The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  With the loss of prayer had come so many other losses. He began to read the speeches Dennis wrote for him with leaden automatism. The power to persuade, to control a single man or a small group of men in private talks, lapsed too. Gulfs constantly yawned between him and other people. There was always disagreement or bafflement on other faces. Once and for all, the legislature buried the bill to aid parochial schools. Mayor O’Connor did not even bother to write him a pro forma apology. Old friends such as Jim McAvoy found it difficult to talk to him. He could no longer bear to reminisce about the war. It brought him too close to weeping in public.

  And this dream, this constant dream of water to cross. Sometimes it was the river, sometimes it was a vast shrouded sea. Sometimes Mary Shea was with him, sometimes it was someone else he loved, old Davey, his father, Dennis. They were all urging him to take a journey. Again, the Cardinal almost laughed, dry aimless mirth. He knew the kind of journey Dennis was asking him to take - a vacation. You should get away, really you should, the young, earnest face had pleaded with him yesterday. Nodded in agreement, had Cardinal Mahan. It was imperative for the Cardinal to get away from Mahan. To escape this dry, drifting hulk of a priest. But that was easier said than done.

  But the love, the concern, on Dennis’s face. Can’t I accept that, Lord?

  No, another wingless insect on the floor, because his love is for something that doesn’t exist, this Cardinal cum saint that he imagines, this defier of Vatican decrees as if some kind of revenge were the answer to their dilemma. Didn’t he understand that a man who was trying to be human, a man of flesh instead of unforgiving marble, could only add what they had done to his catalog?

  On July 1, a letter had arrived from Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, head of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops. July 28, 1969, wrote the Cardinal, would be the first anniversary of the encyclical Humanae Vitae. Nothing would make the Holy Father happier than to see or hear a statement from Matthew Mahan on that day supporting the Pope’s stand. The Cardinal pointed out that Cardinal Mahan and Cardinal Cushing were the only rulers of America’s ten largest archdioceses who had failed to support the Holy Father wholeheartedly. For Matthew Mahan it was, of course, only a confirmation of everything he had dreaded when he heard frater noster taciturnus from Paul’s lips.

  The Cardinal had not shared that secret with anyone, even Dennis. So it was almost amusing - and oddly comforting - to see Dennis sputter in indignation as he realized that the choice of Mahan for a red hat was part of a carefully calculated carrot-and-stick operation. “It’s unbelievable. It’s so totally contrary to the spirit of the Gospels,” Dennis had cried. “They honor you, and then they turn the honor into a weapon. They make it meaningless.”

  I accept it, I accept it, Lord, as one more rebuke to my endlessly resourceful arrogance.

  But your resigned smile was not enough to satisfy Dennis. He wanted a ferocious bellow of defiance from you. The following day, he had laid a clipping on your desk. An interview with Cardinal Suenens, the primate of Belgium, on the failure of the reform movement in the Church.

  Matthew Mahan arose from the prie-dieu and wandered back down the hall and up the stairs to his office. The clipping was still on his desk. Dennis had speared it on one of the pens.

  “What is wanted is to liberate everyone, even the Holy Father himself, from the system - which has been the subject for complaint for several centuries, and yet we have not succeeded in loosening its grip or reshaping it. For while the Popes come and go, the Curia remains,” Suenens had said. He called for the election of the Pope by “representatives of the Universal Church” including the laity. With special passion, Dennis had underlined the final portion of the interview when he laid it on Matthew Mahan’s desk. “There are some who insist on the primacy of the Roman Pontiff to the extent that it resembles the absolute monarchism of the time before the French Revolution. We (the bishops) are not only under the Pope, but we exercise our power with him.”

  “That’s exactly what I think,” Matthew Mahan had said when he read it. “Thank God someone important is saying it. This could have a real impact.”

  “Why don’t you agree with him - in public?” Dennis had asked, his face alight with fiery hope.

  “No, Dennis, I’m not important enough.”

  Hope had turned to anguish on the young face. “You must be kidding.” He waved a clipping from the New York Times - five column-length biographies of the new American Cardinals. “Here you are right next to Cooke and Dearden in the world’s most important newspaper.”

