by Morris West
‘You’re not Italian, are you?’
‘No, I’m Russian.’
‘And I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘Probably. They’ve printed a lot of pictures of me lately.’
‘Then what were you doing in Old Rome?’
‘I’m the Bishop of the City. I thought I should know at least what it looked like.’
‘That makes us both foreigners,’ said the girl cryptically.
‘Where do you come from?’
‘I was born in Germany, I’m an American citizen, and I live in Rome.’
‘Are you a Catholic?’
‘I don’t know what I am. I’m trying to find out.’
‘This way?’ asked Kiril quietly.
‘It’s the only one I know. I’ve tried all the others.’ Then she laughed, and for the first time since their meeting she seemed to relax. ‘Forgive me, I’m behaving very badly. My name is Ruth Lewin.’
‘I’m Lakota.’
‘I know. The Pope from the steppes.’
‘Is that what they call me?’
‘Among other things…’ She challenged him again. ‘These stories they print about you, your time in prison, your escape, are they true?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now you’re in prison again.’
‘In a way, but I hope to break out of it.’
‘We’re all in prison, one way or another.’
‘That’s true…And it’s the ones who understand it that suffer most of all.’
For a long moment she was silent, staring down at the tumbled marbles of the Forum. Then she asked him, ‘Do you really believe that you stand in God’s shoes?’
‘I do.’
‘How does it feel?’
‘Terrifying.’
‘Does He speak to you? Do you hear Him?’
He thought about it for a moment and then answered her gravely. ‘In one sense, yes. The knowledge of Himself which He revealed in the Old Testament and in the New pervades the Church. It is there in the Scripture and in the Tradition which has been handed down from the time of the Apostles, and which we call the Deposit of Faith. This is the lamp to my feet…In another sense, no. I pray for divine light, but I must work by human reason. I cannot demand miracles. At this moment for instance, I ask myself what I must do for the people of this city – what I can do for you. I have no ready answer. I have no private dialogue with God. I grope in the dark and hope that His hand will reach out to guide me.’
‘You’re a strange man.’
‘We are all strange,’ he told her with a smile, ‘and why not, since each of us is a spark struck off from the fiery mystery of the Godhead?’
Her next words were uttered with a poignant simplicity that touched him almost to tears:
‘I need help, but I don’t know how, or where, to get it.’
For a moment he hesitated, torn between prudence and the promptings of a vulnerable heart. Then once again he felt within him the subtle stirring of power. He was the Pastor and none other. Tonight one soul had slipped through his fingers; he dare not risk another. ‘Take me home with you,’ he told her. ‘Make me a cup of coffee, then talk it out. Afterwards you drive me back to the Vatican.’
In a small apartment huddled under the shadow of the Palatine Hill she told him her story. She told it calmly and gravely, and with no trace of that hysteria which every confessor feared in his relations with women.
‘I was born in Germany thirty-five years ago. My family was Jewish, and it was the time of the pogroms. We were chased about from one country to another, until finally a chance came to enter Spain. Before we applied for visas we were told it might help if we became Catholics …So my parents went through the motions and became converts – Moriscos might be a better name! We took the new identity and we were admitted.
‘I was a child then, but it seemed that the new country and the new religion opened their arms to welcome me. I remember the music, the colour, the Holy Week processions winding through the streets of Barcelona, while little girls like me, with white veils and flower wreaths in their hair, threw rose petals before the priest who carried the Monstrance. I had lived so long in fear and uncertainty that it was as if I had been transported into a land of fairy tale.
‘Then, early in 1941, we were granted visas for America. The Catholic Charities Bureau took care of us, and with their help I was placed in a convent school. For the first time I felt thoroughly safe and, strangely enough, thoroughly Catholic.
‘My parents did not seem to mind. They too had reached safe harbour, and they had their own lives to rebuild. For a few years I was serenely happy; then – how do I say it? – my world and I myself began to crack down the middle. I was a child still, but the minds of children open more quickly than adults ever believe.
‘In Europe millions of Jews were dying. I was a Jew and I was oppressed by the thought that I was a renegade who had bought my safety by forswearing my race and my religion. I was a Catholic too, and my belief was identified with the freest and happiest time of my life. Yet I could not accept the freedom or the happiness because it seemed they had been bought with blood-money.
‘I began to rebel against the teaching and the discipline of the convent and yet all the time I knew that I was rebelling against myself. When I began to go out with boys, it was always with the rebels, the ones who rejected any kind of belief. It was safer that way. Perhaps in the end it would be better to believe nothing than to be torn apart by a double allegiance.
‘Then, after a while, I fell in love with a Jewish boy. I was still a Catholic, so I went to discuss the case with my parish priest. I asked for the usual dispensation to marry someone outside the faith. To my surprise and my shame, he read me a bitter lecture. I heard him out and then walked out of the rectory, and I have never set foot inside a church since. He was a foolish man, blind and prejudiced. For a while I hated him, and then I understood that I was really hating myself.
