Catholics

by Moore, Brian; Ellsberg, Robert;

  Catholics

  A Novel

  Brian Moore

  Introduction

  Robert Ellsberg

  On a storm-swept island off the coast of Ireland, a community of “Albanesian” monks maintains the “faith of their fathers,” worshipping God as the church has for centuries, “changing bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ the way Jesus told his disciples to do it at the Last Supper.” It was monks such as these who kept the faith alive during previous times of invasion and persecution, and who, indeed, as Thomas Cahill has put it, “saved civilization” when barbarians roamed the land. Except that now, it is the barbarians who are running the church.

  Such is the background of Catholics. Brian Moore’s short novel, first published in 1972, is set sometime in the near future, after a fictional Vatican IV has completed the church’s wholesale capitulation to the spirit of secularism. Far beyond Vatican II’s famous aggiornamento (“—updating”), the church is now on the brink of a historic apertura, allowing for the first time “interpenetration” between the Christian and Buddhist faiths.

  But suddenly, on the eve of this breakthrough, comes disturbing news. Catholic pilgrims from around the world have been converging on a coastal town in Ireland where the monks of Muck Abbey, ignoring current church teaching, continue to say Mass in Latin according to the old Tridentine rite. To put an end to this scandalous anachronism, an American priest, James Kinsella, has been dispatched to deliver an ultimatum to the recalcitrant monks: either conform to the new order or face the consequences.

  Kinsella is a perfect embodiment of the new Catholicism. Dressed “like a soldier boy” in denim fatigues, he is bemused by the monks’ references to “mortal sin” and their attachment to the rosary, to outmoded prayers, and to the practice of private confession. Religion for him is mainly a vehicle for social change. Asked to provide his own understanding of the Mass, Kinsella, speaking for “most Catholics in the world today,” describes it a purely symbolic act: “I do not, in the old sense, think of God as actually being present, there in the tabernacle,” he says.

  Facing Kinsella is Tomás O’Malley, the abbot of Muck, whose wily graciousness leaves us in doubt, right up to the end, about how he will respond. Will he yield to authority and give up the Latin Mass, or will he stand up defiantly for the old way? It is more than simply a dispute over language. As the monks see it, the conflict is really about the religious content of the liturgy. As one of them puts it, “This new Mass isn’t a mystery, it’s a mockery, a singsong, it’s not talking to God, it’s talking to your neighbor.”

  Complicating the abbot’s decision, as we soon learn, is the fact that he himself has long since lost his faith. He continues in his post, much as a foreman or manager, making sure the job gets done, while dreading the day when he must face the void and enter “null.” On his response rests the future of Muck Abbey, and perhaps even more.

  Although the specific drama of Catholics is set in an imaginary future, the conflict it describes reflects a real tension in the post–Vatican II church. The decision in those years to replace the Tridentine Latin Mass with a new liturgy in the vernacular was a jarring transition, even for those who accepted it. For centuries, Catholics had been raised on an image of the church as essentially timeless and unchanging, united by one language, one liturgy, and one symbol of unity (an infallible pope). For some, the reforms of Vatican II called everything into question, removing the ancient symbols of faith without offering anything substantial in their place.

  Of course Vatican II’s reform of the liturgy, which sought to put more emphasis on the role of the community, involved no retreat from the traditional Catholic teaching on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Nevertheless, pockets of resistance arose from the likes of Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers. After he ordained several traditionalist bishops without Vatican authorization, Lefebvre was excommunicated.

  But he was by no means the most extreme case. More-radical sectarians have entirely rejected the legitimacy of Vatican II, holding that Pope John Paul II and his immediate predecessors were in fact apostates from the true faith. One can find their screeds on the internet, denouncing the pope’s interfaith prayer meetings at Assisi with such vehemence that one might assume that the fanciful “apertura” was already upon us.

  And yet quite apart from this paranoid fringe, concerns about the place of faith and tradition in the modern, secular world are shared by many believers. In recent years Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, were among those who warned against the danger that Christians, in the name of dialogue and openness to the world, would lose any sense of transcendent truth.

