The Order (32 page)

At first, he thought it was a practical joke. Yes, the voice on the phone sounded like the Holy Father's, but surely it couldn't
really be him. He wanted Father Jordan to come to the papal apartments the following evening at half past nine. Father Jordan
was to tell no one of the summons. Nor was he to arrive even a minute early.

“I assume it was a Thursday,” said Gabriel.

“How did you know?”

Gabriel smiled and with a movement of his hand invited Father Jordan to continue. He arrived at the papal apartment, he said,
at the stroke of nine thirty. A household nun escorted him to the private chapel. The Holy Father greeted him warmly, refusing
to allow him to kiss the Ring of the Fisherman, and then showed him a most remarkable book.

“Did Lucchesi know of your personal connection to the gospel?”

“No,” said Father Jordan. “And I never told him about it. It was my personal connection to Donati that was important. The
Holy Father trusted me. It was just a stroke of dumb luck.”

“I assume he allowed you to read it.”

“Of course. That's why I was there. He wanted my opinion as to its authenticity.”

“And?”

“The text was lucid, at times bureaucratic, and granular in its detail. It was not the work of a creative mind. It was an
important historical document based on the written or spoken recollections of its nominal author.”

“What happened next?”

“He invited me back the following Thursday. Once again, Donati was absent. Dinner with a friend, apparently. Outside the walls.
That was when the Holy Father told me that he planned to give the book to you.” He paused, then added, “Without informing
the
prefetto
of the Vatican Secret Archives.”

“Did he know Albanese was a secret member of the Order of St. Helena?”

“He suspected as much.”

“Which is why Lucchesi asked you to make a copy of the book.”

Father Jordan smiled. “Rather ingenious, don't you think?”

“Did you do the work yourself, or did you utilize the services of a professional?”

“A little of both. I was a rather talented illustrator and calligrapher when I was young. Not like you, of course. But I wasn't bad. The professional, who shall remain nameless, handled the
artificial aging of the paper and the binding. It was an extraordinary piece of work. Cardinal Albanese would never have been able to tell the difference. Not unless he subjected the volume to sophisticated tests.”

“But which version of the gospel did he remove from the papal apartments the night of the Holy Father's murder?”

“It was the copy,” answered Father Jordan. “I have the original. The Holy Father gave it to me for safekeeping in case something
happened to him.”

“That book belongs to me now.”

“It belonged to my grandfather before it was taken from him by the Order. Therefore, I am the rightful owner, just as Isabel
Feldman was the rightful owner of that painting that magically resurfaced last weekend.” Father Jordan scrutinized him for
a moment. “I suppose you had something to do with that, too.”

Gabriel made no reply.

“It never goes away, does it?”

“What's that?”

“The survivor's guilt. It gets passed down from generation to generation. Like those green eyes of yours.”

“They were my mother's eyes.”

“Was she in one of the camps?”

“Birkenau.”

“Then you are a miracle, too.” Father Jordan patted the back of Gabriel's hand. “I'm afraid there is a straight line between
the teachings of the early Church and the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. To maintain otherwise is to engage in
what Thomas Aquinas called an
ignorantia affectata
. A willful ignorance.”

“Perhaps you should put it to rest once and for all.”

“And how would I do that?”

“By giving me that book.”

Father Jordan shook his head. “Making it public will accomplish nothing. In fact, given the current climate here in Europe
and America, it might make matters worse.”

“Are you forgetting that your former student is now the pope?”

“His Holiness has enough problems to deal with. The last thing he needs is a challenge to the core beliefs of Christianity.”

“What does the book say?”

Father Jordan was silent.

“Please,” said Gabriel. “I must know.”

He contemplated his sunbaked hands. “One central element of the Passion narratives is undeniable. A Jew from the village of
Nazareth named Jesus was put to death by the Roman prefect on or about the holiday of Passover, in perhaps the year 33
c.e.
Much else of what was written in the four Gospels must be taken with a cartload of salt. The accounts are literary invention
or, worse, a deliberate effort on the part of the evangelists and early Church to implicate the Jews in the death of Jesus
while simultaneously exculpating the real culprits.”

“Pontius Pilate and the Romans.”

Father Jordan nodded.

“For example?”

“The trial before the Sanhedrin.”

“Did it happen?”

“In the middle of the night during Passover?” Father Jordan shook his head. “Such a gathering would have been forbidden by
the Laws of Moses. Only a Christian living in Rome could have concocted something so outlandish.”

“Was Caiaphas involved in any way?”

“If he was, Pilate makes no mention of it.”

“What about the tribunal?”

“If that's what you want to call it,” said Father Jordan. “It was very brief. Pilate barely looked at him. In fact, he claimed
not to be able to recall Jesus' physical appearance. He merely jotted a note for his files and waved his hand, and the soldiers
got on with it. Many other good Jews were executed that day. As far as Pilate was concerned, it was business as usual.”

