The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘I believe that,’ said Jean Télémond. ‘Otherwise I think I should have abandoned the work altogether.’ He hesitated a moment and then asked, ‘Where do I stand now?’

  ‘We have brought you home,’ said Semmering gently, ‘because we value you, and we need you. There is work for you here, urgent work.’

  ‘I have never made conditions; you know that. I have never tried to bargain with God or with the Society. I worked as best I could within the limits imposed on me. Now…now I should like to ask something.’

  ‘Ask it,’ said Rudolf Semmering.

  ‘I think,’ said Télémond carefully, ‘I think I have gone as far as I can on this lonely road. I think what I have done needs to be tested by discussion and debate. I should like to begin to publish, to submit my thesis to open criticism. This is the only way knowledge grows, the only way the horizons of the spirit are enlarged…I have never asked for anything before, but in this I beg for your support, and for the support of the Society.’

  ‘You have it,’ said Rudolf Semmering.

  In the cramped seats of the speeding automobile they faced each other, superior and subject, the man under obedience, the who exacted the fulfilment of the vow.

  Télémond’s lean face crumpled a little, and his blue eyes were misty. He said awkwardly, ‘I – I did not expect so much. This is quite a homecoming.’

  ‘It is better than you know,’ said the Father General gently. ‘But there are still risks.’

  ‘I’ve always known there would be. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘First you have to pass a test. It will be a rough one, and you have less than a month to prepare yourself.’

  ‘What sort of test?’

  ‘July 31st is the feast day of Saint Ignatius Loyola.’

  ‘I was ordained on that day.’

  ‘It makes a good omen then, because on that same day His Holiness will visit the Gregorian University, which you know owed its beginning to our founder and Saint Francis Borgia…I want you to deliver the memorial lecture in the presence of His Holiness, the teaching staff, and the students.’

  ‘God help me,’ said Jean Télémond. ‘God help my stumbling tongue.’

  As they turned into the clamour of the city, through the Lateran Gate, he buried his face in his hands and wept.

  Ruth Lewin sat under a striped umbrella on the Via Veneto, sipped an aranciata, and watched the lunchtime crowds disperse towards siesta. The soft air of summer lifted her spirits and she felt as if all the weight of the world could be shrugged off with one long, comfortable yawn. Even the city seemed to have taken on a new face. The clamour of the traffic was a friendly sound. The folk were better dressed than usual. The waiters were more courteous. The ogling of the men was a compliment.

  Nothing had changed in her situation. None of her doubts or dilemmas had resolved themselves, yet their burden was lighter, and she wore it with a better humour. It was as if her long convalescence was over and she could take her place confidently in the normal commerce of the world.

  It was not all an illusion. She had suffered too long the perilous alternations of exaltation and depression to deceive herself about her cure. But the swings were shorter now – the heights less dizzy, the deeps less terrifying. The pulse of life was returning to a regular beat. The fever had broken at last and the moment of crisis had been her meeting with Kiril the Pontiff in a Roman back alley.

  Even now the memory was lit by a kind of wonder. His aspect was so strange – the scar, the beard, the contrast between his office and his humble dress. Yet when she had confronted him in her own house, over the banality of coffee and biscuits, the impression was not of strangeness but of extraordinary simplicity.

  Ever since her break with the Church, she had had a creeping distaste for clerical talk and the forms of clerical convention. This man had none of them. He wore his belief like a skin, and his convictions were expressed with the gentleness of one who had acquired them at a price he would not ask others to pay. His words came out new-minted and ringing with sincerity.

  ‘…All life is a mystery, but the answer to the mystery is outside ourselves, and not inside. You can’t go on peeling yourself like an onion, hoping that when you come to the last layer you will find what an onion really is. At the end you are left with nothing. The mystery of an onion is still unexplained because, like man, it is the issue of an eternal creative act…I stand in God’s shoes, but I can’t tell you any more. Don’t you see? This is what I am here to teach – a mystery! People who demand to have Creation explained from beginning to end are asking the impossible. Have you ever thought that by demanding to know the explanation for everything you are committing an act of pride? We are limited creatures. How can any one of us encompass infinity…’

  In the mouth of another the words would have sounded dry and stilted; but from this Kiril, they came endowed with a quality of healing, because they were not read from a book, but from the palimpsest of his own heart. He had not reproached her for the dereliction of a baptismal faith, but had talked of it with kindness, as if it were even a sort of mercy in itself.

