American Gangster (9 page)

This was the general opinion of many of the people standing in Bronx rain waiting to get inside Immaculate Conception Church. Gathered across the street from Dunkin' Donuts and the burger joint called Sloppy Buns are bus drivers, maintenance men, manicurists, teachers, and retirees. Many of the seekers were born in Croatia, but others hail from the Philippines, Mexico, Russia, Korea, and all of Latin America, wherever souls have been touched by the historical reach of the Roman Catholic Church, wherever the black-robed missionaries and armored clank of conquistadors strode with Scripture and sword. Standing with the faithful, you hear the usual
New York Babel, five languages going at once. But this will soon change, says Tom Robles. Soon another tongue, transcendent of national origin and neighborhood, a language of the heart, will be spoken tonight inside the church.

It is something he found in his reading, Tom says: that stigmatics, due to their unique relationship with God and Christ, can somehow “communicate with each other through meditation across the ages.” Since so many stigmatics have been declared saints, that means, Tom supposes, Father Sudac will not be alone in saying mass tonight. “Saint Francis will there too…. Saint Francis, and Saint John of God, and Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Catherine de' Ricci, and Saint Clare, and Padre Pio too. Saints from six hundred years ago, right here, on Gunhill Road in the Bronx.”

“No church is big enough for Sudac now,” says Father Giordano Belanich, the fifty-three-year-old pastor of St. John's Church in Fair View, New Jersey, an industrious if slightly scruffy home to several thousand Croatian and Latin immigrants a few miles south of the George Washington Bridge. Born in the Adriatic town of Mali Losinj before fleeing the Tito regime with his family as a young boy, Father Gio, as he is called, has been charged with the responsibility of “looking after” Father Sudac during his stay in the United States. An amply proportioned man with a stern, down-to-earth manner that gives him a Karl Malden waterfront cleric aspect compared to Sudac's Montgomery Clift etherealness, Father Gio acts as the stigmatic's interpreter. He stands beside the younger priest during mass translating his sermons into both English and Spanish, a language Gio has mastered recently so as to better serve his largely Latin flock. Father Gio also arranges Father Sudac's schedule (he's been in Kansas City, Vermont, and Louisville in the past couple months) and compiles long lists of e-mailed “healing petitions,” which he prints out for Sudac to bless en masse.

Looking after Father Sudac was becoming “a full-time job,” said Father Gio, who has plenty to do already with his regular pastoral duties and running Croatian Relief, the organization he founded 1991 to provide spiritual
and material aid in the wake of the ruinous Yugoslavian war. But Belanich was not complaining. God's work was God's work, plus, he said, with a sly smile, it was “always like that with these mystics, they're so much trouble.”

This was because, Gio said, people like Sudac were not like everyone else. They were under “a lot of stress.” On one hand everyone wanted to see them, seek their counsel and blessing; on the other hand, they needed repose, time for introspection. In an urban setting, with so many needy people, this created a serious management problem, said Father Gio. Maybe once Saint Francis could talk to the birds without interruption, but that was eight hundred years ago, before faxes requesting interviews were piling up on the desk. Prophets were no longer free to sit in caves to receive divine revelation. They tended to be “confused young people like other young people.” People with “special gifts” needed to be “kept in line,” lest they “lose focus, fall prey to distraction.” Already Sudac has had to move out of the rectory house in Fair View, to some “undisclosed” place in the metropolitan area. His whereabouts are not discussed. Father Gio personally drives him to masses around the City in his Toyota Avalon with the Croatian flag hanging from the rearview mirror. When the mass is over, Sudac, Elvis-like, leaves the church immediately.

As a Croatian, he had some knowledge of the handling of potential saints, Father Gio said, in an offhand way. Croatia has had a long history of millennialism. Medjugorje, a village on the Bosnian border where in 1981 several students reported a visitation from Mary, Mother of God, is one of the foremost Christian pilgrimage spots in the world. (Indeed, for around $2,300, Gio could sign you up for a five-day summer retreat in Medjugorje, including air, hotel, and an audience with Father Sudac.)

