Strange Gods

by Peter J. Daly

  “And remember when some African bishops a few years back said it was OK to distribute condoms to married people because of the huge risk of AIDS in Africa? Rome rebuked them. Is the prohibition on condoms more important than human life?”

  “I agree with you there, Jack,” said O’Toole. “Even Pope Benedict was changing his mind on that.”

  “Mike, you once told me about a bishop you knew here in the States who had spent twenty-five or thirty years working in parishes. What was his name? Turin or Curling or something like that. He wasn’t a great scholar, but he was a good pastor. He dissented when the bishops issued some statement on homosexuality, because he said it did not express the truth of those relationships as he had seen them. The other bishops shunned him, like the Amish do. When he came down to breakfast, nobody would sit with him. When he rode on the bus to your meetings, he had to sit by himself. Thirty years of service to the people of God counted for nothing, because he had the courage to say what he saw to be true.”

  O’Toole nodded. “True.”

  “Mike, I am an old man,” said Jack. “I will die soon. We all get things wrong about the mystery of faith, and everyone will certainly get some correction when we meet our maker. But I know one thing for sure. When I stand before the throne of grace, I hope God will say that I preached His mercy more than His justice.”

  The late afternoon sun came in through the front window, and a breeze off the sea blew the lace curtains covering the open window. Air-conditioning was unnecessary in Gloucester.

  O’Toole and McClendon sat in silence. After a while Mike looked over at Jack. He had nodded off to sleep. Mike quietly slipped out the front door and went out for a walk. Dressed in black slacks and a clerical shirt, he passed some girls in Catholic school uniforms. “Good afternoon, Father,” they said, giggling.

  He wondered, did I miss the point of priestly life? Should I have stayed here with these people and shared their love? Maybe the real success was here in Gloucester, not the Vatican.

  O’Toole walked the length of the breakwater. When he came back to the house, Jack was still sleeping, so the cardinal sat in the other chair and nodded off himself. The table clock woke him when it chimed five o’clock. Jack was up, looking out the window. The afternoon was mostly gone.

  McClendon suggested that they pray the evening prayer together. “Evening prayer always goes better when followed by a vodka martini,” said Jack.

  They started their prayers. When they got to the Magnificat, McClendon struggled to stand up for the words of the gospel. But his old legs would not cooperate, so they both just sat back down and read the words together.

  He has cast down the mighty from their thrones

  and has lifted up the lowly.

  He has filled the hungry with good things,

  and the rich he has sent away empty.

  He has come to the help of his servant Israel

  for he has remembered his promise of mercy,

  the promise he made to our fathers,

  to Abraham and his children forever.

  After prayer, they sipped their martinis and watched the evening news. Then they got their jackets. Neither of them asked where they were going. Their ritual was unchanged. They always went to the Gloucester House for a lobster dinner.

  At dinner, they sat looking at the Atlantic.

  “What should we do, Jack?” asked O’Toole. “What should we do to bring the Church back?”

  Jack thought for a minute, looking out at the gray ocean. It occurred to him that the ocean was a good metaphor for God. We can only know a little about the ocean. We can only splash around the edges and skim over the surface.

  Jack looked back at Mike.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we should talk less. Instead of publishing all those documents that sink without a trace under the ocean, we should just do something that would make people know they are loved.”

  “What do you mean?” O’Toole asked.

  “Something dramatic. Let’s give the museum away. Close the Vatican Bank. Give away all the money. Trade your watered silk for an ordinary suit of clothes. Stop having bishops’ coats of arms like you are medieval lords. Give up on your titles like excellency and eminence. Stop pretending the Church is a country with diplomats and embassies. Give it all away for the sake of the kingdom. Don’t take anything for the journey, just like Jesus told us.”

  “Then we would be just like the rest of the world,” said the cardinal.

  “Exactly,” said Jack.

