Free Boy Crucified by Jerome Wilde Page A

never had.
    “It’s not serious, is it?” I asked, knowing the question was stupid.
    He shrugged and smiled. “Look at this,” he said. He showed me the business card I had given him on my last visit, several months ago. “I dug this out. I was going to call you. Just haven’t felt like getting myself downstairs. I wanted to make sure you were… okay.”
    The way he said it suggested he wanted to make sure I was okay so he could die in peace, so a loose end could be tied up. It would probably not occur to him that I would have appreciated being notified that he was sick so I could visit and try to offer help.
    “I’m fine,” I said. “You know you don’t have to worry about me.”
    He smiled as if he knew this was a lie, which of course it was.
    “A lot of these gray hairs belong to you,” he said, chuckling, pointing at his head. “Why don’t you sit on my bed? I wish I could get up, but I’m tired. What brings you here?”
    Now that I knew he was sick, I didn’t want to say. I sat on the edge of his bed, frowning down on him. I hadn’t expected this. What else was going to go wrong? I had always thought Fr. Cyrus was going to live forever, was always going to be there, whenever I needed to hear his voice or see his ancient, wrinkled face.
    “How are things at the police department?” he asked.
    “That’s why I’m here,” I said. “Are you sure you’re up to some conversation?”
    “I don’t look that bad, do I?”
    “No,” I said, lying. “I just didn’t know you were sick.”
    “Fire away,” he said.
    “You have to keep it to yourself, but we’ve had a bizarre death, which I’m investigating. A boy was crucified, after a fashion. He seems to have been involved with a Catholic cult. I was wondering if you knew anything about groups like that.”
    “Catholic cults?”
    “The boy’s parents said he met some people from this group over the Internet. The people told him things like ‘the Pope is a heretic’ and that their group was the only true Catholic group left on the face of the planet and other outrageous stuff like that.”
    “The Pope is a heretic?” he repeated.
    I nodded.
    “If I had to guess—I’m assuming that’s what you want me to do—I would say you’re looking for traditional Catholics. After Vatican II in the 1960s, there were a lot of changes in the Church, and a lot of Catholics fell away. Some of them formed ‘traditionalist’ groups, wanting to keep the Latin Mass, not wanting Mass in English. There was a bishop in France who made quite a name for himself by setting up a traditionalist seminary and churning out traditionalist priests. Archbishop Lefebvre. You should look into that, as a place to start. Before he died, not too many years ago, he defied the Vatican and consecrated four bishops to continue his ‘work’.”
    “So these traditionalists don’t agree with Vatican II?”
    “That’s partly it, yes. There’s a lot of those groups out there, especially here in the US, although there are some in Europe. The ones in Europe tend to be a bit more intellectual. The ones over here tend to be a bit odd. Extremists, disobedient, argumentative. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about them.”
    “What kind of stories?”
    “Mostly scandalous stuff. Some of these priests and bishops get themselves involved with right-wing causes, or drugs, or sex scandals, all sorts of things.”
    “When you say right-wing causes, do you mean things like the Jewish World Conspiracy?”
    He nodded, chuckled. “All that kind of nonsense—conspiracies, the John Birch Society, the ‘Church has been infiltrated by communists’. All of it nonsense, start to finish, but that doesn’t stop people from believing it. Anyway, they’re not the first group of people to break away from the Church, not by a long shot. After Vatican I, there were dissidents who broke away because they did not believe in papal infallibility, which had been defined at Vatican I. They also had