  In words that might have been spoken by a monk of Muck Abbey, Cardinal Ratzinger proclaimed the following in 1988:

  While there are many motives that might have led a great number of people to seek a refuge in the traditional liturgy, the chief one is that they find the dignity of the sacred preserved there. After the Council there were many priests who deliberately raised “desacralization” to the level of a program, on the plea that the New Testament abolished the cult of the Temple: the veil of the Temple which was torn from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross is, according to certain people, the sign of the end of the sacred. The death of Jesus, outside the City walls, that is to say, in the public world, is now the true religion. Religion, if it has any being at all, must have it in the nonsacredness of daily life, in love that is lived. Inspired by such reasoning, they put aside the sacred vestments; they have despoiled the churches as much as they could of that splendor which brings to mind the sacred; and they have reduced the liturgy to the language and the gestures of ordinary life, by means of greetings, common signs of friendship, and such things.

  This is the same man who warned, on the eve of his papal election, of the “dictatorship of relativism.” In the conflict between Muck Abbey and the church of “Vatican IV,” it is not hard to imagine where his sympathies would lie. What is at stake is whether the church will opt for “relevance” at the expense of emptying out the essential religious content of its faith.

  Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Catholic novelist who died in 1964, wrote extensively about this tension, as she saw it, between faith and the secularizing tendencies of her age. Long before Father Kinsella (citing the “standard belief in this day and age”) would describe the Eucharist as a symbol, O’Connor supplied her own memorable reply: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” To a liberal friend, she wrote, “All around you today you will find people accepting ‘religion’ that has been rid of its religious elements. This is what you are asking: if you can be a Catholic and find a natural explanation for mysteries we can never comprehend. You are asking if you can be a Catholic and substitute something for faith. The answer is no.”

  That is ultimately the dramatic crux of Moore’s novel—not a parody of contemporary ecclesiastical politics, but a question about the ultimate mysteries that lie at the heart of faith. Kinsella and his ilk believe passionately in not much of anything. The monks of Muck Abbey, in contrast, believe just as passionately in the old certainties. And then there is Abbot Tomás, who cannot be identified unequivocally with either faction. He is a man with nothing but doubts. And yet those doubts, which at least pertain to matters of ultimate significance, may be the slender thread that preserves his connection to God.

  In that light, it is fair to wonder whether the abbot’s dilemma doesn’t speak for the author himself. Brian Moore, who was raised as a Catholic in Protestant Belfast, claimed to have abandoned his faith long before he left Ireland for a new life in North America. And yet in many of his twenty novels he wrestled with the problem of faith and the things th
at take its place when it is gone. One option in this novel is the proud secularism of Father Kinsella. Another is the “null” that haunts Abbot Tomás. But is there also a third option, a “faith beyond faith,” that lies beyond these characters’ imagination?

  According to Scripture, faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.” There is always an element of risk in trusting in the hidden God. And so the tension between belief and doubt is not a contest between “true Catholics” and the general mass of modernists. It is a tension that runs through the heart of every believer. How will we distinguish between the essentials of faith and the changeable traditions in which it is conveyed? Is it not possible to opt for both relevance and sacred mystery? Openness to the world and a passion for truth?

  Whichever choice Abbot Tomás makes will involve a leap into the void. The same is true for every Christian. We can only trust in the abbot’s final words (whether he and Moore believe them or not): “If our words become prayer, God will come.”

  PART ONE

  The fog lifted. The island was there. The visitor walked to the end of the disused pier and saw it across three miles of ocean, riding the sea like an overturned fishing boat. Morning sunlight moved along a keel of mountain, above valleys black as tarred boat sides.

  He thought of Rome. Surprisingly, the order itself had little descriptive information. In the Lungotevere Vaticano he had been handed an out-of-print book: Weir’s Guide to Religious Monuments.