  12

  HOLY MOTHER THE CHURCH

  THE PORTER FOR THE METROPOLE HOTEL IN BRUSSELS slipped noiselessly into the grand meeting room and made his way up the side aisle to the second row of tables and chairs, where Brigid Condon was sitting. His white-gloved hand reached in over two empty chairs and handed her a note. In English it said simply, “Important telephone call, front desk.”

  She was not accustomed to being called out of important meetings, but her cell phone did not work in Europe, so there was no other way to reach her.

  Brigid looked at the porter quizzically. He pointed to the lobby. His uniform made him look like a Napoleonic general, complete with epaulets. One did not argue with such a commanding presence. Brigid gathered her papers up from the green cloth-covered seminar table and stuffed them into her big briefcase.

  She was attending a conference on money laundering sponsored by the European Union. She was representing the Federal Reserve. It was her department at the Fed that kept tabs on illegal money flowing in and out of the European Union. It was actually interesting stuff, because it meant tracking everybody who moved lots of currency. That included everybody from Italian mobsters to Colombian drug lords. The EU tracked the euros. The Federal Reserve tracked the dollars.

  Brigid had a hard time getting out of the meeting room as silently as the porter had come in. Her heels made a click-click sound on the polished marble floor that reverberated off the gilded coffered ceiling twenty feet above. Just as she got to the door, the giant three-ring-binder briefing book she carried fell to the floor. The crash sent up an echo and made everyone turn their heads. It was hardly a graceful exit. She was embarrassed. By the time she got to the front desk, she was more than embarrassed; she was irritated. Whoever this was, it had better be important.

  The desk of the Metropole was a giant oak counter in the Beaux-Arts style. Everything at this nineteenth-century palace was in the over-the-top style of the Belle Époque, when the tiny kingdom of Belgium ruled the Congo and grew wildly rich from its trade in diamonds, rubber, and gold. Given its origins, the Metropole was a good place to think about illegal and immoral transfers of wealth.

  The uniformed desk clerk, standing in front of a whole wall of old-fashioned room keys hanging from pearl-handled key chains, saw the porter and motioned Brigid to pick up the telephone on the counter. Even the phone was gaudy, like something from an opera set. Brigid had never used a phone so elaborate. It was encased in red enamel, trimmed with gold leaf. It looked like something Maurice Chevalier might have used in Gigi.

  “Hello,” said Brigid. “This is Brigid Condon.”

  “Brig,” Nate said. “Hope I didn’t interrupt your meeting.”

  “As a matter of fact,” she answered, “you did. Everybody noticed my exit.”

  Nate continued, unfazed. “Come to Rome for the weekend. We are both in Europe. Nothing happens in the Vatican over the weekend, and it would be nice to spend some time with you. We could go for pasta and vino, and I could get us a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.” This last little detail he was not sure of, but he thought he could entice her with art.

  “No,” said Brigid. “I have to be back here for work on Monday. I would be exhausted from traipsing halfway across Europe. I would hardly get there, and then I would have to turn around and come back.”

  “Oh, come on, Brig. It would be fun.” Nate was almost pleading.

  “No,” she said. “It’s too far. Would you fly from New York to Atl
anta for an overnight?”

  “I would if you were going to be there,” said Nate. He was a hopeless romantic. That was what she had always loved about him.

  “I’ve got work to do. I have a presentation to make at 8:00 a.m. on Monday. These Northern Europeans are not like that domani culture down there in Rome. When they say we start at eight, they mean it.”

  “Ah, Brig, come on. The food is better here. I have a giant room with a frescoed ceiling covered with winged nymphs.”

  “No, Nate. I’m not coming. My work is just as important as yours. We can see each other back in New York.”

  “I don’t know when that will be,” said Nate. “Why can’t you say yes?”

  “Stop it, Nate. I’m standing in the middle of a hotel lobby. This is getting embarrassing. The answer is no. What part of no don’t you understand?”

  “OK,” said Nate. “I just thought I would try. Sometimes it’s good to be a little spontaneous.”

