The Assassini (20 page)

The history of the Church had always been a cluttered tapestry, full of screaming faces and flayed flesh, soaked in the gore of unbridled ambition and greed and corruption, scheming and plotting and armies on the march. It had always been necessary to balance the worldliness, the evil, and the power, against the goodness, the selflessness, the faith and the hope it held out to man, the hope and promise that made an otherwise intolerable existence somehow endurable. No matter whom the Church was torturing and killing at a given moment, it was men who were doing it, men and not the faith for which the Church stood. Men were always good and bad, but the faith in the idea that Christ had died for our sins, that man in his weakness and frailty was redeemed eternally in Christ—the message of faith always tipped the scale. The good was always greater, that was what they taught us, but sometimes the issue was in doubt. More often than not, it seemed to me.

“Until the twenty-seventh of October in the year 312,” Sandanato was saying, “it was a relatively simple, if not altogether pleasant business, being a Christian. You might be fed to a lion, or spend your life bent double shackled wrist to ankle, a pack of Roman toughs might
beat you to death in an alley for the sheer sport of it, or you might find yourself crucified at the side of a Roman road to serve as an object lesson, but you certainly knew how things stood between you and the rest of the world. Wealth, power, and pleasure were evil … and poverty, faith in God, and the promise of salvation were what your existence consisted of.” This might be Sandanato’s idea of a midnight bull session, but I had to admit it carried me back. I felt strangely comfortable with it, there was no point in denying it. It was making me begin thinking like a Catholic again.

27 October 312.

Constantine, a German, thirty-one years old, fluent in six languages, a pagan warrior-king who ruled the West from Scotland to the Black Sea, was preparing for a crucial battle at one of Rome’s great bridges, the Milvian. As dusk came, knowing that the morning would bring the ferocity of battle, Constantine had a vision … and the world ever after was an utterly different place. In the sky, reddish-gold in the glow of the setting sun, he saw the cross of Jesus and he heard a voice, just as Paul had heard it on the road to Damascus. “In this sign you will conquer.” In the morning he joined the battle with his soldiers’ shields and their horses’ heads painted with the sign of the cross. And the battle was won. Rome was his and he had no doubt as to why. The power of Jesus had carried him to victory.

28 October 312.

Still drenched in sweat, spattered with blood, and caked with the muck of battle, he demanded to be taken to the Trastevere section of Rome, where a terrified little brown man was brought before him. Miltiades, the pope. Miltiades had spent his life in hiding, ever fearful of capture and the inevitable execution, and he feared the worst. He was so unlearned that he required a translator to understand Constantine’s perfect court Latin. He trembled before the tall, blond Teuton. But the message was clear. He nearly fainted as he listened.

From now on everything would be different, new, better. Rome would be Christian. The emperor would wear a nail from Christ’s crucifixion in his crown, another
would be turned into a bit for his horse so it would always be with him in battle.

The next day Constantine and his family rode with Miltiades and his first priest, Silvester, past the stadium of Caligula and the temples of Apollo and Cybele to the cemetery atop Vatican Hill, where Constantine knelt in prayer over the bones of Peter and Paul. As the party strolled the cemetery grounds, the emperor sketched out his plans: a basilica in the name of Peter would be built here, over his remains, and Paul’s bones would be removed to that place on the road to Ostia, where he had been killed, where another basilica would be built. But that wasn’t all. Constantine was now a man with a mission. The party went to the Lateran Hill, which was covered by the palaces of the ancient Roman family of Laterani. Constantine flung open the gates: “Henceforth, this is the House of Miltiades and of every successor of the blessed apostle, Peter.”

Fifteen months later Miltiades was dead and Silvester was pope, crowned by Constantine. Silvester, the first truly secular pope, grasped, with an acuity far beyond that of Miltiades, the new and undeniable future of the Church. It was Silvester who forged the bond between Church and empire, thereby guaranteeing the first worldwide Church carried forth along those straight Roman roads to every corner of the vast domain. It was Silvester who heard Constantine’s confession. It was Silvester who saw that the triumph of Christ need not wait for the Second Coming. Jesus Christ could reign with the power of Rome throughout the world, governed through the offices of Peter’s successors. The Church seemed unlimited in its scope.

