This corresponded so closely to what Matthew Mahan thought that he reacted with uneasy caution. “It’s the way the system works,” he said.
“Have we ever had a decent A.D.? They were all lemons from the very first one. He talked the Pope into condemning the so-called Americanist heresy.”
“Oh yes,” Matthew Mahan said, although he only had a vague idea what his secretary was talking about. “They gave us an earful of that one at Rosewood in my day.”
“Most contemporary theologians consider it a myth. Not that it really matters. All the things that were condemned - freedom of conscience, for instance - were overwhelmingly approved in Vatican II.” Dennis McLaughlin hesitated for a moment and then added, “Maybe it’s just as well that history is the worst-taught subject in Catholic seminaries.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you,” Matthew Mahan said. “God knows all the Americans could have used a lot more history at Vatican II. It would have helped us understand why the Germans and the Italians were at each other’s throats, for instance. If we had a little more perspective on our own past, we might have had a lot more impact as a group. Most of us just voted with the liberals by instinct. We were the dogfaces, the troops,” he added, seeing Dennis did not understand the World War II reference. “It was a pretty unnerving experience, let me tell you. When I came home, I got out a couple of biographies that Davey Cronin out at the seminary recommended. One on Cardinal Gibbons and another on Archbishop John Ireland. I think I learned more from those books than I have from anything I’ve read since I was ordained.”
“Who did you like most?” Dennis McLaughlin asked. It was the first time that Matthew Mahan had seen him genuinely interested in their conversation.
“I admired Ireland’s guts, but I have to admit I preferred Gibbons. He had the judgment, the finesse -”
“Yes,” Dennis said in the listless automatic tone that Matthew Mahan had learned to read as disagreement. “I suppose you’re right.”
Irritation flickered through Matthew Mahan’s weariness. In the sulky silence, he found himself asking tense questions. I suppose you think finesse is old-fashioned, or, worse, cowardly. Where in God’s name did you people get the idea that the Church was supposed to wade into every issue and conduct a running brawl with all comers? You can say what you want about the guidance of the Holy Spirit, common sense is also a very valuable commodity.
He tried to still this ranting voice by saying something intelligent. “Of course, Gibbons had some guts, too. He did go to Rome and stop the Pope from wrecking the Church by banning labor unions.”
“True,” Dennis said mildly. “But he had practically unanimous backing for it here in America. That was the way he always operated. He waited for the parade to form and then took charge of it. I prefer that line from Ireland. ‘Seek out social evils and lead in movements that tend to rectify them. Laymen need not wait for priest nor priest for bishop nor bishop for Pope.’”
“I wonder if he felt that way when he found his priests or his nuns not waiting for him.”
The episcopal tone was growing ominous, Dennis decided. He dropped the subject and was grateful to Eddie Johnson, who filled the next ten minutes with a discussion of their local baseball team’s chances in the upcoming season. Archbishop Mahan seemed at least as interested in this subject as he had been in the relative merits of John Ireland and James Gibbons.
A half hour later, Matthew Mahan sat in a booth of the local Red Coach Grill listening to Monsignor Harold Gargan tell him what was wrong with Rosewood Seminary. It was like a visit to the Wailing Wall. The white hair, the veined eyes, the drooping face, dominated by the pendulous nose, seemed to add ten years to Gargan’s age. Matthew Mahan had to remind himself that this man had graduated only a year ahead of him. He could not be more than fifty-six or fifty-seven. This was a man who had once confided to Matthew Mahan in his peppery curate days that he had played the piano in a nightclub to pay his way through the seminary. What had happened to him? What was happening to everyone?
According to Rector Gargan, almost everything at Rosewood was bad and getting worse. They had caught another three seminarians saying an unorthodox mass using Gallo wine and Rye Krisp in the locker room of the gymnasium. The class of 69 had dwindled from a paltry thirteen to a pathetic ten. Total enrollment had fallen below 100 for the first time in twenty-five years. The desperate Gargan could think of only one solution - improve their public relations. A very good man who had handled public relations for the Air Force Academy was available. What did Matthew Mahan think? He wanted a very good $25,000.