“Was there a crowd present?”

“Heavens, no.”

“What was the charge against Jesus?”

“The only crime punishable by crucifixion.”

“Insurrection.”

“Of course.”

“Where did the incident take place?”

“The Royal Portico of the Temple.”

“And the arrest?”

The bells of Assisi tolled two o'clock before Father Jordan could answer. “I've told you too much already. Besides, you and
your family have a plane to catch.” He rose and extended his hand. “God bless you, Mr. Allon. And safe travels.”

There were footfalls outside in the corridor. A moment later Chiara and the children appeared in the doorway, accompanied
by the Benedictine monk.

“Perfect timing,” said Father Jordan. “Don Simon will show you out.”

 

The monk saw them into the street and then quickly closed the gate. Gabriel stood there for a moment afterward, his hand
hovering over the intercom, until Irene finally tugged at his sleeve and looked up at him with the face of his mother.

“What's wrong, Abba? Why are you crying?”

“I was thinking about something sad, that's all.”

“What?”

You
, thought Gabriel.
I was thinking about you
.

He lifted the child into his arms and carried her through the Porta San Pietro to the parking garage where he had left the
car. After buckling Raphael's seat belt, he searched the undercarriage more carefully than usual before finally climbing behind
the wheel.

“Try starting the engine,” said Chiara. “It helps.”

Gabriel's hand shook as he pressed the button.

“Maybe I should drive.”

“I'm fine.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He reversed out of the space and followed the ramp to the surface. The only road out of the city took them past the Porta
San Pietro. Framed by the archway, like a figure in a Bellini, was a white-haired priest, an old leather satchel in his hand.

Gabriel slammed on the brakes and climbed out. Father Jordan offered him the bag as though it contained a bomb. “Be careful,
Mr. Allon. Everything is at stake.”

Gabriel embraced the old priest and hurried back to the car. Chiara opened the satchel as they sped down the slopes of Monte
Subasio. Inside was the last copy of the Gospel of Pilate.

“Can you read it?” he asked.

“I have a master's degree in the history of the Roman Empire. I think I can handle a few lines of Latin.”

“What does it say?”

She read the first two sentences aloud. “Solus ego sum reus mortis ejus. Ego crimen oportet.”

“Translate it.”

“I alone am responsible for his death. I alone must bear the guilt.” She looked up. “Shall I keep going?”

“No,” he said. “That's enough.”

Chiara returned the book to the satchel. “What do you suppose normal people do on vacation?”

“We are normal people.” Gabriel laughed. “We just have interesting friends.”

The Order
is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in
the story are the product of the author's imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Visitors to Munich will search in vain for the headquarters of a German conglomerate known as the Wolf Group, for no such company exists. Nor will one find a restaurant and jazz bar in the Beethovenplatz called Café Adagio. Thankfully, there is no far-right German political party known as the National Democrats, but there are several like it, including the Alternative for Germany, now the third-largest party in Germany, with ninety-four seats in the Bundestag. BfV chief Hans-Georg Maassen faced calls for his resignation in 2018 over accusations that he harbored extremist political views himself and was
quietly working to assist the Alternative for Germany's rise to power.

There is no restricted section of the Vatican Secret Archives known as the
collezione
, at least not one I uncovered during my research. Deepest apologies to the
prefetto
for shutting down his power supply and security system, but I'm afraid there was no other way for Gabriel and Luigi Donati
to enter the Manuscript Depository undetected. They could not have been given the first page of the Gospel of Pilate, because
such a book does not exist. The other apocryphal gospels mentioned in
The Order
are accurately depicted, as are the words of early Church figures such as Origen, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr.

It was Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who undertook an ambitious renovation of two apartments in the Palazzo San Carlo to create
a 6,500-square-foot luxury flat with a rooftop terrace. But Bertone's dwelling was a hovel compared to the palace in Limburg,
Germany, that Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, the so-called Bishop of Bling, renovated at a reported cost of $40 million.
In May 2012, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was removed as president of the Vatican Bank in connection with the sex-and-money scandal
that became known as Vati-Leaks. An internal Vatican dossier on the rampant corruption of senior Church officials reportedly
influenced the 2013 conclave that elected Pope Francis. The Vatican Secretariat of State condemned the media's pre-conclave
reporting on the scandal as an attempt to interfere in the selection of the next supreme pontiff.

Former cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, DC, reportedly funneled more than $600,000 from a little-known archdiocese
account to friends and benefactors at the Vatican, including popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The
Washington
Post
found that several of the Vatican bureaucrats who received money were directly involved in assessing allegations of sexual
misconduct leveled against McCarrick, which included accusations that he solicited sex while hearing confessions. An Episcopal
Conference of Switzerland report released in July 2018 found a startling increase in
new
accusations of sexual abuse against Swiss priests. It is little wonder that Swiss Catholics, including my fictitious Christoph
Bittel, have turned their backs on the Church in droves.

