Like all over-touristed areas of the world these days, the crush of humanity in London can make for some claustrophobic shoulder rubbing. During a visit during the Christmas holidays,  a magical time in the city, we were fortunate enough to find a boutique hotel The Mayfair Townhouse  (left) just steps off Piccadilly that provided a welcome respite from the crowds. An additional bonus was that it backed up to Shepherd Market––a warren of two business-lined squares dating to 1735 housing pubs, shopping and restaurants in an atmosphere still in touch with the Nineteenth Century.
    Early mornings found us ducking in for coffee at one of the half dozen caffeine shops sprinkled among its intimate side streets, or, later in the day, for a pint of cask ale at the historic Ye Grapes pub (right).

One frigid evening (when walking too far seemed as insensible as cargo shorts), we were lucky enough to score a table at Kitty Fisher's, a Dickensian, unpretentious bistro (below), holding the distinction of being the only Michelin-starred restaurant to be named after a famous 18th century prostitute, once painted by Joshua Reynolds (below).
    It was one of the toughest tickets in town when it opened ten years ago, but is now easier to book (at least on weeknights), and retains the feel of a local foodie favorite that hasn't been spoiled by the star-chasing crowd.  The food can best be described as English-updated. As with Noble Rot (which is around the corner), and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, the chefs here use basic idioms of British cooking and local ingredients as their muse, but are also adept at going off the English estate entirely, as when they grill broccoli with smoked chilies and garlic, or incorporate Caerphilly cheese into a pumpkin risotto.
    The menu is as snug as the subterranean dining room, with seven starters and four mains sharing space with a few veggies and desserts. We began with a slab of decadent chicken liver parfait with Mandarin compote, and a plate of soused mackerel squares topped with blood oranges, which balanced the fish against just the right amount of sweet-sour, and tasted as good as it looked. More traditionally, a ramekin of potted crab came hid under a lid of sweet, congealed butter, while the Welsh rarebit was as tangy, soothing and  satisfying as this dish can get.                
    Main courses skewed more modern: Tamworth pork chop with burnt pear and crispy pig's ear, the aforementioned textbook-tender risotto, and Brisham hake atop a pool of vivid lobster sauce, accented by a smoked ratte potato and saffron aïoli. The only dish that didn't impress was a celeriac soup so thick you could stand a spoon in it. Desserts––apple and almond tart, and a candy bar-sized rectangle of solid ganache with salted caramel ice cream––were simple and flawless.
    No pirouettes are being done on the plates here, just thoughtful bistro cooking served in a home-like Victorian parlor, tucked into a charming,  anachronistic neighborhood.
    The quaintness of Shepherd Market gave way to Edwardian luxuriousness the next day, as we strolled into Claridge's Restaurant for an opulent Sunday roast lunch. These weekend repasts are in high demand with the smart set, so we booked far in advance, which still resulted in us being consigned to the worst table in the house, within feet of the hostess stand, without a decent view of the room. Our perturbations were quickly assuaged by the friendly staff and a well-priced bottle of claret. Still, the majesty of the art deco room, bathed in golden light with sconces and gilded mirrors dripping with history, was hard to appreciate from our sideline nook, so instead we concentrated on ordering.
    Prices are fixed (£85 for two courses, £100 for three), and selections are limited to five starters, five mains and three desserts. Starters––smoked salmon, fried fish cakes––were simple but beautifully done. Once my main event arrived, however, it was a different story entirely. My much-vaunted English beef––two slabs of very rare and lean-to-a-fault Herefordshire sirloin––easily defeated my over-matched knife and jaws. The not-exactly-popping fresh Yorkshire popover didn't help matters. Better by far were my wife's Cornish lamb medallions and a succulent hunk of grilled halibut with a creamy sauce Nantais that needed no apologies.
   The sin of my Sunday roast was atoned for by the show-stopping desserts, including a plate-sized dome of chocolate shingles hiding a chocolate brownie whose thin cacao roof dissolved under streams of hot chocolate sauce;  a refreshing baked lemon meringue tart, and what has to be England's definitive sticky toffee pudding.    
    Of course, even in Great Britain, man does not live by Anglo-Saxon cuisine alone, and sometimes a change of pace is needed. For that we headed to  Cipriani to see how this sleek link in the expanding Italian chain is faring. (Packed all the time, it appears.) Being a regular at the Las Vegas outpost helped us secure a table, and once seated, we were treated to a parade of Mayfair's finest: a well-heeled international crowd hungry for its northern Italian specialties.
    If you're familiar with the Cipriani blueprint, you know the drill: Bellinis to start, then carpaccio (below), some smoked salmon, a pasta or two, followed by a protein, and then some gelato alongside a prodigal slice of vanilla meringue cake––all of it served to hungry patrons in comfy leather chairs congenially sitting at slightly lower-than-average tables.
   Since the Cipriani family keeps it simple, we did the same, opting for the smoked salmon;  a comforting eggplant Parmigiana; faultless cacio e pepe; and a Venetian dish rarely found in America: seppie in tecia,  slices of tender cuttlefish stewed in its own ink. Black squid ribbons may not win any photogenic awards, but they are much beloved by gastronomes for their pure dense seafood intensity.
    Being something of a Cipriani veteran,  I can attest that this branch is as faithful to the canon that made the brand famous. For dessert, everyone seems to follow the Cipriani script and get that vanilla cake, as the staff makes quite a show of parading the entire drum-sized structure around the premises, just to taunt your appetite and add to the conviviality.
    Old school or new, cacophonous Italian or sedate Sunday lunch, there is much to recommend in gastronomic London these days. The seafood is nonpareil, chefs take great pride in their produce, and the cooking palette has expanded into a cornucopia of choices. Most strikingly, as English tastes have blossomed, the typical British reserve seems to have melted away. The place is now so friendly, sometimes you may think you're in Italy.

