The Good Shepherd (27 page)
For another moment, he sat there paralyzed, his spoon in midair. Mary, too? Where did all of them - Cronin, Mike Furia, Dennis McLaughlin - get these incredible expectations? But this was the most unbearable summons. She was placing her soul in the balance and demanding the impossible from him to stop the scale from plunging her into darkness.
“Mary - I’m not going to be that important - to start lecturing the whole Church.”
“One of eleven American Cardinals. Of 135 in the whole world? If you speak, Matt, speak forcefully, they’ve got to listen.”
“But I’m not sure - it’s not really my style, Mary. I try to avoid brawls - not start them.”
“You fought old Hogan. You spoke out for important things - when you knew it would enrage him. Negro rights. The liturgy. Psychiatric help for Catholics. Honest labor unions.”
The causes of the fifties. How simple, how nostalgic, they sounded. How could he tell her the difference now? How could he explain how threatened the Church seemed to him, how much time he spent defending, preserving, rather than changing it? He saw from the anguish on Mary’s face that it was impossible to explain. And then he saw what he could never endure - tears. For a dazed moment, he saw his mother weeping, heard his father’s voice snarling:
Okay, okay, we’ll do it your way.
What were they arguing about? What hadn’t they argued about?
But he would not snarl. He could not, would not, be that man of iron, or rock - yes, that marble man to whom he felt so strangely close these days. He would consciously refuse to be him, snarling his laconic decrees. No, somehow, no matter what it cost him, no matter how soft, how vulnerable, it made him, he would be a man of love. He took Mary’s hand and held it between his bigger hands. “Don’t, Mary, don’t,” he whispered. “We’ll do it. We’ll find a way.”
Dear Leo:
It’s the beginning of my first full day in Rome, and I am so tired I am seeing double. The flight over was sheer barbarism, no possibility of sleep for the entire night. We all staggered into bed late in the afternoon, napped a few hours, and then had dinner. The Cardinal went off alone with this mysterious Mary Shea whom I have mentioned to you. By now I’ve met her, and if there is something going on there, I have to congratulate His Eminence for his good taste, at least. She’s a real beauty, one of those svelte, gray-haired women who simultaneously manage to look sexy and mature without trying, all very subdued and controlled. That same night, I went to dinner with our millionaire godfather, Mike Furia, and Bishop Cronin. What a combination, I thought, at first. But it turned out to be an interesting evening. Cronin left his intellectual hat in his room, and we spent most of our time talking about Matthew Mahan. Mike F. told me that he’d probably be a hit man in the Mafia today if he hadn’t met Padre Matt in W.W. II. His father was a soldier in one of our city’s best families. Incidentally, if you think you’re cynical about the Church, you should talk to Furia. He knows an incredible amount about the Vatican’s business dealings.
Furia and Cronin got talking about the odd way that Mahan became a bishop in the first place. It’s a series of coincidences, built around Pope John XXIII, of all people. It seems that Roncalli, who was an Italian army chaplain during World War II, decided to give a dinner for American army chaplains just after the war ended, in 1945. (He was the papal nuncio in France by this time.) Since his English wasn’t very good, he wanted someone who spoke French or Italian to help him out. The local chief of chaplains tapped Captain Matt, with his decorations and his mother’s good Italian, and the two of them got along like father and son. The dinner was a big success. Father Matt suggested inviting Protestant and Jewish chaplains, as well as Catholics, and Roncalli loved the idea. Thereafter, Roncalli invented all sorts of excuses to keep Matt on his staff practically full time until the division sailed for home.
Back in the States, Big Matt corresponded with him sporadically. Then Mary Shea came into the picture. She is the very rich niece-in-law of our fair city’s old boss, and Matt was assigned to soothe her spiritually when her marriage collapsed. Since she was loaded with money, he told her that her best chance for an annulment was a direct appeal in Rome. Sensible advice, even if it didn’t work. But Mary decided that she liked living in Europe, and she settled down - guess where? In Venice. And guess who was appointed patriarch of Venice on January 15, 1953, within a month or so of her arrival in Gondolaville? Naturally, Patriarch Roncalli got to know the very rich American lady. In that respect, good Pope J. was, I gather, no different from any other prelate. She was soon being invited to lunches and dinners at the patriarchal palazzo, no doubt responding magnificently via her checkbook.
Guess who she talked about when she got the ear of His Eminence? Who else but that wonderful monsignor who was charging around our archdiocese, building schools and CYO gymnasiums by the dozen, and raising money by the ton. That’s right, good old Matt. Imagine her surprise when Roncalli, who apparently never forgot a name, brightened instantly and began agreeing with her paeans.
