There’s no way to approach yet another story of sexual abuse by Catholic priests without a weary sense of revulsion. I lived in Boston during the most shocking revelations about the archdiocese, and though I wouldn’t take a word — or an award — away from the Boston Globe’s coverage, the ever-rising tally of robed predators became morally exhausting. But don’t let that worn-out disgust turn you away from Jennifer Haigh’s smart fourth novel, “Faith.” Haigh brings a refreshing degree of humanity to a story you think you know well, and in chapters both riveting and profound, she catches the avalanche of guilt this tragedy unleashes in one devout family.
“Most of you have heard, by now, what happened to my brother,” the narrator begins, placing this fictional case in the context of those accusations during 2002 when grim photos of collared monsters flashed up on the nightly news. Two years have passed since that horrible spring, and now Sheila McGann is breaking a promise of silence she made to her older half brother, Father Art. A lonely, middle-aged woman long estranged from her family and her church, Sheila carefully pieces together “a kind of fifth gospel” to describe the events that ruined his life. “My penance is to tell this ragged truth as completely as I know it,” she says, “fully aware that it is much too little, much too late.”
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Ron came to The Post in 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the Book Editor and lead critic. He lives in Bethesda with his wife, an English teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
Actually, she’s being too modest. As a narrator, she’s fantastic: compassionate, psychologically astute and candid about her own biases and blind spots. The novel works so effectively because Haigh has created a thoughtful woman poised between doubt and belief. Without the self-righteous bitterness of an apostate or the willful certainty of the devout, Shelia hovers precariously, not sure what to believe about her brother’s faith or his sins.
In a preface to the main story, Sheila lays out Art’s early life and adolescence in swift, dramatic strokes, searching for the foundations of her brother’s character: early abandonment by his father, then a distant stepfather and finally the welcoming arms of the church. Though she doesn’t feel it herself, Sheila intuits the comfort that orthodoxy can provide a frightened young man. The collar, the pulpit, the vow of chastity — she understands that these aren’t burdens for Art so much as shields against the complex demands of adulthood. But how effectively, she wonders, can such a cloistered person handle the passions and strivings of being human?
Haigh raises these psychological inquiries in a story that repeatedly knocks our sympathies off balance. The action begins when Father Art is in his early 50s and feeling as though he’s lost his way. On Good Friday, 2002, as he contemplates the promise of new life, he receives a call from a church administrator. “He told me later that he’d had no idea why he’d been summoned,” Sheila writes, but that “seems incredible.” TV news vans have been stationed outside the chancery for months, hoping to catch the cardinal’s reaction to each new accusation of abuse. As soon as Art arrives, he’s calmly informed that he’s being placed on administrative leave. In this Kafkaesque scene, he’s not told “the name of the accuser; not even what he was supposed to have done.” But he must speak to no one and move out of the rectory that has been his home for years.
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