"Let's not mince words here," Doyle went on. "There aren't many like you in the priesthood nowadays, Joe. There's a reason the archdiocese sent you to North American College instead of the local seminary. Because they thought you had what it took to be a leader. And you haven't proved them wrong. You're a rising star. You're young, while all the rest of us are getting old. You're white—which can be a mixed blessing, I know, but it matters to a lot of people. You're heterosexual, and we all know what that means to us nowadays. You're smart and charming, and don't tell me you don't know about that cute little crooked smile of yours. No flattery here, just facts. You've got everything going for you, but that just means you have an obligation to figure out how to use your gifts most effectively in the service of Our Lord."
Hurley wrinkled his brow. "How do you know I'm heterosexual?" he asked.
Doyle merely laughed and sipped his coffee.
"So, are you offering an alternative? Is this all that's on the table?"
"We're not stupid enough to compel your obedience, even though I do recall something about a vow you took. If you don't want to do it, you don't want to do it. The alternative will be a post in some rich, growing suburban parish. Still a valuable ministry, but maybe lacking the spiritual rewards that Saint Jerome's offers to someone with your sensibilities. And maybe if you do a good job you could get your own parish someday. Just like Billy."
"And how long do I have to make up my mind?"
Doyle glanced at his watch. "Twenty minutes long enough?"
"Tomorrow, Larry. I'll call you tomorrow morning."
"Oh, all right." Doyle finished his coffee and stood up. "I know it's a tough one, Joe. Give it some thought and some prayer. I'm sure you'll make the right call."
"How about buying us that refrigerator?" Joe asked as they walked back out of the rectory.
Doyle grinned. "Take up a second collection."
* * *
Father Hurley didn't mention Doyle's visit to the pastor until suppertime. Hurley was on call that night, so Billy Flynn was generous with the wine he poured himself to go with the spaghetti and meatballs Mrs. Ramirez had left. Hurley figured he had to bring up the visit before the wine put Billy to sleep.
When Hurley had started at Saint Jerome's, he was prepared to believe that Billy Flynn was everything he didn't like about Catholic priests—old, out of touch with his parishioners, alcoholic, utterly cynical about the Church and human nature. But the more time he spent with Billy, the more he admired the man, the more he hoped he could be as good a priest as Billy when he was Billy's age. Monsignor Flynn had plenty of faults, but he got out of bed every morning, laced up his shoes, slapped on his aftershave, and went off to do his job as best he knew how. Hurley recalled shortly after he arrived seeing Billy seated in his favorite armchair, lips moving, apparently in silent prayer. But when he came closer he realized that Billy had headphones on, and he was mouthing sentences in Spanish as he struggled with a language tape. He might have been out of touch, but it wasn't for lack of trying.
"Well," Hurley said, "Doyle stopped by again. He wants an answer by tomorrow."
Billy chewed a meatball and looked glum. "He still wants you in the chancery?" he asked finally.
"That, or Saint Megabucks by the Sea," Hurley replied. "I don't think you'll get a replacement."
Billy nodded. He was a short man with a mop of white hair that was perpetually falling over his eyes. He pushed the hair back now and asked, "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know. I don't want to leave, Billy. And I don't want a desk job."
Billy sipped his wine. "You work in the chancery, you can still come back Sundays, help out," he pointed out.
"That's great, but it's the rest of the time I'm worried about. I didn't join up to become a paper-pusher."
Billy gave him a dark look, and Hurley realized he had crossed one of the monsignor's unspoken boundaries. You could say the most terrible things about the Church and its personnel and dogmas and Billy wouldn't blink an eye, and then you'd come out with something that seemed utterly innocent and he'd be angry at you for days.
"Priests don't have the luxury of choosing their lives," he said flatly. "If that's what you want, you're in the wrong line of work. I wonder what the new pope is thinking about at this very moment. Bet you anything that becoming pope wasn't at the top of his wish list. But he took the job, because that's what you're supposed to do. God's will."
