The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘You will go free,’ Kamenev had said, ‘because I need you free. But you will always owe me a debt because I have killed a man to give you a name. One day, I shall come to you to ask for payment, and you will pay, whatever it may cost.’

  It was as though the jailer had assumed the mantle of prophecy, because Kiril Lakota had escaped and made his way to Rome to find that a dying Pope had made him a Cardinal ‘in the breast’ – a man of destiny, a hinge-man of Mother Church.

  To this point the road in retrospect was clear. He could trace in its tragedies the promise of future mercies. For every one of the bishops who had died for his belief, a man had died in his arms in the camp, blessing the Almighty for a final absolution. The scattered flock would not all lose the faith for which they had suffered. Some of them would remain to hand on the creed, and to keep a small light burning that one day might light a thousand torches. In the degradation of the road gangs, he had seen how the strangest men upheld the human dignities. He had baptized children with a handful of dirty water and seen them die unmarked by the miseries of the world.

  He himself had learned humility and gratitude and the courage to believe in an Omnipotence working by a mighty evolution towards an ultimate good. He had learned compassion and tenderness and the meaning of the cry in the night. He had learned to hope that for Kamenev himself he might be an instrument, if not of ultimate enlightenment, then at least of ultimate absolution. But all this was in the past, and the pattern had still to work itself out beyond Rome into a fathomless future. Even the light of contemplation was not thrown beyond Rome. There was a veil drawn, and the veil was the limit imposed on prescience by a merciful God…

  The light was changing now; the landscape of the steppes had become an undulant sea, across which a figure in antique robes was walking towards him, his face shining, his pierced hands outstretched, as if in greeting. Kiril Cardinal Lakota shrank away, and tried to bury himself in the lighted sea; but there was no escape. When the hands touched him and the luminous face bent to embrace him, he felt himself pierced by an intolerable joy, and an intolerable pain. Then he entered into the moment of peace.

  The servant who was assigned to care for him came into the room and saw him kneeling rigid as a cataleptic with his arms outstretched in the attitude of crucifixion. Rinaldi, making the rounds of the conclavists, came upon him and tried vainly to wake him. Then Rinaldi too went away, shaken and humbled, to consult with Leone and with his colleagues.

  In his cluttered and unelegant office, George Faber, the grey-haired dean of the Roman press corps, fifteen years Italian correspondent for the New York Monitor, was writing his background story on the papal election:

  ‘…Outside the small medieval enclave of the Vatican, the world is in a climate of crisis. Winds of change are blowing and storm warnings are being raised, now in one place, now in another. The arms race between America and Russia goes on unabated. Every month there are new and hostile probes into the high orbits of space. There is famine in India, and guerrilla fighting along the southern peninsulas of Asia. There is thunder over Africa, and the tattered flags of revolution are being hoisted over the capitals of South America. There is blood on the sands in North Mrica, and in Europe the battle for economic survival is waged behind the closed doors of banks and board rooms. In the high airs above the Pacific, war planes fly to sample the pollution of the air by lethal atomic particles. In China the new dynasts struggle to fill the bellies of hungry millions, while they hold their minds chained to the rigid orthodoxy of Marxist philosophy. In the misty valleys of the Himalayas, where the prayer-flags flutter and the tea-pickers plod along the terraces, there are forays and incursions from Tibet and Sinkiang. On the frontiers of Outer Mongolia, the uneasy amity of Russia and China is strained to the point of rupture. Patrol boats probe the mangrove swamps and inlets of New Guinea, while the upland tribes try to project themselves into the twentieth century by a single leap from the Stone Age.

  ‘Everywhere man has become aware of himself as a transient animal and is battling desperately to assert his right to the best of the world for the short time that he sojourns in it. The Nepalese haunted by his mountain demons, the coolie hauling his heart muscle into exhaustion between the shafts of a rickshaw, the Israeli beleaguered at every frontier, everyone all at once is asserting his claim to an identity; everyone has an ear for any prophet who can promise him one.’

