But it’s hard to say.” The uncle, less animated in his concern, tells the narrator that his “old friend is gone, you’ll be sorry to hear ” still, even here, the enunciation on the considerable difference in their ages, and the idea that the priest was not just a Father but a “friend” advances the sense that their relationship was atypical. “I have my own theory about it,” Cotter continues. I’ll tell you my opinion.” Indignant, the boy remains silent but is interiorly infuriated by this “tiresome old fool!” who is, through frustrating indirection and interrupted opinions, casting suspicion on Father Flynn. When the boy descends the stairs for supper, the family friend Old Cotter is sitting fireside, smoking, speaking to his uncle: “No, I wouldn’t say he was exactly. When we try to arrive at express and certain answers, we seem to hear the words that hang over Dante’s underworld: ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE. The word, which “had always sounded strangely in my ears,” now “sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being.” Although this first story of Dubliners is filled with elusiveness and ellipses, we gather that, for the boy, the word is affiliated with Father Flynn, whose “third stroke” leaves the priest with “no hope.” The story starts, then, in an infernal state. As Father Colum Power notes in James Joyce’s Catholic Categories, although he formally severed his relationship to the Church, the Irish apostate kept “continuing devotion to the Easter liturgy, to the point of ‘secret tears.’” In “The Sisters” he gives us a powerful poetic initiation into the pains that quiet those crippled by priestly abuse. And yet, the Jesuit-educated Joyce remained haunted by the realities of Catholicity for his entire life.

True, his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man culminates in the protagonist Stephen Daedalus’s rejection of his Holy Mother in favor of a strict adherence to the priesthood of art (“forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being”). This sense of paralysis permeates “The Sisters,” James Joyce’s story of a troubled priest and his troubling relationship with an unnamed narrator. What stays silenced, what stays suggested or suspected but not known, discolors all the faithful, even those who do not, like the abused, inhabit a place of paralysis.

Still more startling is the silence that so many victims kept, especially as such quiet moves us to wonder how many more remain stifled by confusion and the maddening pressure to keep up appearances. Graphic stories, given by so many victims of Catholic priests and made explicit in (for instance) the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, leave the listener transfixed in terror over how one person could be so broad- in persona Christi and unspeakably perverted-at once.

The sisters dubliners