Finally, Kelleher spoke. “What now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said O’Toole. “I need some time alone. I want to go somewhere just to think.”
“We could go back to the Vatican,” said Kelleher.
“No good,” said O’Toole. “People press in on you there. They will say they just need a minute, and then they will take an hour. Let’s go somewhere that we can talk.” He paused. “Maybe we could go up to the grounds at the NAC. I could call the rector and tell him I need a private place for a bit.”
The pope got out his cell phone. Kelleher chuckled. “The pope’s cell phone number! Now that’s a number the world would love to have.”
Before they could make the call, a distinguished-looking man about age fifty in a tailored Italian suit slid open the glass door and came into the room. “Con permesso, Santo Padre,” he said formally to O’Toole. “I am Luigi Giuliani, the administrator of the hospital. It is an honor to have you here.”
They shook hands all around. Guiliani bowing slightly to the pope.
Then Giuliani said, “Dunque,” which means “now then.” Italians always say dunque when they are about to say something of consequence.
“It’s a madhouse downstairs. The press knows that you are here. They have surrounded the main entrance and your little car.”
He looked at Kelleher. “You cannot get out without going through the paparazzi. I’m afraid you are trapped.”
“Is there another way out?” asked Kelleher.
“There is an elevator just outside this unit,” said the hospital administrator. “We use it only for patients going to surgery and for transporting bodies to the morgue in the basement. It has an override button to prevent it from making any stops, so that people don’t get on the elevator when we are transporting a body to the morgue. You could take that elevator down to the ground floor and then follow the corridor to the loading dock.”
“But what about the car?” asked Kelleher.
“I’m afraid you will have to leave it for the moment,” said Giuliani. “But my car is parked near the loading dock. I would be honored to drive, Your Holiness, wherever you would like to go. We could cover you in the backseat with a blanket. No one would be looking for you in my car.”
“Thank you so much, Signor Giuliani. We appreciate this kindness,” said the pope.
The three men stepped toward the door, but O’Toole turned back for a moment. He leaned over Jack’s dead body and kissed him on the forehead. “Good-bye, old man. I’ll see you in heaven,” he said. Then he turned to the others and said, “Andiamo.”
Now it was Kelleher who paused. “Wait,” he said. “Let’s take off our collars and just go out in something else. The press will be looking for the pope.”
“Un momento,” said Giuliani. He went to a linen room on the other side of the ICU and came back with two blue technicians’ smocks and a hospital blanket. O’Toole and Kelleher put on the smocks and headed toward the elevator, hoping that no one called the lobby to alert the press.
The old elevator smelled bad. When it whirred to a stop in the basement, they walked down a long corridor and emerged onto a loading dock. Delivery trucks were parked along the dock.
Giuliani led them down a side staircase into a covered parking garage. The director’s car was parked very near the garage entrance in a reserved spot. It was a huge Lancia, the car of the upper middle class in Italy.
The pope got in the backseat and lay down. Kelleher and Giuliani covered him with a blanket. Then they got in the front. Giuliani drove the three of them out of the hospital grounds. It looked like a hospital technician and the hospital director going out on an errand.
As they exited the hospital grounds, Kelleher looked back at the scrum of reporters and a dozen television trucks clustered near the main entrance. They ignored the anonymous Lancia leaving through the gate. A few blocks away, Kelleher turned to the backseat and said, “We’re out.”
The pope sat up, blinking in the sunshine.
“Dove andiamo?” asked the administrator.
“Al Gianicolo,” said the pope.
O’Toole got out his cell phone and called the rector, William Tourigney, at the North American College. He had a little trouble getting through. The porter at the college didn’t seem to believe that it was the pope calling.
Finally, the rector came on the phone.
“Bill,” said O’Toole. “This is Cardinal O … This is Pope Michael.” It felt strange to refer to himself as the pope.
“I need to come up to the college for a little while. I need to talk privately with a priest from the States. I would like absolute privacy. Is that possible?”
