The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  “What would it be worth to him to lose track of the problem for a while? It would be worth a hell of a lot to me.”

  “That would only get his back up.”

  Mike smiled wryly. “I should know better. You can’t bribe a pope with 500 million in liquid assets. What do we do?”

  “We have our lunch and go straight from here to see Mary. Tell her the truth. And hope for the best.”

  Mike nodded and beckoned to the head waiter. It was an unpleasant lunch. Mike’s mood was sour. He proceeded to tell Matthew Mahan every vicious negative story he had heard about the Vatican during his three weeks in Italy.

  “That ex-Jesuit - what’s his name, Father Mirante? - tracked us down and gave us an earful on the latest inside stinks.”

  “What happened to him? I gave him $500 and never heard another word from him.”

  “He sends you profuse apologies. He’s got some sort of family troubles. Anyway, the big news he thought you should know is about celibacy. He’s really bugged on that question. He says the Dutch bishops are going to maneuver Il Papa into a corner on it.”

  “Really,” said Matthew Mahan, instinctively disliking the idea of a confrontation.

  “Where do you stand on it, Matt?”

  Was Mike being deliberately sarcastic? Matthew Mahan decided that it did not matter. “It’s a question that should be left open for the whole Church to debate over the next decade. I’m more and more inclined for optional marriage myself.”

  “Good thing. According to Bill Reed, you may be hearing wedding bells in your residence before long.”

  “You mean Dennis and Bill’s daughter?”

  “Doc says they can barely keep their hands off each other.”

  Matthew Mahan nodded mournfully, pretending to know all about it, although the words suggested a more painful reality than Dennis had admitted to him. “Dennis told me.”

  “Il Papa sold his 30 percent interest in Immobiliare to a French syndicate. I hear he got about 30 million for it. It’s part of a new policy. He wants to reduce the Vatican’s visibility in the business world. I met one of the guys who handled the final bargaining. Do you know who was right there at the table keeping track of the smallest decimals? Old Paolo himself.”

  Mike began discussing the men around Paul, his secretary, Macchi, the Substitute Secretary of State, Benelli, making each of them sound like crypto-Fascists who would welcome the resurrection of Mussolini. There was venom in every word, and Matthew Mahan began to wince at the thought of this man living with Mary, saying these things to Mary, destroying her faith day by relentless day. Was God a mad joker? How could he insult him this way? How could he permit this black comedy that starred him as the perpetrator of this marriage?

  Going uptown in the Cardinal’s Ford, they were silent. They got out at 2600 Parkway, the most expensive apartment building on the city’s most expensive street, and went up in the elevator. Mary sat in the living room, conferring with Raymond Snodgrass, the city’s leading decorator, a small, ugly man with loving-cup ears who cheerfully never pretended to be anything but a homosexual. He had handled the sale of the episcopal antiques and greeted Matthew Mahan as an old friend. “It’s such a delight to be working for Mrs. Shea again. I did her first apartment.”

  “Do you think he’s a jinx?” Mary said, welcoming Matthew Mahan with her warmest smile.

  “Oh no. Raymond’s good luck. He’s like one of those statues of the Little Flower. I bet he glows in the dark.”

  “Oh, that’s mean, Your Eminence,” Raymond said. He giggled. “I do.”

  They got rid of Raymond and sat down, Mike beside Mary on the couch, Matthew Mahan in an easy chair a few feet away. Did it hurt to see her kiss him on the mouth and entwine her fingers in his thick tanned hand? No, old losses, old wounds, no longer counted. He admired several paintings by a young pop artist named Fontanella whom Mary had recommended to Mike, and pretended to understand while they told him about visiting the artist’s studio, where he showed them a whole series of paintings in abstract expressionist style.

  After Mike put away the paintings and sat down beside Mary on the couch again, she abandoned any pretense of a casual visit. “Did you enjoy communing in your masculine sanctum sanctorum?” she asked.

  “Listen,” Mike said. “I picked the Athletic Club after you said you couldn’t come. You had to commune with Raymond.”

  “You don’t tell Raymond when to come. He tells you.”

  “Baloney. I think you’re afraid of this guy.” Mike gestured to Matthew Mahan. “A frown from him, and it’s all over between you and me.”