“I think we’d both need our heads examined if we hired him. All these kids are antiwar. Can you imagine how they’d react? They’d probably be out on strike in ten minutes. We’d be in every newspaper in the country.”
“What about these amateur liturgists?”
“Discipline them - mildly. No weekend privileges, something like that. I don’t want the kind of trouble Krol got into in Philadelphia or worse, what Cushing wound up doing in Boston - throwing out half the senior class.”
“But I get this desperate feeling when I wake up in the morning. We’ve got to do something - to reverse the slide.”
“I get the same feeling most mornings, multiplied by ten, Hal. But I don’t see what we can do about it except pray. And be patient. Just because some people - or even a lot of people - are losing confidence in the country and the Church doesn’t mean we have to do the same thing. The one thing we’ve got to avoid is public humiliation.”
Gargan nodded glumly. He looked very tired.
“I think the best thing you could do is get away from the place for ten days or two weeks. When is the last time you took a vacation?”
“Oh, I got down to the shore last summer for a couple of weeks.”
Matthew Mahan took his checkbook out of his briefcase and wrote out a check for $1,000. “Let’s see what two weeks in Florida does for you.”
“Thanks, Matt,” Gargan said, his voice charged with emotion. “I think it might do me a lot of good. I don’t think I’ve slept more than three hours a night for the last month.”
“I’m not doing much better,” Matthew Mahan said as he laid a $20 bill on the check that the waitress brought him. He peeled another $20 off the roll of cash he had in his pocket and said to her, “This will take care of the young priest who’s lunching in the next room with my chauffeur.”
All the way back to the seminary in the car, Monsignor Gargan complained about his seminarians’ lack of interest in athletics. They had been forced to abandon most of their intramural sports program because so few came out for the teams. “Yet they’ll march their legs off down in Washington, or at City Hall, to protest against the war or pollution or eating the wrong kind of lettuce or grapes.”
“As long as they act as individuals, Hal, we’ve got to give them the right to do those things,” Matthew Mahan said. “You know what I went through in the forties and fifties every time I opened my mouth.”
“I know, I know,” said Gargan in a totally unconvinced voice.
For a moment, weariness swept over Matthew Mahan again. He felt as tired as Gargan looked.
“Remember what I said, Hal, patience.”
Gargan nodded glumly as the car swung through the gate of Rosewood Seminary and swept up the curving path to the administration building. Emotion stirred in Matthew Mahan as he looked across the broad lawn at the drab fieldstone building. Here was where his priesthood had begun, where he had spent six of the happiest years of his life. At this time, on a Friday afternoon toward the end of March, there would have been at least two softball games going strong on the north and south lawns. Today, three seminarians played with a Frisbee on the south lawn. They weren’t even doing a good job of catching it.
“They all clear out on weekends these days,” Gargan said.
Next year, Matthew Mahan thought, suddenly as morose as Gargan but concealing it, the seminarians will demand the right to live in off-cam
pus apartments. These young people were insatiable. They already had so much more freedom than his generation ever dreamed of achieving, yet they were still morose, sullen, dissatisfied. And what were they doing with their freedom? That was the tormenting question. Mostly thinking up new ways to embarrass, harass, or disturb the Archbishop, so it sometimes seemed. But that was unfair, Matthew Mahan chided himself. Most of his harassment today had come from a hate-filled seventy-two-year-old monsignor.
As Harold Gargan got out in front of the administration building, he turned and with forced humor in his voice said, “Want to see the bishop before you go?”
“No, I haven’t got time,” Matthew Mahan said hastily. “Give him my best. Tell him I’m going to drag him in for dinner soon.”
The door slammed. “Who’s the bishop?” Dennis McLaughlin asked as they pulled away.
“My one and only auxiliary,” Matthew Mahan said ironically. “Bishop David Cronin. He’s eighty-one. One of my sentimental mistakes, I’m afraid. He taught dogmatic theology when I was here. He sort of became - my mentor. To be honest, he got me through this place. I wouldn’t have graduated without the tutoring he gave me, and not just in dogmatics. I took him along as one of my experts at Vatican II. That turned out to be another mistake. The old boy went from moderate to radical overnight. Every time I talk to him now, he scares the life out of me.”