  Haltingly he had tried to explain how he felt about the oath of personal loyalty he had taken to Pope Paul. “Suenens,” he pointed out, “is one of John’s Cardinals.”

  “Aren’t your convictions more important than that damn red biretta?”

  Matthew Mahan almost smiled, recalling his reaction to that challenge. For a moment, the old smoothie had almost turned on his shouting act. It was frightening to discover how very much alive he still was in your soul.

  “Dennis,” Matthew Mahan had said, “my convictions aren’t the point here. The question is - should I attack the man who made me a Cardinal four months after I come back from Rome?”

  “You’re not attacking him.”

  “Dennis. Don’t pretend to be naïve.”

  Matthew Mahan began fiddling with his shortwave multiband radio. At this hour of the morning, he was able to pick up the Vatican broadcasts with remarkable clarity. A voice began speaking in sonorous Italian. Coincidence. Another attack on Cardinal Suenens. The Belgium primate had given two more interviews in the course of the summer, each a ferocious assault on the papal monarchy. The Vatican had replied with its heaviest guns. Matthew Mahan’s old friend and fellow neo porporato, Jean Derrieux, had castigated Suenens for undermining the papacy. From the propaganda point of view, the tactics were superb. Liberal attacked liberal. The current broadcast was pursuing the same shrewd policy. Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, dean of the Sacred College of Cardinals and Rome’s leading Orientalist - which de facto made him considerably less than a knee-jerk supporter of papal supremacy - issued a statement calling Suenens’s attack on the Curia really an attack on Pope Paul. Then came a quote from the Pope. His Holiness had remarked with sorrow that there seemed to be a lesser sense of doctrinal orthodoxy today - and a certain widespread distrust toward the exercise of the hierarchical ministry. Criticisms of the Curia, said the Pope, were not all exact and not all just nor always respectful and opportune - and he personally lamented such protests and deviations.

  Matthew Mahan snapped off the speaker in mid-sentence. He must stop listening to Rome. Everything he heard on this radio depressed him. It was enough to give him a primitive fear of the thing, as if it were an invention of the devil. But it was like the old nonsense song “Close the doors, they’re coming in the windows, close the windows, they’re coming in the doors.” Rome had a dozen ways of reaching him. Only yesterday, Dennis McLaughlin had laid on his desk an analysis of the Pope’s statement on Vatican policy toward apostolic delegates. Ignoring the obvious desire of most of the world’s bishops to get rid of these diplomatic intruders, Paul had firmly upheld the current policy. Acidly, Dennis had pointed out the numerous references to papal infallibility worked into the document, all purportedly quotes from Vatican II. But an investigation revealed that the quotes were all from footnotes which in turn were quotes from Vatican I.

  They’ll stoop to anything, won’t they? Dennis had scrawled at the bottom of his report.

  He was tireless. The spirit of old Davey had obviously infested his soul. It was so Irish, this assumption that freedom had to include defiance. The Cardinal, the Archbishop, the priest, you are trying to become has another answer. Freedom is silence. It should have humility’s quiet, the simplicity of the poor in spirit. It sought guidance in unexpected places, in rebukes and failures. Frater taciturnus. Yes, somehow what you must become, what you are groping to find, is in those words.

  While you waited, while
you waited on the shore for the journey to begin, on this desert shore, was there any consolation? He picked up one of a dozen letters he had received from divorced couples whom the diocesan marriage tribunal had accepted as good-conscience cases.

  Dear Cardinal Mahan,

  I feel I must tell you from a heart that is bursting with joy how grateful my husband and I are for the way you have reached out to us and permitted me to return to the sacraments. My husband is not a Catholic. My first husband was a cold, sadistic man whom I divorced after five horrible years of suffering. I love my second husband deeply - more deeply than I ever thought possible. He is one of those men of goodwill, of no particular religion, yet always full of charitable instincts, ready to help others, to work for good causes. I continue to raise the two children from my first marriage as Catholic. This inevitably began to cause strains as they grew older. I had to tell them why I could not receive Holy Communion with them. It was terribly confusing for them to think of their mother as a sinner. Yet a sinner who loved them, and who did her best to give them love. It was very upsetting to me, too, and I think if it had lasted much longer it might have affected my marriage. But now these worries have vanished. I feel so much at peace - with God - with the Church - and with my husband.

