Long before things began to fall apart, Father Paul J. Olmsted was a simple man in the very best of ways. He was kind and self-effacing, intelligent but humble, strong while gentle, and funny without being rancorous. A man of great piety who had been a boy of great piety, he always nurtured a longing for quiet time away and alone, thus he chose as his Confirmation name Simeon Stylites after the fourth century saint and aesthete who lived for thirty-seven years on a small platform atop a pole near Aleppo in what is today Turkey.

Paul sometimes claims to be the love child of Leeann Chin and Bob Dylan, though he is not Asian, has a tenor voice that does not scratch like Bob’s, and was born at St Mary’s Hospital in Duluth in the same wing on the same calendar day (though not the same year) as Dylan. Some days Paul claims, impossibly, to have been mixed up in the nursery with the young Bobbie Zimmerman. His Aunt Betty claimed to have sold Bob his first guitar in the basement of Sears in their hometown of Hibbing.

Father Paul is a simple soul, seeking God in the Order of St. Clement (The Clementines), living with the fathers and brothers in the daily bump and grind of community life. He is also a wily character who has a vision of a world transformed and is eager to “do his inch,” as he had learned to say from his parents and grandparents as he grew up in Hibbing. While he knows himself to be a dreamer and teller of tall tales, he has no malicious intent; he might tease, but he never bullies.

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Father Paul can be both a confusing and a compelling character but, until Anders Jefferson and his band of lawyerly grifters came along, no one had ever questioned his faithfulness, his virtue, or his chaste commitment to celibacy. Paul was, as even his critical confreres would assert, an endlessly upright man.

Paul’s piety was a product of both nature and nurture from his quintessentially pious Catholic family of origin. After finishing Catholic grade school in Hibbing, he asked his parents’ permission to attend Saint Clement’s Prep where he could begin formation among the Clementines, the religious community of priests and brothers to which he wanted to belong. He kept his Confirmation name Simeon Stylites when he eventually made his final vows and was ordained. Even though the Order of Saint Clement is neither monastic nor contemplative, Paul continued to admire greatly the saint from the earliest years of the Church who lived a hermit’s life atop a pole to keep himself above and away from the temptations below. Paul had a bit of a solitary streak and made an annual retreat with the Trappist monks down in Iowa, where he could be quiet and live in their hermitage for a week or two. And he went out to the little hermitage the Clementines maintained on the island offshore from the Prep as often as he could get Brother Finbar and his pontoon boat to drop him off there.

 

Among Paul’s classmates was young Ronald Lucarelli from the Italian parish over in Eveleth. Ronnie, as he was called then, was born of Italian immigrants who came to the Iron Range to dig in the mines. His father knew that this son would labor with his mind, not his back, and would often tell anyone who would listen, “My Ronnie, he wear cuff link. Not like old man. Cuff link. White shirt. Drive big car.” Ronnie flirted briefly with a vocation with the Scalabrini Fathers, who served Italian immigrants and Italian Americans in Eveleth and elsewhere, but he did not like the idea of going so far away as their place at Our Lady of Pompeii in New York City’s Greenwich Village, so he too found a home on Saint Clement’s Hill, although noting that the American prairie doesn’t have much in the way of meaningful hills.

Joining Ronnie and Paul a year later as a sophomore was T. Barnabas Clifford (“Call me Clif, with one f!”). Clif began high school over in Aberdeen, in South Dakota, but when his father was transferred to the home office in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, the whole family became Coon Rapidians and young Clif was soon off to Saint Clement’s Hill and Prep School.

Also that second year, Michael T. Chambers, called M.T. for obvious reasons, completed the friendly foursome. He was from Vineland, Minnesota, and had begun his high school studies with the Crosiers in the neighboring, not-quite-bustling, burg of Onamia, which he and his friends quickly changed to “Nonamia.”

M.T.’s first and greatest attraction to this group was the habit worn by the Crosier Fathers: a white cassock with a black cincture and a black scapular adorned with a crusader’s cross in red and white, and over all that a mozzetta, a black, elbow-length cape. The young M.T. thought the Crosier habit to be the absolute pinnacle of ecclesiastical and sartorial fashion. When the boy had been in fourth grade, Father J. Edward Lattimer, their Vineland pastor and a Crosier priest, had visited their Sunday school and brought along a child-size habit. He dressed Harold Forneris, of all people, up in front of the whole class as a mini-Crosier (the habit worn, of course, over his street clothes just as did the Fathers over in Onamia). Harold, everyone knew, did not even want to be a priest!

