Crossroads Podcast: Catholic Issues Looming Over That Patrick Clancy Interview
Anyone looking for religious content in the tragic story of Patrick Clancy and his former wife Lindsay, who strangled their three children to death, can simply look at a timeline of his life.
People magazine rounded up the basics for a short Sept. 18 profile. Here is part of that story:
Patrick grew up in Massachusetts in a large Catholic family, as he told The New Yorker. …
Patrick went on to attend a Jesuit boys’ school before graduating from Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., with a degree in business. After graduating, he moved to Boston and started working at a telecommunications company.
While working there in the summer of 2013, he met Lindsay, who was attending nursing school at MGH Institute of Health Professionals and living with one of his cousins. Patrick later took Lindsay on a date to fly kites, and he introduced her to his family shortly after. They married three years later in December 2016.
However, the religion angle stayed in the background during Patrick Clancy’s high-profile interview with Ross Douthat on “60 Minutes,” which was the former New York Times columnist’s first on-air work for one of the cornerstone programs of CBS News. The coverage surrounding that exclusive interview served as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast.
In its hard-news report about the Clancy interview, the Times offered this material that hinted at spiritual elements in the drama.
Mr. Clancy dreams about his children “all the time,” he told Ross Douthat on the program “60 Minutes.” Cora was 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, when they died.
In one dream, Mr. Clancy said, “I’m in the kitchen at the house, and Cora walks in. And I just look at her and I — it was, like, I basically just said, ‘Where have you been?’ And she comes up to me and gives me a big hug.”
Shortly after the deaths of the three children, Mr. Clancy moved to New York City. On the day that Callan would have turned 1, he lit a candle at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in his son’s honor. Then he sobbed on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Clancy, 38, said in the interview, which was his first since Ms. Clancy’s murder trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4.
Clancy has said that his move to New York City was, in part, an effort to get lost in the throngs of its 8.5-million population, instead of remaining in or near the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. He needed to get away from the scene of the crime, in a close community where so many people knew him. The stunned father wanted a place to grieve, to get help and, if possible, to start a long, seemingly impossible, road to personal peace. Hold that thought, because I will come back to it.
The transcript of the “60 Minutes" script, along with a longer version of the interview (featured at the top of this post), added another exchange with obvious religious overtones, when dealing with such a hellish event in the life of a Catholic family.
Ross Douthat: Did you ask Lindsay why she did it?
Patrick Clancy: I asked her if she remembered it.
Ross Douthat: And what did she say?
Patrick Clancy: She said it was like a dream. And -- she remembered it much in the way you would remember a dream after waking up.
Ross Douthat: Do you feel like you failed in some way in this period or do you feel like you did the best you could?
Patrick Clancy: I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time. And I live with the outcome. I live with it every day.
Ross Douthat: Has she ever asked for your forgiveness?
Patrick Clancy: No. But I gave it to her.
Clancy made it clear, in the Douthat interview, that his convictions about his former wife’s state of mind remain the same — that she had struggled for months while fighting waves of depression and bizarre, intrusive thoughts and, perhaps, visions.
The Times noted that: “On the night of the killings, she later said, she heard a voice commanding her to kill the children and herself.” And there was this, as well:
Mr. Clancy’s decision to speak out about his experience — and against the damaging public discourse surrounding the case — followed earlier attempts to temper the tone of the reaction. A few days after the killings in January 2023, as public condemnation of Ms. Clancy reached a fever pitch, Mr. Clancy made his first public statement, urging forgiveness.
“I want to ask all of you that you find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have,” he wrote at the time. “The real Lindsay was generously loving and caring towards everyone.”
“Crossroads” host Todd Wilken asked if Douthat’s open, traditional Catholic faith may have played a role in Clancy choosing to do this high-profile interview.
That is not an out-of-bounds question. I think it is likely that this was the case, based on Douthat’s career in print and, in recent years, long-form podcast interviews. I have, during the past 20 years, had several conversations with Douthat about issues shaping religion-news coverage, starting when he lived near my Capitol Hill office at the Washington Journalism Center.
This interview was, on one level, one Catholic dad interviewing another Catholic dad who has been through hell. But if Catholicism was part of this story, why wasn’t the faith angle discussed in the “60 Minutes” interview?
In the podcast, I offered two reasons — based on my own experiences in journalism — why the “religion ghost” (to use a crucial GetReligion.org term) was not openly discussed on the air. Douthat and his producers may have agreed to this in the ground rules for the interview.
First of all, Clancy moved to New York City in an attempt to find some degree of privacy. This has become even more important because of the tsunami of acidic online commentary — much of it aimed at him — before, after and during his former wife’s trial.
To be blunt: The last thing Clancy needed to do was talk about his new Catholic parish or name the Catholic priest or priests who have been helping him.
That’s the practical, personal, reason. But there may have been a legal reason to avoid Catholic subjects on the air. There is a good chance that, after the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, there will be another trial.
One extremely tense moment during the trial, when the judge apparently considered declaring a mistrial, focused on questions focusing on Catholic doctrines about suicide and murder. Here is a crucial Times story about this: “References to ‘Mortal Sin’ Anger Judge and Defense in Clancy Trial.”
Let’s walk through this.
Religion became a point of contention … in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother charged with murder in the strangling deaths of her three young children.
For the second time since the trial opened last month, a reference to “mortal sin,” a concept that is part of the Catholic faith, incensed the judge, who sternly instructed jurors to disregard any references to it.
Here is some background on this tense moment in the courtroom:
Kirk Heilbrun, a psychologist and witness for the prosecution who evaluated Ms. Clancy after the killings, said in his testimony that she had reported saying “Go to God” as she strangled her children.
“When I asked her about that, when I said, ‘Isn’t suicide a mortal sin?’” he testified before being cut off by an objection from Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington.
The judge, William Sullivan, quickly sent the jury out of the room.
Mr. Reddington then asked him to grant a mistrial because, he said, the prosecution’s witness had made improper references to religion. “This is just over the top,” he said.
Jennifer Sprague, a prosecutor, said she had not asked Dr. Heilbrun for “any testimony about Catholicism or religion.”
Judge Sullivan did not grant a mistrial. But when the jury members returned, his words to them were gruff. Ms. Clancy’s religion “is absolutely an inappropriate area of testimony,” he said. “It is to be stricken. It is not to be considered.”
This clash was linked to an earlier moment in the trial, involving Lindsay Clancy’s former mother-in-law, Susan Clancy.
After a series of questions that referenced both women’s involvement with the Catholic Church, Shanan Buckingham, another prosecutor, asked: “So you’re aware that murder is considered a mortal sin?”
What is a “mortal sin”? Here is some background material from the Catholic Answers website, with notations from the Catholic Catechism:
A mortal sin is one that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) puts it (1874). That’s what makes it “mortal,” or deadly: it cuts us off from God forever, unless it is “redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness” (CCC 1861).
If there is another trial, Patrick Clancy will be on the witness stand once again. If all discussions of Catholic doctrine were declared out of bounds in the first trial, to the degree that the judge considered declaring a mistrial, I think it’s likely that Clancy’s legal team decided he should avoid discussions of openly Catholic topics.
But watch the interview, or read the transcript. What do you think? Do you sense a “religion ghost” in between the lines of the on-air conversations between Douthat and Clancy?