"So you think I should accept?"
Billy refilled his wine glass and shrugged. "I don't want to lose you, Joe. But I don't think we have a choice. As for whether you should take this job, well, I don't give advice unless forced to. But you're certainly gonna be better than some of the bums we've got there now."
Hurley grimaced. He decided he wasn't very hungry. "Mind if I have a small glass of that wine, Billy?"
* * *
Hurley felt like a fireman when he was on call. You can sit around for hours with nothing happening, and then the phone rings and you have to spring into action. A young girl is run over by a bus, and you search for the words to comfort the grieving parents. An old man is dying alone in the hospital, and you have to go and sit by his side, holding his cold bony hand as his life slowly ebbs away. Hurley liked to read, or meditate, or work on his Sunday homily when he was on call. But there was always the sense that the quiet of his evening could be shattered in an instant, and he had better be ready.
Tonight he was thinking about his future when the phone rang. It was Maria Gutierrez, breathless and excited. "Father Hurley, I'm so frightened, my boyfriend's out drinking and I think he's gonna come here and beat me up—you know what Danny's like when he's been drinking. So I was wondering if you could come over here and stay with me. Please?"
Maria was about twenty and worked in a hairdressing salon. She was gorgeous and well aware of it. She was probably an occasion of sin for every man in the parish, but she seemed to be interested in only one of them: Joe Hurley. Her attempts to do something about this were transparent, amusing, and deeply troubling.
"Maria," Hurley pointed out, "having a man in your apartment when Danny comes by is not exactly the best way to calm him down."
"But you're not a man," Maria pointed out in turn, "you're—oh, you know what I mean, Father. He respects you."
"He wouldn't respect me if he caught me alone with you in your apartment. And he shouldn't. That's just not what priests do, especially nowadays. Maria, this is not a good idea. If you're afraid, call the police, or just leave and go to a friend's house. I'm not going to be able to help."
"I don't think you like me, Father."
Hurley rolled his eyes. "This isn't a game, Maria. You should try to be a little more respectful of my position."
"I think you should try to listen to your feelings, Father. It's not healthy keeping them, like, all bottled up."
"Good night, Maria. Call the police if you really are afraid."
He hung up. So how did Monsignor Doyle know he was a heterosexual? The same way Maria knew? Did he give off vibes? Had he led her on somehow? Or was it just his crooked little smile doing him in again? In any case, this business with Maria was not good.
Sometimes it still astonished him that he was actually a priest. It certainly continued to astonish a lot of his old friends. He remembered how his college roommate had reacted when he had first broached the idea. Gary Coombs was as lapsed a Catholic as you were likely to find. "You're fucking crazy," he had diplomatically informed Hurley. "The priesthood's a thirteenth-century job in a twenty-first century world. You'll spend half your time defending the indefensible and the other half trying to extract money from people. And you'll be horny no matter what, because what you're trying to do is basically unnatural. You'll wash out before you're thirty, and you'll wonder whatever possessed you to try. And you'll end up more of a heathen than I am because you'll have more of your illusions shattered. It ain't worth it, Joe."
Well, he hadn't washed out yet. And, even thou
gh Gary seemed to have been right about the horniness, Hurley hadn't given in to the Maria Gutierrezes of the world.
But a desk job...
Hurley recalled what Billy Flynn had said about Pope John. And he abruptly decided it was time to give his friend Rick Kelliher a call. Rick was a classmate of Hurley's who had gone back to Rome for a Vatican job after a short stint in his home diocese. He didn't seem the type to become a bishop—at times he didn't even seem to be much of a priest. But, as with Billy, appearances could be deceiving.
Kelliher was used to getting phone calls from Hurley in the middle of the night, but that didn't mean he approved. "Jesus Christ, Joe," he complained, "waking someone up at this hour has got to be a mortal sin. I hope you don't die before you make it to confession, or you're going to burn."
"Tell me about the new pope," Hurley said.
"You woke me up to chat about Pope John?"