  “You mean like you were when you said yes to this cloak-and-dagger thing for the Church? If I had asked you to quit your job and go off for God knows how long on a project for me, you would have said, ‘Are you crazy?’ But for Holy Mother the Church, you drop everything, including me.”

  Where was all this anger coming from? She was really on a roll. “I think you should do your detective work solo and leave me to my work here.”

  “I get the point,” said Nate. “By the way, while you are up there, I want you to run down a lead in Belgium for me.”

  “Nate, are you serious? One minute you’re romancing me. The next minute you’re giving me work?”

  “You’re right, honey. But if you do get out of Brussels, there’s a former priest in a little town near Bruges. His name keeps coming up in the files here. If you’ve got a pen, write this name down. Bernard Willebroeck.”

  She took a pen off the counter and wrote the name on a Metropole Hotel notepad by the phone. “What do you want me to find out?” she asked.

  “Not sure,” said Nate. “It looks like he might have wired money to people in all the cities where these cardinals have died. Seems like too much of a coincidence for me. Where would a former parish priest get that kind of money? The people he is sending the money to are not missionaries. I thought you could find out something through your money laundering sources.”

  “OK,” said Brigid. “Anything else? I’ve got to go back to my meeting.” Actually, that was not true. The meeting was breaking up, and the participants were beginning to emerge from the meeting room across the lobby. But she wanted to get off the phone. For some reason, he was irritating her.

  “No,” said Nate. “That’s all. Sorry you won’t come to Rome.”

  “We both have work to do,” said Brigid. “Bye, Nate. See you back in the States.”

  “Ciao, bella,” said Nate, trying to win her over with flattery.

  “Bye,” said Brigid, undeterred.

  They hung up. No I love yous were exchanged. It was all business. Brigid stood leaning on the counter for a moment, reflecting on the call. Nate could be so charming and simultaneously infuriating. He expected her to drop what she was doing and come to him, but he would never do the same for her. She felt taken for granted.

  Brigid turned around, not sure what the next move should be, in the moment or in life. Things were not great between them. Nate had this allegiance to the Church that both perplexed and irritated her. She knew he wanted a more traditional marriage and definitely wanted children. They had postponed all that by mutual agreement, but now the agreement was frayed.

  Across the lobby she saw one of the reps from the European Union coming toward her: Maria Erfurt, a Belgian who worked in the banking regulation department at the EU.

  “Brigid,” she said, in perfectly accented Oxford English, “come join me in the bar for a drink before I take my train home to Bruges.” Brigid was glad for the invitation. She wanted to talk to another professional woman. Maria seemed intelligent and empathetic. They had been to a lot of meetings together in the past few years.

  They headed off to Le 31, the piano bar off the grand lobby. It had high-back leather chairs and red-shaded brass floor lamps. Hercule Poirot would have felt right at home in the nineteenth-century elegance. They ordered two glasses of wine and some cheese.

  “Are you married?” asked Brigid as they waited for the wine.

  “Yes,” said Maria. “Why?”

  “Well, how do you manage a job like this and a husband?” asked Brigid.

  “My husband is proud of my work,” said Maria.

  “But is he proud of you?” said Brigid. “My husband likes the way I look and likes the idea that I work, but he wants something more. We used to have shared friends, but now we just share social obligations, and most of his are connected with the Church. He wants me to be both the professional woman and the traditional wife. Are you a Catholic, Maria?”

  “All Belgians are catholique,” said Maria, slipping into the French pronunciation. “We are catholique in name, anyway, if not in practice. That is the European way.”

  “My husband is a twenty-first-century lawyer, but at these church functions I’m treated more like a nineteenth-century Catholic wife. I don’t understand his deference to the Church. In my mind, the bishops are damaged goods after the scandals of the past decade. I can’t take them seriously.”

  “That kind of Catholic hardly exists in Belgium anymore,” said Maria. “We are evolving our own version of Catholicism. The hierarchy has been so discredited here. The bishop of my own home diocese, Bruges, was forced to resign when it came out that he had been sexually abusing his own nephew for years. He said it was all a ‘game,’ the stupid bastard. It was no game to his nephew.”

