The Confessional

Canon Mallon was well respected not just in Glasgow, but also in Rome. The Roman part of the Cannon Mallon's Glasgow church extended, of course, beyond the brick walls of St Stephen’s parish in The View. Cannon Mallon had such an extensive knowledge of sins, and potential sins, that he could even tell you sins that you didn't even know you had committed. The problem wasn't in the telling, but the hearing. It might have been the thick purple confessional cloth that seemed to suck up speech and helped fill the gap that separated priest and penitent, the lamb from the goat, or it may just have been Cannon Mallon’s way of speaking. His normal everyday way of speaking was in a low insistent, Irish whisper of a hum, which was just audible enough to be comprehensible. Most people just nodded a lot when they met him later. Smiling was not an option with Cannon Mallon. Smiling was a sure sign of sin. Cannon Mallon's other tone was his preaching tone. God had given him a great gift, because nobody on this earth, and some souls beyond it, could fail to hear him when he used the latter. In the confessional box he sometimes switched from one to the other.

Canon Mallon believed in the sanctity of the confession, what was said in the confessional box should stay there. When there was nothing on the radio Cannon Mallon would usually got an impressive audience, kneeling in the pews around his confessional box, talking in church shorthand and listening to the latest episodes and insights of the penitent all provided, in stereo, by Cannon Mallon’s preaching voice. There was a childish danger in this of course, that gave it an added thrill. Most penitents sat and kneeled in the pew closest to the confessional box. It was a bit like a Catholic Conga line. The penitents shuffled along the pew, with the one at the end dropping off and falling into the confessional box, to be relieved of their sins. But nobody did that kind of thing when Cannon Mallon was the priest in the confessional box.

Cannon Mallon didn’t just believe in the sanctity of the confessional box, he also believed it was mandatory, and he was just the man for the job. He was unpredictable, just as likely to sniff the air for some remembered sin outside the confessional, as in it. Then Cannon Mallow would dart out of his side of the double door, mid confessional. Some troubled soul would still be inside saying, ‘yes Father, no Father,’ and hopping from one knee to the other and hoping that one, or the other, was right response. Canon Mallon, the penitent would have been glad to know, would not be there to hear such indecision, but was out of his box and grabbing an unwary church goer, frozen in pew filled dread, and drag him or, more likely her, and position them outside his confessional box. He didn’t say ‘sit’ as you might have done to some friendly dog, but he simply said ‘kneel,’ as in a Coronation or a beheading. Some sat far away from Cannon Mallon’s confessional box and some sat near, for Cannon Mallon and God worked in mysterious way, for he picked you, not you him

Cannon Mallon had pounded up the aisle and pounced on Mrs Clocherty, his eyebrows raised and lifted, like the marbled arches of a Gothic cathedral and an expression that suggested only madness or death would have been enough of an excuse to miss the glorious chance of Holy Confessional. But in Cannon Mallon’s view these were malingering kinds of excuses, the kind of excuses only a Catholic, that had married a Protestant wife, would have used. Both of those little temporal things, would have made that very need to find sanctity in his, and mother church’s bosom, all the more pressing, for to confess your sins was to avoid madness and death.

Mrs Clocherty had in a way picked herself. For a start she hadn’t been kneeling. She had been sitting on the pew. She hadn’t been looking straight ahead at the altar in the prescribed way, that suggested every question she’d ever asked The Holy Mary Ever Virgin, was being transmitted from there to her eyeball, like lucky winning bingo numbers, if only she’d looked long and hard enough. Instead, Mrs Clocherty looked as if she had just wandered in and was waiting for a bus, or someone or other and, in the mean time, decided to start picking at her sandaled feet. Every one of us in St Stephen’s, that night, fervently thanked God it was her that was specially picked. But God wasn’t listening or maybe He was. Cannon Mallon had her by the under arm, as if he was ready to life her straight out of the pew. Mrs Clocherty had a fine Irish lilt and maybe it was that which swung it.