But there was also a temporal aspect. “Things are bad now in Croatia,” Gio said, as we sat in the stark white kitchen behind his office, with its shelves full of china cups decorated with Balkan coats of arms. “As bad as the war was, we knew things would get worse once Ted Koppel forgot who we were. World crises are like that. When you are at the top of the news, relief comes in. Then, you are forgotten and on your own. Our economy is very bad now. People are depressed, the suicide rate is very high. Perhaps
God recognizes such things. Perhaps that is why we have Father Sudac now.”

Asked what sort of fellow Sudac was, on an everyday basis, Gio cocked his giant Easter egg–shaped head and said, “Oh, I'd say he's pretty normal.” What did this mean? Did the stigmatic like to watch the Croatian soccer team in the Olympics? Did he like to laugh, sharing Father Gio's stated belief that “God is a great comedian, sitting up there in His rocking chair, making fun of the mess we make for ourselves?” Was he a pragmatic and an activist like Gio, who was driving a forklift truck in street clothes when we first met, moving relief supplies he planned to send to Bolivia and El Salvador?

Father Gio shrugged. “I am not here to tell you that he is a regular fellow. These people, they are not like you or me, or the guy you might run into in the next pew or at the corner bar…. Let's say he spends a lot of time in his room thinking about the Eucharist.”

When talk turns to skepticism and why Sudac does not display the wounds, however, Father Gio grows testy. “This is why I can't stand the media. I read in the newspaper, ‘Sudac
claims
to have the stigmata. He doesn't
claim
to have it. He
has
it. That's what people don't understand about Father Sudac. He is not a rock star. He is not a television actor, something stupid like that. The devil is alive in this world and Sudac, being full of God's love, is a weapon, a special weapon, to fight against the enemy.”

A week or so later, another two thousand or so people wait in another rainstorm, trying to get inside St. Athanasius Church on Bay Parkway and Sixtieth Street in Bensonhurst, where Father Sudac will conduct mass. In an article in the Brooklyn section of the
Daily News
titled “Abuzz Over Stigmata Priest,” St. Athanasius monsignor David Cassato expressed concern over the size of the turnout. Consequently, the cops have shut down Bay Parkway, snarling traffic for blocks around.

“Hope, I feel a lot of hope,” says a woman in her fifties, wearing a black dress and high heels. Her daughter, who has cancer, is undergoing
chemotherapy. She had a picture of the teenage girl, taken at the beach in Bermuda. She planned to hold the photo up for Sudac to bless, but fears the church will be filled by the time she gets to the front of the line and she'll have to watch the mass on closed-circuit TV from the school auditorium on the other side of the street. “I got to make eye contact. If I make eye contact, then I know Father will pray for me.”

“This is really something,” remarks an older Italian woman, who says her mother once saw Padre Pio near Naples. “Now I get my turn…. I am so excited.” The woman's sons, both Wall Street workers who still live in the neighborhood, are less convinced. “Let's just see, Mom,” says one. “Let's wait and see. You don't know who he is, if he's for real.”

“Yes, I do,” says the woman.

Inside the church, a '50s modern-looking place without a choir or any of the medieval ambiance the soul hungry
tourista
of such occasions craves, Father Gio is translating Father Sudac's sermon. Sudac, usually quite soft-spoken and conversational, is raising his voice, screaming in Croatian, sounding almost like a Baptist or Pentecostal preacher.

“Don't look into politics! Don't look into ideologies! Don't look into magics!” Sudac shouts, a roar of urgency in his voice, Father Gio following him with matching fervor, a mighty, rising call and response. “Don't look into spiritism! Don't look into Santeria! Don't be afraid of the Truth! Don't be afraid of sin! There is no sin! Jesus Christ died to banish sin from this world! Open yourself! Leave yourself open. Make room in your heart. Then He will come in there. He will come
real fast
!”

Sudac, who usually does not allude to the stigmata in his sermons, now draws attention to it. Speaking in a tone of harsh rebuke, he says, “You have heard of me, you know who I am, perhaps that is why you are here … but that is the
only
reason, you must think again. Look to the giver, not the gift. Come for Christ, not for me.”

Then, quieter, almost inaudibly, he went on. “I am a young priest. Only thirty-one, which is very young for a priest. But I am not so young not to see that many crazy things go on in this world. Things beyond explaining. Does it matter if I am a saint? I don't think so. Only Jesus matters.”

