by Неизвестный
Two weeks before he sailed home to Ireland for his first holiday in three years, the authorities assigned him his first exorcism. “You're young, Father. I wish you'd had more experience,” was the way he recalled the bishop's instructions, “but the Old Fella won't have much on you or over you. So go to it.”
It had lasted 13 hours (“In Hoboken, of all places,” he used to say whimsically), and had left him dazed and ill at ease. He never forgot the statement of murderous intent hurled at him by the man he had exorcised. Through foaming spittle and clenched teeth and the smell of a body unwashed for two years prior, the man had snarled: “You destroy the Kingdom in me, you shit-faced alien Irish pig. And you think you're escaping. Don't worry. You'll be back for more. And more. Your kind always come back for more. And we will scorch the soul in you. Scorch it. You'll smell. Just like us! Third strike and you're out! Pig! Remember us!” Peter remembered.
But a two-week vacation in County Clare restored him to his energy and verve. “God! The scones running with salty butter, and the hot tea, and the Limerick bacon, and the soft rain, and the peace of it all! 'Twas great.”
Most of Peter's wounds were not inflicted by the harsh realities of the world around him; but, deep within him, they opened as his way of responding to the evil he sometimes sensed in daily life.
Those who still remembered him in 1972 agreed that Peter had been neither genius nor saint. Black-haired, blue-eyed, raw-boned in appearance, he was a man of little imagination, deep loyalties, loud laughter, gargantuan appetite for bacon and potatoes, an iron constitution, an inability to hate or bear a grudge, and in a state of constant difference of opinion with his bishop (a tiny old man familiarly called “Packy” by his priests). Peter was somewhat lazy, harmlessly vain about his 6' 2“ height, and a lifelong addict of Edgar Wallace detective stories. ”He had this distinct quality,“ remarked one of his friends. ”You felt I he had a huge spirit laced with cast-iron common sense and untouched by any pettiness.“ f ”If he met the Devil at the top of the stairs one morning and saw; Jesus Christ standing at the bottom,“ added another, ”he wouldn't! turn his back on the one in his hurry to get down to the other. He'd back down. Just to be sure.“ In normal circumstances, Peter would have stayed on permanently in Ireland after his vacation of scones and soft rain. He would have worked in parishes for some years, then acquired a parish of his own. But there was something else tugging at his heart and something else written in his stars. When he left for New York at the outbreak of the Korean War in order to replace a chaplain who had been called up, he recalled the exorcism in Hoboken. ”Third strike and you're out! Pig! Remember!“
He remarked jokingly to a worried friend who knew the whole story: “ 'Tis not the third time yet!”
In January 1952, he was asked to do his second exorcism. His effectiveness in the first exorcism and the resilient way he had taken it recommended him to the authorities. The exorcism took place in; Jersey City. And, in spite of its length (the better part of three days and three nights), it took very little out of him physically or mentally. Spiritually, it had some peculiar significance for him.
“It was a sort of warmer-upper for the 1965 outing,” he told me in 1966. “The ceremony lasted too long for my liking, was hammer and tongs all the way, almost beat us. But there was no great strain inside here [pointing to his chest].” And he added with a significance that eluded me then: “Jesus had a forerunner in the Baptist. I suppose; darkness has its own.”
Looking back on his role as exorcist today, it is clear to me that first two exorcisms prepared him for the third and last one. They were three rounds with the same enemy.
The exorcee that January was a sixteen-year-old boy of Hispanic origin who had been treated for epilepsy over a period of years, only to lie finally declared nonepileptic and physically sound as a bell by a team of doctors from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Nevertheless, on the boy's return home, all the dreadful disturbances started all over again in a much more emphasized way, so the parents, turned to their priest.
“They tell me you've a. . . eh. . . a sort of a way with the Devil, Father,” said the wheezy, red-faced monsignor, grinning awkwardly as he gave the necessary permissions and instructions to Peter. Then, stirring in his chair, he added grimly as a bad Catholic joke: “But don't bring him back here to the Chancery with you. Get rid of him or it or her or whatever the devil it is. We have enough of all that on our backs here already.”