‘I’m sorry Father,’ and such was her sincerity that even the church walls seemed to leak rain tears, ‘I can’t come into confession right now because I’ve promised to say another couple of rosaries to Our Lady of Guadalupe that I may make a full and PROPER confession’.

Mrs Clocherty pulled out not one set or rosary beads, but two intertwined, as if they had been tied together and she was a master of the double rosary.

‘Perhaps you could bless these Father,’ Mrs Clochery said, holding up her beads in benediction.

‘Of course,’ said Cannon Mallon with an expression that was the equivalent of granite smiling, ‘bring them into me, after the next person in confessional box’. He looked around.

I’m not sure what happened next, because I was very busy praying, for the safety of my soul. But when it was safe to turn around Mrs Clocherty was scuttling away as fast as she could. She quickly flung holy water from the font, at the vestibule, up into the air, sprinkling herself with a rainbow, whilst blessing herself, at the church door.

There was, of course, one sin that was never mentioned, but often alluded to. It was the sin of Onan, son of Judah, the sin of touching oneself inappropriately and the sin that Cannon Mallon specialized in. Cannon Mallon had cast many a poor soul into a lifetime of purgatory for the sin of masturbation. For masturbation on a Sunday Cannon Mallon tended to favour hell and eternal damnation. For masturbation at mass on a Sunday a special hell had to be created so that Cannon Mallon couldn't get at you. There were no masturbators in Cannon Mallon’s parish.

Cannon Mallon, for all his worldly expertise, could never imagine that you would want to touch someone else. That was a perversion beyond anything he could encounter.

Rumours are terrible things that destroy marriages, but as Cannon Mallon knew you had to live within that sanctified marriage, but you didn’t have to live with rumours. And a rumour about a new and holy young priest wasn’t a rumour if it was true. Because weren’t all young priests, young? And, of course, weren’t all priests holy? It was this kind of Catholic syllogism that was taught in many a seminary for the greater good. And as everybody in the parish also knew, the only place to meet a young seminarian, just out of Church school, was the confessional box.

Cannon Mallon believed that young priests should be seen and not heard. And if they were to be heard it should only be in the sanctity of the confessional box, were there was the priest and penitent, with God standing, in the gap between them, listening in for Cannon Mallon. It was good training and a way of meeting, if not actually seeing, parishioners, good for at least the first year, thereafter it would be reviewed, for nothing lasts for all eternity.

Rumours are terrible things. No one had ever seen the young Father McDonald outside of the confessional box. And you couldn’t see him in the confessional box either. Stories started up and grew angel’s wings about what he looked like.

Mrs Russell said she saw him and proclaimed to all and sundry that, 'he looked just like a burning bush'.

There was a lot of head shaking at that one, from the woman in the View, but as Aisie Maloney, number 23 said, 'Mrs Russell’s specs are that thick they cover her big nose and that takes some doing. And probably everybody looks like a burning bush to her'.

But Mrs Murphy, her neighbour, who knew the doings of every saint in heaven, before and after they got there, said, 'if it was good enough for Moses it was good enough for her. And maybe Father McDonald was that holy it just kinda shone out of him, like a holy halogen lamp, and made him look a bit like a burning bush. For sure, didn’t have all the saints have those little things around their heads?' That was the old version.

The new version was provided by Mrs McGlinchy. Nobody would ever have said that Mrs McGlinchy was short sighted. She never seemed to have missed a thing, and even if she did, she knew about it before anybody else, that wasn’t actually there, and some that were. Mrs McGlinchy said that the new priest looked, 'just like a small Jesus'. Nobody knew where she got that information from, but it was taken as Gospel.

When the woman of the View, enmasse, finally, descended down, and met Father McDonald, outside Our Holy Reedemer’s, the local primary school, smiling, like some kind of half wit, they found out he wasn’t even Irish. But they were a forgiving bunch. He was almost one of their own.