The Good Shepherd
Page 34
On his throne, Pope Paul was comparing the synod of bishops and the College of Cardinals. He said both offices were consultative. Neither one interfered in the least with the Pope’s prerogative of personal universal and direct government. Basically, the Cardinals assisted him in this responsibility.
There it was, the note that had been sounded with ever more insistence in the closing sessions of Vatican II. The Chair of Peter had no intention of abandoning its claim to absolute authority over the entire Church. Wasn’t it, from Paul’s point of view, the only possible decision? The responsibility for abandoning authority might be more agonizing than the results of wielding it. As a wielder of authority in his own small world, Matthew Mahan knew that much. Was there a dimension between these two alternatives, was that where Michelangelo’s Moses was looking with that eternal spiritual hunger on his graven face? Was that where John XXIII lived? Why couldn’t Cardinal Mahan and the men around him - above all, the tiny figure on the huge throne - enter this Promised Land? O Lord, tell us, tell us what we are doing wrong, Matthew Mahan prayed.
Now the Pope asked each of them to take their traditional vow of fidelity to Christ and obedience to the Chair of Peter. There was, he explained, an additional passage added to the oath, in order to insure his access to the advice and counsel of all the Cardinals.
The priest standing to the right of the papal throne began to read the vow, and the Cardinals repeated it after him, inserting their individual names in the first line.
I, MATTHEW MAHAN, CARDINAL OF THE HOLY ROMAN CHURCH, PROMISE AND SWEAR THAT FROM THIS HOUR ON, FOR AS LONG AS I LIVE, I SHALL BE FIRMLY FAITHFUL TO CHRIST AND HIS GOSPEL AND OBEDIENT TO ST. PETER AND THE HOLY APOSTOLIC ROMAN CHURCH AND TO THE SUPREME PONTIFF PAUL VI AND HIS SUCCESSORS LAWFULLY AND CANONICALLY ELECTED: FURTHERMORE THAT I SHALL NEVER DIVULGE TO ANYONE THE DELIBERATIONS ENTRUSTED TO ME BY THEM EITHER DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY TO THEIR DAMAGE OR DISHONOR UNLESS WITH THE CONSENT OF THE APOSTOLIC SEE.
MAY THE ALL POWERFUL GOD SO HELP ME.
Matthew Mahan kept his eyes on the Pope’s face while he repeated these words. Again, he felt an intense desire to locate this man in his own soul. The words he had just spoken had enormous weight. He had vowed his personal loyalty, his personal obedience, to this man. It was a huge step beyond the loyalty and obedience he owed him as the head of the Church, and he was prepared, he truly was prepared, to say these words. But not the words of the added passage. The vow of silence traduced the first vows. A worm of nasty distrust entered with them. Why, why? Matthew Mahan knew what old Davey Cronin would say. The hallmark of authoritarianism. It always goes too far because it thinks in terms of power first and people second.
But Matthew Mahan did not see any of this on Paul’s face. He saw only sadness there, a film of sadness through which the personal man spoke and acted. Was it the sadness of defeat or the sadness of the ultimately lonely?
One by one now, as each Cardinal’s name was called, he mounted the platform and knelt before the papal throne. Solemnly Paul placed the red biretta on his head, repeating in Latin the ancient formula. “For the praise of the omnipotent God and for the honor of the Apostolic See, receive the red hat, symbol of the great dignity of the Cardinal, which means that you must show yourself to be fearless, even to the shedding of blood, for the exaltation of the Holy Faith, for the peace and tranquility of the Christian people, and for the liberty and expansion of the Holy Roman Church.”
Predictably, Cardinal Cooke got the biggest round of applause. At least 500 of the 1,000 Americans in the hall were from New York. Finally, Matthew Mahan heard his own name, and he rose to walk up the red-carpeted aisle. As he knelt before the Pope, he looked up at him, and their eyes met. The tiniest hint of a smile appeared on Paul’s lips. “Frater noster taciturnus,” he whispered. Taking the red biretta from the monsignor, he placed it on Matthew Mahan’s head, reciting the Latin exhortation once more.