"Tell me," Hurley repeated.
"Hard to say," Kelliher responded. "We haven't talked much. In fact, he hasn't stopped by my office at all. I can't imagine why not."
"What do people in the Curia think of him?"
"They're either crapping in their cassocks or they're getting ready to grind him into dust. They haven't got the slightest clue what he's going to do, and that sure puts bureaucrats on edge."
"But how do you think the pope is reacting? Do you think he wanted the job?"
Kelliher could be perceptive even when groggy from sleep. "This isn't about the pope, is it, Joe?"
"Well, not exactly," Hurley admitted. "Larry Doyle wants me to become his assistant."
"Doyle's a smart guy," Kelliher pointed out. "Maybe a little too smart for my taste. You'll learn a lot."
"But I like what I'm doing."
"I like to sleep. That doesn't mean I get to do it whenever I want."
"So you think I should take the job, Rick?"
"I think you should be clear about the consequences if you don't," Kelliher replied.
"Doyle says I'm in line to become pope of America. Do you think that's what I should be trying to do?"
"I think America could do a lot worse, your Holiness."
"Well, all right," Hurley muttered. "Go back to sleep."
"I'm not sure I ever really woke up."
Hurley hung up and stared into space, still thinking about the new pope. Kelliher didn't have much to say about him, but Billy Flynn was undoubtedly right; Gurdani had no more signed up for those burdens when he entered the seminary than Hurley had signed up for a desk job in the Boston archdiocesan offices.
Then again, Gurdani was undoubtedly a better man than he was. Hurley wondered if there had been a Maria Gutierrez to plague him, back in Africa. Maybe every priest had a Maria Gutierrez.
He slept restlessly that night. As he feared, he had dreams that he'd much prefer to have avoided; Maria would have been delighted. He said the seven o'clock Mass, then had breakfast with Billy, who eyed him over his coffee. "You look like you had a worse night than I did," the monsignor said.
"Tell me about it."
"What are you going to do?"
"Call Doyle, like I promised."
"And say what?"
Hurley shrugged and shook his head. "Dunno. Still waiting for the Holy Spirit to help out."
"Coffee will help, too."
Hurley poured himself a cup, drank it in silence while Billy read the Globe, and then went into the study. He stared up at the crucifix that hung above the old-fashioned roll top desk and said one final prayer. Here goes nothing, he thought. Then he picked up the phone to call Larry Doyle and decide his future.
Chapter 5
The meeting took place in one of the large rooms in the pope's private apartment. The cardinals sat along a polished oak table under a glittering chandelier. Sunlight poured in through the high windows and gleamed off the cream-colored walls and parquet floor.
Cardinal Riccielli sat at the far end of the table. This was a problem, because the new pope spoke softly, and in English, which was not Riccielli's strongest tongue. On the other hand, Riccielli had no great wish to be noticed by the pontiff, whose gaze seemed to reach deep into your soul, so he felt comfortable sitting as far away from him as possible. Not the maturest of attitudes, he had to admit, but there it was.
"My dear friends," Pope John was saying as Riccielli strained to hear, "I have much to learn, and I am counting on you to teach me. We are somewhat new to each other, and I am certain that there will be misunderstandings and complications in the course of our relationship. But with good will and God's help there is no problem we cannot overcome."
Pious nonsense, of course. Pope John had stepped into a pit of vipers, and he knew it, or he was far stupider than Riccielli suspected. In this room he was facing the cardinals of the Curia, the men who headed the bureaucratic apparatus of the Church. Few if any of them had supported him. Most were deeply suspicious of him. They knew that they were creatures of the previous pontiff, and for that reason alone they were likely to be shuffled aside in the new administration. But one had to credit them with more than just personal concerns. They had given their lives to the Church, and now it was led by a man about whom they knew next to nothing. Who was he? What did he believe in? What did he care about? In the days since his election everyone had been trying to divine answers to these questions, analyzing his scant writings and speeches, interviewing friends and associates, studying his archbishopric. What had they come up with? Not much: surface orthodoxy that never touched on controversial topics, deep piety that verged on mysticism, the persistent rumors of healing powers. Better to take the measure of the man in person, Riccielli thought, and now the pope had given them that opportunity.
At any rate, even if his opening remarks were clichéd, there was something about him that made even the hollow phrases about God's help sound persuasive... The media had already picked up on this, of course. Charisma was the term they were starting to use, although Riccielli was not sure it sufficed. There was a powerful aura of holiness about the man, an intensity, despite his soft voice and easy smile. God shone through him, Riccielli had heard a nun say, and that seemed as good a description as any.
Of course his public image wasn't hurt by those stories of his miraculous cures—stories which, however, most Curial cardinals found profoundly alien and distasteful. To them, the tales conjured up images of ignorant natives writhing on the ground, believing themselves to be possessed by devils that the holy man cast out. This was not their idea of religion.
So holiness and charisma might not be sufficient to deal with the vipers. The Vatican had overmatched more than a few pious pontiffs over the centuries, men who would have been better off in monasteries or retreat houses than in the Apostolic Palace, happier saying their beads or tending the sick than trying to run the Universal Church.
Riccielli did not know if Pope John was such a man, but he could hope. Contemplate God, he thought. Do not contemplate me.
Right now Pope John was asking a question. "I would like to know what each of you thinks is the greatest problem facing the Church today. Where do we need to focus our efforts? How do we make things better?"
This wasn't the way the cardinals wanted the meeting to go, Riccielli thought. They already knew their own opinions; they wanted to find out his.
There was silence at first, unusual in a group of such powerful men. The pope waited patiently, his head cocked to one side, a small smile on his lips.
Finally Cardinal Krajcek began. He had a cherubic face but a soul of steel. "I would say that our most pressing problem is that of obedience," he said in his typical clipped, harsh tone. "Without obedience, especially from theologians, without submission to the teaching power of the Church, one can scarcely say that there is a Church...." And on from there. Krajcek was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in its earliest manifestation had the more menacing title of the Inquisition. His opinions on obedience were not news.
Then old Rufio, from th
e Congregation for the Clergy, piped up with his usual dissertation on the decline in vocations. Was it such a surprise that fewer people wanted to enter the priesthood, Riccielli wondered, with someone like Krajcek hammering clerics who stepped out of line?
More opinions followed, all utterly predictable, with murmured banalities in response from the pope. Not a word about the sexual scandals, which somehow seemed irrelevant here. When it came to be Riccielli's turn, he decided to be as inoffensive as possible. "I don't pretend that this is as important an issue as others that have been mentioned, Holiness, but it can't be ignored, alas. I'm referring to money. Without money, many of the problems we have been talking about can't be solved, many of these worthy goals can't be reached. Getting this money is a problem itself, which we ignore at our peril."
Pope John's gaze rested on him for a long moment, and Riccielli suppressed an urge to shiver. "Yes," the pope said finally, "my homeland has discovered to its despair the results of inattention to its finances." And he made a note on a sheet of paper.
There. That hadn't been so bad.
The opinions continued.
Riccielli looked at Cardinal Valli, seated to the pope's right. His face betrayed nothing but bland interest in the exchanges. As cardinal secretary of state, he had the most power and prestige to lose under the new pope. And as one of the pope's leading rivals during the conclave, he had perhaps the greatest reason to expect to have that power and prestige stripped from him. But it was not like Valli to worry, or to back down from a deeply held position, if it came to that. Valli, he had heard, had tendered his resignation as expected, but it had been refused, which was not at all expected.
What would Valli say when his turn came? Riccielli expected that others were wondering the same thing. Many of them looked to Valli for guidance, for a sense of how to deal with their new leader. But Valli was saying nothing. Finally the pope asked him directly. "Cardinal Valli, surely you have some thoughts on the challenges facing the Church. Would you share them with us?"
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