"Where don't you wear it?"
"What?"
"The collar. You said there are places you take it off."
Father Daniel Mercer looked down at his shirt as though I had asked about his socks.
"The grocery store."
"Why the grocery store?"
He did not answer immediately.
"Children."
That was how we got into it.
He had been ordained in 1978.
In 2002, when the abuse crisis was breaking open in newspapers and television reports across North America, he was a pastor in a suburban parish.
He had never been accused of sexual misconduct.
He wanted that stated plainly.
Then he wanted something else stated just as plainly.
"Don't make me the victim."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good. Because I wasn't."
He leaned toward the screen.
"Children were hurt. Families were destroyed. Men in collars did things that should make you sick. Other men knew things or should have known things. Don't turn my discomfort in a supermarket into the story of the abuse crisis."
I told him I wouldn't.
"Now I'll tell you about the supermarket."
He was buying eggs.
A woman was standing near him with a boy, maybe six or seven.
Father Daniel turned toward them because he needed to pass.
The woman put her hand on the boy's shoulder and moved him behind her.
Six inches, perhaps.
That was all.
"She didn't glare at me. She didn't say anything. I don't even know if she knew she did it."
He demonstrated the movement with one hand.
"Like that."
He finished shopping.
In the car he took off his collar.
The following week he put it in the glove compartment before going inside.
He did that for years.
"I understood her. That's the part people don't understand when I tell this."
"You weren't angry?"
"Of course I was angry. Understanding something doesn't stop it from hurting."
He looked at me.
"But what was I supposed to do? Chase her through produce and explain that I was one of the good ones?"
He laughed once.
"Imagine that sentence. 'Excuse me, ma'am, I am a safe priest.' If you have to announce it in aisle four, we've already got a problem."
The parish had a meeting that year.
People came who had not attended Mass in months.
Some came angry. Some came frightened. Some wanted names. Some wanted reassurance Father Daniel did not have the authority to give them.
One man stood and asked him:
"Did you know?"
Father Daniel did not know which case he meant.
"So I said, 'Know what?'"
The room turned on him.
"That was the wrong answer."
"Why?"
"Because he wasn't asking me for information."
Father Daniel remembers this now.
He did not understand it then.
The man was asking whether the priest standing in front of him understood how trust had been broken.
Father Daniel answered like a witness being questioned.
No, he had not known.
No, he had never seen anything.
No allegation had ever involved his parish while he was there.
All true.
All useless.
"I thought facts would save me from the question."
"Did they?"
"No."
After the meeting, a woman remained behind.
She had been abused by a relative, not a priest. She told Father Daniel that the meeting had made her sick because every man in the room kept talking about what he personally had or had not known.
"She said, 'Nobody is asking whether you're guilty, Father. We're asking whether you understand why we're afraid.'"
He remembers the exact words.
"That changed you?"
"Eventually. I'm not going to pretend I became wise in five minutes. I was defensive for a long time."
That is another thing he wanted kept in.
He resented being looked at differently.
He resented jokes.
He resented newspaper photographs that seemed to use a Roman collar as shorthand for every terrible thing in the story.
He resented parishioners asking questions he could not answer.
Then he became ashamed of resenting them.
"It was a mess."
I asked whether he ever considered leaving the priesthood.
"No."
Then he corrected himself.
"That's too easy. I considered wanting not to be a priest for about ten minutes at a time. That's different."
He kept celebrating Mass.
Kept visiting hospitals.
Kept baptizing children whose parents sometimes watched him more closely than parents had watched priests twenty years earlier.
"They should watch," he said.
That surprised me.
"You want parents suspicious of priests?"
"I want parents responsible for their children. A priest who gets offended because a parent has boundaries has misunderstood which person in the room needs protecting."
Years later, a young seminarian assigned to his parish asked him whether wearing clerics in public still mattered.
Father Daniel told him yes.
I asked why, considering the grocery store.
"Because the collar isn't a reward for being trusted."
He took hold of the white tab with two fingers.
"It tells people what I am available for. It also tells them what they have a right to expect from me."
"So why still take it off at the grocery store?"
He smiled.
"I don't anymore."
"When did you stop?"
"I don't know."
That answer bothered me, so I came back to it later.
He finally remembered.
It was after a funeral.
He had gone into the same supermarket for milk. Still in his collar. He forgot to remove it.
A young employee came up to him.
"She said, 'Father, can I ask you something?'"
Her mother was dying.
She did not know how to get a priest to the hospital because the family no longer belonged to a parish.
Father Daniel gave her his number and went that evening.
"So the collar frightened one woman and helped another find me. Both are true. That's what people want to make simple. It isn't simple."
I asked him what an innocent priest inherits from the crimes of priests he never met.
He was quiet.
"Responsibility isn't the same as guilt."
Then he said it again.
"Responsibility is not guilt. But 'I didn't do it' can't be the end of the sentence."
That may be the most important thing he told me.
The Church has official reports, review boards, policies, legal files, training programs and safeguarding protocols. It needs all of them.
But there is another history underneath those documents: what happened inside ordinary priests, parishioners, parents, survivors, seminarians and children when trust itself changed meaning.
That history is harder to file.
I asked Father Daniel what he wanted a young priest fifty years from now to know about this period.
He thought for a while.
"That some priests were guilty. Some bishops failed terribly. A lot of innocent people paid for it too. But don't you dare put us in the same sentence as the children as though the suffering were equal. It wasn't."
He looked down at the collar again.
"And tell him that after all of it, when somebody saw the collar in a hospital corridor, sometimes they still looked relieved."
He stopped.
"You have to earn that look every time."
That is where we ended.