The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘Strange,’ said Fedorov the Tass man softly, ‘strange! Wherever you turn today you feel the finger of Kamenev, even in this – name him or not you see his touch.’

  Beron the Czech nodded wisely but said nothing. The great Kamenev was beyond the reach of his humble pen, and after twenty years of survival he had learned that it was better to say nothing for a year than to permit himself a moment’s indiscretion.

  The Russian talked on with the quiet zeal of the orthodox. ‘Months ago I heard a rumour – it was only a rumour then – that Kamenev had organized this man’s escape, and that the Praesidium would have his head for it. Now, although we have been told to say nothing, the secret is out. It was Kamenev. And he must be laughing in his sleeve to see a man on whom he has left his mark, sitting on the Apostolic throne.’

  ‘And what does the Praesidium think of it?’ asked the Czech cautiously.

  Fedorov shrugged and spread his stubby fingers on the table. ‘They approve, of course – why should they not? Kamenev’s mark is on every one of them too. Besides, the man is a genius. Who else could have done what all the Five Year Plans could not do – brought the Siberian plains into flower? From the Baltic to Bulgaria, look what he has done! For the first time we have peace in the Western marches. Even the Poles don’t hate us too much any more. We are exporting grain. Think of it! I tell you, whatever this man does the Praesidium and the people cannot fail to approve.’

  The Czech nodded soberly and then asked another question. ‘This, this mark of Kamenev – what is it?’

  The Tass man sipped his drink thoughtfully, and then said, ‘He spoke about it once, I believe. I was not there but I heard echoes of it. He said, “Once you have taken a man to pieces under questioning, once you have laid out the bits on the table and put them together again, then a strange thing happens. Either you love him or you hate him for the rest of your life. He will either love you or hate you in return. You cannot lead a man or a people through hell without wishing to share a heaven with them too.” That’s why our own people love him. He put them on the rack for three years and then suddenly showed them a new world.’ He downed his drink at one gulp and slapped the glass on the table. ‘A great man, the greatest we have had since Peter the Emperor!’

  ‘And this Pope – this Kiril – what sort of a man will he be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the Russian thoughtfully. ‘If Kamenev loves him, strange things may happen. Strange things may happen to both of them.’

  He was not yet crowned, but already Kiril the Pope had felt the impact of power. The shock of it was greater than he had ever dreamed. Two thousand years of time and all of eternity were now given into his hands. Five hundred million people were his subjects, and his tribute came in every coinage of the world. He could walk, as he walked each day now in the gardens of the Vatican, and measure the confines of his kingdom in a day’s stroll; yet this narrow domain was only a foothold from which his power reached out to encompass the tilted planet.

  The men who had made him, he could now unmake with a word. The treasures of the centuries which they delivered to him with the Keys, he could dispense at will or dissipate with a fool’s gesture. His bureaucracy was more complex and yet more cheaply run than any other in the world. The toy soldiers who guarded his sacred presence were backed by thousands of levies bound to him by vow to serve with their talent, their hearts, their will, and all their celibate lives. Other men held dominion by the fickle voice of voters, by the pressure of party alignment, or by the tyranny of military juntas. He alone in all the world held it by divine delegation, and no one of all his subjects dared gainsay it.

  Yet the knowledge of power was one thing, the use of it was quite another. Whatever his plans for the Church, whatever changes he might make in the future, he had for the present to use the instruments at his disposal and the organization which his predecessors had transmitted to him. He had to learn so much so quickly; and yet in the days before his coronation it seemed almost as if there were a conspiracy to rob him of the time to think or plan. There were moments when he felt like a puppet being dressed and rehearsed for the theatre.

  The cobblers came to measure him for new slippers, the tailors to stitch his white cassocks. The jewellers offered their designs for his ring and his pectoral cross. The heralds presented their drawings for his coat of arms: crossed keys for Peter’s charge, a bear rampant on a white ground, above it the dove of the Paraclete, and, beneath, the motto, ‘Ex oriente lux. A light out of the East.’