 

    When she’d finished, Katie felt proud of the work, with little of the anger over the subject matter she’d had when she began, but also knowing that her article would cause enormous damage to an already wounded Church. She recalled reading a book in college by Gary Wills called Bare, Ruined Choirs, the title from the Shakespeare poem,  in which Wills warned that the much-needed social change within the Church in the post-Vatican II era was the very thing that might serve to destroy it. Katie felt her story would root out much that was wrong and cause a further falling away of those who still supported it.

         As always when her stories were about to appear, Katie drove up to David’s house to deliver pre-publication copies of McClure’s. He made her dinner of rigatoni with eggplant and tomato and opened a good bottle of Barolo.

         “Y’know, David, I really think this article will do a lot of good,” she said. “But I just don’t want to see all the good priests who are doing God’s work—missionaries, helping the poor and the immigrants and the sick people, y’know, the Mother Teresas—I don’t want to see them get damned along with the wicked ones.”

         “You’ve got another moral dilemma on your hands,” said David.

         “I know. Honestly, it’s not the first time I’ve felt this way. I’ve gone after a lot of institutions in my stories, and some were shut down by them. It was never my intent to destroy the Church, just to expose the rot inside it.”

         David smiled and said, “Katie, not even you, the Supergirl of 21^st Century muckraking, is going to put the Catholic Church out of business. You’ve ruffled its feathers, but I really think a lot of good will come out of this. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler didn’t fold after Ralph Nader proved they made unsafe cars. And NYPD will never completely stamp out the Mafia. Heads will roll, for sure, but I have to hope the ones that replace them will be better men and women who want to do what’s right. As it is, people are leaving the Church because they think it’s hundreds of years out of date.”

         David changed the subject.

         “Hey, have you heard from Joseph Evangelista?”

         “I have. I made him lunch last week. He’s doing well, got a job teaching Spanish at Fordham Prep.”

         “And I assume he’s proud of what you’ve done.”

         “He is, and I reminded him I never could have done it if he hadn’t brought me the idea in the first place.”

         David changed the subject again.

         “So, now that it looks like nobody else wants us dead, what’ll we do next?”

         It sounded like David was suggesting a mutual vacation, but he knew Katie was not going to be swayed into such an arrangement.

         “Well, this was our fourth project together,” she said, “and we seem bound to protect each other’s backs, so I’m assuming we’ll be working together again.”

         “Soon?”

         “I’m not even thinking beyond the publication date of this next article, about three weeks from now. I’ll get through the publicity, then I’ll take some time off.”

         The face of the lawyer guy popped into David’s head. One of these days Katie was going to have to make a decision about that relationship. If they got married, Katie’s days of gallivanting around the world with David were probably over. She’d have a couple of kids, and that would be that.

         David was often tempted to try to make Katie feel sorry for him, living up the river alone, no woman in his life, no friends nearby, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good and just make him sound like he was whining.

         They finished dinner, then paged again and again through the magazine, which included photos of the two of them.

         Katie looked at her watch and said, “Oh, Jeez, it’s nine o’clock, and they said there might be freezing rain tonight. I better get home ahead of it.”

         “What, no espresso? I thought you loved my espresso.”

         “I do love your espresso, but recently coffee’s been keeping me awake, and if I need anything right now it’s a lot of sleep.”

         David just nodded and helped Katie on with her coat. It was still a cold, crisp night with no signs of rain.

         “You be careful driving,” he said as she got behind the wheel of the Fiat. “It can get icy out there and the Taconic isn’t well lighted.”

