The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  Immediately after the Consistory, Potocki, the Cardinal from Poland, presented a petition for an urgent and private audience with the Pope. To his surprise it was answered within an hour by an invitation to dinner. When he arrived at the papal apartment, he found the new Pontiff alone, sitting in an armchair, reading a small volume bound in faded leather. When he knelt to make his obedience, Kiril stretched out a hand and raised to his feet with a smile.

  ‘Tonight we should be brothers together. The cooking is bad, and I haven’t had time to reform the papal kitchens. I hope your company will give me a better dinner than usual.’ He pointed to the yellowed pages of the book, and chuckled. ‘Our friend Rinaldi has a sense of humour. He gave me a present to celebrate my election. It is an account of the reign of the Dutchman, Adrian VI. Do you know what they called the Cardinals who elected him? “Betrayers of Christ’s blood, who surrendered the fair Vatican to foreign fury, and handed the Church and Italy into slavery with the barbarians.” I wonder what they are saying about you and me at this moment?’ He shut the book with a snap and relaxed once again in the chair. ‘It is only the beginning, and yet I do so badly, and I feel myself so much alone…How can I help you, my friend?’

  Potocki was touched by the charm of his new master, but the habit of caution was strong in him and he contented himself with a formality. ‘A letter was delivered to me this morning, Holiness. I am told that it comes from Moscow. I was asked to deliver it directly into your hands.’ He brought out a bulky envelope sealed with grey wax and handed it to Kiril, who held it a moment in his hands and then laid it on the table.

  ‘I shall read it later, and if it should concern you as well, I shall call you. Now tell me…’ He leaned forward in his chair, begging earnestly for a confidence. ‘You did not speak in the Consistory today, and yet you have as many problems as the others. I want to hear them.’

  Potocki’s lined face tightened and his eyes clouded. ‘There is a private fear first, Holiness.’

  ‘Share it with me,’ said Kiril gently. ‘I have so many of my own, it may make me feel better.’

  ‘History sets snares for all of us,’ said the Pole gravely. ‘Your Holiness knows this. The history of the Ruthenian Chutch in Poland is a bitter one. We have not always acted like brothers in the faith, but like enemies one to another. The time of dissension is past, but if Your Holiness were to remember it too harshly, it could be bad for us all. We Poles are Latin by temper and loyalty. Time was when the Polish Church lent itself to persecution of its brothers in the Ruthenian rite. We were both young then, but it is possible – and we both know it – that many might have lived who are now dead had we kept the unity of the Spirit in the bond of faith.’ He hesitated and then stumbled awkwardly through the next question. ‘I mean no disrespect, Holiness, but I must ask with loyalty what others will ask with a false purpose: how does your Holiness feel about us in Poland? How do you regard what we are trying to do?’

  There was a long pause. Kiril the Pontiff looked down at his gnarled hands and then abruptly heaved himself from the chair and laid his hands on the shoulders of his brother bishop. He said softly, ‘We have both been in prison, you and I. We both know that when they tried to break us, it was not with the love we had, but with the resentments that we had buried deep inside us. When you sat in the darkness, trembling and waiting for the next session with the lights, and the pain, and the questions, what tempted you most?’

  ‘Rome,’ said Potocki bluntly, ‘where they knew so much, and seemed to care so little.’

  Kiril the Pontiff smiled and nodded gravely. ‘For me it was the memory of the great Andrew Szepticky, Metropolitan of Galicia. I loved him like a father. I hated bitterly what had been done to him. I remembered him before he died, a hulk of a man, paralysed, torn with pain, watched all that he had built being destroyed, the houses of education, the seminaries, the old culture he had tried so hard to preserve. I was oppressed by the futility of it all, and I wondered whether it were worth spending so many lives, so many more noble spirits, to try again…Those were bad days, and worse nights.’

  Potocki flushed to the roots of his thin hair. ‘I am ashamed, Holiness. I should not have doubted.’

