The Problem of Evil

When the fog lifted, Masterson finally cast his line out and waited sitting with a fag in his mouth on the old maintenance box.  It wasn’t long before he was reeling in a juicy halibut, much to his own surprise; he had experience fishing, but never in open seas, and usually he’d have to wait half an hour before he felt so much as a tug.  This was a fast grab.  Stinson, who was resting nearby, his head buried in the Gospels, jumped up quickly when he saw that his colleague had hooked something.

‘Good for you, Masterson,’ he enthused, then watched his fellow priest whack the halibut hard against the deck flooring. ‘Isn’t there a more humane way?’

‘This is the humane way.  Do you want me to leave it here to suffocate?  That’s much worse.  What do you think this boat does?  How do you think the fishermen on boats like this usually kill the fish?’

‘What if you just didn’t kill it?  What if you had just thrown it back in the water?  Wouldn’t that be more humane?’

‘Why fish it out if you’re just going to sling it back in?  There’s no living in that.’

How in the name did a man like Ronan Masterson come to enter the priesthood?  What led him to answer the call?  The answer, it would seem, lay in corruption – a word which for some urged feelings of vigilance and loathing; for young Masterson however, it was alluring.  That he could hold power and status, and use them to fatten his comforts, knowing there was an organisation behind him with safeguards in place to avoid public opprobrium: this sounded quite alright to him in his adolescence.  While others his age aimed for the traditional route in life, he elected to go down a different road.  A road his peers at the time couldn’t comprehend as Masterson was always among them the burliest, coarsest, shiftiest, wildest, horniest.   The stuff of priests bore no resemblance. 

And what of celibacy?  That great inner tonnage for men who sought the cloth.  Well, he could circumvent that.  He’d seen others do it before, and get away with it.  Fathers Muckian, Hanley, Clerkin, O’Toole, McGann.  After sermons were done, if there was a young one, or an old one, waiting outside, they might be received privately by the foremost leader of their parish, which led to sordid entanglements that mostly never saw the light of day.  Legends, the lot of them, in Masterson’s eyes. 

And there were others too who just got away with all manner of unsound behaviour.  As an altar boy in Athlone, he had watched closely Father Madigan – pederast, gunrunner, published poet as gaeilge – and rather than be repelled by the man, Ronan Masterson was in fact emboldened.  Madigan never touched him, as he did the other altar boys, but once before a mass he pulled a revolver from his smock, pushed the end of it into young Ronan’s side and warned him, ‘I’ll stick a bullet in ya, boy, if you fuck up the offertory.’   Such madness was common at that time.  1917.  It seemed like everyone was running around with munitions in their pockets in those troubled days.  And though troubled for some, they were good days for those clergymen possessed with the mercenary spirit.  If Madigan could get away with what he got away with, Well, young Ronan thought, why the bloody hell not?

When Masterson reminisced about his early days, and considered how he’d come to be this man, a great deal of his experiences appeared inconsequential.  It never affected him psychologically.  He knew who he was even before Madigan and the rest.  He did not believe he was part of some blanket continuum of evil.  There was no evil, only competency.  A gross and forbidden form of competency, it might have been, but competency it was.  Those who went on and on about the problem of evil – well, they just couldn’t get the bloody hang of it: living, to wit, and the dying that came of it.