  He stopped typing, lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, considering the thought which he had just written – ‘a claim to identity’. Strange how everyone had to make it sooner or later. Strange for how long one accepted with apparent equanimity the kind of person one seemed to be, the state to which one had apparently been nominated in life. Then all of a sudden, the identity was called in question…His own for instance. George Faber, long-time bachelor, acknowledged expert on Italian affairs and Vatican politics. Why so late in life was he being forced to question what he was, what he had so far been content to be? Why this restless dissatisfaction with the public image of himself? Why this doubt that he could survive any longer without a permanent supplement to himself?…A woman, of course. There always had been women in his life, but Chiara was something new and special…The thought often troubled him. He tried to put it away and bent again to his typewriter:

  ‘Everywhere the cry is for survival, but since the supreme irony of creation was that man must inevitably die, those who strived for the mastery of his mind or his muscle have to promise him an extension of his span into some semblance of immortality. The Marxist promises him a oneness with the workers of the world. The Nationalist gives him a flag and a frontier, and a local enlargement of himself. The Democrat offers him liberty through a ballot box, but warns that he might have to die to preserve it.

  ‘But for man, and all the prophets he raises up for himself, the last enemy is time; and time is a relative dimension, limited directly by man’s capacity to make use of it. Modern communication, swift as light, has diminished to nothing the time between a human act and its consequences. A shot fired in Berlin can detonate the world within minutes. A plague in the Philippines can infect Australia within a day. A man toppling from a high wire in a Moscow circus can be watched in his death agony from London and New York.

  ‘So, at every moment, every man is besieged by the consequences of his own sins and those of all his fellows. So, too, every prophet and every pundit is haunted by the swift lapse of time and the knowledge that the accounting for false predictions and broken promises is swifter than it has ever been in history. Here precisely is the cause of the crisis. Here the winds and the waves are born and the thunderbolts are forged that may, any week, any month, go roaring round the world under a sky black with mushroom clouds.

  ‘The men in the Vatican are aware of time, though many of them have ceased to be as aware as they need to be…’

  Time…! He had become so vividly conscious of this diminishing dimension of existence. He was in his mid-forties. For more than a year he had been trying to steer Chiara’s petition of nullity through the Holy Roman Rota so that she might be free from Corrado Calitri to marry him. But the case was moving with desperate slowness, and Faber, although a Catholic by birth, had come to resent bitterly the impersonal system of the Roman Congregations and the attitude of the old men who ran them.

  He typed on vividly, precisely, professionally:

  ‘Like most old men they are accustomed to seeing time as a flash between two eternities instead of a quantum of extension given to each individual man to mature towards the vision of his God.

  ‘They are concerned also with man’s identity, which they are obliged to affirm as the identity of a son of God. Yet here they are in danger of another pitfall: that they sometimes affirm his identity without understanding his individuality, and how he has to grow in whatever garden he is planted, whether the ground is sweet or sour, whether the air is friendly or tempestuous, Men grow, like trees, in different shapes, crooked or straight, according to th
e climate of their nurture. But so long as the sap flows and the leaves burgeon, there should be no quarrel with the shape of the man or the tree.

  ‘The men of the Vatican are concerned as well with immortality and eternity. They too understand man’s need for an extension of himself beyond the limit of the fleeting years. They affirm, as of faith, the persistence of soul into an eternity of union with the Creator, or of exile from His face. They go further. They promise man a preservation of his identity and an ultimate victory even over the terror of physical death. What they fail too often to understand is that immortality must be begun in time, and that a man must be given the physical resources to survive before his spirit can grow to desire more than physical survival…

  Chiara had become as necessary to him as breath. Without her youth and her passion, it seemed that he must slide all too quickly into age and disillusion. She had been his mistress for nearly six months now, but he was plagued by the fear that he could lose her at any moment to a younger man, and that the promise of children and continuity might never be fulfilled in him…He had friends in the Vatican. He had easy access to men with great names in the Church, but they were committed to the law and to the system, and they could not help him at all. He wrote feelingly:

  ‘They are caught, these old and deliberate men, in the dilemma of all principality: that the higher one rises, the more one sees of the world, but the less one apprehends of the small determining factors of human existence. How a man without shoes may starve because he cannot walk to a place of employment. How a liverish tax collector may start a local revolution. How high blood-pressure may plunge a noble man into melancholy and despair. How a woman may sell herself for money because she cannot give herself to one man for love. The danger of all rulers is that they begin to believe that history is the result of great generalities, instead of the sum of millions of small particulars, like bad drainage and sexual obsession and the anopheles mosquito…’

  It was not the story he had intended to write, but it was a true record of his personal feelings about the coming event…Let it stand then! Let the editors in New York like it or lump it…The door opened and Chiara came in. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He damned the Church and her husband and his paper to a special kind of hell, and then took her out to lunch on the Via Veneto.

  The first day of the conclave was left private to the electing Cardinals, so that they might meet and talk discreetly, and probe for one another’s prejudices and blind spots and motives of private interest. It was for this reason that Rinaldi and Leone moved among them to prepare them carefully for the final proposal. Once the voting began, once they had taken sides with this candidate or that, it would be much more difficult to bring them to an agreement.

  Not all the talk was on the level of eternal verities. Much of it was simple and blunt, like Rinaldi’s conversation with the American over a cup of American coffee (brewed by His Eminence’s own servant because Italian coffee gave him indigestion).

  His Eminence, Charles Corbet Carlin, Cardinal Archbishop of New York, was a tall, ruddy man with an expansive manner and a shrewd, pragmatic eye. He stated his problem as baldly as a banker challenging an overdraft:

  ‘We don’t want a diplomat, and we don’t want a Curia official who will look at the world through a Roman eyeglass. A man who has travelled, yes, but someone who has been a pastor and understands what our problems are at this moment.’

  ‘I should be interested to hear Your Eminence define them.’ Rinaldi was at his most urbane.

  ‘We’re losing our grip on the people,’ said Carlin flatly. ‘They are losing their loyalty to us. I think we are more than half to blame.’

  Rinaldi was startled. Carlin had the reputation of being a brilliant banker for Mother Church and of entertaining a conviction that all the ills of the world could be solved by a well-endowed school system and a rousing sermon every Sunday. To hear him talk so bluntly of the shortcomings of his own province was both refreshing and disquieting. Rinaldi asked:

  ‘Why are we losing our grip?’

  ‘In America? Two reasons: prosperity and respectability. We’re not persecuted any more. We pay our way. We can wear the faith like a Rotary badge – and with as little social consequence. We collect our dues like a club, shout down the Communists, and make the biggest contribution in the whole world to Peter’s Pence. But it isn’t enough. There’s no – no heart in it for many Catholics. The young ones are drifting outside our influence. They don’t need us as they should. They don’t trust us as they used. For that,’ he added gravely, ‘I think I’m partly to blame.’

  ‘None of us has much right to be proud of himself,’ said Rinaldi quietly. ‘Look at France – look at the bloody things that have been done in Algeria. Yet this is a country half-Catholic, and with a Catholic leadership. Where is our authority in this monstrous situation? A third of the Catholic population of the world is in the South Americas, yet what is our influence there? What impression do we make among the indifferent rich, and the oppressed poor, who see no hope in God and less in those who represent Him? Where do we begin to change?’

  ‘I’ve made mistakes,’ said Carlin moodily. ‘Big ones. I can’t even begin to repair them all. My father was a gardener, a good one. He used to say that the best you could do for a tree was mulch it and prune it once a year, and leave the, rest to God. I always prided myself that I was a practical fellow like he was – you know? Build the Church, then the school. Get the nuns in, then the brothers. Build the seminary and train the priests, and keep the money coming in. After that it was up to the Almighty.’ For the first time he smiled, and Rinaldi, who had disliked him for many years, began to warm to him. He went on whimsically, ‘The Romans and the Irish! We’re great plotters, and great builders, but we lose the inwardness of things quicker than anybody else. Stick to the book! No meat on Fridays, no sleeping with your neighbour’s wife, and leave the mysteries to the theologians! It isn’t enough. God help us, but it isn’t!’