  Kiril shrugged and smiled wryly. ‘Why not? We are all human. You are walking a tightrope in Poland, I am walking another in Rome. Both of us may slip, and we shall need a net to catch us. I beg you to believe that if I sometimes lack understanding, I do not lack love.’

  ‘What we do in Warsaw,’ said Potocki, ‘is not always understood in Rome.’

  ‘If you need an interpreter,’ said Kiril briskly, ‘send me one. I promise him always a ready hearing.’

  ‘There will be so many, Holiness, and they will speak in so many tongues. How can you attend to them all?’

  ‘I know.’ Kiril’s thin frame seemed suddenly to shrink as if under a burden. ‘Strange. We profess and we teach that the Pontiff is preserved from fundamental error by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. I pray but I hear no thunder on the mountain. My eyes see no splendours on the hills. I stand between God and man, but I hear only man and the voice of my heart.’

  For the first time the harsh face of the Pole relaxed, and he spread his hands in a gesture of willing defeat. ‘Listen to that, Holiness. Cor ad cor loquitur. Heart speaks to heart, and this may well be God’s dialogue with men.’

  ‘Let’s go to dinner,’ said Kiril the Pontiff, ‘and forgive my nuns their heavy hand with the sauce. They are worthy creatures, but I will have to find them a good cookery book.’

  They ate no better than he had promised, and they drank a thin young wine from the Alban hills; but they talked more freely, and a warmth grew between them, and when they came to the fruit and the cheese, Kiril the Pontiff opened his heart on another matter.

  ‘In two days I am to be crowned. It is a small thing, perhaps, but I am troubled by so much ceremony. The Master came into Jerusalem riding on a donkey. I am to be carried on the shoulders of nobles between the plumed fans of a Roman Emperor. All over the world are barefoot men with empty bellies. I am to be crowned with gold, and my triumph will be lit with a million lights. I am ashamed that the successor of the Carpenter should be treated like a king. I should like to change it.’

  Potocki gave a thin smile, and shook his head. ‘They will not let you do it, Holiness.’

  ‘I know.’ Kiril’s fingers toyed with the broken crumbs on his plate. ‘I belong to the Romans, too, and they must have their holiday. I cannot walk down the nave of St Peter’s because I could not be seen, and even if the visitors do not come to pray, they do come to see the Pontiff. I am a prince by treaty, they remind me, and a prince must wear a crown.’

  ‘Wear it, Holiness,’ said Potocki with grim humour. ‘Wear it for the day and do not trouble yourself. Soon enough they will crown you with thorns!’

  An hour away at his villa in the Alban hills, Valerio Cardinal Rinaldi was giving his own dinner party. His guests made a curious yet powerful assemblage, and he managed them with the skill of a man who had just proved himself a king-maker.

  Leone was there, and Semmering the Father General of the Jesuits, whom the vulgar called the ‘Black Pope’. There were Goldoni from the Secretariat of State, and Benedetti, the prince of Vatican finances, and Orlando Campeggio the shrewd, swarthy fellow who was the editor of Osservatore Romano. At the foot of the table, as if for a concession to the mystics, sat Rahamani the Syrian, soft, complaisant, and always unexpected.

  The meal was served on a belvedere which looked down on a classic garden, once the site of an Orphic temple, and beyond it to the farmlands and the distant glow of Rome. The air was mild; the night was full of stars, and Rinaldi’s assiduous servants had coaxed them into comfort with one another.

  Campeggio, the layman, smoked his cigar and talked freely, a prince among the princes. ‘…First it seems we have to present the Pontiff in the most acceptable light. I have thought a great deal about this, and you will all have read what we have already don
e in the press. The theme so far has been “in prison for the faith”. The reaction to this has been good – a wave of sympathy–an expression of lively affection and loyalty. Of course this is only the beginning, and it does not solve all our problems. Our next thought was to present “a Pope of the people”. We may need some assistance with this, particularly from an Italian point of view. Fortunately, he speaks good Italian and therefore can communicate himself in public functions, and in contacts with the populace…Here we shall need both direction and assistance from the members of the Curia…’ He was a deft man, and he broke off at this point, leaving the proposition for the clerics.