“For three centuries we had barely existed in the world,” Sandanato said, “hunted and martyred and in hiding. Now Silvester had the great chance to make the Church
of the world
. Jesus had spoken to Constantine, converted him, and Constantine was the means of converting the rest of the world. Spiritualism was now wedded for good to wealth and pomp and force. With Constantine behind him, Silvester could now harken back to what Jesus had once said to Peter at Mount
Hermon.” Sandanato stopped, looked at me, as if waiting for my Catholic memory to supply the quotation. Somehow, from the subconscious depths, it did.

“ ‘I give unto you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven,’ ” I recited. “ ‘Whatever you allow on earth will be whatever Heaven allows. Whatever you forbid on earth will be whatever Heaven forbids.’ ”

“Exactly,” Sandanato said. “For the first time in history the successor to Peter had some firepower anyone could understand. And of course he, along with his Church, fell prey to it. More than ever, in the centuries to come, violence haunted us, has never left us in peace.…

“It’s the price of Constantine,” Sandanato was saying. “Once we accepted the secular power, we had to pay the secular price. With the power came the power seekers, the challengers, those who would have stripped us of our military alliances and the vast wealth at our disposal. Our history is a history of the threats made against us, the compromises we’ve had to make. But, until now, Mr. Driskill, we’ve always known who our enemies are. Even when the challenge was most drastic, we knew what was happening. You’ll of course remember that ungodly hot August of 1870 …”

As it happened, I remembered it well, as many a seminarian was bound to. It was when the secular world finally turned against the Church. But what occurred that long, agonizing summer a bit over a century ago had really begun in 1823 and stretched twenty-three years through the pontificates of Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI: twenty-three years of papal oppression and dictatorship in the city of Rome and throughout the Papal States, where the pope-kings reigned. Nearly a quarter of a million citizens had been put to death, or sentenced to life imprisonment, or exiled for committing political offenses—that is, for incurring the displeasure of the Church. Books were censored, people were forbidden to congregate in groups larger than three, travel was strictly curtailed, and tribunals were in session everywhere to sit in severest judgment on the accused. The trials were
conducted entirely in Latin; consequently, rare was the man who understood of what he had been accused. Justice ceased to exist under these popes, and was replaced by violent caprice, the restoration by Leo XII of the Inquisition and its inhuman tortures, and popes who would not listen to the pleas of the people they ruled. Every town square was decorated with a permanent gallows, always in readiness to receive those who ran afoul of the Church.

Secret societies proliferated. Assassinations became a way of life. And when the people of Bologna, for example, revolted, they were brutally suppressed. Austrian troops seemed always to be responding to a pope’s call, crossing the borders of the Papal States to practice the arts of war on the rebellious citizenry. But the tide of history was running against the old ways, and in 1843 the people—the
mob
, in the eyes of the Church—took over the city of Rome.

Pius IX was elected pope in 1846 and the world he inherited was a desperate one, at least as viewed from the papal palace. Garibaldi and Mazzini were in full cry and, not long after ascending to the Throne of Peter, Pius fled Rome by night in the open carriage of the Bavarian minister, didn’t stop until he got to Naples, then scurried from one hiding place to another as the Romans proclaimed a republic, symbolically dispensed with the pope, murdered clergy, and despoiled the churches. He was finally able to return to Rome four years later, when the French Army took the city and Mazzini fled to Switzerland and Garibaldi returned to the mountains. Pius IX was back, it was true, supported by the might of a foreign power, but the fact was—and Pius knew it—that the handwriting on the wall of the Lateran Palace was finally indelible.

Pius IX had begun his reign on a wave of popularity and had responded by trying to give his people what they wanted. He expelled the Jesuits, gave the okay for publication of a popular newspaper, razed the ghetto, saw to the first use of a railway in the Papal States: he proclaimed a civil constitution—all in an effort to undo the evils of the past quarter century. But it came to nothing.
History, like a runaway coach and six, ran him down. The people wanted the future, not the past, and the future lay not in being owned by the pope but in belonging to the new Italian nation.