  He approved it at first glance. It appealed to his imagination and to his sense of humour. It took time to lick a bear into shape – but once he was full-grown he was a very formidable fellow. With the Holy Ghost to guide him, he might hope to do much for the Church. And perhaps the East had been dark too long because the West had given too local a shape to a universal Gospel.

  The chamberlains led him through audience after audience – with the press, with the diplomatic corps, with the noble families who claimed place about the papal throne, with prefects and secretaries of congregations and tribunals and commissions. The Chancellery of Briefs and the Secretariat of Briefs to Princes kept his desk piled with replies in impeccable Latin to all the letters and telegrams of felicitation. The Secretariat of State reminded him daily of crisis and revolution and the intrigues of the embassies.

  At every step he stubbed his pontifical toe on history, ritual, and protocol and the cumbersome methodology of Vatican bureaucracy. Wherever he turned there was an official at his elbow directing His Holiness’s attention to this or that – an office to be filled, a courtesy to be bestowed, or talent to be elevated.

  The setting was grandiose, the stage management was sedulous, but it took him nearly a week to find out the title of the play. It was an old Roman comedy once popular, but now fallen into some disrepute: its title was, ‘The Management of Princes.’ The theme was simple – how to give a man absolute power and then to limit his use of it. The technique was to make him feel so important and to keep him so busy with pompous trifles that he had no time to think out a policy or put it into execution.

  When he saw the joke, Kiril the Ukrainian laughed privately and decided to make a joke of his own.

  So, two days before his coronation, he summoned without warning a private meeting of all the Cardinals in the Borgia rooms of the Vatican. The abruptness of the call was calculated, and the risk of it was calculated too.

  The day after his coronation, all but the Cardinals of the Curia would leave Rome and return to their own countries. Each could prove a willing adjutant or a discreet hindrance to papal policy. One did not become a prince of the Church without some ambition and some taste for power. One did not grow old in office without some hardening of heart and will. They were more than subjects, these hinge-men, they were counsellors also, jealous of their own Apostolic succession and of the autonomy conferred by it. Even a Pope must deal delicately with them and not strain too far their wisdom, their loyalty, or their national pride.

  When he saw them seated before him, old and wise and shrewdly expectant, Kiril’s heart sank and he asked himself for the hundredth time what he had to offer to them and to the Church. Then once again it seemed as though power renewed itself in him, and he made the Sign of the Cross, an invocation to the Holy Ghost, and then plunged into the business of the Consistory. He did not use the ‘we’ of authority, but spoke intimately and personally, as if anxious to establish a relation of friendship:

  ‘My brothers, my helpers in the cause of Christ—’ His voice was strong, yet strangely tender, as if he pleaded with them for fraternity and understanding. ‘What I am today you have made me. Yet if what we believe is true, it is not you, but God who has set me in these shoes of the Fisherman. Day and night I have asked myself what I have to offer to Him or to His Church – I have so little, you see. I am a man who was wrenched out of life like Lazarus, and then drawn back into it by the hand of God. All of you are men of your time. You have grown with it, you
have been changed by it, you have contributed to change it for better or for worse. It is natural that each of you should guard jealously that place and that knowledge, and that authority which you have earned for yourselves in time. Now, however, I must ask you to be generous with me and lend me what you have of knowledge and experience in the name of God.’ His voice faltered a little, and to the old men it seemed for a moment as if he were about to weep. Then he recovered himself, and seemed to grow in size, while his voice took on a stronger tone. ‘Unlike you I am not a man of my time – because I have spent seventeen years in prison and time has passed me by. So much of the world is a novelty to me. The only thing that is not new is man, and him I know and love because I have lived with him for so long in the simple intimacy of survival. Even the Church is strange to me because I have had to dispense for so long with what is unnecessary in it, and I have had to cling the more desperately to that which is of its nature and its essence – the Deposit of Faith, the Sacrifice, and the Sacramental Acts.’