Our silent brother. Back in his seat, Matthew Mahan fingered the hat on his head and pondered the words, which now seemed to have a voice of their own, repeating themselves again and again in his mind. Frater noster taciturnus, our silent brother.
He knew precisely what they meant. Old Davey was right. They were aware of his silence on the birth control encyclical, the great issue of Paul’s pontificate. Yet he did not feel that the words were a rebuke. No, it was typical of the man at the moment of conferring the greatest honor in his power to bestow. All he could do was whisper these heartbreaking words. Not a rebuke, but a plea, a sad, somber plea.
Then that insidious word Romanita flowered in his mind. The moment, the most precisely, cruelly effective moment, had been selected to deliver the essential message. What was the message? This honor that we are bestowing on you, Cardinal Mahan, has nothing whatsoever to do with your three decades of labor on behalf of Holy Mother Church and even less with what slim pretensions you might have to spiritual stature.
You have been bought up, Cardinal Mahan, as part of a worldwide, astutely managed political campaign. When we dangled the bait, you snapped at it on the first pass, and now we are pulling on the hook.
No, Matthew Mahan told himself desperately, no. He refused to believe that appallingly cynical explanation. There was no proof, no proof whatsoever, that anyone, above all, the sad-eyed man on the papal throne in front of him, was party to such a demeaning, dehumanizing, demoralizing plot. Frater noster taciturnus. It was perfectly natural for Paul to think of him as a silent brother. Yet he had placed the red hat on his brother’s head. Couldn’t that be interpreted as proof of his generosity, his willingness to tolerate reasonable dissent, loyal freedom within the Church? Yes, yes, Matthew Mahan told himself, he would not, he could not, allow his mind to accept the cynical explanation. Romanita. The word quivered down his nerves like fingers scratching a blackboard.
Cardinal Yu Pin, the Archbishop of Nanking, China, was now replying on behalf of the new Cardinals, expressing their gratitude to Paul and vowing their fidelity to him. He was not, in Matthew Mahan’s opinion, the best choice to represent them. According to stories he had heard from several Italian friends, Pius XII had berated Pin for fleeing to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek when the Communists took over China. But the speech was only a formality, and Pin had probably been chosen for the color of his skin. It was Vatican policy to emphasize the Church’s international composition these days.
After thanking Pin, Pope Paul announced a major change in his cabinet. Cardinal Jean Villot was to become Secretary of State, replacing Cardinal Amleto Cicognani. He summoned the eighty-six-year-old Cicognani to the platform beside him and asked Villot to join them. He praised both men for their devotion to the Church and their tireless efforts on her behalf, and particularly on behalf of the Chair of St. Peter. There was applause from the audience. Villot looked tough, and Cicognani’s lumpy old man’s face was sour. In his twenty-five years as apostolic delegate to the United States, Cicognani had shown himself to be a blundering authoritarian, repeatedly sticking his nose into American church affairs and throwing his Roman weight around. Yet John XXIII had appointed him Secretary of State, the second most powerful man in the Vatican after the Pope. It was a tragic commentary on John’s helplessness. Except for his epochal breakthrough, the council, he had been a prisoner of the Curia.
The consistory was over. Paul went down the aisle and vanished through the curtains at the back of the hall. Laymen and priests swarmed around their Cardinals for another round of congratulations. Matthew Mahan smiled, nodded into familiar faces, shook dozens of hands while the words echoed in his mind. Frater noster taciturnus. A sullen ache crept across his stomach.
They drove directly to the Hotel Excelsior, where all of the Mahanites, as Dennis McLaughlin occasionally called them, were giving a dinner for their favorite Cardinal. It was a pleasant evening, but a little embarrassing. Speaker after speaker heaped praise on him until he began to wonder if they were talking about somebody else. He heard himself extolled as a war hero, the finest c
haplain in the U. S. Army, a friend of the blacks, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, even the Protestants.
He stood up finally, to cries of “Speech, speech,” and good-humoredly denied it all. “I just happen to be a very lucky fellow,” he said. “I’ve been in the right place at the right time again and again.” Informally, without the slightest pretense to having a prepared talk, he rambled from memory to memory, speaking to individuals in the audience. He asked George Petrie if he remembered the time the schedules got scrambled, and the girls’ basketball team from Holy Angels found themselves pitted against the downtown mugs of St. Sebastian’s parish. He asked Madeline McAvoy if she remembered the dedication of Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Home for the Aged, when he inadvertently became the straight man for an eighty-year-old Irish lady. She asked him, “How old do you think I am?”
