Free The Good Shepherd by Thomas Fleming Page B

all of them empty. He had thrown up in several places, the last time on the bed. Matthew Mahan took a deep breath and stood there for a moment, staring mournfully at the sleeper. He was remembering seminary days. He could hear Bill Fogarty singing his outrageous parody of Mother Machree at the musical they had staged at the end of their third theology year.
    Sure we’ll love the dear surplice
    that drags on the ground,
    And we’ll serve, and we’ll sugar your tea
    If you let us stay out until ten once a week.
    Dear Father, Dear Father McKee.
    Wait, it had been a duet, he and Bill had sung it as a duet Matthew Mahan recalled. Which gave him all the more reason for thinking, as he pondered the ruins of Bill Fogarty: There but for the grace of God go I.
    A handsome black Irish buck, that was what he had been, Matthew Mahan thought mournfully, looking down at the flaccid cheeks and sagging mouth and thinning gray hair and beer belly of the man on the bed. Was it time alone that wreaked such havoc, or was it spiritual failure, whatever that meant? Matthew Mahan did not pretend to be an expert on the subject, but he knew that it had something to do with pride and the way pride so slowly slides into arrogance and too often ends in despair. No one had been prouder than Bill Fogarty, prouder of being priest, prouder of his unique ability to hold an audience, to make them laugh and to make them cry.
    The pride had seemed innocent enough, even justifiable to his friends and admirers in the class of 1939 at Rosewood Seminary. It had also seemed perfectly understandable that Bill became the darling of the uptown Catholics, always invited to parties and on trips, always cajoling a week off here and a week off there to relax in Florida or enjoy the summer sun at the state’s poshest beaches. And what harm was there in riding back and forth on these outings with a very attractive and very divorced woman?
    Alas, when Archbishop Thomas Hogati heard about, he thought there was a good deal of harm. Bill suddenly found himself exiled to what the older clergy of that era called the Prairies, and Matthew Mahan’s generation called Siberia - the dreary downstate boondocks of the archdiocese where Catholics were a distinctly unaffluent timid minority. When Bill balked, he was singled out by the Archbishop at the next meeting of his deanery and publicly excoriated as a disgrace to the priesthood. He was then summoned to the episcopal throne and ordered to kneel and kiss the extended ring.
    Bill crept out to his assignment, a cowed, embittered man. His very divorced lady friend was horrified by what she had inadvertently done, and deeply sympathetic. Result: A clandestine romance which finally become a real scandal. Saddened friends, Matthew Mahan among them, advised Bill to ask for laicization. After two years of not very patient waiting, Bill left the Church and married his divorced friend. When Matthew Mahan became Archbishop, he had looked up Fogarty’s case in the files. Hogan had never even forwarded the papers to Rome.
    Fogarty’s wife had money, which seemed a good thing because Bill found it practically impossible to get a job. Old Hogan and the characters around him were vengeful men, and they got Bill fired or blocked his being hired more than once In the end his wife’s money only made it easy for Bill to drink all the booze he wanted. Like so many ex-priests’ marriages, Bill’s love was doomed from the start. He never resolved the conflict between the woman and his priesthood. He loved both, and now he was ending his life probably hating both.
    Matthew Mahan gently shook the sleeping man’s shoulder “Bill. Bill,” he said.
    Fogarty awoke and lay there staring numbly at him. “You called me, Bill.”
    Tears trickled out of Fogarty’s eyes and down the unshaven cheeks.
    “O Jesus, Matt,” he said. “O Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Matt, what’s going to become of me?”
    “I don’t know, Bill,” Matthew Mahan said. “I