A climax had been reached with the assassination of the pope’s prime minister, Rossi, an elegant aristocrat, on the steps of the Quirinal Palace. A crowd had gathered as Rossi left the main doors at the top of the famous steps. Halfway down, the flash of a young man’s dagger, the blade in the throat, then Rossi tumbling and the blood spurting across the steps, the mob growling with pure hatred … and above at the window of his study, Pius watching. That was an image which haunted all my years of study and which has remained, engraved on what was once my Catholic conscience.

In the past, when things of the world had encroached on the power of the papacy, there had always been worldly recourse, an army to be summoned. Silvester I, Leo III, Gregory VIII, Clement VII—they had all withstood the secular challenge by calling for one soldiery or another, but in 1869 there was nowhere left to turn, no army to call upon to save the papacy. A de facto decision had been made in the capitals of Europe: the papacy was through. The
Times
of London referred to “the final passing of this venerable institution.” When I first studied the period I can recall thinking in amazement, could my father know that things had ever been so bad for the Church? It didn’t seem possible that such a situation had existed without his telling me, warning me, but of course he was simply doing all he could to make sure it didn’t happen again.

Never in all the centuries since the vision had appeared to Constantine had the situation been so grave, but still Pius had a hole card and no choice but to play it. He turned to the power Jesus had conferred on Peter, the power of the spirit. In July 1869 the principle of infallibility was declared by the bishops, as well as what the Church called primacy. The pope was now incapable of error in matters of morals and faith; he must be obeyed. And as primate, his teachings and jurisdiction could not be superseded or replaced by any man or group in all
Christianity. The Church had declared the man at its head the ultimate spiritual leader and authority on earth and dared anyone to deny or ignore it.

There was a hollow ring to this claim, however, and no one knew it better than Pius. While the spiritual battle might have been won, in a secular world the secular battle had been lost.

It was not merely a matter of metaphor. The battle was a fact and the French, falling back before the Prussian advance in August 1870, were leaving Rome that day, the nineteenth. General Kanzler’s army of fewer than four thousand was all that stood between the integrity of the last pope-king and General Cadorna’s Italian national army of sixty thousand men less than a day’s march from the walls of Rome. Pius, with nowhere to turn, ordered only a token resistance, then surrender.

King Victor Emmanuel, leading his new nation, had won. Rome would be capital of all Italy. On the twentieth, at sunrise, the Italian cannon commenced firing.

Fewer than five hours later the white flag flew from the dome of St. Peter’s.

In October a plebiscite was held throughout the Papal States. The votes cast in favor of joining the Italian republic numbered 132,681. There were only 1,505 against. In the spring of 1871 the Italian parliament guaranteed the pope’s sovereignty over his reduced world, which would henceforth consist of the Vatican, the Lateran, and the summer home at Castel Gandolfo. Pius bitterly responded then and for the rest of his life: “We will be a prisoner.”

Not until 1929, when Pius XI reached his accommodation with Benito Mussolini with the signing of the Lateran Pacts, was the Church free once more to operate at will in the worlds of power, finance, and politics.

Sandanato’s tiny gold lighter flared; I smelled the Gauloise, felt the blown smoke brush my face.

“Violence is nothing new,” he said, “we both know that. Violence in the Church exercised considerable fascination for your sister. Or so I was told by His Eminence. We’ve always suffered it, but now it’s running amok, isn’t it? And we can’t identify the enemy. You
see, we’ve always known in the past who the enemy was. But now we have three freshly dead and we’re afraid and there’s no army to call upon to come crashing in to save us … those days are gone. Here we are, all alone, unarmed, in a darkening world.” I sensed that despite the somber words he was smiling sadly. He seemed to relax when the subject was violence. Maybe he just wanted it out in the open. We were in the middle of murder. He lifted his brandy glass. It was nearly four o’clock, the morning of my sister’s funeral, and I was finally tired, ready for sleep.

“Confusion to our enemies,” he said.

I looked at him sharply. “You can say that again, pal.”