Free The Confession of Joe Cullen by Howard Fast Page B

something inside of me. I know what you mean, sleeping with that girl.”
    â€œHow do you know if you can’t sleep with a girl?”
    O’Healey shrugged. “I can sleep with a woman. I have. I’m celibate, not virginal. I’m not the best priest in the world. Like you, I’ve seen things so terrible, I can find my solace only in the arms of a woman. I’m not like the priests up north in our country, and I don’t fault them, because they must do what they must do and I must do what I must do.” He lifted a foot. “I wear these sandals, and sometimes I’m barefoot, and I’ve given away my cassock half a dozen times, and I say that without pride and I hope with some humility — and where my parish is, sometimes in one part of the hills and sometimes in another, I can go for days without food, but I must not show hunger.”
    â€œBut you’re going home now, and it’s over.”
    â€œIf they send me back to the States, it’s only a short interruption. I’ll be back here.”
    But even then, it occurred to Cullen that the priest would never go home and he’d never come back, because they’d kill him. Almost desperately, he asked the priest, “But why do you do it?”
    â€œAh, why? There’s a question, isn’t it?”
    â€œAre you sent here? I can’t believe the church would assign you here.”
    â€œYes, an assignment. I came for a while, and then I stayed. You really want to know why?”
    Cullen nodded.
    â€œWell, two reasons. Number one: happiness. I believe that God created us to be happy. I was never very happy. We were the poorest of poor Irish, and maybe you know as well as I do how that feels. My father died when I was a kid, my mother worked her hands to the bone, and I went to the seminary because it made her happy. It didn’t make me happy, and being a priest didn’t make me happy, and I never felt that I was a priest. You know when I became a priest?”
    Cullen shook his head.
    â€œDown here — out there in the hills, when I gave absolution to a three-year-old child who died because we didn’t have a bottle of penicillin tablets that would cost five dollars in San Francisco, and I gave this little girl absolution and I turned my face up to God and cursed Him, and that day I became a priest; and this is something I never talked about to any other soul — and I’m laying it on you, Cullen, because behind that dumb Irish face of yours, I see something, or maybe only when you smile. I’m here because I found happiness here, and I’m here because I found God here.”
    In college, Cullen had taken a course in astronomy. It was what was called at the time a crap course, which meant you could slide through it without opening a book. It consisted of a series of lectures, two seminars, and no tests. But if it was a throwaway course, it nevertheless turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of his education, and the slides that accompanied the lectures were fascinating.
    It was an hour before midnight here in these Honduran hills, and nighttime had tempered the bitter heat of day. Cullen sat on a bench in front of the tent he slept in, an army issue, and stared at the brilliant canopy of stars and remembered his course in astronomy, and brooded over the immeasurable distances that the heavens revealed from here, the earth, the tiny speck of dust on the outer edge of a minor galaxy. He possessed a deep, subconscious love-hate connection with the Catholic church. Cullen was neither an intellectual nor an uneducated mental boor; somewhere between the two, he nevertheless lacked the training that might have led him around the symbols of the church to some inner truth. When he looked at the heavens and considered the presumption of a Pope who declared himself the vicar of Christ and the spokesman for God, he could not help snorting in anger, and when he recalled Vietnam,