  ‘No two people come to God by the same road. There are very, very few who reach Him without stumbling and falling. There are seeds that grow a long time in darkness before they push up shoots into the sun…There are others that come to the light at one thrust in a single day You are in darkness now, but if you want the light, you will come to it in time…The human soul, you see, meets barriers that it must cross, and they are not always crossed at one stride. The direction in which the soul travels is the important thing. If it travels away from itself, then it must ultimately come to God. If it turns back upon itself, this is a course of suicide because without God we are nothing…Everything, therefore, that urges you to an outward growth – service, love, the simplest interest in the world – can be a step towards Him…’

  Disturbed as she was on that night, she had not taken in the full import of all that he had said. But the words had remained imprinted on her memory, and each day she found in them a new meaning, and a new application. If now she could sit calm in a summer sun watching the folly and flirtation of the town, passing no judgement on it or on herself, it was because of this Kiril, who sat in the seat of judgement and yet withheld verdict. If love were possible again, it would be because of him who lived solitary in the celibate City of the Vatican.

  Love…! It was a chameleon word and she had seen more of its changes and colorations than she could admit without blushing.

  Every big city had its enclave of cripples and oddities and vagrants who sustained life on the best terms they could get, and were grateful for the most temporary easement from lonely misery. Here in Rome the kingdom of the beggars of love was a weird and polyglot domain and in her time she had wandered over most of it.

  It was a treacherous journey for a widow of thirty-five with money in the bank and a heart empty of resources. Unhappy boys had wept at her breast for their mothers. Straying husbands and playing tourists had come knocking on her door. Men with noble names had made her the confidant of their exotic attachments. The secret sisterhood had offered her entry to the sapphic mysteries. In the end she had emerged, shaken and unsatisfied, knowing that even in the half-world of the odd ones, there was no place for her.

  Love…! Here on the Via Veneto, pretty girls with poodles on a leash sold it by the night’s instalment. In the clubs and bars any woman with a foreign accent could buy it for a smile and the flirting of a lace handkerchief…But where and how did one find the person on whom to spend this newly discovered self – so fragile and suddenly so precious?

  Miraculously, Humpty-Dumpty had been picked up and put together again. He was sitting back on the wall, smiling and clapping hands at the concourse. But if he tumbled again and the glue came unstuck…who then could patch the eggshell? O little white wandering spirit, please, please stay in one piece!

  Out of the clamour of the traffic she heard her own name spoken. ‘Ruth Lewin! Whe
re have you been hiding yourself?’

  She looked up to see George Faber, grey-haired and dapper as any Roman dandy, looking down at her.

  In his private study, Kiril the Pontiff was closeted with two of his senior ministers: Cardinal Goldoni, his Secretary of State, and Cardinal Clemente Platino, Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The purpose of their meeting was a day-long stocktaking of the affairs of the Church, Holy, Universal, and Apostolic. The study was a large room bare of ornament save for a carved wooden crucifix behind the Pontiff’s desk and, on the opposite wall, a case full of maps showing the distribution of Catholic communities throughout the world.

  In another setting and another dress they might have been a trio of international businessmen: the Pontiff, dark, bearded and exotic; the Secretary of State, grey, stocky and harshly eloquent; Platino, tall, olive-skinned, urbane, with a great eagle beak inherited from some Spanish ancestor.

  But in this place and in this time they were dedicated, each to the limit of his own talent, to a folly that promised small profit to any business: the preparation of all men for death and for union with an unseen God. Their talk ranged over a multitude of subjects: money, politics, military treaties, economic agreements, personalities in high places round the globe; yet the core of the discussion was always the same: how to spread throughout the world the knowledge of Christ, His teaching, and the society which He had set up to preserve and disseminate it.

