The Accidental Pope (49 page)

“We'll be back in a few hours, probably midafternoon,” Motupu called to the others cheerfully. “While we're away you can visit with the people that keep this mission going. Sister Winnie will show you around and introduce you to the rest.”

With that Motupu, Pope Peter, and Monsignor Shanahan took seats in the old mission sedan and were driven to the airport.

37

VIRUS

The sleek aircraft was waiting and the pilot greeted them with the news that, as requested, they were cleared into Ugandan airspace for a landing at Entebbe.

Sitting with Motupu and Shanahan in the front compartment, Bill Kelly could not stifle a broad, victorious smile. “Now I feel as though I am accomplishing something important for the first time since I took on this job. We're going to do whatever it takes to change things here.”

“Bill, you haven't seen the worst,” Motupu replied. “But I'm feeling vindicated in getting you here by the way you are moving in on the situation. All I can say is that God answered my position at the conclave. I knew we had to make a big change in Church procedure. Sometimes, like now, I really believe in divine intervention.”

Once airborne, Bill Kelly stared out the window at the countryside below. The ground cover ranged from green jungle to sere brown, and when the plane reached a cruising altitude of twenty thousand feet and leveled off, central Africa in all its contrasts and hues stretched out below them. Half an hour after takeoff the pilot announced that directly ahead of them lay the western shore of Lake Victoria. They could see its waters below them as they proceeded north toward Entebbe.

“You know,” Bill mused, “up here, soaring above God's beautiful earth, getting ready to put down in the middle of a starving, sick, and quarreling humanity, I can sympathize with God. He answers our selfish idiotic prayers, descending from his beautiful domain high above to straighten out the mess we humans make of the astonishing earth he gave us.”

“An apt observation, Your Holiness,” Motupu agreed. “I was thinking the same thing myself. And wait till you see the contrast between what we look down on from up here and what we find when we touch down into the real world.”

The words came down from the cockpit. “We are starting our approach to Entebbe Airport. Seat belts please. We should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

“I have an arrangement with customs here,” Motupu said. “Whenever someone from our mission comes in they are escorted with their medical supplies through official barriers and on to our transportation, such as it is.”

“Do they know the pope is on this plane?” Shanahan asked.

“I told the pilot to so notify ground control,” Motupu replied. “We'll soon find out how much, and if, our missionary work is appreciated in Uganda.”

The squeal of tires on tarmac signaled they had landed. The airplane drew up to the terminal and the engines shut down. The copilot came out of the flight deck, walked past the pope to the door, which he opened, and pushed down the steps reaching to the ramp. Motupu led the way, followed by Monsignor Shanahan and finally Pope Peter. The few ground attendants waited, staring up at the door for a popelike figure to emerge. Bill Kelly was wearing black slacks and a white shirt with a silver cross around his neck. An official greeted Moputu and was introduced to Shanahan and then to His Holiness, who shook his hand.

“I'm sorry to arrive in your country in informal dress, but this trip is apparently going to require some agility on my part,” the pope apologized.

“Your Holiness.” The airport attendant was apparently a Catholic. “Welcome to Uganda. Had we known you were coming there would be a crowd to greet you.”

“We weren't certain ourselves.”

“Will you permit our Land Rover to pick us up out here?” Motupu asked.

“Certainly, Your Eminence.” He muttered to a man behind him, who immediately ran toward the terminal.

“You are going out to Rakai, Your Eminence?”

“His Holiness wants to see for himself what our mission is doing.”

The official shot a dubious look at the pope. “Maybe it is best not to go out to Rakai, Your Holiness. Many people are sick out here. Even I don't go.”

“I'll advise you about it when I get back,” the pope replied with a grin.

“Dr. Mainovic is out there now,” the airport officer added.

The pope cast a questioning look at Motupu, who quickly replied, “Dr. Marija Mainovic is a Serb woman, a doctor from Yugoslavia. She is part of a group of medical professionals and a strong Eastern Orthodox Church member, personally close to the patriarch. When the Serb president began his ethnic cleansing policy, she left her nation and has been active out here ever since. Two American Catholic Relief medical personnel trying to help our effort have died recently.”

