to have to increase our revenue.”
“Maybe we could make an appeal to the people,” Father Doheny said. “Tell them the truth and ask them to help out.”
“Would you expect them to?”
Father Doheny hesitated again. “No,” he said finally.
“No,” the Cardinal Archbishop agreed. “The people feel that this is something that has been visited on them as well as on the Church as an institution, and that it’s our fault as well as our responsibility. And they do have a certain amount of justice on their side. It’s one thing to ask the people in the pews to dig into their pockets a little more deeply to fund a new parish school or a new mission or even a new cathedral. It’s quite another to ask them to do the same thing because one archbishop didn’t have sense enough to realize that a man who has molested children in his last three parishes is going to molest new ones in his next six, or because another archbishop couldn’t count and committed the Church to payments in excess of the gross income of his archdiocese. Note I said gross. If he’d only overshot the net, we might not be in so much trouble.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Father. I’m sure that if we pray on it, God will tell us in time. For the moment, however, what we have to do is nothing. No fuss. No muss. No bad press. There are other numbers besides these.” The Cardinal Archbishop waved at the computer, as if he could make the other numbers appear. “The decline in Mass attendance and parish membership that followed the worst of the scandal has been halted and reversed. We have some very successful parishes, now. St. Bonaventure. St. John the Baptist. St. Anselm, of all places, considering how closely it’s connected to this mess. We have some very successful missions, too, homeless shelters, soup kitchens. If we can continue the way we’ve been, maybe we can make an appeal to the larger donors that sounds like something other than a con game. I wish the old Archbishop had kept his mouth shut on national television.”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“You ought to go off and get yourself some breakfast,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “It’s getting very close to the time for the Sisters’ Mass, and you’re saying it this morning if I remember rightly. There’s no need to worry about me.”
“You never sleep,” Father Doheny said. “You never seem to eat, either.”
“I do as much of both as I need to.” The Cardinal Archbishop stood up. It was something he tried not to do, unless he was deliberately attempting to intimidate someone. The combination of his extreme height and his extreme thinness made him seem like a ghost of the Inquisition. “Go get some breakfast,” he said again.
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
Father Doheny turned around. The Cardinal Archbishop could almost hear the gears going around in his head. The walls were so bare here now. In the days of the old Archbishop, they had been full of framed photographs: the Archbishop with the mayor; the Archbishop with two different presidents; the Archbishop with the Pope. This Cardinal Archbishop kept only one crucifix on one wall, and that one made of plain wood and unpainted. Even the official publicity shot of the Pope, duly signed by the Pontiff himself, or with a stamp of the Pontiff’s signature, and sent out to every parish and parish school, had been banished to Sister Marie Claire’s reception desk outside.
“Well,” Father Doheny said. “I’ll see you later, then. At the seven o’clock.”
“At the seven o’clock,” the Cardinal Archbishop agreed.
Father Doheny went out, leaving the door open, so that the Cardinal Archbishop could hear his footsteps going down the corridor outside. If it had been another time of day, the Cardinal Archbishop would have taken pains to shut the door himself. Now he knew that no one would come in, except perhaps for Sister Marie Claire, who might, like Father Doheny, see the light on in his office and wonder.
He sat down behind his desk again and clicked the mouse a couple of times to get rid of the screen with the accountants’ numbers on it. He could go over the figures as often as he wanted to, but the problem came down to simply this: right at this moment, they couldn’t take a breath wrong without collapsing. And it would not be a pretty collapse. The waters were full of creatures that fed on blood, and that hunted the Church and all Her people. They preferred dead bodies to living ones. They waited just out of sight. If the archdiocese had to declare bankruptcy, or even if it only found itself unable to meet a payroll or two, it would all be over. The archdiocese would survive in name only, and maybe not even in that.