‘My marriage was happy. My husband had no fixed belief nor, it seemed, did I; but we had a common race, and a common heritage, and we were able to live in peace with one another. We made money, we made friends. It was as if I had achieved the continuity which my life had lacked from the beginning. I belonged to someone, to a settled order, and, at long last, to myself.
‘Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, a strange thing happened. I became morbid and depressed. I would wander around the house disconsolate, tears rolling down my cheeks, sunk in utter despair. Sometimes I would break out into violent rages at the slightest provocation. There were times when I contemplated suicide, convinced that I would be better dead than inflicting so much unhappiness on myself and on my husband.
‘In the end my husband forced the issue. He demanded that I see a psychiatrist. At first I refused angrily, and then he told me bluntly that I was destroying myself and destroying our marriage. So I agreed to begin treatment, and entered on a course of analysis.
‘This is a strange and frightening road; but once you begin to walk it you cannot turn back. To live life is hard enough. To relive it, to retrace every step in symbol and fantasy and simple memory, is a weird experience. The person who makes the journey with you, the analyst, assumes a multitude of identities: father, mother, lover, husband, teacher – even God.
‘The longer the journey the harder the road, because each step brings you closer to the moment of revelation where you must face once and for ever the thing from which you have been fleeing. Time and again you try to step off the road or turn back. Always you are forced forward. You try to defer, to temporize. You create new lies to deceive yourself and your guide, but the lies are demolished one by one.
‘In the middle of my analysis my husband was killed in an automobile accident. For me it was another guilt added to all the others. Now I could never restore to him the happiness of which I had robbed him. My whole personality seemed to disintegrate under the shock. I was taken to a nursing home, and the therapy began again. Slowly the nature
of my hidden fear became clear to me. When I reached the core of myself I knew that I should find it empty. I should not only be alone, but hollow as well, because I had built a god in my own image, and then destroyed him, and there was no one to take his place. I must live in a desert without identity, without purpose since, even if there were a God, I could not accept Him because I had not paid for His presence.
‘Does this seem strange to you? It was a terror to me. But once I stood in the desert, empty and solitary, I was calm. I was even whole. I remember the morning after the crisis when I looked out from the window of my room and saw the sun shining on the green lawn. I said to myself: “I have seen the worst that can happen to me, and I am still here. The rest, whatever it is, I can endure.”
‘A month later I was discharged. I settled my husband’s estate and came to Rome. I had money, I was free, I could plan a new life for myself. I might even fall in love again…I tried it too; but in love one must commit oneself, and I had nothing to commit.
‘Then I began to understand something. If I lived for myself and with myself I should always be hollow, always in solitude. My debts to my people and my past were still unpaid; I could accept nothing from life until I had begun to pay them.
‘You asked me tonight why I do this kind of service. It’s simple enough. There are many Jews in Rome – the old Sephardic families who came from Spain in the time of the Inquisition, immigrants from Bologna and the Lombard cities. They are still a people apart, many of them are poor like the ones you saw tonight…I can give them something. I know I do. But what do I give myself? Where do I go?…I have no God although I need one desperately…You tell me you stand in His shoes – can you help me?’
EXTRACT FROM THE SECRET MEMORIALS OF KIRIL I PONT. MAX.
…I am troubled tonight. I am solitary and perplexed. My installation in the see of Peter is complete. I have been crowned with the Triple Tiara. The Ring of the Fisherman is on my finger. My blessing has gone out to the city and to the world. In spite of it all – because of it all, perhaps – I have never felt so empty and inadequate. I am like the scapegoat driven into the desert with the sins of all the people on my back…
I must ask Rinaldi to find me a wise priest to whom I can confess myself each day, not only for absolution and the sacramental grace, but for a purging of this pent, stopped-up spirit of mine. I wonder if the faithful understand that the Vicar of Christ has often more need of the confessional than they themselves…
I have seen many men die, but the sad and solitary exit which I witnessed tonight in a Roman tenement afflicts me strangely. The words of the woman who saw it with me still ring in my ears – ‘They can cope with death. It’s the living that defeats them.’ It seems to me that this defeat is the measure of our failure in the ministry of the Word.
Those who need us most are those who are bowed the lowest under the burden of existence – whose life is a daily struggle for simple sustenance, who lack talent and opportunity, who live in fear of officials and tax-gatherers and debt-collectors, so that they have no time and hardly any strength to spend on the care of their souls. Their whole life becomes a creeping despair…If it were not for the infinite knowledge and the infinite mercy of God, I too could easily despair.
The case of the woman, Ruth Lewin, gives me more hope. While I was in prison and under the long ordeals of interrogation, I learned much about the intricate functioning of the human mind. I am convinced that those who devote themselves to the study of its workings, and of its infirmities, can do a great service to man and the cause of his salvation…We should not, as shepherds of souls, treat this infant science with suspicion or hasty censure. Like every other science it can be wrested to ignoble ends. It is inevitable that many who explore the misty country of the soul will make mistakes and false guesses, but every honest research into the nature of man is also an exploration of the divine intent in his regard.