The pope put the call on speaker so they could all hear the rector. “Anything you want, Your Holiness. I’ll tell the porter at the gate to let you through.”
The Lancia made its way down Monte Mario, past the Vatican, and then up the Gianicolo Hill to the North American College. The seminary sits on a fairly large tract of land overlooking the Vatican and the city of Rome.
The Gianicolo Hill, like Monte Mario, is not one of the seven hills of the ancient city, but it is historically significant. The Gianicolo takes its name from the Latin name for the Roman god Janus, the two-faced god. The month of January takes its name from him too.
Janus is the Roman god of transitions, the god of beginnings and endings. All the statues of Janus have two faces, one looking forward to the future and the other looking backward to the past. The two faces also make Janus the god of good and evil, of truth and hypocrisy. The ancient Romans invoked Janus when they were going to war or making peace. O’Toole caught the irony of going to the hill of Janus at this transitional moment.
When they pulled up to the gate of the North American College, Giuliani honked the horn on the Lancia. By this time they had put their Roman collars back on. A clerical collar would help them get in the gate.
The porter looked out the window. He saw two priests in a big black Lancia with a driver and probably thought nothing unusual. He pressed the button to open the heavy steel gate. After it slid open, the car pulled into the cobblestone courtyard of the American college. The gate closed behind them. They were safe from prying eyes.
O’Toole recalled vividly the first time he went through that gate forty years before, when he arrived as a seminary student. He remembered how much the seminary looked like a prison. In fact, the local Roman ragazzi called the fascist-style building Sing Sing, after the famous New York prison.
The car pulled across the large cobblestone yard to the main entrance. The two priests got out and thanked the hospital administrator profusely, who, in turn, thanked them profusely.
O’Toole and Kelleher walked up the three red marble steps to the formal entrance hall. In the stone floor was the crest of the college. Inscribed under the crest was the Latin motto of the college, Firmum Est Cor Meum, which literally means “Strong is my heart,” but generations of seminarians applied it to their bishops and translated it as “Hard is my heart.”
Standing alone in the college lobby for a moment, they heard the rector, Monsignor Tourigney, come running breathlessly down the corridor.
“Holiness, Holiness, welcome,” he said, patting his forehead with a white handkerchief. “What an unexpected honor to have the new American pope visit the American College on the first day of your papacy. This is truly historic.”
The rector was the classic ambitious Roman monsignor, unctuous and flattering.
“Is there a place where Father and I can talk privately?” asked the pope.
“My suite, of course, Holiness. It would be my honor,” said the rector.
“Fine,” said the pope, interrupting the rector. “That’s perfect.”
“I’ll send up some refreshments,” said the monsignor.
“Just coffee and pastries would be fine. One more thing, we don’t want to be disturbed.” Holding up his finger to the rector for emphasis, he said, “No one, you understand, Father
?”
“Certainly,” he said. “I’ll bring up the refreshments myself.”
The rector pushed the button for the elevator. The doors on the Art Deco elevator opened. It carried them up two floors to the level of the rector’s suite. Once inside the suite, they crossed the living room to a large tiled terrace with upholstered porch furniture.
When they were settled on the terrace, Kelleher and O’Toole took a deep breath. Both men were still a bit stunned. Jack had died hardly an hour before. O’Toole had been elected pope less than twenty-four hours before. So much had happened in the past day, and so much more lay ahead.
The view from the terrace was lovely. It looked out onto a manicured lawn and a garden bordered by an ancient wall, built in 275 AD by Emperor Aurelian to fortify the city. It provided a fortress-like barrier for the college. People speeding by on the other side of the wall had no idea of the green oasis a few feet away.
Along the walkways of the garden were tall umbrella pines, oddly trimmed in the Roman fashion with all the branches at the top. These were the “pines of Rome,” memorialized in music by Respighi in his concerto.
Everywhere there were flowers.
“Jim,” said O’Toole, “I’m shell-shocked.”