“I’d like to meet him,” Dennis McLaughlin said, brightening appreciably.
“You will, you will,” Matthew Mahan said. “I have him in for a Sunday night supper every so often.”
But not so often lately, a nasty voice reminded him. He shook it off and asked, “What’s next on the schedule?”
“Seventy-six trombones,” Dennis said.
“What?”
“The Fifth Annual Statewide Catholic High School Marching Band Competition.”
“Oh yes,” Matthew Mahan said.
“Hopefully, it’s almost over,” Dennis said.
“Now, now,” Matthew Mahan said testily, “it won’t be that had. There’s a lot to be said for playing in a band. It keeps kids out of trouble. It gives them a sense of community. Everybody can’t be an intellectual, Dennis.”
Your Excellency is entitled to his opinion, thought Dennis McLaughlin moodily as they took their places in the reviewing stand at Cardinal Beran Regional High School. On the football field in front of them, ninety-two green-uniformed members of Our Savior Catholic High School Drum and Bugle Corps, from the southern end of the state, were performing intricate maneuvers while blasting out “Macnamara’s Band.” Matthew Mahan shook hands with stocky, crew-cut Monsignor Joseph Gumbolton, the forty-year-old principal of Cardinal Beran, and a half-dozen members of the faculty. The crowd in the nearby stands was thin.
“Mostly parents,” Monsignor Gumbolton explained. He introduced him to Beran’s new band mistress, Sister Margaret Kelly, a tall, thin nun with a perky smile. The nuns’ decision to go back to using their baptismal names if they chose, constantly threw Matthew Mahan off balance. She took him down on the field and explained the complicated scoring by which the five judges rated the performance of each band.
Dennis McLaughlin followed the Archbishop, persisting in wondering what it all had to do with Catholic education or any other kind of education. After an hour of deafening brass, the winner was announced: Our Savior for the fifth year in a row. The grinning bandmaster, a popinjay of a man, accompanied by a moon-faced, middle-aged priest who introduced himself as “McGuinnes - the chaplain,” rather smugly accepted the gold trophy. Father McGuinnes told Matthew Mahan it was the twenty-sixth trophy that they had won in the last three years. “We almost went to Washington for the inaugural, but our black brothers from Jackson High School in your fair city beat us out.”
Archbishop Mahan murmured something vaguely sympathetic and went out on the field to shake hands with the angular drum major. Behind him, a half-dozen drum majorettes in net stockings, gold lamé miniskirts, and silvered blouses giggled as Matthew Mahan asked him how he managed to twirl two batons simultaneously.
“Practice, Your Eminence,” said the boy, who was surprisingly shy. “I practice four or five hours a day.”
The Archbishop congratulated him and the rest of the band and headed for his limousine.
In twenty-five minutes - such was the wonder and variety of the American suburbs - they were beyond the one-acre zoned plots and in the world of the really rich. The houses sat in splendid isolation at the head of oval driveways or on one of the rolling hills surrounded by acres of brownish gold meadow in which saddle horses gamboled. The Archbishop amazed Dennis McLaughlin with his knowledge of each property owner. “There’s one of the richest,” he said, pointing to an unpretentious-looking white house on an approaching hill. “Old Paul Stapleton. The family ran our city for a long time. They must be worth 100 million. His wife is a Catholic.”
A red brick imitation of Jefferson’s Monticello. “The Crowells, they made their money in meat-packing.” A Tudor style a half mile back on an immense lawn. “The Duncans, the carpet company.” A cluster of sharp-edged Norman roofs. “The Colemans - electronics.”
Finally, they swung into the driveway of a combination Spanish-Italian villa. A serving girl with a pugnacious Irish face opened the door. In the huge entrance hall, a woman came toward them on a cane. She was a spooky old lady, unusually tall, with a mass of gray hair tied in a sloppy bun at the back of her neck. Her face was gaunt, with deep-socketed intense eyes.