  Muck Abbey, Kerry, Ireland. On a small island off the rocky panoramic coastline of the Atlantic Ocean known as “The Ring of Kerry.” The monastery, (Albanesian order), founded 1216, rebuilt 1400–1470, has a dependency, or cell, on the mainland, the priory of Holy Cross, at Mount Coom near the village of Cahirciveen. This priory, sacked by Cromwellian troops, was, in Penal times, a site for clandestine Mass, conducted in the open air on a “Mass rock” altar. The abbey itself (on Muck Island) escaped Cromwellian despoliation and sits on the western slope of the island overlooking a splendor of sea. From the abbey tower the visitor looks down on gray waves that curl on barren rock. The monks fish and gather kelp.

  He had telephoned again before breakfast. The pretty girl at the desk in his hotel cranked up an incredibly old-fashioned device to call exchange. “We’re wanting Muck Island. No, Sheilagh, it’s all right, it’s for that priest who spoke to the island last night.

  “There now, Father.” He took the receiver. A bell rang and rang.

  “Muck Island One,” said a crackly voice, out in the Atlantic.

  The visitor gave his name. He said he had been asked to call and check on the weather.

  “What was your name again, now?”

  “Kinsella. Father James Kinsella.” He had learned his lesson.

  “Ah, Father Kinsella. We’ll send a boat for you, to be sure. Go down to the pier now, and Padraig will be along shortly.”

  Gulls, searching the remains of fish, skimmed overhead, dipped to the brackish waters beneath. Behind him, at the end of the road that led to the pier, were three roofless concrete boat sheds, floored with weeds, smelling of urine and sheep droppings. A very old car, which he had thought abandoned, sat in one of the sheds. Yesterday, when he first drove down here searching the fog for a sight of the island, he had looked in at the car. A purple silk stole lay on the front seat. At the hotel, after dinner, he asked who had built this pier. No, the monks had not built it, the Irish government built it, years ago, before the fishing became polluted. At that time, there were some twenty families living on the island. “They’ve nearly all come out since. Scattered now, to the four ends of the world.”

  “Polluted. Does that mean the monks don’t fish anymore?”

  “Ah, no, the fishing is grand again. The water was cleaned up, a while back. The trouble is, it was done too late for the people of Muck. There do be only four families left on the island. And the monks.”

  The old car he had seen in the boat shed, was it the monastery car?

  “It is, indeed. The monks do use it to drive to Cahirciveen of a Sunday. It’s twenty miles, Father.”

  “But, what if the sea is rough, or if there’s a fog, and a boat can’t come over from the island?”

  “Then no Mass is said at Cahirciveen.”

  No Mass? Yesterday’s sights filled his mind; the streets of this Kerry village, gray nineteenth-century facades, market square, gray Gothic church, streets built before, and impassable to, today’s traffic. Now existing in permanent confusion, cars, buses, trucks, campers, vans, moving in an endless clogged procession in and out of the narrow streets, while on the outskirts more vehicles were bogged in the muddy confusion of improvised car parks and tent villages. And everywhere in Cahirciveen, jammed into the shops and pubs, herded into the main square like beasts on a fair day, the pilgrims. No one knew how many they were on any given weekend, but for months there had not been a room or a bed to rent for fifty miles around. They were Irish, of course, but there seemed an almost equal number from England and Scotland. Others came by car ferry and charter plane from the continent; an emphasis of French, but also many Germans and even some pilgrims from Rome itself. The Americans had flown in two charter groups, many of them old souls who had never crossed the Atlantic before. They came, it seemed, simply to hear at least one Mass, say the rosary, and leave. The uncomfortable local accommodations did not encourage a long stay. It was a phenomenon, even in the history of pilgrimage. There were no miracles, there was no hysteria, there was not even a special fervor. The mood was nostalgic. The pilgrims rose early on Sunday, went in buses and cars to the foot of Mount Coom, five miles from the village. There, they ascended the mountain, on foot, to kneel on muddied grassy slopes, or on shelves of rock, often in the unyielding Irish rain. Most could see the Mass rock and the priest only from a distance, but all heard the Latin, thundering from loudspeakers rigged up by the townsfolk. Latin. The communion bell. Monks as altar boys saying the Latin responses. Incense. The old way.