  They both sat in silence for a moment, looking at their wine glasses.

  “No, Brigid,” continued Maria, “nobody can take that part of the Church too seriously. But there is a good part of the Church, too. There are people who remind us of its beauty and its charity and its prayer. Like the nuns.”

  “Not like most of the nuns I knew. They didn’t remind me of beauty, charity, or prayer,” said Brigid.

  Maria looked at Brigid. “Why don’t you come down to Bruges this weekend, and I will show you my parish. If you like, you can even come to Mass with me.”

  Brigid was surprised. Nobody in her circle of friends ever invited her to Mass. They would be more likely to invite her to a séance. But there was something sincere and direct about Maria. Brigid liked her. This was a professional woman like herself, but a believer. That intrigued Brigid.

  “I don’t know,” demurred Brigid. “Like I said, I’m not much for going to church these days. I got turned off on the way it treated women years ago.”

  “Well,” said Maria, “I think you would like this parish. It is almost all women. I go to a convent chapel in Bruges. Sometimes we don’t have any men present.”

  “Don’t you need a priest?” said Brigid.

  “No. We haven’t paid much attention to the hierarchy on refusing to ordain women. If we don’t have a regular priest, we have decided we should not go without the Eucharist, so one of the nuns leads us.”

  Brigid was intrigued. She liked Maria’s progressive spirit. Maybe it would be good to spend some of her free time with her.

  “Besides, you can go shopping for chocolates and lace in Bruges if you come. I’ll even take you to see the relic of the Holy Blood,” said Maria.

  “The what?” asked Brigid.

  “The Holy Blood,” said Maria with a smile. “We Belgians have a vial of Christ’s own blood brought back from the Crusades. People come from the whole world over just to touch it.”

  One thing Brigid did like about the Catholic Church was the stories. Evangelical Protestants were so relentlessly serious about all their sin and redemption. Catholics had great stories, saints, and relics. Who else had a whole vial of Christ’s own blood?

  “I don’t know. You make a pretty good argument,” said Brigid
.

  “It’s decided, then. Come on down with me on the train. You can get a room in the old city, and we can go to Mass on Sunday. And I promise, you’ll even have time to shop.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying yes to this, but OK,” said Brigid, suddenly feeling spontaneous after brushing Nate off. “Wait in the lobby, and I’ll get my bag.”

  13

  SISTER MIRIAM

  SUNDAY MORNING IN BRUGES IS QUIET. EVEN THOUGH sixty percent of all Belgians are baptized as Roman Catholics, only about five percent actually go to church. Consequently, Brigid and Maria had the streets of Bruges to themselves as they made their way to the convent for Mass.

  The convent of the Sisters of Our Lady is a sturdy stone building sandwiched between a little side street and a canal, near the cathedral.

  The building had been a convent off and on since the sixteenth century, with a long interruption around the time of the French Revolution, when most convents and monasteries were closed by the revolutionaries. This left a bad taste for liberty in the mouth of the Catholic Church.

  Maria rang the bell at the convent door. The chimes could be heard echoing down the corridors. Eventually, a short woman dressed in a simple black dress answered the door. She wore no makeup. Her gray hair was pulled back in a neat bun. She spoke impeccable English.

  Maria did the introductions. “Sister Gertrude, this is Brigid. Brigid, Sister Gertrude.” They stood smiling and nodding at each other. “We are here for the Mass,” said Maria. Gertrude nodded.

  Silently, the nun led the two guests down a long corridor, past a Baroque-style chapel and into a large dining room furnished with wooden tables. Chairs were arranged in a semicircle at the center of the room.

  Brilliant sunlight poured through the peaked Gothic windows on one side of the room. The diamond-shaped glass panes illuminated the refectory in geometric patterns. Brigid found herself stepping from diamond to diamond like she was a schoolgirl. She could almost hear her grandmother say, “Don’t step on the cracks.”