“I flattered her and said seventy. Then I asked her how old she thought I was. She took me seriously and guessed forty. I told her she was off by ten years, and she didn’t bat an eye. ‘Well, glory be to God, Bishop,’ she said, ‘you never worked a day in your life.’”
Dennis McLaughlin sat in the back of the hall listening to the adulatory laughter. Beside him, Bishop Cronin was laughing as heartily as anyone in the audience as the Cardinal reminisced now about his failings as a seminarian. “I am morally certain,” he was saying, “that I am the only Cardinal in the history of the Church who got zero in a theology examination. I wasn’t totally ignorant, but the teacher, a fellow named Cronin, only asked one question on the examination. If you didn’t know a lot about that one subject, you were in deep trouble. That year, he asked us to discuss in depth the influence of the Council of Ephesus on the development of Christian theology. I got Ephesus mixed up with Chalcedon and a half-dozen other towns in the Middle East. I wrote pages and pages of absolute baloney, but I thought they were worth something. When I got a zero, I went to see this fellow Cronin and asked him why. He answered, ‘Because there was no lower mark I could give you, Mahan.’”
What is the reason for your nonlaughter, Dennis? Was it the memory of this afternoon’s lovemaking - an idiotic word, but somehow descriptive - in the Pensione Christina that made you unable to tolerate this sentimentality? Who knows, who knows. Jesus said no man can serve two masters. Loving one, hating another was inevitable. Or was it? Didn’t the mind, the sovereign intellect, as someone called it, have something to say about such decisions? Or was democracy also a psychobiological phenomenon?
Was there a voice of the cells, the genes, that was summoning him now to reject once and for all this big bulky man in the red cape and incongruous lace skirt smiling at him from the head table? Why in the steady motionless light cast by electricity did shafts of sunlight repeatedly break across his eyes? Why did those rows of smiling faces turn without warning into white crosses? Why was there a hand on his arm, a heavy father’s hand and a father’s voice speaking, not the harsh words of contempt, condemnation (no, you spoke those - how merciless we will be to ourselves if we finally do get rid of God), but gentle forgiving words? Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
He stood up. The Cardinal was still talking. There was only the slightest break as their eyes met. “I don’t want you to think of me as Cardinal Mahan. I hope I’ll always be Father Matt to every one of you. There’s only one way in which I want to be a Cardinal. In Latin, the word means hinge. I want to play that part in our city. I want to be a man who opens doors for everyone, doors to hope in the future, doors to faith in God, doors to love for every person in the city, no matter what his religion or his color may be.”
Tremendous applause. Dennis McLaughlin turned his back on those noble words and rushed to the door. He tripped over someone’s foot and almost fell on his face. His hand groped for the gold doorknob, cold beneath his sweaty fingers. Out in the hall then, gulping antihistamines, his chest expanding only to a point where pain awoke, like the thrust of a dagger. No, no, no. It was freedom that he was fighting to preserve. His precious birthright, stolen from him by Holy Mother Church. Yes, freedom.
He was breathing again. Freedom from Wholly Mother.
Did those ironies mean anything now? Weren’t you really running away from that sentimental man at the speaker’s table? That complex man who combined roars and smiles, power and guile, fear and love. Summed up in one unbearable word. Father.
Matthew Mahan’s miter pressed painfully on his throbbing temples as the procession of white-and-gold-robed Cardinals left the Chapel of the Pieta and began the long walk to St. Peter’s main altar. As they entered the immense nave, through the open front doors, they could hear the distant sound of bands playing and crowds cheering. It was May 1, and Rome’s Communists were filling the city’s streets with pageantry and protest. Out there, some might say, was the voice of the future. Here they were about to pay obeisance to the past, to re-enact a ceremony that was 2,000 years old.