  God bless you.

  Sincerely,

  Irene Tracy

  P.S. My pastor, Monsignor O’Reilly at Holy Angels, has never mentioned this program from the pulpit or in the parish bulletin. I learned about it from a friend who worships at the cathedral.

  Consolation? Yes, a drop of water on the parched tongue. But the diocesan tribunal had processed almost 100 cases now. And they had only a dozen letters like this one. What were the others seeing, doing, thinking? Were they telling their friends and neighbors that the Church had abandoned its teaching on divorce? Were they giving hundreds, perhaps eventually thousands, of people the impression that Mahan, the swinging Cardinal had capitulated to modern mores? Next month a pornographic missal had been among the more polite sneers from outraged conservatives. You have no answer to that, Your Eminence. You do not know why the majority of your lost sheep have not bothered to say thank you. But shouldn’t you really rejoice? Didn’t Jesus receive the same complacent treatment from the lepers he had healed?

  Of course, if you want to meditate on real failure, there is always Monsignor O’Reilly’s reply to your letter of peace and reconciliation. He picked up the typewritten note with the name scrawled hugely beneath it in red ink.

  Insofar as I can decipher your scrawl, your letter only convinces me once more of your utter incapacity for the high position you hold. There is no need for you to lecture me upon my responsibility in regard to heretics like Father Novak. Father Cannon has thus far resisted the spiritual epidemic which is raging all around us unchecked - indeed encouraged - by your silence. As long as he does so, you may be assured that I will show him the fatherly concern every responsible pastor has for the young priests in his care.

  What about your visit to Sister Agnes Marie? Surely consolation there. You had healed your differences. You had ratified their inner-city programs, doubled the financial support from the diocese, abandoned your prohibitions about counseling poor women on birth control. You had called her Agnes, and she had (shyly at first) called you Matthew. You had told her what you were doing in the inner city. When Eddie McGuire died, you had appointed your best black priest pastor of the parish and vicar-general of the inner-city deanery. With your approval, he had directed all the downtown pastors to open their playgrounds, gymnasiums, bowling alleys, social halls, and auditoriums to the people of the neighborhood, no matter what their religion - or color.

  Agnes had smiled impishly and said: “That should shut up Father Disalvo.”

  For a moment, he had been hurt. “I didn’t do it for that.”

  “I know,” she said.

  He sensed as he rose to leave that she wanted to say something else. He was halfway to the door when the words came. “Matthew. I know what you’re going through. I went through it myself many years ago.”

  “You?” he said incredulously.

  She nodded. “God hasn’t abandoned you, Matthew. It’s his way of purifying us. Once you take the risk, once you rely on nothing but Him, He has to make us worthy - truly worthy - before He enters the heart.”

  “Do you really think that’s happening to me? I didn’t - I didn’t ask for this.”

  Sister Agnes laughed briefly. “Who would? But somewhere you made a fundamental decision to - go beyond the place where you were. Most people stop at some safe point along the way. There are all sorts of places to stop. Preacher, politician, man for all seasons. You were a very good bishop for the other Church. The one that is passing away.”

  He nodded, forcing a smile. He did not want to hurt her feelings. But his case was much more complicated. Perhaps he had made some sort of decision. But what he could not accept was the loss of power, the loss of prestige, the loss of popularity that it seemed to involve. If God was turning His face away, it was because he, Matthew Mahan, was such a colossal spiritual failure.

  “I can only promise you what I know. Someday it will end. Then the joy begins. A joy, a sweetness that is beyond words, beyond everything. Then perhaps you will want to go further, into the very darkest night, walking not toward joy but light. Pure light. I tried. I couldn’t do it.”

  What sadness was in those words.

  “I won’t even try.”

  He came back to the desk and took her hand. He was shocked for a moment by how warm it was. Her utter calm was not cold. It was a banked fire. “Thank you, Agnes,” he said and walked toward the door again.