  For them every question – how a man married, how he was educated, what he was paid, his national allegiance – was at root a theological proposition. It had to do with the Creator and the creatures and the eternal relationship of one with the other. Everything that was done in the dimension of time had its roots and its continuity in eternity.

  When the Secretary of State appointed an ambassador to Austria or a legate to Uruguay, his function was to maintain an official relationship with the government, so that in a climate of accord between Church and State human souls might be led the more easily to the knowledge and the practice of a saving truth.

  When Platino appointed this missionary congregation or that to go into the jungles of the Amazon, he did so with the fullest conviction that he was obeying a clear command of Christ, to carry a Gospel of hope to those who sat in darkness and the shadow of death.

  It was, however, a point of view that raised special problems of its own. Men who did a godly work were apt to become careless about the human aspect of it. Men who dealt with the currency of eternity were apt to rest too hopefully on the future and let the present slip out of their control. Those who were sustained by the two-thousand-year-old structure of the Church were protected too softly from the consequence of their own mistakes. With so much tradition to rest on, they were often prickly and suspicious about new modes of Christian action.

  Yet in spite of all, men like Platino and Goldoni had an acute awareness of the world in which they lived and of the fact that, to do the work of God, they had to come to terms with what man had done for himself or to himself. Platino was making this point now. His long brown finger pointed to a spot in South-east Asia.

  ‘…Here, for example, Holiness, is Thailand. Constitutionally it is a monarchy. In fact it is a military dictatorship. The religion of the state is Buddhism. At one time or another in his life every male of the royal family, and every senior official, takes the saffron robe and spends some time in a monastery. We have schools here. They are run by nuns and teaching priests. They are free to give religious instruction but not within normal school hours. Those who wish to be instructed in the faith must come outside these times. This is our first difficulty. There is another. Government appointments – and any position of consequence is a government appointment – are only open to Buddhists. Officially, of course, this is not admitted, but in fact it is true. The country is underdeveloped. Most commerce is in the hands of Chinese, so that, for all practical purposes, a man who becomes a Christian must give up all hope of economic or social advancement…The temper of the people, which has also been conditioned by Buddhist belief, is resistant to change and suspicious of outside influence…

  ‘On the other hand, there is evident among the young men a growing interior conflict. They are being brought every day into closer contact with Western civilization through American military and economic aid; but there is little opportunity or work for them. I have been given what I believe is a reliable statistic, that twenty-five per cent of senior male students are addicted to heroin before they leave school. You see the problem. How do we move to make a real penetration of the minds and hearts of the people?’

  ‘How do you summarize the work we are doing now?’ asked the Pontiff gravely.

  ‘Basically as a work of education and charity. On the human level we are helping to raise the standard of literacy. We run hospitals which are used as training centres. There is a home for the rehabilitation of girls who have been taken out of the brothels…We serve the community. We display the faith to those who pass through our hands. However, the number of conversions is small, and we have not yet entered effectively into the mind and heart of the country.’

  ‘We have a worse position in Japan,’ said Goldoni in his brisk fashion. ‘We have a concordat which gives us much more effective working conditions than we have in Thailand, but here again we have made no real break-through.’

  ‘Yet we did once make a break-through,’ said Kiril with a smile. ‘It was begun by one man, Saint Francis Xavier. The descendants of his converts are still there – the Old Christians of Nagasaki and Nara. Why do we fail now? We have the same message. We dispense the same grace as the Church of the catacombs. Why do we fail?’ He heaved himself out of the chair and stood by the map, pointing to one country after another and measuring the failures and retreats of the Church. ‘Look at Africa. My predecessors proclaimed constantly the need for the swift training of a native clergy: men identified with their own people, speaking their language, understanding their symbols and their special needs. Too little was done too slowly. Now the continent is moving towards a federation of independent Mrican nations, and the ground has been cut from under our feet…Here in Brazil you have an immense industrial expansion, and a huge population of peasants living in the most grinding poverty. To whom are they turning to champion their cause? To the Communists. Do we not preach justice? Should we not be prepared to die for it as for any other Article of Faith? I ask you again. Where do we miss?’