“Miss Childers,” said the Archbishop, with a literally beaming smile, “it’s so nice to see you.”
“Your Excellency,” she said in a surprisingly rich girlish voice.
Father McLaughlin was introduced, and they adjourned to tea in a sitting room that was almost Victorian with its profusion of overstuffed chairs and bric-a-brac. But Miss Childers was remarkably contemporary. She wanted to know what the Archbishop thought of the Vietnam War, now that President Nixon seemed committed to fighting on indefinitely. Dennis had trouble concealing a smile as His Excellency did his best to talk out of both sides of his mouth. And the liturgy? What did he think of these floating parishes? Jazzmen and modern dancers performing on the altar? Once more His Excellency tried to sound both with it and against it. Miss Childers startled him by announcing that she had gone to a guitar mass in the city and loved it. His Excellency hastily conceded that there was something to be said for the guitar as a liturgical instrument. And priests marrying? What about that idea? His Excellency temporized. It was an open question. There was nothing inherently wrong with it.
Again, the Archbishop was obviously startled when Miss Childers said: “I see a good deal right with it. Better to marry than burn, as St. Paul said. For me, that word ‘burn’ has always meant unsatisfied yearning, as much as the fires of hell. Sometimes when I think of the terrible thing my father did to me, I hate him, I really do.”
Archbishop Mahan seemed unduly upset by these words. “It’s very hard - almost impossible - to judge the previous generation. Especially your father” - he faltered on that word and added only us a murmured afterthought - “your mother.”
Miss Childers leaned back in her armchair and belched. Without apologizing she declared, “My father was a selfish old bastard, Your Excellency. I think it’s healthier to say that sort of thing, don’t you, Father McLaughlin?”
“Yes, yes.” Dennis said, hoping there was conviction in his voice. He caught Archbishop Mahan eyeing him and added: “If it’s true.”
“Oh, it’s true, it’s true.”
The Archbishop was obviously eager to get away. He refused a second cup of tea and spoke vaguely about appointments in the city. “You look terribly tired,” Miss Childers said. “Uneasy lies the head and all that, I suppose.”
“And all that,” Matthew Mahan said, forcing a smile.
Out in the car, the Archbishop looked uneasily at his secretary. “I suppose that bored you stiff,” he said.
“No, not at all,” Den
nis said. “She’s almost a swinger.”
“She is an amazing old girl. Her father was governor of the state in the twenties. A ruthless crook. Her mother died when she was quite young, and the old man turned her into his companion. He lived to be eighty-three or so.” Matthew Mahan shook his head. “The terrible things people do to each other.”
You should know, Your Excellency, whispered a nasty voice.
Suddenly the pain was alive in his body again, ripping at him. While those seemingly innocent words tore his mind from the steel shell of the moving car across thousands of miles of water to a woman’s suffering face in Rome.
In counterpoint, another voice, which he also did not control, whispered: Forgive me, Mary, forgive me.
“I suppose there’s a big bequest there,” Dennis McLaughlin said.
“What?” Matthew Mahan said dazedly. “Miss Childers? Oh yes, we hope so. She’s intimated that it will be around a million.”
Again Matthew Mahan glanced uneasily at the impassive yet somehow accusing young face. “I suppose you don’t think much of the way a bishop has to hustle around buttering up the rich.”
Dennis refused to plead guilty or not guilty to the implied indictment. He decided a simple shrug was the best answer. The Archbishop did not spend all his time chasing bequests. But why say that when he seemed about to make an interesting confession?
“We get 20 percent of our income - about the same as most dioceses - from bequests. For us, that was over 2 million last year.”
A nod this time, Dennis. You may yet emerge unscathed by His Excellency’s acerbic tongue. Now a nice neutral question.
“Would you like to do the rest of the mail?”
“Good idea.”
They were down to the beggars: requests for help from obscure missionaries in Swaziland, Uganda, Pondicherry. The Indians were the worst. They were indefatigable wailers. “Give them the usual,” Matthew Mahan said, which meant a form letter full of blessings and a check for $25.
The Good Shepherd Page 5