  It was Leone who took it up, worrying it in his stubborn fashion, while he peeled an apple and sliced it with a silver knife. ‘Nothing is quite as simple as it sounds. We have to present him, yes, but we have to edit him and comment him as well. You heard what went on in the Consistory today.’ He thrust the knife blade at Rinaldi and Rahamani. ‘Print what he said baldly and without explanation, and it would read as if he were ready to throw two thousand years of tradition out of the window. I saw his point, we all did, but I saw too where we have to protect him.’

  ‘Where is that?’ Semmering, the spare, blond Jesuit, leaned forward in his place.

  ‘He showed us his own Achilles’ heel,’ said Leone firmly. ‘He said he was a man who had dropped out of time. He will need, I think, to be reminded constantly what our times are and what instruments we have to work with.’

  ‘Do you think he is unaware of them?’ asked the Jesuit again.

  Leone frowned. ‘I’m not sure. I have not yet begun to read his mind. All I know is that be is asking for something new, before he has bad time to examine what is old and permanent in the Church.’

  ‘As I remember,’ said the Syrian mildly, ‘he asked us to find him men. This is not new. Men are the foundation of every Apostolic work. How did he say it? “Men with fire in their hearts and wings on their feet.”’

  ‘We have forty thousand men,’ said the Jesuit dryly, ‘and they are all bound to him by solemn vows of service. We stand, all of us, at his call.’

  ‘Not all of us,’ said Rinaldi without rancour. ‘And we should be honest enough to confess it. We move familiarly where he must move for a while awkwardly and strangely, in the headquarters of the Church. We accept the inertia and the ambition, and the bureaucracy, because we have been bred to it, and in part we have helped to build it. You know what he said to me yesterday?’ He paused like an actor waiting for their attention to focus on him. ‘He said, “I celebrated Mass once in seventeen years. I lived where hundreds of millions will die without having seen a priest or heard the word of God, yet here I see hundreds of priests stamping documents and punching time-clocks like common clerks…” I understand his point of view.’

  ‘What does he expect us to do?’ asked Benedetti acidly. ‘Run the Vatican with IBM machines, and put all the priests in the mission fields? No man be as naïve as that.’

  ‘I don’t think he is naïve,’ said Leone. ‘Far from it. But I think he may discount too readily what Rome means to the Church – for order and discipline, and a stewardship of the faith.’

  For the first time Goldoni, the grey, stocky man from the Secretariat of State, entered the argument. His harsh, Roman voice crackled like twigs in a fire, as he gave his own version of the new Pontiff. ‘He has been in to see me several times. He does not summon me, but walks in quietly and asks questions of me and of my staff. I have the impression that he understands politics very well, especially Marxist politics, but he is little interested in details and personalities. He uses one word often, pressure. He asks where the pressures begin in each country, and how they act on the people, and on those who rule them. When I asked him to explain, he said that the faith was planted in men by God, but that the Church had to be built on the human and material resource of each country, and that, to survive, it had to withstand the pressures that were suffered by the mass of the people. He said something else too: that we have centralized too much, and we have delayed too long to train those who can maintain the universality of the Church in the autonomy of a national culture. He spoke of vacuums created by Rome – vacuums in classes and countries – and local clergies…I do not know how enlightened his own policies may be, but he is not blind to the defects of those which already exist.’

  ‘The new broom,’ said Benedetti tartly. ‘He wants to sweep all the rooms at once…He can read a balance sheet too! He objects that we have so much in credit, while there is so much poverty in Uruguay, or among the Urdus. I ask myself if he really understands that forty years ago the Vatican was almost bankrupt and Gasparri had to borrow ten thousand sterling pounds to finance the papal election. Now at least we can pay our way, and move with some strength for the good of the Church.’