  Goldoni breathed a silent sigh of relief and left the answer to his colleague. After all a Secretary of State had to deal with a situation as it was, with diplomats and politicians as they were – good or bad, pagan or Christian. Platino, on the other hand, was charged directly with the spread of Christian belief throughout the world. His authority was enormous, and inside the Church they called him ‘The Red Pope’ as the Father General of the Jesuits was called the black one.

  Platino did not answer directly, but picked up from the desk two photographs which he held out to the Pontiff. One of them showed a fuzzy-haired Papuan in a white shirt and white lap-lap, with a small crucifix hung round his neck. The other was the picture of a native from the uplands of New Guinea with a head-dress of bird-of-paradise feathers and a pig tusk thrust through his nose.

  As the Pontiff examined the photographs, Platino explained them carefully:

  ‘Perhaps these two men will answer Your Holiness’s question. They both come from the same island, New Guinea. It is a small place, economically unimportant, but politically it may become so as the pivot of a federation of South Pacific Islands. In two years, five at most, New Guinea will be an independent country. This man…’ He pointed to the photograph of the man who wore the crucifix. ‘This is a mission boy. A teacher in one of our Catholic schools on the Coast. He has lived all his life in a mission colony. He speaks English and Pidgin and Motu. He teaches the catechism, and has been proposed as a candidate for the priesthood…This one is a tribal chief from the mountains: a leader of
twenty thousand men. He speaks no English, he understands Pidgin, but speaks only his own upland dialect. He is wearing now a ceremonial dress. He still holds to the old pagan beliefs…Yet, when independence is granted to this country, he is the most likely leader, while our mission boy will have no influence at all.’

  ‘Tell me why,’ said Kiril the Pontiff.

  ‘I have thought about it a long time, Holiness,’ said Platino deliberately. ‘I have prayed much. I am still not sure that I am right, but this is what I believe. With our mission boy, we have in one sense succeeded admirably. We have educated a good human being. We have set him in the way of salvation. He lives chastely, deals justly, and displays in himself the example of a godly life. If he becomes a priest, he will teach the Word and dispense the Grace of the Sacraments to those with whom he comes in contact. In him and those like him, the Church fulfils her prime mission – the sanctification of individual human souls…In another sense, however, we have failed because in this boy – how shall I say it? – we have limited the relevance of the faith… In the mission we have created a small, safe world for him. A Christian world, yes, but one that has cut itself off from the larger world which is still God’s vineyard. We have made him an apolitical individual, and man by his nature is a political and social animal who has an immortal soul…We have left him, in large part, unprepared for the dialogue which he must sustain throughout his life with the rest of his fellows in the flesh…Look at our friend here, the one with the tusk through his nose. He is a man of power because he practises polygamy and each wife brings him a plot of land and then cultivates it for him. He holds to the old beliefs because these are his ground of communication with his tribe. He is their mediator with the spirits as he is their mediator with men of other tongues. He understands tribal law and tribal justice. In the difficulty and confusion which will follow the granting of independence, he will speak with more authority and more relevance than our mission boy, because he has not been divorced from the realities of social existence…Your Holiness spoke of Brazil and the South Americas. There is an analogy between the two situations. The Church has to deal with man in the circumstances in which he lives. If he is hungry we have to feed him; if he is oppressed we must defend him so that he may have, at least, a minimum freedom to set his soul in order. We cannot preach from the pulpit, “Thou shalt not steal”, and then stand by inactive while political or social injustice is done to those who sit and listen to our preaching…We see a strange example in Poland, where the Church has had for very survival to enter actively into a conversation with elements hostile to it. It has had to prove itself relevant, and it has done so. It lives the more strongly for that very reason, even though it lives more painfully…’