  “No Mass?” he said to the hotelkeeper. “But when they’ve come all this way, what do they do if there’s no Mass?”

  “Ah, now, Father, that’s a grand thing to see. The pilgrims just stay there, kneeling and saying the rosary. They stay all day, waiting and praying.”

  “But don’t some of them try to go out to the island itself?”

  The hotelkeeper laughed, showing gap teeth. “No fear! No boat can land on Muck that doesn’t know the trick of it. And the island boats will land nobody without the abbot’s permission. Besides,” the hotelkeeper said, serious again, “these pilgrims do be good people. When the abbot put up a sign in the church here in Cahirciveen saying ‘Parishioners Only for Confession,’ most of the pilgrims stopped bothering the monks. Mind you, the lines are still long. After Mass, on a Sunday, there do be three monks, hard at it in the church until it’s time for them to take the boat back.”

  “But why do the confessions take so long?”

  “We still have private confessions. One person at a time in the box.”

  Private confessions. This was not known in Rome. “What about public confessions?”

  “Public confessions, Father?”

  “Where the whole congregation stands before Mass and says an act of contrition?”

  “Ah, that never took here.”

  Anger, sudden and cold, made Kinsella say: “It took everywhere else!” Ashamed, he saw the hotelkeeper bob his head, obedient, rebuked, but unconvinced.

  Yesterday when he first arrived by car from Shannon, Kinsella had carried a paramilitary dispatch case, a musette bag, and was wearing gray-green denim fatigues. At the desk of Hern’s Hotel, the girl was curt. The hotel was full, there was a two-month waiting list, no reservations had been made for days. “But you took my reservation,” he said. “You confirmed it, and the confirmation was telexed from Dublin to Amsterdam Ecumenical Center. This is Hern’s Hotel, isn’t it?”

  “What was your name again, sir?”

  “Jame
s Kinsella. Catholic priest,” he said, in the Ecumenical manner.

  “Oh, Father Kinsella. Oh, excuse me, Father. We have a room for you, certainly.”

  Father. In the crowded hotel lobby, every available seat was occupied. Standees circled disconsolately around racks of seaside postcards and shelves of paperback books. Father. Sun-reddened faces turned to stare, supercilious of his American accent, his ecumenical clothes. Most of these pilgrims were older than he, old enough to remember the Latin Mass. But there were young ones too, former Catholic Pentecostals, now eager for experience as the penitentes of the day. Their scorn toward him, his own scorn in reverse, met him as he went toward the stairs and the privileged bedroom. His friend Visher, a behaviorist, had made a study of current Catholic attitudes toward their clergy. “People are sheep,” Visher said. “They haven’t changed. They want those old parish priests and those old family doctors. Sheep need authoritarian sheepdogs nipping at their heels from birth to funeral. People don’t want truth or social justice, they don’t want this ecumenical tolerance. They want certainties. The old parish priest promised that. You can’t, Jim.”

  Waves lapped the slimed boat steps. A new sound entered Kinsella’s ear, the pulse of an engine. He looked at the sea but saw no boat. Sound, preceding vision, carrying clear over the whitecapped waves. Pulsing. Coming, coming; the painful confrontation. He and the abbot of Muck.

  “This will not be your first visit to Ireland,” father general said, looking up from the file. It was a statement, not a question, but he felt he should answer it.

  “No, sir. In my last year at Harvard, I went over there to attend a summer school. The Yeats school, in Sligo. My ancestors were Irish. They came from County Mayo, I believe. It’s in the West, where this abbey is.”

  “William Butler Yeats.” The general smiled his faint, Prussian smile. “‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last.’ Appropriate. I want you to bury this beast. And I think the way to do that is for me to give you plenipotentiary status. Emissaries who must report back to headquarters, especially young ones, would seem to these old mastodons to be mere novices. I will make clear to this abbot that you are me. What you decide will be the order’s final edict.”