“I know,” said Kelleher. “We’ve both lost someone we loved very much.”
“Yes,” O’Toole said, “and someone who loved us very much.”
He paused for a moment. “I feel disoriented, like I did when my mother died.”
Kelleher could see that the new pope needed to talk, so he let him talk.
“What should I do now?” asked O’Toole rhetorically. “The curia is a mess. Cardinals are killing cardinals. We have a sex abuse scandal that never stops. While the curia lives in regal splendor, we close parishes and hemorrhage membership around the world.”
O’Toole fingered Jack’s breviary. He pulled out a newspaper clipping that Jack had stuck on the inside front cover.
After a moment, he said to Kelleher, “Listen to this. It’s an interview with Cardinal Martini before he died. Jack must have saved this for me.” Then he read:
“‘The Church is tired. In Europe and America our culture has become old, our churches and our religious houses are big and empty. The bureaucratic apparatus of the Church grows and grows. Our rites and our dress are pompous … ’”
O’Toole paused and scanned down the page, then began again.
“‘Where are the heroes who can inspire us? … The Church is two hundred years behind the times. Why doesn’t it stir? Are we afraid? Is it fear rather than courage? In any event, the faith is the foundation of the Church. Faith, trust, and courage.’”
Just then Monsignor Tourigney arrived with coffee, water, and pastries. He put the tray down and left the two men alone. A good servant knows when it’s time to disappear.
O’Toole and Kelleher took their snack, momentarily enjoying the Roman sunshine and listening to the Vespa motor scooters toiling up the hill on the other side of the ancient wall.
“This garden is kind of a metaphor for the Church,” said the pope. “Here we are behind our ancient walls. Everything is beautiful and serene, but just on the other side of that thick stone is a living, pulsating, turbulent city. We are completely unaware of ordinary life.”
Kelleher nodded his head. “It is even worse than that. Sometimes when we go out into the world, we are afraid, and so we retreat behind the wall again.”
“Do you think we are as bad as all that, Jim?” asked the new pope.
“Yes, sadly, I do.”
After a pause O’Toole started to speak again.
“You’re right, Jim, but remember how excited and enthusiastic we were as seminarians and young priests? It wasn’t just because we were young and inexperienced. It was more about the possibilities for the Church. That’s what Vatican II provided. The Church felt young, hopeful.
“Hope! Hope was that great gift that Christ gave us. Hope to be better. Hope to dream. Hope that mercy would always trump justice. And hope that as weak and sinful as we are, we can always get better at being human.”
O’Toole seemed strangely energized by his own ferverino.
Jim jumped in. “God knows, Mike, in the past fifty years there’s been enough talk, enough scholarly papers, and endless committee meetings. The issues of celibacy, married priests, woman priests, gay rights, and authority have been dissected and pulled apart over and over. It’s time to act, Mike. To do something big. Something bold. We’ve been discussing these things for decades. Time to stop talking and start moving.”
O’Toole picked up this thought. He sounded enthusiastic, even young again. “You’re right, Jim. Jack felt that Catholicism was dissolving right around us. These so-called issues need to be settled, so we can get back to proclaiming some good news.”
O’Toole looked tired, but there also seemed to be a new resolve in the way he spoke. “Jack used to say that he didn’t know with any certainty whether heaven existed, but that he chose to believe that it did, because it makes life easier to live. You know, Jim, I feel the same way about the future. I have no certainty about the outcome of what I need to do now, but I believe that it is the right thing. I’ll leave the rest to the Holy Spirit.”
He paused and took a drink of water.
“St. Augustine said that faith is like a hand stretched out into the darkness. That’s the type of faith we will need on this journey.” The pope finished his coffee and stood up. “Time for me to get back, Jim. I want you to stay here in Rome for a while, if you can. I need you. I need your advice. I need your honesty. Most of all, I need your friendship.”
“I’m with you,” said Kelleher. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Two days later, Pope Michael was installed in a simple ceremony. St. Peter’s Square was not quite full. The taint of scandal hanging over the Church kept many of the dignitaries and even some common folk away.
Nate, Brigid, and Sister Miriam were once again in the square, but this time they had seats at the top of the steps, in the second row, just behind the heads of state. Pope Michael had arranged the seats, partly to honor them and partly to protect them.
Brigid and Nate were pleased with the pope’s installation, but not elated.
After the incident in Venice, they now had a police bodyguard and a bulletproof Lancia to ride around in. When they returned to Rome, they didn’t check back into the Columbus Hotel. Instead, Nate called a friend at the Justice Department in Washington who pulled some strings to let them stay in a safe house on the grounds of the American Embassy on Via Veneto.
As Pope Michael was delivering his homily, Nate’s mind wandered back over the preceding few weeks. He thought of Monsignor Ackerman, frightened in the cemetery. He thought of Signora Luppino, in Naples, crying for her son. He thought of Cardinals Crepi and Salazar and their sleazy, self-centered lives. He thought of the corruption that Monsignor Rodriguez told him about.
Nate trusted O’Toole as a good man, but he no longer believed in the goodness of the Church bureaucracy. He saw it as just as corrupt as any bureaucracy. “Two months ago, I would have been thrilled just to be here in the square. Now I keep looking over my shoulder.”
Brigid agreed. “As soon as we get back to New York, I will relax a bit. But it will be a while before I stop wondering if someone is watching us.”
Sister Miriam was cautious.
“Something new is being born, at least I hope so. Pope Michael might be different. Maybe this time grace will be allowed to build on human nature. That’s the way it has to work anyway.”
34
THE FUTURE
POPE MICHAEL WAS NERVOUS.
It was only three days since his installation. He had asked the cardinals to remain in Rome for a consistory. Given the crisis of the moment and the corruption unearthed in Nate’s investigation, he saw no reason to put things off. Previous popes had tried caution. He would try candor.
Before his speech to the consistory, Pope M
ichael sat in a little conference room, just outside the Vatican Synod Hall. He had a plastic cup filled with water on the table beside him. Next to the cup was a leather folder containing his speech. In his hands, he held Jack’s old breviary. He needed a moment of prayer and he needed the presence of Jack.
The only other person in the room was Monsignor Henry Rodriguez. Pope Michael had named the Mexican American priest to be his personal secretary. From Nate’s investigation he had learned that Father Rodriguez was fearless enough to finger the Soldados for the murder of Cardinal Garcia. That was the kind of man the pope needed for an assistant. Rodriguez stood guard at the door of the conference room to give the pope a few moments of privacy.
For centuries the word consistory meant a mandatory meeting of the College of Cardinals, presided over by the pope. But today’s meeting would be different. This consistory would include not only cardinals but also priests, nuns, monks, and representatives from various religious orders. Sister Miriam was in the audience representing her religious order. The pope had thought to include a few laymen and women. Something never done before.
Even the setting was different. Instead of the ornate grandeur of the Sala Clementina, the papal throne room, Pope Michael gathered the consistory in the Vatican Synod Hall. It had the look of a university lecture hall, except that it had the capacity for simultaneous translation, each one understanding in his own tongue. Pope Michael wanted a new Pentecost.
The pope’s speech was printed on heavy vellum. The new leather folder already had his official seal affixed to the cover. At the bottom of the speech was a decree. He signed his name and then affixed the initials P.M. for Pontifex Maximus. This inscription was the title of the ancient pagan high priest of Rome. It meant supreme bridge builder.
The Pontifex Maximus was supposed to be the bridge builder between heaven and earth. Pope Michael hoped he could be a bridge builder between factions in the Church and between the past and the future.
If the pope’s anxiety was high, the stakes were even higher. Catholics were divided more than at any time in a thousand years, and Pope Michael knew it. In an earlier age, people would have called it a schism. Nobody was ready to call it that, yet.
Strange Gods Page 36