  “Perhaps it would help,” she said, her voice rising almost imperceptibly, “perhaps it would help to know that you are part of my joy.”

  No, no, Your Eminence, your soul cannot be tricked into levitation that way. There are too many years of accumulated dross in it. You are tied inevitably to the earth. Perhaps you should try Bill Fogarty’s solution. He had written from the monastery in Kentucky a few weeks ago, thanking Cardinal Mahan for saving his soul and shyly explaining that he had decided not to return to the archdiocese. He was going to spend the rest of his life as a monk. Who was that Cardinal - Leger of Montreal - he had resigned and gone to work among the lepers in Africa. Remember at the time how you had scoffed at the decision, even told yourself that the man was a coward, running out on the real job. If you can’t stand the heat, you had said, stay out of the kitchen. But you were not talking about the heat of the Death Valley - Dead Sea circuit, where the failures toil and the water ranges from brackish to brine.

  A knock on the door. Dennis McLaughlin, peering anxiously through the gloom beyond the fluorescent desk lamp. “I saw the light in the hall. I thought - you might be sick.”

  “Just the usual insomnia.”

  Dennis pointed to the radio. “Any news from Vatican Hill?”

  He summed up what Cardinal Tisserant and Pope Paul had just said about Cardinal Suenens.

  “That wraps it all up, doesn’t it?” Dennis said. “If you open your mouth, you’re a heretic, a rebel, and you’re disrespectful and inopportune.”

  Matthew Mahan lit a cigarette. “And you were telling me that he wouldn’t take Suenens’s sort of criticism personally?”

  “Don’t you have to go another step, then, and ask yourself what comes first, personal relations or the good of the whole Church?”

  “If there were a clear answer to that question,” Matthew Mahan said “I wouldn’t hesitate to make the decision.”

  Dennis obviously thought about saying the situation seemed perfectly clear to him. Matthew Mahan headed off this little confrontation by asking, “Have you gotten through the saints’ mail yet?”

  Dennis looked morosely toward his office, where there were stacks of letters from irate followers of St. Christopher, St. Catherine, and the 200 other saints Rome had recently eliminated from the Church’s calendar without warning.

 
; The Pope claimed he was following a directive of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy, which called for encouraging official devotion only to saints with universal significance. Nowhere was there any call for 200 eliminations.

  “About halfway. But more keeps coming in. I’m afraid the followers of St. Pudentiana have not yet been heard from.”

  “That sounds slightly obscene. Was there a St. Pudentiana?”

  “There was. There isn’t any more. It seems there was a church named after Pudens, the senator who greeted St. Peter when he came to Rome - that’s his chair enshrined in Bernini’s Cattedra. The church was called the Basilica Pudentiana. Some sixth-century monk thought it was a woman’s name.”

  “Half the ones they left in the calendar are just as dubious as the ones they bounced,” the Cardinal said. “Like St. George the Dragon Slayer. How many letters did we get about losing St. Christopher?”

  “About twenty. My favorite is the guy who accused us of making millions selling St. Christopher medals one year and abolishing him the next year. He claims it’s a plot to transfer the medal deal to another saint, so we can make another million.”

  “It’s funny - but not so funny, too. He won’t give me any money, if he really believes that.”

  “I thought the fund drive was over.”

  “They’re still trying to collect pledges. I understand there have been several dozen cancelations because of the saints. They were probably looking for a good excuse.”

  “The whole thing is a Curia enterprise,” Dennis fumed. “They saw it as one more chance to demonstrate their authority, wield their power. The more you wield it, the more powerful power becomes.”

  What was he supposed to say now? Matthew Mahan wondered. He knew what Dennis wanted to hear - a call to the spiritual barricades. For a fiery moment, that was exactly what he himself wanted, too. The American Suenens summons his fellow bishops to join him in a call for the end of the papal monarchy. But that was only another version of the marble man, a Napoleonic variation, with the old smoothie standing in the background urging him on à la Cardinal Richelieu. “Try not to be so bitter, Dennis. Be sure and tell those people that they can go on praying to St. Christopher. Put in all that stuff about Rome saying he may have existed, they just don’t have proof.”