The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘Do you regret us? I wonder. I should like to think so because I regret you. We could have done great things together, you and I; but you were wedded to this wild dream of the hereafter, while I believed, as I still believe, that the best a man can do is make barren earth fruitful and ignorant men wise, and see the children of puny fathers grow tall and straight among the sunflowers.

  ‘It would I suppose be courteous to congratulate you on your election. For what they are worth, you have my compliments. I am curious to know what this office will do to you. I let you go because I could not change you, and yet I could not bring myself to degrade you any more. It would shame me now if you were to be corrupted by eminence.

  ‘We may yet have need of each other, you and I. You have not seen the half of it, yet I tell you truly we. have brought this country to a prosperity she has not known in all her centuries. Yet we are ringed with swords. The Americans are afraid of us; the Chinese resent us and want to drag us fifty years back in history. We have fanatics inside our own borders who are not content with bread and peace and work for all, but want to turn us all back into bearded mystics from Dostoevsky.

  ‘To you perhaps I am anti-Christ. What I believe you reject utterly. But, for the present, I am Russia, and I am the guardian of this people. You have weapons in your hands, and I know, though I dare not admit it publicly, how strong they are. I can only hope you will not turn them against your homeland, nor pledge them to a base alliance in East or West.

  ‘When the seeds begin to grow, remember Mother Russia, and remember that you owe me a life. When the time comes to claim payment, I shall send you a man who will talk of sunflowers. Believe what he tells you, but deal with no others, now or later. Unlike you I do not have the Holy Ghost to protect me, and I must still be wary of my friends. I wish I could say that you were one. Greetings. Kamenev.

  …I have read the letter a dozen times, and I cannot decide whether it brings me to the fringe of a revelation or to the edge of a precipice. I know Kamenev as intimately as he knows me, yet I have not reached down to the core of his soul. I know the ambition that drives him, his fanatic desire to exact some goodness from life to pay for the debasement he inflicted on himself and others for so many years…

  I have seen peasants scoop up a handful of soil from a new plot and taste it, to see whether it was sweet or sour. I can imagine Kamenev doing the same with the soil of Russia.

  I know how the ghosts of history threaten him and his people because I understand how they threaten me too. I do not see him as anti-Christ, not even as an arch-heretic. He has understood and accepted the Marxist dogma as the swiftest and sharpest instrument yet devised to trigger a social revolution. I think he would throw it aside the moment he saw it fail of its purpose. I think, though I cannot be sure, that he is asking my help to preserve what he has already won of good for the people, and to give it a chance to grow peacefully into other mutations.

  I believe that having thrust himself up so high he has begun to breathe a freer air and to wish the same fortune for a people he has learned to love. If this be true, then I must help him…

  Yet there are events which give him the lie at every moment. There are invasions and forays on every frontier, under the banner of the sickle and the star. Men are still starved and beaten, and locked away from the free commerce of thought and the channels of Grace.

  The great heresy of the earthly paradise still creeps across the world like a cancer, and Kamenev still wears the robe of its High Priest. This I am pledged to fight, and I have already resisted it with my blood…

  Yet I cannot ignore the strange working of God in the souls of the most unlikely men, and I believe I can see this working in the soul of Kamenev …I see, though only dimly, how our destinies may be linked in the divine design …What I cannot see is how to comport myself in the situation which exists between us …

  He asks for my friendship, and I would gladly give him my heart. He asks, I think, for a kind of truce, yet I cannot make truce with error, though I can ascribe the noblest motives to those who propagate it. I dare not, however, place the Church and the faithful in jeopardy for an illusion, because I know that Kamenev could still betray me, and I could still betray myself and the Church.

  What do I do?

  Perhaps the answer is in the sunflower – that the seed must die before the green shoots come, that the flower must grow while men pass by, heedless that a miracle is taking place under their noses.

  Perhaps this is what is meant by ‘waiting upon the mercy of God’. But we cannot only wait because the nature with which He has endowed us drives us to action. We must pray too in darkness and dryness, under a blind sky…

  Tomorrow I shall offer Mass for Kamenev, and tonight I must pray for light for Kiril the Pontiff, whose heart is restless and whose vagrant soul still hungers for its homeland…

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOR GEORGE FABER, the coronation of Kiril I was a long and elaborate boredom. The ovations deafened him, the lights gave him a headache, the sonorities of the choir depressed his spirit, and the gaudy procession of prelates, priests, monks, chamberlains, and toy soldiers was an operatic cavalcade, which pricked him to resentment and gave him no entertainment at all. The exhalation of eighty thousand bodies, jammed like sardines into every corner of the Basilica, made him feel faint and nauseated.

  His copy was already written and filed for transmission: three thousand glowing words on the pageantry and symbolism and religious splendour of this Roman festal day. He had seen it all before, and there was no reason for him to repeat the tedium except, perhaps, the snobbery of sitting in the place of honour in the press box, resplendent in a new frock-coat, with the ribbon of his latest Italian decoration bright upon his chest.