  “Oh really?” Mary lifted her chin in mock disdain. “I didn’t act that way in Rome - did I?”

  They were talking to each other almost as if he were not in the room. Six months ago it would have been humiliating, enraging. Now it had a strange reverse effect. For the first time in months, his heart stirred with a tremor of hope. They were in love. Intensely, physically in love. For a burning moment, he saw them in each other’s arms, exultantly delighting in the touch and taste of breasts, lips, loins, the dark parousia that he would never know. Did his own poor love shrivel in the white glare of that vision? Yes, yes, of course it did. But it was used to that, used to the glare of the desert sun. It sat mutely like a dumb suffering animal waiting for permission to speak.

  “Wait till you hear what he’s got to tell you about his good-conscience divorce program,” Mike said.

  “What?” said Mary expectantly.

  He told her, humbly pleading behind the neutral words for a pardon he did not deserve and could not receive.

  Mary sat in strangely composed silence for a moment. Was she fighting off the stricken haunted look that had tormented him in Rome? “Oh, Matt,” she said, “I feel so awful - for you. I know how much this meant to you. But let me tell you something that I know now. It isn’t as terrible for the others or for me as you think, Matt, assuming that the others are as much in love as I am.”

  She untwined her fingers and slipped her arm around Mike’s massive bicep. “I know it won’t bother me, Matt. I know I’ll be all right now. I needed someone to care for, someone to care for me. I tried to get it from you, Matt. I inflicted myself on you. It was so unfair, so awful what I did to you. All you could give me was a small part of yourself; the rest was parceled out to all those other people you have to care about. When I turned to the Church as a whole to find it - it was like trying to embrace a cloud. I needed a whole person - and I’ve found him.”

  How could he tell her that her words were like manna to the desert wanderer, like rain in Death Valley, stirring life in petrified, withered seeds, making the barren earth bloom? Then came a warning note, a sudden realization that Mary was talking too rapidly, with too much intensity in her voice. She was trying to reassure herself, as much as him. Even though everything she was saying was true, good, profound, it was failing to penetrate the deepest level of her self.

  “Of course, I did want you to marry us, Matt. That would have made everything perfect. It would be more - more complete if I was at peace with the Church. But I guess we can’t have everything in this world.”

  “You are at peace with the Church, Mary. As long as you know in your inner heart that you’re doing the right thing. I have a definite feeling that God has played a part in this - this happiness.”

  “I do, too, Matt,” Mary said. “Of course, this pseudo-atheist or agnostic, or whatever he is, scoffs at that kind of thinking. But I scoff right back at him.”

  She made a fist and pushed it against Mike’s big chin.

  Again, Matthew Mahan sensed a false note, gaiety concealing a conflict that could cause trouble. He tried to gloss it over by joining in the cheer.

  “Well, children,” he said, standing up, “even if I can’t do much for you legally, there’s nothing in the rules that prevents me from giving you my blessing, for whatever that’s worth.”

  “It’s worth a lot to me.”

  “And
me, too,” Mike Furia said.

  “Don’t kneel down. There’s no need for any ceremony.”

  Quickly Matthew Mahan made the familiar cross m the air above them with his right hand and murmured the prayer. Mary looked up at him, her face solemn. Then she was standing beside him, full of frowning concern. “Matt, you look so tired. What have you been doing?”

  “Oh - worries. Work. Old age. And problems. Lately, even my problems have problems.”

  “Yes - but you -”

  What was she going to say? You used to thrive on hard work and problems? How could he explain to her the overwhelming sense of failure that tormented him now? A failure so large, it was laughable. He had to step back, look at himself and smile at the utter futility of his episcopate. The Good Shepherd - good for what?

  “Bill Reed told me you should take a month off,” Mike Furia said.

  “I know. I know. Maybe I will, after Christmas.”

  “I was hoping you could marry us just before Christmas,” Mary said with an ominous falling note in her voice. We wanted to spend our honeymoon in Hawaii. Mike says it’s marvelous at that time of the year.”

  “We’ll still do it,” Mike said. “Just because Il Papa has eliminated this guy -”

  Wrong Matthew Mahan thought, too abrasive, Mike. I’m not your enemy; I’m your friend here and everywhere else.