Rome’s streets had echoed to the march of many men, Caesar’s legions, Napoleon’s chasseurs, Hitler’s troopers. It was easy to say that the Communists were another false faith, another easy answer to man’s perpetual search for worldly happiness. While here within these sacred walls was the true answer, a faith that said life was not merely a puzzle to be solved. But recent years had made Matthew Mahan wary about this glib use of resounding truths. The hostility of the young had sharpened his eyes and quickened his ears to incongruous details like those distant Communist bands. Ahead of him marched thirty-three men like himself, Princes of the Church, dressed in white and gold. Should a church created by a man who said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” have princes? His eyes rested for a moment on the chapel of Pius X where he knew the bronze relief of John XXIII reached out to the pleading faces behind bars. A moment later he stared at the white marble monument of tiared Gregory XIII, sitting on his coffin. Two statues symbolizing science and religion gazed in awe at his great achievement, dramatized on the side of the sarcophagus, the reform of the calendar. The Church had power in those days, unquestionably. But according to old Davey Cronin, Gregory had a natural son and used to spend most of his time during mass gossiping with his Cardinals. His chief interest was building the chapel named after him, the Capella Gregoriana. When he died, he was buried like a pharaoh, his body drenched in balsam and aromatic herbs, wearing full pontifical robes and a golden miter. What did monuments to these egotistical Renaissance princes have to do with Christianity, with the simple men in dusty robes who trudged the roads of Palestine? The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.
Who was sending him these thoughts? Was it the voice of John XXIII speaking to him? His mind drifted back to last night. The party had ended in his suite, with Mike Furia, Mary Shea, the McAvoys, Bill Reed, his sister in law Eileen, Monsignor Frank Falconer, and a half-dozen other members of his seminary class killing off some very good champagne. That was why his head was aching and his stomach twinging, and maybe it also explained his wayward mind. They had spent the last half hour discussing the difference between Popes John and Paul. He had surprised himself by rather strenuously defending Paul. He needed time. Turning the Church in a new direction was an immense responsibility; it had to be done slowly.
But inevitably, so it seemed, he soon found himself talking more about John. When the editor of Osservatore Romano came to see him, it was the first time he’d been inside the papal apartment in thirteen years. Pacelli kept him at arm’s length. The old guy proceeded to start interviewing John, on his knees. That was the way he talked to Pacelli. John told him if he didn’t sit down, the interview was over.
They call Montini the poor man’s Pacelli, Mary Shea had said.
He loved to walk. The first time I met him, in Paris, we had lunch and then he suggested a stroll over to the Left Bank. He walked my legs off. And I was a chaplain in an infantry regiment
So was he, come to think of it. Anyway, Pacelli told him to stop walking around Paris. It was undignified for a papal nuncio.
Somewhere behind Matthew Mahan a roar of acclaim filled the cathedral. The crowd was greeting Pope Paul. On a raised platform to the right of the high altar, Dennis McLaughlin and Bishop Cronin sat next to a woman who obviously had no ticket to these select seats. She was Italian, as far as Dennis could gather from the prayers she murmured. She wore a red and black kerchief around her head, and a coat that was several decades old. In a bundle at her feet, there seemed to be almost everything from cheese and bread on which she dined to handkerchiefs, books, a veritable portmanteau. With her was a small thin boy of about ten who knelt beside his mother and prayed with equal intensity.
When Pope Paul came into view, walking at the rear of the procession, his hand raised in blessing, the woman went berserk. “Evviva il Papa, Evviva il Papa,” she screeched, almost fracturing Dennis’s eardrum. To anyone even a few feet away, her howl was swallowed in the general applause. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face now. With surprising strength, she raised her son high so he could see the Pope, too. She murmured to him in Italian, and the little boy began to cry.
Dennis pondered the paradox that the woman presented. Back at the university, they had all agreed like good intellectuals that the Church must return to simple first-century Christianity if it was to serve the poor. Away with gold miters and bejeweled chalices, immense cathedrals with their stained-glass windows and overwhelming statuary. But what if the poor didn’t want first-century Christianity? What if they wanted splendor, solemnity, mystery?
At a table on the high altar, the Pope and the thirty-four new Cardinals began concelebrating mass. They looked like a flock of exotic birds, Yeats’ golden birds from fabled Byzantium, perhaps, except that these birds were flesh and blood, living anachronisms, Dennis thought.