With that, Sudac slumped down in a thronelike chair to the right of the altar. For a moment there was a hush in the room as Sudac, seemingly spent, took a Kleenex from his vestments and wiped his eyes.

“He's crying,” said a young girl, in a voice that could be heard for several pew rows around. Several flash cameras went off. Visibly angry, feeling that “the infernal snapping” demeans the Spirit, Father Gio rises in protest. “This is not a show! Not a circus!” he yells. Yet, you wonder, why not take Sudac's picture? Last year, in Chicago, someone took a snapshot in which Sudac appears to be transparent. A few days later, the shot was all over the Internet.

Now, in the strobing light, you could watch Sudac, hone on his wan, almost desperate-looking face. A few days earlier I called up a priest friend who also practiced as a university psychologist. What would he do, I asked, if someone had come into his office bearing the wounds of Christ. “Well,” the priest said, “as a psychologist I'd probably give him the Minnesota multiphasic test and then treat him as a hysteric … as a priest I'd pray for him. Pray hard. Because I'd think,
better him than me
. God chooses who he wants. But in the end, what really matters is: does it help people, make their burden in this life any lighter? If this Sudac is stigmatic, or if people just think he is stigmatic, does it matter?”

At St. Anthanasius's, however, rationalities and doubts could be discarded. For a moment it was possible to stop trying to see if the sleeves of Sudac's vestment were about to blot red from wounds made by “blazing rays of blood.” His face, mournful, tortured, was enough. You knew, whatever anyone else might think,
he
believed it.

Moments later, Father Sudac was holding the monstrance, the sun burst–shaped symbol of Eucharist in front of his face, walking through the church, blessing the faithful. One by one, people reached out for him as he walked down the aisle, some falling back into their seats after touching his robe. Then he walked out into the rainy night, across Bay Parkway, to bless those who couldn't fit inside the church. The cops formed a corridor through the crowd for Sudac and Father Gio to pass. The lights from police cruisers swept across the slick streets, reflecting off the golden monstrance
in front of Sudac's face. He looked electric, on fire. For the moment a Brooklyn block, as prosaic as any Brooklyn block, was transformed, lifted from the everyday.

People surged toward Sudac. Two men pushing a wheelchair barged through the crowd, the tires running over an older woman's feet.

“Father! Father! Our brother! Bless him!” the men screamed to Sudac, indicating a teenage boy in the chair. The boy was crippled, his dense black eyes crossed. The boy had been paralyzed since he was born, the men shouted. “A stroke … a stroke since birth,” the men declared in heavily accented broken English. One reached over the police line and grabbed Sudac's garment.

“You have the stigmos!” the man yelled. “Bless him. We are Greek! Bless him! He has always been like this! Please, Father
… the stigmos
… help him … there is nothing else that can be done! Please!”

Father Sudac turned and, Eucharist in front of his face, bowed once, turned both left and right, and walked on. Immediately, the men, now crying, kissed the boy in the chair. “He blessed you,” they weeped. “Now you have hope.”

One of the men sprinted after Father Sudac, again reaching for his garment. Falling to his knees, the man said, “Bless you, Father.
Bless you
.” Whether Father Sudac, afflicted of the wounds of Christ, heard this was hard to tell. He just kept walking, into the night.

When I first wrote this piece, it sat around for a while because it was supposed to go in the “culture” section and the editor felt it “had nothing to do with culture.” What's culture then, I yelled, “spending fifty dollars to see Mark Morris dance around?” This exchange did not do wonders for our relationship. From
New York
magazine 2005
.

The usual Saturday afternoon merchants lined the sidewalk across 125th Street from the Apollo Theatre: the shaved-ice lady, the roots-and-incense dealers, the Senegalese peddlers of ersatz Rolexes. Also there was the zombie, machete protruding from the side of his bullet-hole gouged head. An invader from Brooklyn, the zombie was in sell mode, lurching toward passersby, product in hand.

“
Dead Roses!
Independent film! Shot in Brooklyn! Not a bootleg!
Dead Roses!
” the zombie droned, his voice muffled beneath several pounds of latex and stuffed cotton. “
Dead Roses!
Only ten dollars!”