The Good Shepherd (36 page)

She stepped back and slammed the door in their faces. Bill Reed shook his head and took a deep breath. When he exhaled, it was almost a groan. “I told you, Matt. I told you.”

As they rode back to their hotel in the taxi, Bill Reed looked moodily out the window at the Roman facades and said, “The one thing I can’t figure out, Matt, is the way she quotes the Gospel at me. To be honest, I always thought that raising a daughter in the Catholic Church was the safest route I could take. The only thing I ever worried about was the possibility that she’d be too repressed.”

“It isn’t the same Catholic Church anymore, Bill,” Matthew Mahan said mournfully.

“It looks the same and sounds the same to me - except when I start talking to Helen.”

“Tell me something, Bill. Why haven’t you married again? With a wife -”

“Yes, she wouldn’t be able to hurt me quite so much. I know.” He sighed, and still looking out the window, said, “I haven’t got the guts, Matt. I couldn’t go through - that pain again. Maybe it’s because I’m a doctor. But it was a special kind of defeat for me to have my own wife die of cancer. To realize that I was hearing the symptoms at the breakfast table - and not paying any attention to them.”

“Bill - that could happen to anyone. Any doctor.”

“Sure. But it happened to me, and I can’t forgive myself.”

“God forgives you, Bill.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But I can’t talk to him. So I’m stuck with doing the job for myself. We atheists, agnostics - whatever you want to call us, Matt - it all comes down to the same thing - have to play a double role, sinner and judge. We’re pretty hard on ourselves.”

“Can’t you let a friend get into the act?” Matthew Mahan asked softly. “How about letting me masquerade as God for about sixty seconds? I’ll put on all my regalia, miter, cape, the whole works. No, better yet, we’ll go up to my room and strip down to our undershirts and sit around drinking beer the way we used to in the aid station when there was a lull in the fighting. And when you’re in the middle of telling me one of those dirty stories you loved to shock me with, I’ll put my hand on your arm” - Matthew Mahan reached out as he spoke and made the gesture – “and say, ‘Your sins are forgiven thee.’”

“Thanks, Matt,” Bill Reed said in a choked voice. “But it wouldn’t do any good. I’m a coward about pain, you see. I guess that’s why I became a doctor. I don’t have the guts to risk any more pain.”

“Bill, that’s bunk. You became a doctor because you love helping people. Do you think you ever fooled me for five seconds? Underneath that cynical mask you wear, there’s a man who cares-yes, even weeps the same way I do - for the children of men. That sounds like a sermon, but there isn’t any better way to say it.”

“You get tired of weeping, Matt, you just get tired, I guess.”

They were in front of the hotel. Matthew Mahan stuffed some lire into the driver’s hand and walked back into the lobby with Bill Reed. He was deeply worried about his old friend now. “My stomach would feel 100 percent better, Bill, if I made you a convert. Not necessarily a convert to Catholicism. A convert to - to the presence of God, to the awareness of someone who - who can lift the burdens off your back.”

“But not off your stomach,” Bill said mischievously. “Matt, it’s enough for me to know I stir so much concern in you. It makes me believe that somehow, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I am doing something important.”

Upstairs, Matthew Mahan sat down at the desk in his room and wrote a letter.

Letter in hand, Matthew Mahan knocked on Dennis McLaughlin’s door. He found his secretary, his Jesuit friend Andy Goggin, and Davey Cronin poring over a road map. They were driving up to Florence tomorrow to visit the suburb of Isolotto, which was apparently involved in a nasty clash with the Vatican. Matthew Mahan shook his head. “Don’t you ever quit looking for ammunition?”

“Now, Matt, you can’t deny this isn’t rare stuff,” said Cronin. “A revolution practically in Il Papa’s backyard. You might be glad to know a bit about it yourself the next time you get one of those nasty stop-everything billet-doux from some Curia Cardinal. You can fire back a comment about the beam in his own eye.”

Matthew Mahan yawned and gave Dennis the letter to mail. “I’m going to bed. If anybody is looking for me, tell them I’m having my tiara fitted at Castel Gondolfo.”

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Dennis said as he was going out the door.

“There was a priest named Mirante looking for you here at the hotel about a half hour ago.”

“He’s an old friend. I meant to tell you that I wanted to see him, no matter when or where.”

“Here’s his telephone number,” said Dennis, handing him a slip of paper. “He seemed awfully anxious to hear from you.”

Matthew Mahan sighed. All he wanted to do was sleep. But he went next door and asked the hotel operator to place the call for him. A half hour later, Father Mirante was in the sitting room of his suite, fingering a glass of Cinzano and talking about their mutual friend, Mary Shea.

“She is depressed, poor lady,” Mirante said. “It is almost an epidemic these days in Rome among a certain sect. We might call them the Johannines.”

“Is it - serious?”

“I have sent her to the best psychiatrist in Rome. One who understands - and even occasionally believes in - the reality of the religious factor. The situation as he explains it is really quite simple. She is celibate, like us. She, too, has invested most of her emotional capital in, shall we say, Vatican futures. And finds herself in a declining market.”

“Is it really that bad, Guilio?”

Mirante’s downcast mouth drooped to a Pagliacci smile. “You are asking a prejudiced observer.”

“You’re in trouble. Mary told me. Why?”

“You have perhaps heard of Isolotto?”