  For the first time he smiled at them, sensing their uneasiness and trying to calm them. ‘I know the thought that is in your mind – that you may have for Pope an innovator, a man avid for change. This is not so. Though much change is necessary, we must make it together. I try simply to explain myself so that you may understand me and help me. I cannot cling as zealously as some to ritual and to traditional forms of devotion because for years I have held to nothing but the simplest forms of prayer and the bare essentials of the Sacraments. I know, believe me, I know, that there are those for whom the straightest road is the safest one. I wish them to be as free as possible inside the bond of the faith. I do not wish to change the long tradition of a celibate clergy. I myself am celibate as you are. Yet I have seen the faith preserved under persecution by married priests who have handed it to their children like a jewel in silk. I cannot grow hot over the legalities of the canonists or the rivalries of religious congregations because I have seen women raped by their jailers, and I have delivered their children with these consecrated hands.’

  Once again he smiled and threw out his crooked hands to them in a gesture of pleading. ‘I am perhaps the wrong man for you, my brothers – but God has given me to you and you must make the best of me.’

  There was a long pause and then he went on more strongly still, not pleading, not explaining, but demanding with all the power that surged within him:

  ‘You ask me where I want to lead you, where I want to lead the Church. I will show you. I want to lead you back to God, through men. Understand this, understand it in mind and heart and obedient will. We are what we are, for the service of God through the service of man. If we lose contact with man – suffering, sinful, lost, confused men crying in the night, women agonizing, children weeping – then we too are lost because we shall be negligent shepherds who have done everything but the one thing necessary.’ He broke off and stood facing them, tall, pale and strange, with his scarred face, and his crooked hands, and his black Byzantine beard. Then he handed them like a challenge the formal Latin question:

  ‘Quid vobis videtur? How does it seem to you?’

  There was a ritual to cover this moment, just as there was a ritual to cover every act of Vatican life. The Cardinals would remove their red caps and bow their heads in submission, and then wait to be dismissed to do or not to do that which they had been counselled. A papal allocution was rarely a dialogue, but this time there was a sense of urgency and even of conflict in the assembly.

  Cardinal Leone heaved his lion’s bulk out of his chair, tossed his white mane, and addressed himself to the Pontiff. ‘All of us here have pledged to Your Holiness and to the Church the service of our lives. Yet we should not discharge this service if we did not offer counsel when we believed counsel was necessary.’

  ‘This is what I have asked of you,’ said Kiril mildly. ‘Please speak freely.’

  Leone made a grave acknowledgement and then went on firmly. ‘It is too early yet to measure the effect of Your Holiness’s election upon the world at large, and especially upon the Roman and Italian Church. I mean no disrespect when I say that until we know this reaction there should be a prudence, a reserve in public utterance and public action.’

  ‘I have no quarrel with that,’ said Kiril in the same mild fashion. ‘But you must not quarrel with me when I tell you that I want the voice of Kiril to be heard by all men – not another voice, in another accent or another mode, but my voice. A father does not speak to his son through an actor’s mask. He speaks simply, freely, and from the heart, and this is what I propose to do.’

  The old lion held his ground and went on stubbornly. ‘There are realities to be faced, Holiness. The voice will change, no matter what you do. It will issue from the mouth of a Mexican peasant and an English academician and a German missionary in the Pacific. It will be interpreted by a hostile press or a theatrical television correspondent. The most Your Holiness can expect is that the first voice shall be yours, and the first record shall be the authentic one.’ He permitted himself a grim smile. ‘We too are your voices, Holiness, and even we may find it hard to render the score perfectly.’ He sat down amid a small rustle of approval.

  Then Pallenberg, the lean, cold man from Germany, took the floor and presented his own problem. ‘Your Holiness has spoken of changes. It is my view and the view of my brother bishops that certain changes are long overdue. We are a divided country. We have an immense prosperity and a dubious future. There is a drift of the Catholic population away from the Church because our women must marry outside it, since our males were decimated during the war. Our problems in this regard are legion. We can only solve them at the human level. Yet here in Rome they are being dealt with by Monsignori who cannot even speak our language, who work solely by the canons and who have no sense of our history or of our present problems. They delay, they temporize, they centralize. They treat the affairs of souls as if they were entries in a ledger. Our burden is great enough, we cannot carry Rome on our backs as well – for myself and for my brethren, Appello ad Petrum. I appeal to Peter!’