  ‘When he spoke to us,’ said Rahamani again, ‘I did not hear him mention money. I was reminded how the first Apostles were sent out with neither scrip nor stave nor money for the road. As I heard the story, that is how our Kiril came from Siberia to Rome.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Benedetti irritably. ‘But have you ever looked at the travel bills for a pair of missionaries – or worked out how much it costs to train a seminary teacher?’

  Abruptly Leone threw back his white mane and laughed, so that the night birds stirred in the cypresses and the echoes rolled down over the starlit valley. ‘That’s it. We elected him in the name of God and now suddenly we’re afraid of him. He has made no threat, he has changed no appointment, he has asked nothing but what we profess to offer. Yet, here we sit weighing him like conspirators, and making ready to fight him. What has he done to us?’

  ‘Perhaps he has read us better than we like,’ said Semmering the Jesuit.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Valerio Rinaldi, ‘perhaps he trusts us more than we deserve…’

  EXTRACT FROM THE SECRET MEMORIALS OF KIRIL I PONT. MAX.

  …It is late and the moon is climbing high. The Square of St Peter is empty, but the rumour of the city still reaches me on the night wind – footsteps sounding hollow on stones, a scream of motor tyres, the bleat of a horn, snatches of far-away song, and the slow dip-clop of a tired horse. I am wakeful tonight, and I resent my solitude. I want to walk out through the Angelic Gate and find my people where they stroll or sit together in the alleys of Trastevere, or huddle in narrow rooms with their fears and their loves. I need them so much more than they need me.

  One day soon I must do this. I must shrug off the bonds which are laid upon me by protocol and precaution, and confront this city of mine, so that I may see it and it may see me as we truly are…

  I remember the stories of my childhood, how the Caliph. Haroun disguised himself and walked out with his vizier at night to search the hearts of his people. I remember how Jesus the Master sat at meat with tax-gatherers and public women, and I wonder why His successors were so eager to assume the penalty of princes, which is to rule from a secret room and to display oneself like a demi-God only on occasions of public festivity…

  It has been a long day but I have learned something of myself and of others too. I made a mistake, I think, in the Consistory.

  When men are old and powerful they need to be drawn by reason and calculation, because the sap of the heart dries up with age…

  When one is in a position of power, one must not show oneself publicly humble, because the ruler must reassure with strength and a show of decision. If one displays one’s heart, it must be in private, so that the man who sees it will believe that he has received a confidence…

  I am writing like a cynic, and I am ashamed of it. Why? Perhaps because I was confronted with strong men who were determined to bend me to their opinions…

  Leone was the one who irritated me most of all. I had hoped for an ally, and instead I found a critic. I am tempted to appoint him to another office, and remove him from the position of influence which he now holds. Yet this, I think, would be a mistake, and the beginning of greater ones. If I s
urround myself with weak and compliant men, I shall rob the Church of noble servants…and in the end I shall be left without counsellors. Leone is a formidable fellow and I think we shall find ourselves opposed to each other on many issues. But I do not see him as an intriguer. I should like to have him for my friend, because I am a man who needs friendship, yet I do not think he will surrender himself so far…

  I should like to keep Rinaldi by me, but I think I must consent to his retirement. He is not, I think, a profound man, though he is a subtle and an able one. I sense that he has come to grips with God very late in his life and that he needs a freedom to audit the accounts of his soul. This, fundamentally, is why I am here, to show men the staircase to union with God. If anyone stumbles on my account, then I shall be the one to answer for it…

  Kamenev’s letter is open before me, and beside it is his gift for my coronation – a few grains of Russian soil and a package of sunflower seeds.

  ‘I do not know,’ he writes, ‘whether the seeds will grow in Rome, but perhaps if you mix a little Russian earth with them they will bloom for next summer. I remember that I asked you during one interrogation what you missed most of all, and you smiled and said the sunflowers in the Ukraine. I hated you at that moment because I was missing them too, and we were both exiles in the frozen lands. Now you are still an exile, while I am the first man in Russia.