The human psyche is the meeting ground between God and man. It is possible, I think, that some of the meaning of the mystery of Divine Grace may be revealed when we understand better the working of the subconscious mind, where buried memories and buried guilts and buried impulses germinate for years and then break out into a strange flowering…I must encourage competent men inside the Church to pursue this study, and to co-operate with those outside it, to make the best use possible of their discoveries…
The sick mind is a defective instrument in the great symphony which is God’s dialogue with man. Here perhaps we may see a fuller revelation of the meaning of human responsibility and God’s compassion for His creatures. Here we may be able to illuminate the difference between formal guilt and the true status of the soul in the sight of God…
It might scandalize many if I declared openly that in a woman like this Ruth I see – or think I see – a chosen spirit. The key to such spirits is their recognition that their wrestling with life is in reality a wrestling with God…
The strangest story in the Old Testament is the story of Jacob, who wrestled with the angel and conquered him and forced the angel to tell his name…But Jacob went away from the struggle limping.
I too am a limping spirit. I have felt reason and the foundations of my faith rock in the dark bunker and under the lights and the relentless inquisition of Kamenev.
I believe still. I am committed more completely than ever before to the Deposit of Faith, but I am no longer content to say, ‘God is thus. Man is thus’, and then make an end of it. Where ever I turn on this high pinnacle, I am confronted with mystery. I believe in the godly harmony which is the result of the eternal creative act…But I do not always hear the harmony. I must wrestle with the cacophony and apparent discord of the score, knowing that I shall not hear the final grand resolution until the day I die and, hopefully, am united with God…
This is what I tried to explain to Ruth, though I am not sure that I did it very well. I could not bring myself to present her with blunt theological propositions. Her troubled spirit was not ready to receive them.
I tried to show her that the crisis of near despair which afflicts many people of intelligence and noble spirit is often a providential act, designed to bring them to an acceptance of their own nature, with all its limitations and inadequacies, and of the conformity of that nature with a divine design whose pattern and whose end we cannot fully apprehend.
I understand her terrors because I have endured them myself. This I am sure she understood. I advised her to be patient with herself and with God, who, even if she could not believe in Him, still worked in His own fashion and His own secret time.
I told her to continue the good work she was doing, but not to regard it always as a payment of debts. No one of us could pay his debts, were it not for the redemptive act, consummated on the cross by Christ.
I tried to show her that to reject the joy of living is to insult Him who provides it, and who gave us the gift of laughter along with the gift of tears…
These things I think I should write for others because the sickness of the mind is a symptom of our times, and we must all try to heal one another. Man is not meant to live alone. The Creator Himself has affirmed it. We are members of one body. The cure of a sick member is a function of the whole organism…
I have asked Ruth to write to me, and sometimes to come and see me. I dare not let this office separate me from direct contact with my people…For this reason, I think I should sit in the confessional for an hour each week and administer the Sacrament to those who come into St Peter’s.
The nearest I came to losing my faith and my soul was when I lay naked and solitary in an underground bunker…When I was brought back to the huts, to the sound of human talk – even to the sound of anger and ribaldry and blasphemy – it was like a new promise of salvation…
I wonder whether this is not the way in which the creative act renews itself daily: the spirit of God breathing over the dark waters of the human spirit, infusing them with a life whose intensity and diversity we can only guess…
CHAPTER FOUR
IT WAS nearly six weeks after the coronation before George Faber arranged his luncheon with Campeggio. He might have put it off even longer had not Chiara argued him into it with tears and tantrums. He was by nature a prompt man, but he had lived long enough in Rome to be suspicious of any gratuitous gesture. Campeggio was a distinguished colleague, to be sure, but he was in no sense a friend, and there was no clear reason why he should concern himself with the bedding and wedding of Chiara Calitri.
So somewhere in the offing was a combinazione – a proposition – with the price tag carefully hidden until the very last moment. When one lunched with the Romans, one needed a long spoon and a steady hand, and George Faber was still a little shaken by his quarrel with Chiara.
Spring was maturing slowly into summer. The azaleas made a riot of colour on the Spanish Steps, and the flower-sellers did a brisk business with the new roses from Rapallo. Footsore tourists found refuge in the English Tearoom, and the traffic swirled irritably around Bernini’s marble boat in the Piazza.
To stiffen his small courage, George Faber bought a red carnation and pinned it jauntily in his buttonhole before he crossed the Square and entered the Via Condotti. The restaurant which Campeggio had named for their rendezvous was a small, discreet place, far away from the normal haunts of newsmen and politicians…In a matter of such delicacy, he claimed, one should not risk an eavesdropper, though Faber saw little point in secrecy since the Calitri story was common property in Rome. However, it was part of the game that every combinazione, every progetto, must be dressed up with a little theatre. So he submitted with as much good grace as he could muster.
Campeggio entertained him for half an hour with a vivid and amusing chronicle of the Vatican, and how the clerical dovecotes were fluttering as the new Pope asserted himself. Then, with a diplomat’s care, he steered the talk towards Faber: