The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  No, he was not that bad. Balance, Dennis, what has happened to that beautiful balance, that lovely analytic discrimination that was the intellectual’s pride? Has it withered in the glare of burning cities, crunching bombs, bullet-crumpled leaders, the ghastly symbols of the sixties? Was it also, in the classic tradition of Christianity, his curse, the cause of his collapse? Wasn’t lack of passion, the very thing for which he taunted the Church, his tragic-comic flaw? Fervor, even the negative brand that poured from so many lips these days, seemed somehow beyond him. He had waited patiently for it to come, had sat through endless discussions of spiritual dryness with his Jesuit superiors, had wondered for a while if the Ph.D. in history he was acquiring from Yale had something to do with his growing sense of inner emptiness, but finally decided the answer was some central flaw in his personality which forced him to see with relentless repetition the fly in every ointment, no matter how secret. By temperament, he was a spectator who preferred one of the higher priced seats so he could smile wryly down at both the groundlings and the actors in the modern theater of the absurd.

  Ultimately, it was his mounting dread of this fate that had driven him out of the Jesuit order, where he was highly esteemed as one of the province’s most promising young intellectuals. His doctoral thesis, published as a book, Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Humanism, had been widely praised and sold the expected 4,000 copies. His novel, Infinitedium, a satire of a group of fuzzy Catholic antiwar activists, had been more chillingly reviewed by a few intellectual magazines, where his hits were tensely recorded as accurate and his motives grimly questioned. It had sold the expected 1,500 copies and convinced Dennis that he had no interest in preaching to the elect.

  Everywhere he looked, whether at Yale or St. Francis Xavier University, he saw hollow minds, he heard hollow words, he read hollow books, and he felt the same deadly vacuum drying out his insides. He was becoming a papier-mâché priest, withered scraps of questionable wisdom fluttering in his windy emptiness. Only one thing, both idea and feeling, relieved this emptiness while deepening his despair: his lust. Relentlessly, like one of the creatures from the apocalypse, it stalked his body and mind. Neither prayer nor mortification helped in the least. He toyed for a few months with extremes of penitence, wondering if it was time to fashion a whip of razor blades, favored by some Irish Jesuits in the early years of the century. But the idiocy of the idea made him laugh.

  So he resigned from the Jesuits and sought a career in the city’s slums, hoping that pity would replace conviction. But there, too, he saw all the wrong things. He was incapable of romanticizing the poor. On the contrary, he was appalled by their stupidity, staggered by their self-hate, their degradation, and anguished by the pitiful formulae he offered them for solace.

  When the Archbishop had summoned him to the chancery, Dennis was close to walking out on the whole show. End your sham of a priesthood, he had told himself, give up a role you were never meant to play. Take your Ph.D., pay the Jesuits or the Catholic Church or whomever your conscience selects for your expensive education, and retire to some university faculty where you can devote your life to turning out more students like yourself, dry sophists devoid of moral conviction, wryly amused at the imbecility of contemporary history, and not much more impressed by the banalities of other eras.

  “Jee-sus,” gasped Eddie Johnson. “You hear that, you hear it? Two out in the ninth inning, two men on, and they pitched to Willie. Right-handed powa hitter like him. Don’t even put in a lefty. Leave that poor fella Jones in there to throw against Willie. The first pitch he clears them bases with a triple. Now they hangin’ by their finganails. Don’t them fools ever hear of the intentional walk?”

  “Terrible,” Dennis murmured. “Terrible.”

  Hurriedly he opened Goggin’s letter. A few laughs is what you need, Dennis. Old Gog never fails in that department.

  Dear Mag,

  Your latest depressing letter has been received in my august quarters at the Villa Stritch. It lies on my desk in front of me while Roman rain patters drearily on the tiles above my head. I don’t know how the First Person permits it to rain so much on the very bosom of Mater Ecclesia, but he does. Perhaps it is proof of your dubious speculation that God is a woman, and like all women is instinctively jealous of other females, including her own daughter. Ho-hum.

  The Villa Stritch is where the American employees at the Vatican hang their birettas. It is a cold, drafty old barn, but we have a goodly collection of clerical trolls here, and we do our best to warm the atmosphere with laughter. God knows it isn’t easy, in this, the sixth year in the reign of Pontifical Paulus. Never has a pope cried so much in public, nor washed his hands so regularly while the best hopes of the best people are quietly crucified.

  As for yours truly, to slightly vary the song from Pal Joey,

  My life has no color ever since I left you.

  Oh, what could be duller, the things that I do.

  Once a week I wander over to the Jesuit GHQ in the Borgo Santo Spirito, just around the square from the Vatican, and help translate the latest bad news from England, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States into Italian so that Father General’s Italian secretary can condense them (no doubt leaving out the cries of despair) for our Maximum Leader. I see nothing but trouble emanating from the idea of moving all of New York’s theology students into an apartment building on upper Broadway. What madness! My conservative soul can only wonder that people in authority no longer seem able to exercise it. Men hoary with experience are taking advice from youths even callower than thee and me. We swallowed the advice of the experienced ones and found out it was mostly nonsense. But what is meeting nonsense face to face and gradually recognizing it? I believe that is called maturing. Since the nonsense came from someone else, we have been able to reject it without much guilt. But what will happen to these callow ones, these self-appointed kindergarten charismatics, when they discover that their nostrums are equally - if not more - nonsensical? A catastrophic loss of self-confidence, I fear, and possibly a colossal guilt.

  Two days a week I go for a delightful ride in the country behind the wheel of one of our Fiats. Except for the fact that my knees bump against the windshield while I ride, and every mile involves at least one duel to the death with an Italian driver, it is a pleasant run. My destination is the Vatican Radio, not far from beautiful Lake Bracciano. There, I broadcast the Divine Line in English to the plebs in South Africa. I can’t believe that the good Boers allow my message of racial equality to get across their borders. While I babble, I always have the image of huge electrical ears jamming every word I say. But it no doubt makes good listening for those few who understand English (the elite, naturally) in Black Africa. So maybe Cardinal Rugambwa picks up a few more converts in Tanzania, though I doubt it.

  Two more days a week, I go play linguistics at the Biblical Institute, where I listen to a lot of people hint at things that they’re afraid to say openly about the Gospels. There won’t be much left of the thirteen apparitions on which St. Ignatius dwelt so lovingly, if these boys ever get up the nerve - or get down the permission - to sing out loud and clear. The more I ponder it, the more it becomes for me the Church’s only hope - this degodification of Jesus, and the creation of a New Gospel, in which His various sayings are arranged in reasonably chronological order and He himself is placed in the social context of first-century Palestine. If we can see Him as a very intense Jewish boy who broke His skull studying the Scriptures, as many a one has before and since (the voice of experience speaking), tried to persuade the nationalist maniacs of His day, the Pharisees (as power-hungry as any contemporary Communist), to get off the people’s backs, and only succeeded in scaring the Pharisees into an alliance with the worst elements in the nation, that bunch of thieves who ran the Temple. In retaliation, J.C. flirted with the lunatic left fringe, the Zealots, giving all concerned a perfect chance to crucify Him. Nevertheless, the spiritual miracle still remains - His acceptance of the crucifixion, H
is awareness, gained from studying the sorry fate of most prophets, that only by His death could the spiritual victory which He sought become possible. This to me is so much more poignant, so much more beautiful, than the idea of an all-knowing God condescendingly taking on human form to do the beings He created the favor of redemption - eeeech, as Alfred E. Newman would say. What has that kind of thinking produced? Incredible fanatics like Loyola, ecstatic nuts like St. Francis, neurotic nemeses like the Little Flower.

  This is burn-at-the-stake thinking, and every one of our grim little band over at the institute knows it. What we need, above all, is a writer with the power and grace of Teilhard de Chardin and a lot more courage - to wit, you. I curse the day that you blundered into American history in search of your so-called mystery of freedom. The world doesn’t want to be free, Mag old boy, and it never did. If we Americans keep riding that horse, we are headed for the historical junk heap. My idea is totally different. The Church is necessary to the stability of mankind. She, and not some cheap, wild-eyed dialectical rationalist, must proclaim the New Gospel, out of the fullness of her wisdom and the depths of her researches into the mystery of God and His dialogue with creation. Instead of Gospels written by first-century ignoramuses who were either trying to make the Jews look bad or the Christians look good, or, in the case of John, smugly saying I told you so after the Romans had reduced Jerusalem to a rubble heap, instead of these four pieces of nonsense, we present the world with a coherent account of one of the greatest acts of love in human history. Wouldn’t you want to be remembered as the writer of that book? You could do it if you could only get your head out of the Declaration of Independence and the sermons of Martin Luther King and get your ass over here to the Vatican Library.

  Speaking of that marvelous place, I recently learned that they have now opened the files up to the year 1877. How’s that for keeping up with the times? One of my fellow toilers here at the Villa Stritch, a mick named Harrigan from Chicago, is an assistant archivist over there, and he entertains us nightly with the marvelous things that turn up in those dusty corridors. My favorite is Canon Pandolfi Ricasoli, who was confessor of the Convent of Santa Croce in Florence around 1640. He taught the good nuns that if you kept your mind on God while having intercourse, it was an exercise of purity! He said the sexual organs were holy and sacred parts, and he compared the hair around them to veils around holy and precious images. He taught the younger nuns to say the Our Father while he was enjoying them, and on Christmas Eve, he slept with two of them “in order to greet the day with greater devotion.” The abbess, one Lady Faustina Mainardi, was taught to say, “I renounce you, Satan, and all your iniquities. And I unite myself with you, Jesus Christ,” as he entered her. Abbess Faustina was so enthralled she put some of the Canon’s semen in a handkerchief and placed it on the altar among the holy relics.

  They finally caught up with the old confessor, but his connections were so good in Rome, all they did was excommunicate him for a year or two.

  You are not the first to be troubled by a need to express the life Force, my son. Maybe if you stop being an Irish-American literalist, come to Rome and make some connessiones (connections). . . .

  Seriously, something has to be done. Or at least begun. I have no intention of spending my life aboard a drifting ship. As for you, all your yakking about lust and emptiness would vanish if you could find a purpose for your priesthood. Come over here and get to work before some swinging nun picks you off and retires you to humdrum domesticity forever.

  Penchantly, Gog

  “SWING AND A MISS. MUCCIO STRIKES OUT. THAT RETIRES THE SIDE,” cried the announcer.

  Dennis stared numbly at Goggin’s letter, wondering why he thought it would cure his depression. There was really only one thing that would cure his depression, and he knew it. But where could he find a whole convent as cooperative as the sisters of Santa Croce? Of course, there was another cure. Tearing off this crippling collar, this round white yoke around his neck once and for all, and breathing the sweet air of American freedom. He suddenly found it unbearably close in the Archbishop’s limousine. He flung open the door and stood beside it for a few minutes, taking long deep breaths. Yes, out here in the suburbs, the air was still sweet. But in the city? Twenty miles away, over the budding trees, he could see the gray pall of smog. The air of American freedom was anything but sweet these days. Which made Father McLaughlin worse than a man without a country - he was a man without a cause.

  Inside Holy Angels’ rectory Archbishop Mahan sat at the dining room table with Monsignor Paul O’Reilly at one end and Fathers Emil Novak and Charles Cannon at the other end. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am really very distressed by this situation. Can’t I do something to resolve it?”

  The two curates stared stonily at him. “Only if you give us a statement in writing that nothing we say will be held against us - either by you or by him,” Father Cannon said. Ordained only last year, he was a slight, sandy-haired, freckle-faced young man, who could have passed for a teenager. His hair was as fine spun as a girl’s, and it drifted down over his collar onto the back of his neck.

  “Have you ever in your life heard anything that betrays a bad conscience more clearly than that?” Monsignor O’Reilly growled.

  “Perhaps it would be better if we discussed the situation separately,” Father Novak said. Small and balding, with a pug nose that gave his face a boyish look, he was thirty-five. Last year he had been reported to the chancery for paying too much attention to a woman in his previous assignment, St. Brendan’s parish. He had denied it vehemently but had accepted a transfer to Holy Angels, at the opposite end of the diocese. Was he making a serious attempt to preserve his priesthood, or was this brawl with his new pastor part of a plan to justify his departure? He was obviously a subtler personality than Father Cannon.

  “I hate to do it, but it may be the best way to begin communicating,” Matthew Mahan said. “You gentlemen can go back upstairs. I’ll talk with Monsignor O’Reilly first.”

  The two curates stalked from the room. “Would you like something to drink, Your Excellency?” Monsignor O’Reilly said. “Scotch? Bourbon? Sherry?”

  “Sherry would be nice,” Matthew Mahan said, and in the same moment knew it was futile to pretend friendship with this man, even in its most external forms. They were enemies forever.

  O’Reilly arose and opened a door in the mahogany sideboard. It was a French antique and matched the rest of the dining room furniture. Monsignor had obviously inherited the expensive tastes of his mentor, Archbishop Hogan. Into view swung a set of Irish crystal decanters on a hinged bar. O’Reilly selected the one with SHERRY on a silver nameplate and filled two small gold goblets. “Tio Pepe,” he said. “I hope you like it. I think the English sherries are vastly overrated.”

  Archbishop Mahan sipped the sweet tepid wine and fingered his goblet. “You realize that this is a very explosive situation,” he said. “We’re dealing with a problem that could tear apart the diocese.”

  “Naturally we each have our own point of view,” Monsignor O’Reilly said. “I’m more concerned about the damage to the souls of my parishioners. I was trained by the Jesuits, you know, in Rome. At the Gregorian. That tends to make me much more sensitive to the importance of moral theology.”

  The old Roman ploy again. Matthew Mahan carefully controlled his temper. How many times had he heard this lofty reminder from Monsignor O’Reilly during the 1950s, when he was summoned to the chancery office to get another rebuke for speaking out of turn - usually on an issue that had nothing whatsoever to do with theology. But to Monsignor O’Reilly, only those who studied in Rome were permitted to think.

  “No one is more sensitive to moral theology than I am, Monsignor,” Matthew Mahan said softly. He felt the tension rising in his body, the pain stirring. Monsignor O’Reilly had been Archbishop Hogan’s vicar-general. At one time, he had been considered the probable successor. O’Reilly had taken a very dim view of Matthew Mahan, fundraiser and publi
c relations monsignor extraordinary, appearing from nowhere to shunt him aside. He could almost see the disdain still visible in those hard, direct eyes, the tough, unsmiling mouth. “But I am also sensitive to what happened in Washington, D.C.”

  “You mean the firm stand that Cardinal O’Boyle took against those dissident priests who thought they could defy the explicit teaching of the Holy Father?”

  “I mean the headlines, the tons of newsprint they consumed, exchanging insults.”

  “I only followed it at a distance, but I thought Cardinal O’Boyle conducted himself with great dignity. The insults all came from the other side.”

  “That may be true,” Matthew Mahan conceded. “But think of what it did to the faith of the people.”

  “I suspect it was strengthened, in the long run. It helps to know where the Church stands. Isn’t that what history tells us? Where would we be today if the popes and councils hadn’t struck down heresy every time it arose?”

  “I am inclined to agree with Bishop Cronin,” said Matthew Mahan. “As you no doubt know, he also studied at the Gregorian. There is nothing very edifying about those early Christian brawls between Arians and Monophysites and popes and patriarchs. Almost all of them were basically political conflicts, with theology and the Church dragged in by ambitious men.”

  “A rather odd opinion for a bishop - even an auxiliary bishop - to hold. But from what I hear, Bishop Cronin is rather odd –”