The Land Rover came around the corner of the terminal building and stopped in front of Motupu. “In we go.” He opened the back door for the pope, who climbed in, followed by Tim Shanahan and finally Motupu, pulling the door shut behind him. They all looked more like neatly attired tourists than high-ranking clerics.

For twenty minutes the Land Rover proceeded along a wide paved highway with the bush cut back on either side over a hundred meters. In some places the view from the road was half a mile of flatland. As they turned west off the main road, Lake Victoria, to the east, quickly faded from view to their rear. Now the bush closed in on the secondary road. They pushed northeast away from the main highway and the lake.

“Between the airport and the capital city of Kampala, whoever ran the government made sure there was no place for ambush sites along the main road,” Motupu explained.

“But now, out in the bush?” Tim asked.

“No important traffic. Only us missionaries,” Motupu answered wryly.

It was over an hour from the airport to Rakai, and when they arrived in the middle of a dirt square they heard the sound of children singing. “We'll visit the school after we've checked in with Sister Kaitlin,” Motupu said as they stepped out of the Land Rover.

Moments later a tired-looking young woman wearing a scarf over her head and a nondescript shirt and long skirt appeared, carrying a radio telephone. She came up to the three visitors. “Your Eminence,” she greeted Motupu and then stared at the pope for a few moments. Suddenly, “Your Holiness!” She started to kneel. “I didn't believe Dr. Mainovic when she said you would be here.” The pope reached out for her hand and held her up.

“Sister Kaitlin, please. If anybody should be bowing it is I. What you and International Concern are doing here is indeed saintly. I will tell my dearest and oldest friend, Cardinal Comiskey, that I had the privilege of seeing your work firsthand.”

“The cardinal is indeed a great man, Your Holiness. He keeps us going here.”

“I will now see it all and personally report to him.”

A worried Cardinal Motupu interrupted. “Sister Kaitlin, what's this about Dr. Marija Mainovic saying the Holy Father himself was on the way out here?”

“About an hour ago she got a call on her radio phone that he was on the way. None of us believed her.”

Recognizing Motupu's concern, the pope and Tim Shanahan asked almost as one, “Who is this doctor with such a good intelligence net?”

“She's close to the patriarch,” Sister Kaitlin explained. “She's one of his persuasion, of course, a rabid Serb Russian Orthodox. I wouldn't put it past her to kill an American as her president has urged and her patriarch has tacitly endorsed by saying nothing. Even down here we know what the Serbs did to the Muslim Kosovars, but this doctor only says it is all American propaganda. She is a doctor and it is good to have one here for a few days every month, but she is … possessed.” The nun crossed herself nervously. “You can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes.” Sister Kaitlin shuddered. “It is a good thing we are not American or even NATO European. Dr. Mainovic blames the bomb destruction in her country on them. But she has given us some good medical help, not that there is much that anyone can do,” the sister concluded helplessly.

“The
avviso
warned that the patriarch and his Serb and Russian followers would tacitly advocate a terror campaign against Americans to repay Western military action in the Balkans,” the pope murmured to Tim. Then, to Sister Kaitlin, “May I visit your school and then the early medical treatment center?”

The nun looked fearfully at Motupu. “Your Eminence, surely we can't let the Holy Father expose himself to the virus.” She turned to the pope. “Your Holiness, every one of the hundred children in the school has at least one parent dead of the virus, and more than a few are orphaned. They themselves die almost as fast as they are replaced by refugees coming in from the famine outside.”

“Is there some way we can slow this thing down?” the pope asked.

The sister looked at Motupu, who shrugged. “Despite our teachings we cannot get the concept of abstinence across to them. They have endless children. Perhaps we could still have slowed the outbreak back in the late 1990s if we could have said, ‘Go ahead and fulfill your natural functions, but if you want to avoid dying of the virus and having infected children, at least learn some good birth control information.' Needless to say, when I suggest such a thing, the notion is summarily rejected in Rome. And the UN people agree that things are terrible but they don't give us food or medicine. NGOs are not much help either.”