M.T., as a freshman with the Crosiers, was hugely disappointed when one of the older students came home to Onamia from Chicago for Christmas break and announced he had encountered a teacher at the college seminary who, though reportedly fond of the Crosier students, teased them by saying, “The Crosiers are the only religious order to wear a costume rather than a habit.” The teacher meant it in good humor, which is as the Crosiers accepted it, but the disillusioned M.T. did not share the laugh. The next fall, as a sophomore, he joined Paul, Ronnie, and Clif at Saint Clem’s. The Clementines had no fancy habit, only simple black cassocks with no pockets, since their founder, St. Clement of Blois, regarded pockets as occasions of sin, though not evil in themselves.

Paul, Ronnie, Clif, and M.T. remained close friends and confreres as boarding students at Saint Clement’s Prep, through college seminary, and during their year as novices at the order’s headquarters in Chicagoland, and ever since their ordination. Ronnie, now addressed by those outside the quartet as “Father Ronald,” was currently the Father Provincial of their Order of Saint Clement and his office was in Chicago. The other three priests were still at Clement’s Prep as teachers, mentors, and jacks-of-all-trades.

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Paul was just back from a semester in the Bronx as an exchange teacher at Fordham Prep on the campus of Fordham, the Jesuit University of New York City. As a member of the small and relatively insignificant Order of Saint Clement, he regarded the Jesuits as the Marines of the Catholic Church. He’d taken a Master of Arts degree from Fordham University a year after his ordination, and since then had returned semi-irregularly to the Prep there in an exchange arrangement with one of his Jesuit friends, who regarded a semester in Duesterhaus as bucolic bliss. Paul enjoyed his temporary proximity to the Bronx Zoo and Bronx Botanical Garden, not to mention the D Train, just a short walk up to the Grand Concourse, which could take him to Yankee Stadium as well as Manhattan. He was glad, however, to return home to Saint Clement’s Hill, with its golf course, hermitage on the island, cross-country ski trails, and the good company of his Clementine brethren, not to mention the Saint Clement’s Prep students who had enjoyed the Jesuit exchange teacher well enough, but missed their bibbed-overall wearing, wild rice-harvesting, thought-provoking, master canoeist, and popcorn-making confessor and confidant.

When Paul came back to Duesterhaus, the dock had not yet been put in; the golf course had been neglected; no one had cleaned the hermitage on the island; the begonias, impatiens, and snapdragons had yet to be planted; and the old pickup had a dead battery.
Neither M.T or Clif were adept at nor quick to learn the many tasks that kept the campus from the appearance of desuetude. As the two toasted their friend’s arrival home, Paul noted, “You guys are both about as useless as breasts on a boogie board.”

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Paul, Clif, and M.T. appreciated their reunion, especially since the rising sex abuse scandals in the Church in the United States concerned and frightened most every Catholic and probably all priests, the Clementines among them, including these three confreres among the Clementines. They were glad to be restored to one another’s company in the confused and confusing times.

M.T., a great fan of the Book of Proverbs, dropped one of them on his pals: “A friend is a friend at all times, and a brother is born for the time of adversity.”
 

“I’d be happier for us to be brothers in more usual and ordinary times,” Paul said.

“Amen. Let the good times roll,” Clif responded. Clif, a diabetic and a nondrinker, smiled at the large brandy Manhattans that Paul and M.T. hoisted, while he lifted his own can of diet Mr. Pibb. “I note that you two hurried right into liquid vespers; the size of those
drinks suggests that you, Paul, have fallen under the sway of the Jesuits during your time in the Bronx.”

“Martha Mary Lazarian,” Paul responded in a form of defense, “My favorite cleaning lady and cook out there claims that Fordham University is the intellectual powerhouse of the Bronx. As I not only taught at Fordham Prep on that campus and lived in the Jesuit residence there, of course I noted their evening customs and came to see that a Manhattan of a certain size fortified one for the rigors of the night ahead.” Suddenly turning serious, he added, “Some of those guys are pretty concerned about the scandals after the recent revelations of The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and the failure of too many bishops to address the painful issue.”

M.T., taking another sip of Mr. Pibb, took the opportunity to quote Proverbs once more: “Whoever acquits the wicked, whoever condemns the just—both are an abomination to the Lord.” He continued, “No doubt the bishops and religious superiors will take the opportunity to get rid of any criminals, and we’ll be glad to have them gone.”

“We know now that young kids have been victimized by predators in our clerical ranks, and it makes us sick,” added Clif. “But I just don’t get how that revolting kind of behavior has stayed under the radar. I hope, though, that as the sinners are exposed and brought to justice, no innocent priests are falsely accused. That would be a nightmare.”

“Well, it seems to me that hardworking and law-abiding priests should have no worries,” said M.T. “What’s that the cops always say? Da innocent have nuttin’ ta fear!”

“I dunno,” Clif disagreed, “I think the crisis may turn out to be far deeper, hurtful, and disgusting than it seems now.”

Paul sighed and said, “And I think the innocent especially should be worrying. There’s a storm brewin’, and it’s gonna be fierce.”