In Mysterious Ways
CANZIO, WILLIAM DI
IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS The Death and Life of a Parish Priest Paul Wilkes Random House, $19.95,234 pp. By writing well about one person in very particular circumstances, Paul Wilkes has said something...
...If Saint Patrick's in Natick is representative of contemporary American parochial life, then I would suggest that Father Greer, returning to his parish, lonely, with his confidence and vitality radically compromised by the disease-and by over thirty years of service-is representative of the secular clergy today and of the afflicted authoritarian system...
...In the past, Father Greer had been humbled by his failings and had become a better, more compassionate priest because of them...
...Nobody in his right mind would throw the ball to him, and there was Joe, lofting [him] a sweet little pass...
...Greer, who had just refurbished another parish, turned it down...
...Like all worthwhile books, In Mysterious Ways grows in significance as we reflect on it...
...By acknowledging Country Priest as his model, Wilkes courageously, if tacitly, invites comparison with Bernanos's masterpiece, which received the Grand Prix of 'the Academie Frangaise shortly after publication in 1936...
...Heroism-in the midst of banality and otherwise-is part of what Wilkes's own work is about...
...So Wilkes decided "to write about a healthy, working priest, [rather] then to seek one who fulfilled my 'country priest' specifications...
...He listens closely to characteristic speech and presents it intact, as when the pastor describes his parishioners: "old townies and the swinging liberals, senior citizens and the high-tech crowd out there on Route 128, the Blue Army bunch who think Vatican II is heresy and the Virgin Mary is popping up all over the world, twenty-five-year-old kids who wear scapulars and prolifers ready to excommunicate everybody...
...That all had changed...
...With what strikes me as great artistic chutzpah, Wilkes wrote to the Boston archdiocese asking to be put in touch with fatally ill priests, and then dumped his original plan when he met a superior subject, Joe Greer, pastor of Saint Patrick's in Natick...
...The first half of In Mysterious Ways introWilliam di Canzio duces us to Greer and his world...
...The writer has done his homework...
...moreover, Saint Patrick's was "tired, a parish in extremis," financially languishing, liturgically comatose, its grade school and convent empty, its neglected church upstaged by "a huge billboard advertising bingo...
...Of course it bounced off his head...
...Greer's ordained priesthood, flawed by his sinfulness, besieged by his parishioners, imposed on by his superiors, held in contempt by the world at large, is what he proves, in his life and in his "death," to be the essential truth of his nature, his role in the reign of Christ, and he clings to it in faith, even when he himself may feel that faith is gone...
...For decades the pastor of Saint Patrick's had five full-time assistant priests and commanded, by position if not by birth, the kind of respect customarily reserved for Boston's upper class...
...By writing well about one person in very particular circumstances, Paul Wilkes has said something worth listening to about American Catholicism and about human life shaped by faith...
...Though Greer had been diagnosed with bone marrow cancer, after a year's chemotherapy he was hoping to be told soon that the disease was in total remission...
...He had wanted a miracle- who could blame him?-and it had not happened...
...Cancer takes command in the second half of Mysterious Ways, the way cancer can take over someone's life...
...I realized the church had been pretty good to me," he says, "I felt it was time to give something back...
...What Greer does share with the melancholy young hero, though, is a profound spiritual value, what I would call faithfulness to his own truth...
...And Joe would go over, toss his arm around the guy's shoulder, and apologize for throwing a bum pass...
...He originally planned "to do a documentary film and a book-a modern-day corollary to Georges Bernanos's spiritual classic, The Diary of a Country Priest-following a parish priest as he lived his last days...
...While Wilkes quotes epigraphically from Country Priest at the top of every chapter, his writing has less in common with Bernanos's scorching introspection than it does with his own documentary films (the fine TV biography of Merton is his) and with the work of such masters of nonfiction as Joan Didion and John McPhee, with whom in ways he may be favorably compared...
...Now there was no way of hiding...
...In Mysterious Ways is a book of surprises and ironies...
...When Greer was first offered Saint Patrick's, the pastor had two, not five, assistant priests, a staff soon to be reduced to one...
...Greer, on the other hand, who appears to be so completely the company-man, does not recite the party line when he speaks up about clerical celibacy, Humanae vitae, or the hierarchy...
...The shortage of priests contributes to understaffing, overwork, depression, and burn-out, and this argument is convincingly buttressed not only by what we see at Saint Patrick's, but by interviews with archdiocesan officials as well...
...also has a knack for showcasing facts and figures, so that we marvel at them rather than glide over so much statistical information: Greer's salary, for example, "top scale in the archdiocese, $851 a month...
...Nor does Greer's illness offer the glory of a death which claims him quickly, as does the cure's, who is able to echo Therese of Lisieux with his last breath, "All is grace...
...Unlike the cure, Greer is endowed neither with the glamour of youth, nor with the romance of stunning dialogue and great scenes...
...harden at the mention of issues currently at the center of church debate," such as the ordination of women...
...But on deeper consideration, he accepted...
...Bernanos's fictional portrait of a dying priest in a small, obscure French village had always fascinated and troubled me, revealing as it did such towering heroism in the midst of numbing banality...
...But the book's pivotal irony, reflected in its structure and subtitle, The Death and Life of a Parish Priest, is that Greer's cancer eventually reasserts itself virulently...
...Today's young seminarians at Saint John's, for example, Greer's alma mater, speak a trendy jargon that seems at odds with reactionary attitudes: "their idealistic faces...
...A ruddy, handsome, fifty-five-year old of Irish extraction, Greer had a few years ago accepted the pastorship of Saint Patrick's, with eighty-five hundred members...
...But when we were choosing up for a game and one of those wimpy guys was left, Joe would always take him...
...It's clear to the reader that Greer has already been "giving back" for most of his professional life...
...In most ways, it's fairer and more useful to contrast them, for Bemanos was writing a work of fiction, and his hero, the unnamed cure d'Ambricourt, has more in common artistically with Stephen Daedalus than with Joe Greer...
...It's through the details of Joe Greer's life that Wilkes makes his statement about larger issues, but his argument is clear: "[Greer's] age-about the median age of American priests today-and the state of his parish are indicative of the present-day situation (some would call it a crisis) within the Catholic church...
...he does indeed become like the "country priest" whom Wilkes had originally sought, and he is made to face death armed with unanticipated weapons...
...Now the question was: was he equally unafraid to live if it meant living in this reduced state...
...Father Greer had constantly maintained that he was not afraid to die...
...Greer is sealed in a coffin-like box and repeatedly assaulted with radiation whose total amount killed workers and firemen at Chernobyl...
...The writer knows what he's doing, keeping the sum low by overlooking substantial benefits...
...nevertheless it contrasts strikingly with the $600,000 we learn was recently spent to "refurbish" the chapel in the residence of Cardinal Bernard Law...
...Or when a former seminary classmate tells my favorite Greer story: "He used his elbows in basketball, and when he tagged you in touch football, you knew it...
...Medical science offers a marrow transplant, but in order for the procedure to work, the patient must nearly die...
...But the inner deficiencies had not shown...
...While Greer had come to the hospital secure in faith and prepared for an ordeal leading either to a quick death or the "resurrection" of restored health-such a serene patient that his doctors feel that he ministers to them as much as they to him-he discovers that there was no way to prepare for what would happen: the ghastly realities of his body's violent revolt against the poisons of the treatment, and the mental and spiritual consequences-depression, inability to pray, even hallucinations, loss of reason, and, finally, a sense of failure with his incomplete recovery, as if he were himself responsible for it...
...He succeeds in turning Saint Patrick's around...
...At one time being its pastor was considered a dream assignment," Wilkes writes...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