“Nongovernmental organizations,” Shanahan explained.

“Yes,” the sister sniffed. “They are trying to help, but they think giving everyone a year's supply of condoms is the only answer.”

“Let's go into the school,” the pope suggested.

He intercepted the worried glance from Sister Kaitlin to Motupu. The cardinal stood firm. “Sister Kaitlin, unless the Holy Father sees for himself what is happening here, he will not understand our danger. We are, after all, a microcosm of the African macrocosm.” Then, to the pope, “Come on into the school, Bill.” Moputu led him and Shanahan into a rough wood-and-thatch building, with children playing in the yard outside.

Inside the “school” the pope caught his breath at the ravages of the viruses in the children. It was obvious they had not caught the virus from sexual contact but had inherited it from their parents. All suffered from malnutrition because of the food shortages. And a combination of virus and starvation diets had turned them into bug-eyed stick people with swollen bellies.

“These are the innocents, victims of the several viruses afflicting us. We get enough food to provide a minimum daily survival ration. If it wasn't for the virus we could probably keep most of them alive until the food situation improves.”

“Do you mean to say that every one of these pathetic specimens is … has AIDS?”

“Or other viruses we haven't isolated yet, Your Holiness,” Sister Kaitlin replied.

The pope walked among the listless children and reached another nun at a table facing the class. “Sister, how long have you been here?”

“Your Holiness, I flew in from Dublin three weeks ago to replace Sister Martha.”

“Aren't you afraid of becoming infected?”

“I am careful not to suffer superficial cuts.”

The pope let out a sigh and walked among the apathetic children. They stared at him with wide eyes from sallow faces. At the back of the room he watched as a sister went on teaching lessons.

“Gus, aren't there any Africans beside yourself to help these children?”

“They are orphans or have only one parent—sick, of course.”

“And is it like this in many parts of Africa?”

“I could also arrange for you to see the starvation and brutality against Christians by the Islamic extremists in southern Sudan, where for several years international rescue agencies have tried to help, but the civil war keeps going on and food distributed goes only to the soldiers or those who are willing or forced to renounce Christianity.”

The pope shook his head in disbelief. “Regarding this AIDS crisis,” the pope said. “Why is it? What can be done?”

“We are doing what we can. In the case of these exposed children and those down with the virus, we simply cannot get the medicine that relieves the symptoms. AZT and the other ingredients of the AIDS cocktails help a little. But we don't always know which virus to treat. Some new and more powerful strain of virus, one we have never seen before, turns up every month.”

“Well, we can't blame this on the Russian Orthodox Church,” the pope declared. “It cannot be the fault of their church that AIDS is killing this continent.”

“No. But while we are doing our best to help, the patriarch is spending his resources building up followers in the diamond mining areas and oil locations. He is backed by his civil government, Bill—secretly, of course—but making use of resources we do not have, like Russian government incentives to influence a pro-tem national leader.”

“How does that work?” the pope asked.

“You will see it in the areas where the diamonds are found. Our people in the early part of this new millennium are being converted to the Russian Church. And the Church preaches birth control and safe sex, not abstinence, which is beyond an African's comprehension. It's not the people that they are concerned about, but the land and our rich minerals.” Gus hit the palm of his left hand with his right fist.

At that moment a severe-looking middle-aged woman, her blond hair pulled back tightly and clasped behind her head, dressed in a denim skirt, dark cotton blouse, and bootlike shoes, entered the schoolroom. In one hand she carried a black satchel. She gave the pope an irreverent glance.

Motupu said a few words to her. “I am Cardinal Motupu.” He gestured toward the pope. “This is—”

“Yes,” the woman interrupted harshly. “Mr. Kelly of America and the Vatican. The so-called spiritual force behind the destruction of my country. What wreckage do you plan for Africa?”