It had gone well. The boy became Peter's devoted friend. Later he went to Vietnam and died in an ambush late one night outside Saigon. His commanding officer wrote, enclosing an envelope with Peter's name on it which the dead man had left behind. It contained a piece of bloodstained linen and a short note. Over a decade previously, just before his release from possession, in a final paroxysm of revolt and appeal, he had clawed at Peter's wrist, and Peter's blood had fallen on his shirt sleeve. “I kept this as a sign of my salvation, Father,” the note said. “Pray for me. I will remember you, when I am with Jesus.”
Peter was then forty-eight years old and in his prime as a priest. Yet in himself, he suffered from a growing sense of inadequacy and worthlessness. He felt that, in comparison with many of his colleagues who had attained degrees, qualifications, high offices, and acknowledged expertise, he had very little to show by way of achievement. “I have no riches inside me,” he wrote to a brother of his, “just black poverty. Sometimes it darkens my soul.” When his turn for a parish of his own came around, he was passed over. (Packy was dead already; but, some said, the dead bishop had made sure in his records that Peter would be passed over.)
Peter, in fact, was a maverick. The normal priest found him inferior in social graces but superior in judgment, lacking in ecclesiastical know-how and ambition but very content with his work. Sometimes his protestations of being “poor inside,” of having “no excellent talents” sounded hollow when matched with his stubborn and opinionated attitudes. Anyway, the normal bishop would take one look into his direct gaze and decide that his own authority was somehow at stake. For Peter's stare was not insolent, but yet unwavering; it acknowledged the demands of worth but was devoid of any subservience. It said: “I respect you for what you represent. What you are is something else.” Such a man was unsettling for the absolutist mind and threatening for the authoritarian bent of most ecclesiastics.
Beyond the occasional funny remark, such as “The higher they go, the blacker their bottoms look,” Peter gave no outward impression of discontent or anxiety. A lack of self-confidence saved him from revolt or disgust. And he bore it all lightly. “Well, Father Peter,” one bishop joshed him as he left to do a three-month stint in London parish work, “off you go to hell or to glory, eh?” Peter laughed it off: “In either case, bishops get the priority, my lord.”
Had he raised protests and used the influential friends at his disposal, he would doubtless have retired in good time to the rural repose of a peaceful Kerry parish and the extraordinary autonomy of a parish priest. (A pope or a bishop approached any settled “P.P.” with care. Only his housekeeper could make a frontal assault on a parish priest's autonomy. But, then again, Irish housekeepers were a race unto themselves.)
As Peter was and as he chose to remain—in strict dependence on ecclesiastical whims and never striking out to seek a fixed position—he was available to be tapped for a temporary visit to Rome and an accidental meeting that changed him profoundly.
After his second exorcism, there were ten more years of “helping out” in various dioceses, practically always on a temporary basis as substitute for other priests. And then a chance breakfast in late September 1962 brought him together with a West Coast bishop who, on his way to the opening of the Second Vatican Council in Rome, stayed a few days in New York. The bishop was well known for his sympathy with mavericks and his welcome for “hard cases.” Like all the bishops who went to the council, he needed one or two experts in theology to be his advisors in Rome. He needed, in particular, a theologian c
ounselor skilled in pastoral matters.
The next day Peter was aboard a TWA flight with the bishop enroute to the Eternal City. But for that trip, he probably would not have been at the side of Marianne three years later. And he certainly would never have come close to two men who had a sudden, deep influence on the rest of his life. In Rome, Peter performed his duties as a counselor during his ten-week stay there. But what mattered much more to him personally and affected him deeply were his experiences with Father Conor and with Paul VI, then Monsignor Montini.
Father Conor was a diminutive Irish Franciscan friar, bald-headed, sharp-eyed, and voluble, who taught theology at a Roman university. I wore rimless glasses, trotted and never walked, and spoke with a very strong brogue which made his Latin lectures all but unintelligible.
I le held court for students, professors, foreign visitors, officials, and friends in his monastery room after siesta hour, three or four days a week. There, any bit of gossip in Rome could be learned, tested, and assessed for its rumor value. For half of Rome always feeds on rumors about the other half. And speculation is the stick which continually stirs the pool of rumor. “They till me, me frind, that. . .” was a frequent opening of Conor's conversation.