There is indeed a Catholic fraternity based in the Swiss village of Menzingen, but it is not the fictitious Order of St. Helena.
It is the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX, the reactionary, anti-Semitic order founded in 1970 by Bishop Marcel-François Lefebvre.
Bishop Lefebvre was the son of a wealthy French factory owner who supported the restoration of France's monarchy. During World
War II, then–Father Lefebvre was an unapologetic supporter of the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, which collaborated
with the SS in the destruction of France's Jews. Paul Touvier, a senior officer in the notorious Vichy militia known as the
Milice, found sanctuary at an SSPX priory in Nice after the war. Arrested in 1989, Touvier was the first Frenchman to be convicted
of crimes against humanity.

Not surprisingly, Bishop Lefebvre also expressed support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front and a convicted Holocaust denier. Monsieur Le Pen shared that distinction with Richard Williamson, one of four SSPX priests whom Lefebvre elevated to the rank of bishop in 1988 in defiance of a direct order from Pope John Paul II. Williamson, who is British, routinely referred to Jews as “the enemies of Christ” whose goal was world domination. While serving as rector of
the SSPX's North American seminary in Winona, Minnesota, Williamson declared: “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” He was expelled from the Society of St. Pius X in 2012, but not for his anti-Semitic views. The SSPX called his removal a “painful decision.”

By the time of his death in 1991, Bishop Lefebvre was a doctrinal outcast and something of an embarrassment. But during the
1930s, as storm clouds gathered over Europe's Jews, a prelate who espoused views similar to Lefebvre's would have found himself
largely in the Catholic mainstream. The Church's preference for monarchies and right-wing dictators over socialists or even
liberal democrats has been painstakingly documented, along with the appalling anti-Semitism of many of the Vatican's leading
spokesmen and policymakers. While few Catholic clerics supported the physical elimination of Jews from European society, the
Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano
and the Jesuit journal
La Civiltà Cattolica
cheered laws—in Hungary, for example—that purged Jews from professions such as the law, medicine, banking, and journalism.
When Benito Mussolini enacted similar restrictions in Italy in 1938, the men of the Vatican could muster scarcely a word of
protest. “The terrible truth,” wrote historian Susan Zuccotti in her remarkable study of the Holocaust in Italy,
Under His Very Windows
, “was that they wanted the Jews put in their place.”

That was certainly true of Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the Austrian-German church in Rome. It was Bishop Hudal, not my fictitious
Father Schiller, who wrote a viciously anti-Semitic book in 1936 that tried to reconcile Catholicism and National Socialism.
In the copy he sent to Adolf Hitler, Hudal penned an adulatory inscription: “To the architect of German greatness.”

An Austrian national who was said to be obsessed with Jews, Bishop Hudal moved about Rome throughout the war in a chauffeured car that flew the flag of Greater Germany. Two and a half years after the Allied victory, he hosted a Christmas party attended by hundreds of Nazi war criminals living in Rome under his protection. With Hudal's help, many would find sanctuary in South America. Adolf Eichmann received assistance from Bishop Hudal, as did Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. All with the knowledge and tacit support of Pope Pius XII, who believed such monsters to be a valuable asset in the global fight against Soviet communism.

Pius's critics and apologists have engaged in a decades-long quarrel over his failure to explicitly condemn the Holocaust
and warn Europe's Jews about the death camps. But his indefensible support of wanted Nazi mass murderers is perhaps the clearest
evidence of his innate hostility toward Jews. Pius opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the creation of a Jewish state, and
opposed postwar attempts to reconcile Christianity with the faith from which it had sprung. He excommunicated every Communist
on earth in 1949 but never took a similar step against members of the Nazi Party or the murderous SS. Nor did he ever explicitly
express remorse over the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The process of Jewish-Christian reconciliation would therefore have to wait until Pius's death in 1958. His successor, Pope John XXIII, took extraordinary steps to protect Jews during World War II while serving as papal nuncio in Istanbul, including issuing them lifesaving false passports. He was old when the Ring of the Fisherman was placed on his finger, and sadly
his reign was brief. Not long before his death in 1963, he was asked whether there was anything to be done about the devastating portrayal of Pius XII in Rolf Hochhuth's searing play
The Deputy
. “Do against it?” the incredulous pope reportedly replied. “What does one do against the truth?”