  Now he was paying for the indulgence. His buttocks were jammed tight between the broad hips of a German and the angular thighs of Campeggio, and there would be no escape for at least two hours, until the distinguished congregation broke out into the Square to receive the blessing of the new-crowned Pope with the humbler citizens and tourists of Rome.

  Exasperated, he slumped forward in his seat and tried to find a grain of consolation in what this Kiril might mean to himself and Chiara. So far the Curia had kept him tightly in wraps. He had made few public appearances, and no pronouncements of any moment at all. But the word was already about that this was an innovator, a man young enough and strange enough to have a mind of his own and the vigour to express it in action. There were rumours of rough words in the Consistory, and more than one Vatican official was talking of changes, not only in personnel, but in the whole central organization as well.

  If changes were made, some of them might affect the Holy Roman Rota, where the petition of nullity for Chiara’s marriage had lain in the pigeonholes for nearly two years. The Italians had a wry-mouthed joke for the workings of this august body: ‘Non c’e divorzio in Italia. There is no divorce in Italy – and only Catholics can get it!’ Like most Italian jokes, this one had more than one barb to it. Neither Church nor State admitted the possibility of divorce, but both viewed with apparent equanimity a large-scale concubinage among the rich and a growing number of irregular unions among the poor.

  The Rota was by constitution a clerical body, but much of its business was in the hands of lay lawyers, specialists in canon law, who formed, for mutual profit, a union as rigid and exclusive as any in the world so that the business of marital causes banked up in a bottleneck, regardless of the human tragedies which underlay most of them.

  In theory the Rota must adjudicate equally for those who could pay and for those who could not. In practice the paying petitioner, or the petitioner with Roman influence or Roman friendship, could count on quicker decisions by far than his poorer brethren in the faith. The law was the same for all, but its decisions were dispensed more swiftly to those who could command the best service from the advocates.

  The tag of the joke made another point as well. A decree of nullity was much easier to ob
tain if both partners to the marriage consented to the first petition. If Error had to be proved in the contract, or Condition, or Crimen, it was much easier to do it with two voices. But if one partner only made a petition and the other presented contradictory evidence, the case was doomed to a slow progress and to very probable failure.

  In such cases, the Rota made a neat, if hardly satisfying distinction: that, in the private forum of conscience – and, therefore, in fact – the contract might be null and void; but until it could be proved so in the external forum, by documented evidence, the two parties must be regarded as married, even though they did not live together. If the aggrieved party obtained a divorce and remarried outside the country, he or she would be excommunicated by the Church, and prosecuted for bigamy by the State.

  In practice, therefore, concubinage was the easier state in Italy, since it was more comfortable to be damned inside the Church than out of it, and one was much happier loving in sin than serving a prison sentence in the Regina Coeli.

  The which precisely was the situation for George Faber and Chiara Calitri.

  As he watched the new Pontiff being vested by his assistants in front of the High Altar, Faber wondered sourly how much he knew or could ever hope to know of the intimate tragedies of his subjects, of the burdens which their beliefs and loyalties laid upon their shoulders. He wondered too whether the time had not come to throw aside the caution of a lifetime and break a lance, or his head, for the most contentious cause in Rome, the reform of the Holy Roman Rota.

  He was not a brilliant man, and certainly not a brave one. He had a capacity for close observation and urbane reportage, and a slightly theatrical knack for ingratiating himself with well-bred people. In Rome these things added up to a valuable talent for a correspondent. Now, however, with the climacteric looming, and the lonely years, the talent was not enough. George Faber was in love, and, being a Nordic Puritan and not a Latin, he needed at all costs to be married.

  The Church, too, wanted him married, being concerned for the safety of his soul; but she would rather see him damned by default or rebellion than seem to call in question the sacramental bond which she counted, by divine revelation, indissoluble.

  So, like it or not, his own fate and Chiara’s were held between the rigid hands of the canonists and the soft, epicene palms of Corrado Calitri, Minister of the Republic. Unless Calitri slackened his grip – which he showed no sign of doing – they could both stay suspended till Doomsday in the limbo of those outside the law.

  Across the nave, in the enclosure reserved for dignitaries of the Republic of Italy, Faber could see the slim patrician figure of his enemy, his breast resplendent with decorations, his face pale as a marble mask.

  Five years ago he had been a spectacular young deputy with Milanese money behind him and a Cabinet career already in promise. His only handicaps were his bachelor estate and a fondness for gay young men and visiting aesthetes. His marriage to a Roman heiress, fresh from convent school, had put the ministry in his pocket and set the Roman gossips laughing behind their hands. Eighteen months later, Chiara, his wife, was in hospital with a nervous breakdown. By the time she had recovered, their separation was an accomplished fact. The next step was to file a petition for a declaration of nullity with the Holy Roman Rota, and from this point began the tedious dialogue of the tragicomedy:

  ‘The petitioner, Chiara Calitri, alleges first a defect of intention,’ so the lawyers deposed on her behalf, ‘in that her husband entered into the bond of matrimony without the full intent to fulfil all the terms of the contract, with respect to cohabitation, procreation, and normal sexual commerce.’