Conor spent his summers fishing around Lough Corrib, Ireland, was an expert on Waterford glass, and had a lifelong fascination for all politics, civil and ecclesiastical, a fascination that made Vatican Council II appeal to Conor as catnip to a cat. He had studied demonology (“Mostly ballyhoo,” he pronounced in his thick brogue), witchcraft (“A lotta junk, if y'ask me”), Exorcism (“A mad bizniz”), and possession (“The divil's toe-rag”). He served as a consultant to one Roman office that dealt with cases of possession; and on 14 occasions he had conducted exorcisms (but always protested that he “wouldn't touch wan wid a barge pole, unliss they ordher'd me teh”). According to an in joke about Conor that always made him furious, he induced devils to leave the possessed by threatening to “send them back to Ireland.”
Outside Roman clerical circles, Conor's activity as an exorcist—was relatively unknown. Indeed, he was regarded by his fellow clergy in Ireland as a bookworm and by his lay friends as a “grand, simple, innocent man, slightly dotty about the Middle Ages.”
Peter and Conor were approximately the same age. They shared a love of Ireland and a passion for Rome's ruins. And Conor sensed in Peter a mind never tarnished by the baser ambitions he saw eating into those who gyrated and jockeyed around him in Rome on the political treadmill. He also felt Peter's sense of his own worthlessness.
He found Peter's exorcism experiences enormously interesting. For Peter had “the touch,” he used to say—a natural ability to weather exorcism's storms. On the other hand, Peter found in Conor a friend of practical experience and advice. Rambling in the Roman suburbs, sitting in the cortile of Conor's monastery, visiting the sights of Rome, sipping coffee in the Piazza Navona, they gradually assumed the roles of master and disciple. Peter put questions; Conor answered them. He explained. He theorized. He instructed. He warned. He corrected. He encouraged.
In the area of Exorcism, Conor had things reduced to a recognizable pattern of behavior: how the possessed behaved; how the possessing spirit acted; and how the exorcist should react and conduct the exorcism. During the long walks and talks with Conor, Peter crystallized his own first impressions and learned some valuable guidelines.
He had never realized the radical distinction between the perfectly possessed and the revolters. Nor had he understood the revolters as victims of possession who, partly with their own connivance, surely, had become hostage and were now trying, on the one hand, to give some sign, to summon help, but who in that struggle also became victims of a violent protest against such help—a protest made by the evil thing that possessed them.
Peter was able to adjust and correct his techniques immediately, even without conducting further exorcisms, once Conor explained that the major portion of every exorcism was taken up with shattering a pretense, dispelling a smokescreen; that the most dangerous period lay in the Breakpoint of that Pretense and in the clash of wills that followed at once between the exorcist and the thing that tortured the possessed; and that the “Grate Panjandhr'm” (Conor's epithet for the Devil) intervened only rarely.
In Conor's view, the world of evil spirits was like an autocratic organization: “Joe Shtaleen used to sind Molotov to do his dirty work. So the Grate Panjandhr'm sens his hinchmin.”
Conor taught Peter tricks and ruses; and he gave him tags-phrases, words, numbers, concepts—to label perilous phases, capital moments and events in an exorcism. He made available to Peter some of his own practices: the use of “teaser texts,” for instance. At certain awkward gaps in the exorcism, there was no way to contend head to head with the possessed and with what was possessing them. The possessing spirit literally hid behind the identity of the possessed. It had to be flushed out into the open. Conor had the habit of reading certain texts chosen from the Gospels, until such time as the spirit made mistakes or arrogantly threw aside its disguise.
Conor's advice was always concrete and vivid, and always in Peter's mind echoed with that warm, fresh brogue they both shared like a piece of common turf: “The t'ing is beyond yer mind. It's a sperrit agin vnors. The reel camuflin' starrts inside in yeh. And yeh'r just an ole toe-rag, unless Jesus is wid yeh.”
But, above all else, Conor reconciled Peter to the inevitable drain mi the exorcist. He explained in simple terms what wounds he could receive as an exorcist, what wounds he should avoid, and what wounds were incurable once inflicted on him. All these wounds were “internal” to spirit and mind and memory and will. Peter had received some minor ones already. He now realized what he could undergo.
Conor refined Peter's primitive idea of “the Devil” and of “Devils,” expressing in simple terms what to most moderns is an enigma if not downright nonsense: how that which has no body can be a person, have a personality. And he dealt curtly with psychoanalysts: “Down the road a bit, they're goin' to find out that the whole thing is entoirely differr'nt; and then they'll put Siggy and company up on the shelves as histhorical lave-overrs, like Galen on bones or Arishtot'l on plants.”