The culmination of John XXIII's bid to repair relations between Catholics and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust was the milestone
declaration of the Second Vatican Council known as
Nostra Aetate
. Opposed by many Church conservatives, it declared that Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus or
eternally cursed by God. The great historical tragedy is that such a statement had to be issued in the first place. But for
nearly two thousand years, the Church taught that Jews as a people were guilty of deicide, the very murder of God. “The blood
of Jesus,” wrote Origen, “falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world.”
Pope Innocent III wholeheartedly agreed. “Their words—‘May his blood be on us and our children'—have brought inherited guilt
upon the entire nation, which follows them as a curse where they live and work, when they are born and when they die.” Were
such words spoken today, they would rightly be branded as hate speech.

The ancient Christian charge of deicide is universally regarded by scholars as the foundation of anti-Semitism. And yet the Second Vatican Council, when issuing its historic repudiation, could not resist including the following seventeen words: “True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.” But what source did the bishops use to justify such an unequivocal declaration about an event that took place in a remote corner of the Roman Empire
nearly two thousand years earlier? The answer, of course, was that they relied on the accounts of Jesus' death contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament—the very source of the vicious slander they were at long last disavowing.

Needless to say, the Second Vatican Council did not suggest excising the inflammatory passages from the Christian canon. But
Nostra Aetate
nevertheless set in motion a scholarly reappraisal of the canonical Gospels that is reflected in the pages of
The Order
. Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy will no doubt take issue with my description of who the evangelists were and
how their Gospels came to be written. Most biblical scholars would not.

No original draft of any of the four canonical Gospels survives, only fragments of later copies. It is widely accepted by
scholars that none of the Gospels, with the possible exception of Luke, were written by the men for whom they are named. It
was the Apostolic Father Papias of Hierapolis who in the second century provided the earliest extant account of their authorship.
And it was Irenaeus, the heresy-hunting leader of the early Church in France, who declared that only four of the many gospels
then in circulation were authentic. “And this is obviously true,” he wrote, “because there are four corners of the universe
and there are four principal winds.” Paul Johnson, in his monumental history of Christianity, asserted that Irenaeus “knew
no more about the origins of the Gospels than we do; rather less, in fact.”

Johnson went on to describe the Gospels as “literary documents” that bear evidence of later tampering, editing, rewriting, and interpolation and backdating of theological concepts. Bart D. Ehrman, the distinguished professor of religious studies at
the University of North Carolina, contends they are riddled with “discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems” that mean “they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened.” The Gospels' depiction of Jesus' arrest and execution, says Ehrman, “must be taken with a pound of salt.”

Numerous critical biblical scholars and contemporary historians have concluded that the evangelists and their editors in the
early Church consciously shifted the blame for Jesus' death from the Romans to the Jews in order to make Christianity more
appealing to gentiles living under Roman rule and less threatening to the Romans themselves. The two primary elements utilized
by the Gospel writers to blame Jews for the death of Jesus are the trial before the Sanhedrin and, of course, the tribunal
before Pontius Pilate.

The four canonical Gospels each give a slightly different account of the encounter, but it is perhaps most illuminative to
compare Mark's version to Matthew's. In Mark, Pilate reluctantly sentences Jesus to death at the urging of a Jewish crowd.
But in Matthew the crowd has suddenly become “the whole people.” Pilate washes his hands in front of them and declares himself
innocent of Jesus' blood. To which “the whole people” reply, “Let his blood be on us and our children!”

So which version is accurate? Did “the whole people” really shout such an outlandish line without a single dissenting voice,
or not? And what about Pilate washing his hands? Did it happen? After all, it is no small detail. Obviously, both accounts
cannot be correct. If one is right, the other is necessarily
wrong
. Some might argue that Matthew is simply
more
right than Mark, but this is an evasion. A reporter who made such a
mistake would surely have been reprimanded by his editor, if not fired on the spot.

The most plausible explanation is that the entire scene is a literary invention. The same is likely the case for the Gospels'
inflammatory accounts of Jesus' appearance before the Sanhedrin. Religious scholar Reza Aslan, in his riveting biography of
Jesus titled
Zealot
, asserts that the problems with the Gospels' accounts of a Sanhedrin trial “are too numerous to count.” The late Raymond
Brown, a Catholic priest who was widely regarded as the greatest New Testament scholar of the late twentieth century, found
twenty-seven discrepancies between the Gospels' accounts of the trial and rabbinic law. Boston University professor Paula
Fredriksen, in her landmark
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
, likewise questions the veracity of the Sanhedrin trial. “Between their duties at the Temple and their festive meals at home,
these men would have put in a long day already; and besides, what need?” Fredriksen is equally skeptical that there was a
tribunal before the Roman prefect. “Perhaps Jesus was interrogated briefly by Pilate, though this, too, is unlikely. There
was no point.” Aslan is more definitive on the question of an appearance before Pilate. “No trial was held. No trial was necessary.”