By Father Patrick Hannon, C.S.C., ’82, who returns to The Bluff this summer to teach theology and be pastoral resident in Kenna Hall. Pat is the author most recently of The Geography of God’s Mercy.

When the phone rings at two in the morning, you know it’s not good news. For those of the Irish persuasion for whom the grim reaper is a familiar cousin, such calls prompt a single response: “Who’s dead now?”

This is all the more so for a parish priest, so when the phone rang a month ago, I knew the news was bad. Sure enough, it was the hospital. A young mother had brought her little girl, not breathing, to the emergency room, and had asked for a priest.

I ran into the night. The streets were empty and still. A few miles away a child was in awful distress, her mother was no doubt paralyzed by fear, and except for the nurses and doctors on call this morning, the only other person on earth aware of the girl in danger was me.

When I arrived at the hospital the nurse on duty told me the girl had died. Her name was Madyson. She was four years old. I sat in the nurse’s station and waited for her mother. An hour went by, and then suddenly the doors to the unit opened wide and a little girl was wheeled in, with what seemed like a dozen lines and tubes attached to her body. She was surrounded by emergency personnel. One of the nurses told me the girl was Madyson, and that somehow they’d managed to get her heart pumping again.

Whenever a child is brought to the hospital under such circumstances, the police are called to investigate, and as I waited for another hour to talk to Madyson’s mother it dawned on me that there might be something sinister to Madyson’s fragile state.

She had gone to bed feeling fine, the mother told the attending doctor. No, she hadn’t fallen. Well, actually, a day earlier she did fall on the ice outside the house. I had gone into her room to check on her at around midnight, and she wouldn’t wake up. My boyfriend and
I tried to wake her, but she wouldn’t wake. We checked for a heart beat, and we couldn’t find one, so we started CPR.

I stood by the mother as she recounted the details over and over. Ten yards away seven nurses were attending to Madyson, who lay motionless.
Another hour passed, and another doctor quizzed the mother. I stood next to the mother, my arms around her shivering shoulders. The doctor asked the mother dozens of questions, and I saw that she, the doctor, wasn’t buying the mother’s story. Her eyes betrayed a subtle disgust — you had to look closely to see it — as if she had been down this road before.

I began to feel horror.

The doctor left and the mother asked if she might see Madyson. I went with her and together we stood at the girl’s bedside.

Come on, baby, the mother whispered. Wake up, baby.

I thought I was going to be sick.

The mother asked if she could call her boyfriend. A nurse handed her the phone.

Are you coming down? she asked, and then she listened silently for a few moments, and then she hung up with-out another word. A few minutes lat-er another nurse came in and told the mother that there were two detectives who had a few questions for her. She left the room and I never saw her again.

I was alone with Madyson. Her hair was in pigtails and her left arm was wrapped around a teddy bear.

How is it possible, I thought, for anyone to harm a child? What would possess anyone to hurt a child?

A day later, the local newspaper announced the arrest of the mother and the boyfriend on charges of attempted murder. They later confessed that Madyson had endured physical and sexual abuse for a year.

But that night, as I stood there by her bed, before I knew the sickening details, I anointed her forehead and the palms of her hands with oil, and prayed. God, our Father, I whispered, we have anointed your child Madyson with the oil of healing and peace. Caress her, shelter her, and keep her in your tender care. We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen.

It was near dawn when I left the hospital. I shook my fist at God that morning. How can we account for such evil in a world that our Catholic faith tells us is holy? For me a dismissive reference to the power of sin will no longer suffice. Such antiseptic sophistry is cold comfort to the victims of sin, and an insult to those who survive. What is our response to such abject evil?

Anger is good place to start. Let fury settle into your stomach until you want to throw up. And then let your pulse quicken and your face redden and your eyes fill with tears and rage.

Then pray. Pray as if your life depends on it, for it does. Pray for God to heal the wounds of this world with bandages and salve and balm created from human hands and human hearts, for those are what God is in this world. Pray that we might have the courage to rage but not surrender to rage. Pray that we have the guts to do what Jesus did on the cross: to fight for each breath if only to utter words of mercy and forgiveness, because we believe, we really do, that forgiveness is stronger than sin, and mercy is the one thing evil cannot defeat.