“Oh yes, the parish up in Florence. They seem to be having some sort of brawl with the local bishop. My secretary and my auxiliary bishop are going up there tomorrow to take a look.”

“Eminence,” Mirante said, “I am the last person in the world who should give anyone advice, but do you think that’s wise? Are you prepared to inject yourself into the controversy?”

“Of course not,” said Matthew Mahan, the pain in his stomach leaping into contrapuntal life. “I can’t see any harm in them visiting the parish -”

“It is much more than a dispute between the parish and the bishop. It has become a test of Roman authority. That is why I am no longer a member of the Jesuit order.”

Swiftly he sketched the background of the case. Some militants had occupied Parma Cathedral to protest the links between diocesan authorities and local banks. The parishioners of the parish of Isolotto wrote a letter announcing their solidarity with the protesters. The parish priest, Don Inzo Mazzi, signed the letter. Pope Paul condemned the protesters, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, Ermene Gildo Florit, immediately called on Mazzi to retract his signature or resign. It was the climax of a fifteen-year-old feud between Florit and Mazzi. The Cardinal had already made it clear that he disapproved of the pastor’s attacks on the war in Vietnam and his fondness for letting laymen speak from the pulpit.

Mazzi turned the Cardinal’s ultimatum over to the parish community. They stood squarely behind the pastor. Florit suspended Mazzi and closed the church. Months of guerrilla warfare followed. There were marches on the Archbishop’s palace with placards saying, “Call off your fascist watchdogs,” police arrests of demonstrators, packed rallies in the Isolotto church, and a meeting of parish representatives with Archbishop Benelli, the Substitute Secretary of State. When a neighboring priest, Don Sergio Gomiti, expressed sympathy for Don Mazzi, he, too, was fired and had his church closed. Currently, about 300 people held a Bible service each Sunday in front of the still locked Isolotto church. Perhaps fifty people attended the official parish mass celebrated in a small chapel by a priest sent by Cardinal Florit.

“They sent me up to mediate. The cool intellectual who would see both sides of the question. I am an intellectual, but I am also a priest. And that part of my being was totally converted to the parishioners’ side. These people are asking nothing more than the holy freedom proclaimed for the Church by John. They are good Catholics - better Catholics, in fact, than 95 percent of the population in Cardinal Florit’s diocese. I decided they needed support, not discipline, and I made a statement on their behalf. What followed was a nightmare. I was ordered to return to Rome immediately. When I arrived, I was told to say nothing more on the case, under the pain of excommunication. A week later, I was expelled from the Jesuit order and told to leave my quarters in the Borgo Santo Spirito within twenty-four hours.

“All my papers, my books, were confiscated, my orphanage taken away from me, and I was told to report to the Archbishop of Reggio Di Calabria, if I wished to continue to serve God as a priest. For the last week, I have been living with friends in Rome. But this cannot continue. I must either go to Calabria or -”

He opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I’m appalled,” Matthew Mahan said. “That’s all I can say. Appalled. But what - what else can I say - or do?”

“Would Your Eminence consider allowing me to return to America with you? I would be happy to serve you - in any capacity. You have, as I recall, several parishes with a heavy percentage of Italians. I am not afraid of becoming a parish priest. Perhaps it is the very thing I should become. But to be sentenced to it, to go to a part of Italy where all my Roman instincts will revolt at the mere sound of their Italian. I think I could train an ape to speak our language better than a Calabrian.”

“You won’t hear any classic Italian in my downtown parishes, Guilio. The people are mostly from Sicily.”

“But they are Americans. That is what I want to experience. To speak, to work with people who have freedom, or a hope of freedom, in their blood.”

“Don’t romanticize that word ‘freedom,’ Guilio. It’s a reality. It means something. But -”

“I will do my best to learn by your example. I can never forget that you -”

He stopped in mid-sentence. Did he see on Matthew Mahan’s face the refutation of what he was about to say? This was too painful to believe. Softly, tautly, he finished the sentence for Mirante. “- were consecrated by John. But don’t - for God’s sake don’t expect to see a saint like him in these shoes.”

“I know, I know,” Mirante said. “And tomorrow you will take an oath of obedience, of fealty to the new Pope.” He drained his drink. “You see I can’t even pronounce his name. For me he is - a usurper. A traitor. Yes, even a heretic!”

“Now, that is ridiculous, Guilio.”

Mirante slumped back in his seat, setting his glass down with a clunk on the table beside it. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right. He’s the Pope of Agony. But for me, his agony is obscene. He knows but he cannot act. When he acts, he tries not to know. The Pope of Agony, yes. But also Punchinello.” He laughed bitterly. “Every night when I go to sleep, those lines from Giuseppe Giusti’s fantasy come into my head. Do you know what I mean?”

Matthew Mahan shook his head. “I’ve never read him.”

Mirante nodded. “There is no reason why you should. He was a minor poet, basically a satirist, who died in 1850. Most of his writing had to be printed outside Italy and circulated here surreptitiously. Those were the days when the Pope ruled the papal states, you know. At any rate, Giusti wrote this poem about Father Pero, a happy, simple priest who had been elected pope. The mere possibility of him practicing Christianity on the papal throne threw everyone into a panic.”

Rapidly he recited in Italian.

Matthew Mahan translated it for himself, losing the poetry but getting the meaning easily enough.