  ‘I had the fullest intention to fulfil all the terms of the contract…’ Thus Corrado Calitri in reply. ‘But my wife lacked both the will and the experience to assist me to carry them out. The married state implies mutual support; I did not get support or moral assistance from my wife.’

  ‘The petitioner alleges also that it was a condition of the marriage that her husband should be a man of normal sexual habits.’

  ‘She knew what I was,’ said Corrado Calitri in effect. ‘I made no attempt to conceal my past. Much of it was common knowledge. She married me in spite of it.’

  ‘Fine!’ said the auditors of the Rota. ‘Either of the pleas would be sufficient for a decree of nullity, but a simple statement is not proof. How does the petitioner propose to prove her case? Did her husband express his defective intentions to her or to another? Was the condition made explicit before the contract? On what occasion? In what form of speech or writing? And by whom can the condition be verified?’

  So inevitably the wheels of canonical justice ground to a halt, and Chiara’s lawyers advised her discreetly that it was better to suspend the case while new evidence was being sought than to force it to an unfavourable conclusion. The men of the Rota stood firm on dogmatic principle and the provisions of the law; Corrado Calitri was safely married and happily free, while she herself was caught like a mouse in the trap he had set for her. The whole city guessed at the next step before she made it. She was twenty-six years old, and within six months she and George Faber were lovers. Rome in its cynical fashion smiled on their union and turned to the merrier scandals of the film colony at Cinecittà.

  But George Faber was no complaisant lover. He had an itch in his conscience, and he hated the man who forced him to scratch it every day…

  He felt suddenly dizzy. A sweat broke out on his face and palms, and he struggled to compose himself as the Pope mounted the steps of the altar supported by his assistants.

  Campeggio cocked an astute eye at his queasy colleague and then leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘I don’t like Calitri either; but you’ll never win the way you’re going.’

  Faber sat bolt upright and stared at him with hostile eyes. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

  Campeggio shrugged and smiled. ‘Don’t be angry, my friend – it’s an open secret. And even if it weren’t, you have it written on your face…Of course you hate him, and I don’t blame you. But there are more ways than one of killing a cat.’

  ‘I’d like to hear them,’ said Faber irritably.

  ‘Call me for lunch one day and I’ll tell you.’

  And with that, Faber had to be content, but the hope buzzed in his head like a gadfly while Kiril the Pontiff chanted the Coronation Mass, and the voices of the choir pealed around the dome of the Basilica.

  Rudolf Semmering, Father General of the Society of Jesus, stood rigid as a sentinel at his post in the nave and addressed himself to a meditation on the occasion and its meanings.

  A lifetime of discipline in the Ignatian exercises had given him the facility of projecting himself out of the terms of time and space into a solitude of contemplation. He did not hear the music, or the murmur of the concourse, or the sonorous Latin of the ceremony. His subdued senses were closed against all intrusion. A vast stillness encompassed him, while the faculties of his spirit concentrated themselves upon the essence of the moment: the relationship between the Creator and His creatures which was being affirmed and renewed by the installation of His Vicar.

  Here, in symbol, ceremony, and sacrificial act, the nature of the Mystical Body was being displayed – Christ the God-man as head with the Pontiff as His Vicar, enlivening the whole body by His permanent presence and through the indwellling of the Paraclete. Here was the whole physical order which Christ had established as the visible symbol and the visible instrument of His working with humankind – the ecclesia, the hierarchy of Pope, bishops, priests, and common folk, united in a single faith with a single sacrifice and a single sacramental system. Here the whole mission of redemption was summarized – the recall of man to his Maker by the dispensation of grace and by the preaching of the New Testament.

  Here, too, was the darkness of a monstrous mystery: why an omnipotent God had made human instruments capable of rebellion, who could reject the divine design or deface it or inhibit its progress: why the All-Knowing should
permit those whom He had made in His own image to grope their way to union with Him on a knife-edge path, in daily danger of losing themselves for ever from His face. Here finally was the mystery of the ministerium, the service to which certain men – himself among them – were called: to assume a greater responsibility and a greater risk, and to show forth in themselves the image of the Godhead for the salvation of their fellows.

  Which brought him by a round turn to the application of his whole meditation: what he himself must do for service to the Pontiff, the Church, and the Christ to whom he was bound by perpetual vow. He was the leader, by election, of forty thousand celibate men, dedicated to the bidding of the Pontiff in whatever mission he might choose to give them. Some of the best brains in the world were at his command, some of the noblest spirits, the best organizers, the most inspired teachers, the most daring speculators. It was his function, not merely to use them as passive instruments, but help each one to grow according to his nature and his talent with the spirit of God working in him.

  It was not enough, either, that he should present the massive network of the Society to the Pontiff and wait for a single command to set it working. The Society, like every other organization and every individual in the Church, had to seek and to propose new modes and new efforts to further the divine mission. It could not surrender itself either to the fear of novelty or to the comfort of traditional methods. The Church was not a static body. It was, according to the Gospel parable, a tree whose whole life was implicit in a tiny seed, but which must grow each year into a new shape and a few fruitfulness, while more and more birds made nests in its branches.