         Katie said, “C’mere, you big lug,” and pulled David close to her to give him a loud kiss on the cheek.  “Okay, gotta go, Bye!”

         Once again Katie was heading out of David’s life, at least till the next time they worked together. Maybe they’d have dinner before that.

          He saw her waving her hand and she beeped her horn, and Katie watched David in her rear view mirror, saying to herself, “I sure wish he’d get a woman in his life.”

         David was thinking pretty much the same thing.

 

  THE END

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

         Articles like Katie Cavuto’s in the years to follow did indeed effect changes in the Catholic Church’s response to sexual predation in its ranks.

 

• In 2002 an Irish- British fictional movie came out called The Magdalene Sisters that showed the horrors of what went inside the institution. A former Magdalene inmate named Mary-Jo McDonagh told the director that the reality of the Magdalene Asylums was actually much worse than depicted in the film.

 

• In 2003 the Boston Globe’s investigative “Spotlight” team won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series of articles that exposed child sex abuse by priests in the Boston area, resulting in indictments against five Catholic priests. The paper accused Archbishop Francis Law of having extensive knowledge of sexual abuse committed by dozens of priests in the archdiocese a massive. He resigned his position, and two years later Pope John Paul II appointed Law as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, a position from which he resigned in 2011. Law  (below) died on December 20, 2017, at the age of 86.

• Law’s successor as Archbishop of Boston, Sean O’Malley, was forced to put the Boston residence up for sale in order to pay an $85 million settlement to compensate hundreds of victims of sexual abuse by members of the clergy.

 

• In 2002 the Diocese of Tucson, Arizona, became the first to disclose the names of religious accused of sexual abuse within the diocese. By 2018 thirty-five dioceses had done the same.

 

• In 2005 the building that housed The Magdalene Laundry in Dublin burned down, and the site, now valuable real estate, was put up for sale. A Tokyo hotel chain bid for the lot, but in 2018 the city council revoked the idea of selling the property, with the thought of someday building a memorial museum on the site dedicated to the survivors of institutional abuse.

 

• In 2011, because of allegations against its members, the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers declared bankruptcy, and its head, Brother Philip Pinto  (left) told the Conference of Religious of Ireland that the order’s “future was uncertain.” In 2013 the North American province paid $16.5 million to 400 victims of child sexual abuse across the US, and agreed to enforce a zero-tolerance policy for brothers accused of abuse.  Bro. Hugh O’Neill, Province Leader, wrote to one victim, “We are genuinely sorry and offer a sincere apology to all those who have been directly or indirectly caused to suffer as a result of the deplorable actions of these Brothers. Similarly, we are gravely disappointed in the actions taken by some of our leadership in failing to respond appropriately to allegations against our Brothers.”

 

• In 2015 the movie Spotlight, based on the Globe’s investigation, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

 

• In August 2018 the Pennsylvania District Attorney’s office issued a report that identified more than 1,000 victims abused over a period of 70 year by more than 300 priests in six of the state’s eight dioceses. The report catalogued instances of a priest who raped a young girl in the hospital after she had her tonsils out; another who tied up his victim and beat her with leather straps; and a priest allowed to stay in ministry after impregnating a young girl then arranging for her to have an abortion.

 

 

•  In October 2018 Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl (left) after he became entangled in two major sexual abuse and cover-up scandals. Wuerl resigned after replacing Archbishop Theodore McCarrick (right), who himself was forced by Pope Francis to resign over allegations he sexually abused at least two minors and adult seminarians.

 

• In December 2018, Attorney General Lisa Madigan (left) accused the Catholic Church in Illinois of withholding the names of at least 500 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors. “The number of allegations above what was already public is shocking,” said Ms. Madigan, who concluded that the Illinois dioceses were incapable of investigating themselves and “will not resolve the clergy sexual abuse crisis on their own.”

 

• In 2019 the Society of Jesus issued 50 names of priests accused of a history of sexual abuse who served in Jesuit schools in the Northeastern United States. “At the heart of this crisis is the painful, sinful and illegal harm done to children by those whom they should have been able to trust,” the Very Rev. John J. Cecero (right), the provincial for the Jesuits in the Northeast, said. “We did not know any best practices to handle these violations many decades ago and regrettably made mistakes along the way.”

 

•  Richard Sipe, who'd documented sexual abuse among the clergy,  died on August 8, 2018 of multiple organ failure in La Jolla, California at the age of 85. He, too, was featured in the movie “Spotlight.”

 

 

•  In February 2019 Pope Francis publicly acknowledged the scandal of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns, saying some of its religious sisters had been reduced to “sexual slavery” at the hands of priests, adding, “Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun.”