  There was an audible gasp at so much bluntness. Leone flushed angrily and Rinaldi hid a smile behind a silk handkerchief.

  After a moment Kiril the Pope spoke again. His tone was as mild as ever, but this time they noticed he used the plural of royalty. ‘We promise our German brothers that we shall give immediate and full consideration to their special problems and we shall confer with them privately before they return to their homeland. We would urge them, however, to patience and to charity with their colleagues in Rome. They should remember, too, that often things are left undone from habit and from tradition, rather than from lack of good will.’ He paused a moment, letting the reproof sink in; then he chuckled. ‘I have had my own troubles with another bureaucracy. Even the men who tormented me did not lack good will. They wanted to build a new world in one generation, but the bureaucracy beat them each time. Let us see if we can find ourselves more priests and fewer bureaucrats – fewer clerks and more simple souls who understand the human heart.’

  Now it was the turn of the Frenchman, and he was no less blunt than Pallenberg. ‘Whatever we do in France – whatever we propose from France comes here to Rome under the shadow of old history. Every one of our projects, from the worker priests to studies in the development of dogma and the creation of an intelligent Catholic press, is greeted as if it were a new tramontane rebellion. We cannot work freely or with continuity in this climate. We cannot feel ourselves helped by the fraternity of the Church if a cloud of censure hangs over everything we plan or propose.’ He swung around angrily and flung out a challenge to the Italians. ‘There are heresies here in Rome too, and this is one of them: that unity and uniformity are the same thing, that the Roman way is best for everyone from Hong Kong to Peru. Your Holiness has expressed the wish to have his voice heard in its true tone. We too wish to have our voice heard without distortion at the throne of Peter. Appointments need to be made, men who can represe
nt us and the climate in which we live, truthfully and with understanding.’

  ‘You touch on a problem,’ said Kiril carefully, ‘which pre-occupies us as well. We ourselves carry the burden of history so that we cannot always deal with the simplicity of a matter but must consider a complexity of colorations and historic associations.’ He raised a hand to his beard and smiled. ‘Even this I understand to be a source of scandal to some although our Master and the first Apostles were all bearded men. I should hate to think that the rock of Peter should split for want of a razor. Quid vobis videtur?’

  In that moment they laughed and loved him. Their anger with one another subsided, and they listened more humbly while the men from the South Americas told of their own problems: impoverished populations, a scarcity of trained clergy, the historic association of the Church with the wealthy and the exploiters, lack of funds, the strength of the Marxist idea held up like a torch to rally the dispossessed.

  Came then the men from the East, telling how the frontiers were closing one by one on the Christian idea. And how one by one the old missionary foundations were being destroyed while the idea of an earthly paradise took hold of the minds of men who needed it so desperately because they had so little time to enjoy it. It was a brutal balance sheet for men who had to make their reckoning with the Almighty. And when finally it was done, there was a silence over the whole assembly, and they waited for Kiril the Pontiff to make his final summation.

  He rose then in his place and confronted them – a figure oddly young, oddly alone, like a Christ from a Byzantine triptych. ‘There are those,’ he told them solemnly, ‘who believe that we are come to the last age of the world because man has now the power to destroy himself from the face of the earth, and every day the danger grows greater that he will do it. Yet we, my brothers, have no more or no less to offer for the world’s salvation than we had in the beginning. We preach Christ and Him crucified – to the Jews, indeed a stumbling block and to the Gentiles, foolishness. This is the folly of the faith, and if we are not committed to it then we are committed to an illusion. What do we do, therefore? From this point where do we go? I believe there is only one way. We take the truth like a lamp and we walk out like the first Apostles to tell the good tidings to whoever will listen. If history stands in our way we ignore it. If systems inhibit us we dispense with them. If dignities weigh us down we cast them aside. I have one commission now for all of you – for those who are going away from Rome and those who stay here in the shadow of our triumphs and our sins – find me men! Find me good men who understand what it is to love God and love His children. Find me men with fire in their hearts and wings on their feet. Send them to me, and I will send them out to bring love to the loveless and hope to those who sit in darkness…Go now in the name of God!’