When the miracle occurred in 1958, and the old man became Pope, he was better informed on our archdiocese than he was on any other see in the United States, including New York. He knew that old Hogan was senile and was never any good in the first place. So he promptly made Matt an auxiliary bishop, and within a year had made him coadjutor with a guarantee of succession. Talk about casting your bread upon the waters - or in this case, upon grass widows. There are some curious questions unanswered, of course. Wouldn’t it have been logical, if Mary Shea went to Europe at the suggestion of Big Matt and failed to obtain her annulment, for her to look upon him without much warmth? What has been the source of her continuing attraction, not to say fascination? Renaissance possibilities are the most obvious. If this is the case, he is an even bigger fraud than he seems to be, and thoroughly deserves all the opprobrium you plan to heap on him. But keep that diabolical pen of yours in your pocket for the time being. Let’s try to find out the truth. I know you liberals are not much interested in that sort of thing these days, but I’m old-fashioned enough to believe it may be important.
Best,
Dennis
He had just finished licking the envelope when there was a knock on the door, and in marched Andy Goggin, escorted by Bishop Cronin in a tam-o’-shanter. “I found this innocent wandering about the lobby,” he said, poking Goggin with his blackthorn walking stick, “and thought, at first, he was one of those clerical panhandlers. But then he gave me the password, McLaughlin, and I agreed to deposit him at your door.”
Goggin was, if possible, taller and skinnier than ever. Both aspects drew appropriate comments from Bishop C. “I asked him if they were putting Christians on starvation diets in the Mamertine Prison again. He said no, so I asked him if they were using the rack, for I couldn’t imagine how else he’d been stretched to such a length.”
“He says you’re writing a history of Vatican I with him.”
“He’s liable to say anything,” Dennis said.
“We’re on our own today, lads,” said Bishop Cronin. “His Eminence-to-be is taking his millionaires about the city in a chartered bus with himself as guide. I offered to supplement his comments with a few of me own, and he insulted me by saying he couldn’t afford to have any of his biggest givers scandalized. However, I managed to shake him down for 50,000 lire, which will save us the trouble of eating at the Irish College, a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone but my worst enemy.”
“I am putting myself totally in the hands of you two experts,” Dennis said. “Before the day is over, I expect to know the essential Rome.”
At this point, there was another knock on the door, and Jim McAvoy came wandering into the room looking sheepish. “We missed the bus. I set the alarm clock wrong. Madeline’s downstairs in the lobby, ready to kill me. Do you think we could join you fellows for the morning, at least? We can pick up the Cardinal and the rest of the crowd at the Cavalieri Hilton. That’s where they’re having lunch.”
Bishop Cronin looked annoyed. But Dennis could see no reason why the McAvoys would not fit easily into their entourage. He introduced Goggin, and they descended to the lobby, where Madeline McAvoy looked both relieved and pleased. “We may learn more from a strictly clerical tour,” she said archly to Dennis. “I’m sure the Cardinal is going to give the rest of the group a pretty standard lecture.”
“Which we’ve heard,” said Jim McAvoy. “We came with him in sixty-seven.”
“Well now,” said Bishop Cronin briskly, “there’s only one place to go first. Only one place that means Rome to the likes of us. Saint Peter’s.”
They found a large taxi and headed for Vatican City. Crossing the Tiber on the Ponte Cavour, they drove along the river to the Via della Conciliazione which, Cronin told them, had been built by Mussolini to celebrate the treaty he signed with Pope Pius XI. The street had destroyed The Borgo, one of the most charming sections of old Rome. As they rounded the curve along the river, Cronin pointed out the ancient Castel Sant’Angelo, the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, and more recently a place “where the Pope put people he didn’t like, so he could kill them at his leisure.”
“See that bridge there?” said Cronin, pointing to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. “I never cross on it. I don’t trust the damn thing. In 1450, it collapsed and drowned 172 Christmas pilgrims.”
Soon, St. Peter’s was visible straight ahead of them on the Via della Conciliazione. It looked particularly immense from this distance, Cronin said. In fact, this was the best possible perspective. Closer, the long nave, installed at the order of a pope who wanted the biggest possible audience, destroyed the original architectural plan, which called for a church with four equal wings, surmounted by the stupendous dome.
Against the clear blue sky, Dennis thought the dome looked weary and a little forlorn for all its size. Cronin, seeming to read his mind, remarked, “Belloc in his
Road to Rome
said it was a delicate blue in 1901, but by the time I got here in 1911, it had faded to its present gloomy gray. Either that, or the old boy was looking at Rome through tinted glasses - which I suspect he was.”