But it was not Conor who rid Peter of his lack of confidence. He could never give Peter a reason to trust his own judgment. It was the man who in two years would become Paul VI who made that change in him.
Peter never exchanged one sentence with Giovanni Battista Mon-tini, then Archbishop of Milan. Montini had been relegated from the Vatican to the political wilderness of Milan by Pope Pius XII, had survived it, and now was back in Rome—“still listening to his voices” (as the Roman wags described the ethereal gaze of Montini and the impression he gave of having shutters over his eyes to hide the light within)—and was deeply involved in the council.
One of Montini's theologian-counselors was impressed with Peter's arguments at an evening meal. They met several times afterwards during Peter's stay. Once they went with Conor to a gathering of theologians who were discussing issues being hotly debated on the council floor. Such gatherings were frequent in those days; Archbishop Montini was the guest of honor at this particular meeting.
As Montini arrived and walked to his seat, Conor gossiped in a whisper with Peter: “They tell me, my frind, that Johnny [then Pope John XXIII] won't lasht long.” Then with a nod in Montini's direction: “There's the nixt wan.”
But Peter was not interested in future popes as such. For an inexplicable reason, he was fascinated by Montini. Everything about the man, his person, and his speech and his writings had a peculiar significance for Peter. As he remarked to Conor, “He seems to walk' with a great vision no one else sees.”
He set out to learn all he could about Montini, speaking with those who knew the archbishop, reading his sermons, frequenting Montini's familiars and employees. He even got to the stage of referring to : Montini as Zio, a name used affectionately by those around the archbishop.
Peter came to share Conor's trenc
hant point of view on recent popes: “Pacelli [Pius XII] was loike a shliver of ice serrved up in an archangel's cocktail at the hivinly banquit,” confided Conor wryly as they walked home one evening. “Awsteerr, arishtocratic, sometimes wid a dead-an'-dug-up look, y'know. Johnny [John XXIII], av coorse, is out on his own, a mountin uv sperrit. But this lil' fella [Montini] has an airr 'v thragedee.”
Peter made a point of going to listen to Montini whenever he was billed to speak in public. It was on one of these occasions that he had his “Montini experience.” Together with others present, he knelt to receive the archbishop's blessing at the end of his speech. As Montini raised his right hand to make the sign of the cross', Peter lifted his eyes. They locked with Montini's at the juncture point of the cross the archbishop traced in the air. As he looked, the “shutters” over Montini's eyes opened for an instant. Montini's gaze was momentarily an almost dazzling brilliance of feeling warmth, communication. Then the “shutters” closed again, as Montini's eyes traveled on over the heads of the others kneeling around Peter.
Afterwards, Peter knew that the empty feeling of diffidence had left him. For the first time in his life, he had no fears.
That was in mid-November of 1962. At the beginning of December, as the first session of the council ended, he was told that he had been freed from his obligations back in New York and that he could go home to Ireland for Christmas. After Christmas vacation in his home town, he worked in Ireland from January 1963 until August 1965.
He was winding up his summer vacation in July 1965 and preparing to return to work in Kerry, when he received a short note from New York telling him of Marianne K., a young woman, apparently a genuine case of possession. The note was urgent: the authorities felt he could best handle the affair. Could he come over immediately?
In mid-August he arrived in New York.
Toward the spring of 1964, and thousands of miles away from the calm fresh Kerry countryside where Peter was then living, the habitues of Bryant Park, in New York City, began to notice a skinny young woman of medium height wearing jeans, sandals, and a blouse, with a raincoat thrown over her shoulders. Her visits there were irregular; and she stayed for unpredictable periods of time, sometimes for hours, sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes, once for two days. The weather had nothing to do with the length of her stay; sunshine, rain, snow, cold made no difference. She looked clean; but those she passed got the rancid odor of unwashed hair and skin. She never spoke to anyone, and never stood or sat in exactly the same place twice. Always she had a fixed expression, a kind of frozen smile that was only on her mouth; her eyes were blank, her cheeks unlined, taut; her teeth were never visible through the fixed and smiling lips. Her blonde hair was usually unkempt. Those who frequently saw her nicknamed her the Smiler. Marianne K.