  ‘You’re asking for a saint. I doubt we have many on the books just now.’

  ‘Not a saint.’ Carlin was emphatic again. ‘A man for the people, and of the people, like Sarto was. A man who could bleed for them, and scold them, and have them know all the time that he loved them. A man who could break out of this gilded garden patch and make himself another Peter.’

  ‘He would be crucified too, of course,’ said Rinaldi tartly.

  ‘Perhaps that is just what we need,’ said His Eminence from New York.

  Whereupon Rinaldi, the diplomat, judged it opportune to talk of the bearded Ukrainian, Kiril Lakota, as a man-with-the-makings-of-a-Pope.

  In a somewhat smaller suite of the conclave, Leone was discussing the same candidate with Hugh Cardinal Brandon from Westminster. Brandon, being English, was a man with no illusions and few enthusiasms. He pursed his thin, grey lips and toyed with his pectoral cross, and delivered his policy in precise, if stilted Italian:

  ‘From our point of view, an Italian is still the best choice. It leaves us room to move, if you understand what I mean. There is no question of a new attitude or a fresh political alignment. There is no disturbance of the relations between the Vatican and the Republic of Italy. The Papacy would still be an effective barrier to any growth of Italian communism.’ He permitted himself a dry joke. ‘We could still count on the sympathy of English Romantics for Romantic Italy.’

  Leone, veteran of many a subtle argument, nodded his agreement and added almost casually, ‘You would not then consider our newcomer, the one who spoke to us this morning?’

  ‘I doubt it. I found him, as everyone did, most impressive in the pulpit. But then eloquence is hardly a full qualification, is it? Besides, there is the question of rites. I understand this man is a Ukrainian and belongs to the Ruthenian rite.’

  ‘If he were elected, he would automatically practise the Roman one.’

  His Eminence of Westminster smiled thinly. ‘The beard might worry some people. A too Byzantine
look, don’t you think? We haven’t had a bearded Pope in a very long time.’

  ‘No doubt he would shave it.’

  ‘Would he still wear the ikon?’

  ‘He might be persuaded to dispense with that, too.’

  ‘Then we should be left with a model Roman. So why not choose an Italian in the first place? I can’t believe you would want anything different.’

  ‘Believe me, I do. I am prepared to tell you now that my vote will go to the Ukrainian.’

  ‘I am afraid I can’t promise you mine. The English and the Russians, you know…Historically we’ve never done very well together…Never at all.’

  ‘Always,’ said Rahamani the Syrian in his pliant, courteous fashion, ‘always you search a man for the one necessary gift – the gift of co-operation with God. Even among good men this gift is rare. Most of us, you see, spend our lives trying to bend ourselves to the will of God, and even then we have often to be bent by a violent grace. The others, the rare ones, commit themselves, as if by an instinctive act, to be tools in the hands of the Maker. If this new man is such a one, then it is he whom we need.’

  ‘And how do we know?’ asked Leone dryly.

  ‘We submit him to God,’ said the Syrian. ‘We ask God to judge him, and we rest secure in the outcome.’

  ‘We can only vote on him. There is no other way.’

  There is another way, prescribed in the Apostolic Constitution. It is the way of inspiration. Any member of the conclave may make a public proclamation of the man he believes should be chosen, trusting that if this be a candidate acceptable to God, God will inspire the other conclavists to approve publicly. It is a valid method of election.’

  ‘It also takes courage – and a great deal of faith.’

  ‘If we elders of the Church lack faith, what hope is there for the people?’

  ‘I am reproved,’ said the Cardinal Secretary of the Holy Office. ‘It’s time I stopped canvassing and began to pray.’