“What do they think of Belloc these days?” Jim McAvoy asked. “They told us he was a great Catholic historian.”
“He was a better poet,” said Bishop Cronin and proceeded to rip off the dithyrambic epithalamium or threnody with which Belloc had closed his
Road to Rome.
The bishop was still reciting it as they got out of the taxi and let Jim McAvoy pay the driver.
Drinking when I had a mind to,
Singing when I felt inclined to;
Nor ever turn my face to home
Till I had slaked my heart at Rome.
They walked into St. Peter’s Square and stood there for a moment, feeling miniscule within the immense embrace of the circling columns.
“When I was here the last time,” Mrs. McAvoy said, “a guide told us that those columns represented the Holy Father’s arms reaching out to the whole world.”
“There’s something to that, there’s something to that,” said Cronin with a wicked twinkle in his glance toward Dennis and Goggin. “They were designed by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, educated by the Jesuits, creators of the doctrine that the way to salvation was blind obedience to the Pope.”
“Yea, verily,” said Goggin. “As our sacred founder, St. Ignatius, wrote in Rule Thirteen of the Spiritual Exercises, ‘If we wish to be sure that we are right in all things, we should always be ready to accept this principle: I will believe that the white that I see is black, if the hierarchical church so defines it.’”
They strolled toward the basilica until they reached the obelisk in the middle of the square. “Now stand a moment, if you will,” Cronin said, “and imagine what was here before the Christian Church collapsed into the arms of the Emperor. St. Peter was crucified somewhere along the route we have just come, in or near the Roman Circus of Caligula. No one knows where the devil he was buried, though the popes would like mightily to believe it was beneath that great mass of stone facing us. But the best evidence tells us it was not the grave, but a little shrine to St. Peter that stood here on Vatican Hill.
“It was in the corner of a cemetery - the poorest corner, at that. To get to it, you had to walk past all sorts of impressive tombs of wealthy Romans. The shrine was not much more than two niches in the side of the hill. There was a bit of an altar table on two legs in front of it, and the upper niche was like a tabernacle. Under the altar ledge was a movable slab of stone, behind which the old fisherman’s bones may have lain for a time. The whole thing was no bigger than an ordinary house door and not much higher than one.
“This is what that noble pseudo-Roman, the Emperor Constantine, that wonderful example of Christianity in practice, who killed his wife by putting her into a steam bath and raising the temperature until she was boiled alive, found after he’d slaughtered all his enemies and became the boss of bosses. He decided to build around the humble shrine a church big enough to hold an army. For it was armies and not religion that good old Constantine was thinking about, you may be sure. He was the first but by no means the last imperialist to discover that Christians made good soldiers. Even when I was a green seminarian here just before the Great War, I often found myself wishing that damned old pagan had left well enough alone.”
Madeline McAvoy was obviously enjoying Bishop Cronin s highly unorthodox approach to church history. Jim McAvoy’s reactions seemed a little more wary. “But if it wasn’t for Constantine,” he said, “the Romans would have kept on persecuting the Christians. They would have remained a minority.”
“The best damn thing that could have happened,” Bishop Cronin said. He led them across the piazza until they were about 100 yards from the portico. Then, raising his hand like a traffic cop, he pointed with his blackthorn toward the facade and rapidly read the inscriptions, which consisted of the titles of the Pope in Latin. “Pontifex Maximus, that’s the key phrase to notice up there, children. That term is borrowed lock, stock, and Latin from the Empire. It was one of the many titles of the Emperor. You see,” he said, speaking directly to Dennis, “this marriage of the Church and the state is no joke, lad.”
“Where did you find
him?
” Goggin whispered as they mounted the steps of the portico beside the McAvoys.
“Ex-professor of theology at Rosewood.”
“Can such things be?” murmured Goggin.
“Now here,” said Cronin as they entered the church and stood at the head of the tremendous nave, “we see the beginning of the great conspiracy. The Renaissance church designed by Michelangelo to replace old Constantine’s Romanesque barn was in the form of a Greek cross with equal arms. A nice touch, suggesting among other things that our friends in the East might someday join us to worship here. But this was all changed by the popes of the seventeenth century, for whom absolute monarchy was a way of life. They had a second-rate architect named Maderno triple the size of this arm, so you come from sunlight into this darkness and are led slowly into a world of illusion, of infinite distance, where nothing is clear or certain.” He gestured with his blackthorn stick to the aisles and side chapels beyond the massive pillars.