  “When we get back,” Mary said, ignoring Mike’s nasty tone, “I’m going to make you take a vacation if I have to go down there and lock you out of your residence. I had a dream about you the other night. You were terribly sick in Rome. I kept crying and saying. ‘The world won’t be the same. The world won’t be the same.’”

  Matthew Mahan laughed. “You women are terrible creatures. If you don’t get your way with flattery, you try threats and then witchcraft.”

  “Take care of yourself, please,” Mary said and kissed him on the cheek.

  Riding home in the back seat of his Ford, Matthew Mahan found himself thinking about Dennis McLaughlin. He suddenly remembered vividly the expression on Dennis’s face when he had told him to extinguish all hope of a married priesthood. It was alarmingly similar to the sadness that he had glimpsed on Mary’s face when he had given her his blessing. A patina of hopelessness as if each in his (her) own way was saying: I am not worthy. When all the time it was he, the blesser, the voice of authority, who was the unworthy one. Take me, O Lord, do what you will with me, for their sake.

  On December 21, Matthew Mahan opened the evening paper and read that Michael J. Furia and Mary Shea had been married at a private ceremony in the mayor’s office, with the chief justice of the state’s supreme court, an old friend of the bride’s father, as the officiating magistrate. It was no surprise to the Cardinal. He had had dinner with the loving couple only a week earlier. Mary was defiantly happy, Mike exultant. But again Matthew Mahan had sensed a strain, a tension, an unreality in their manner.

  While Mike was pouring after-dinner cordials, the Cardinal found Mary looking somberly at him as if she wanted desperately to say something but was forbidden to speak. He could only hope and pray that it would pass, that she would be sustained by Mike’s obvious devotion to her. The danger he sensed was very Italian. Mike had a tendency to consider the man as the arbiter of all opinion in the family. He obviously assumed that Mary agreed with him when he unleashed another round of wisecracks on Vatican capitalists and the financial games they played around the world. He made a small speech on the Vatican’s refusal to pay any tax to the Italian Government on its investment profits in Italy. Last May, Mary had joined in this vitriol; it had been nicely attuned to her bitter feelings about the Church. But Mike seemed to have no awareness that he was also talking about the church of John XXIII, the institution that had reawakened hope in her heart.

  The next day, he had called Mike at the office and tried to explain this to him. Mike thought he was trying to tell him what to think, or worse, indirectly influence Mary through him. “Listen, Padre,” he said, “she’s out of your hands now. I think the best thing you can do is stay away from her. Frankly, you’re bad medicine. She was really sort of depressed this morning when we got up. I didn’t want to see you again before the ceremony, but she insisted on it. I still think we can be friends - but on a strictly social level.”

  “All right, Mike. If that’s the right thing to do, you can depend on me to do it. I’m only trying to help -”

  “I know, I know,” Mike said impatiently.

  The happy couple, the paper informed its readers, left immediately for a one-month honeymoon in Hawaii.

  Nothing more was heard from the Furias, not even a postcard. Matthew Mahan did his best to put them out of his mind. It was easy to do at Christmas. He had several dozen appearances to make at old-age homes, orphanages, hospitals, and other diocesan institutions. In his very limited spare time, he worked on drafts of the American bishops’ statement on priestly celibacy. With Dennis’s help, he did his utmost to urge on the other members of the task force an undogmatic point of view. But his letters and memorandums might as well have been blared into outer space. The final draft of the twenty-seven-page statement that arrived on his desk from the residence of the head of the committee, Archbishop Francis J. Furey of San Antonio, Texas, was an all-out defense of celibacy. It did have some sympathetic comments about those who were unable to live up to the hard calling. But it came down to an unwavering affirmation of the prevailing rule.

  Ten days later, Matthew Mahan and Dennis McLaughlin rode to the airport for the trip to Washington, D.C., and the semi-annual meeting of the American bishops. They did not say a word about Matthew Mahan’s promise to speak out at this gathering. Was there any point to it now? he wondered, thinking about the disheartening evolution of the celibacy statement. Never had he been more aware of his outsider’s role in the American hierarchy. The only Archbishop with whom he had felt an emotional and spiritual kinship, genial Paul Hallinan of Atlanta, Georgia, had died last year. Perhaps he should have written to the twenty or thirty bishops who attended that session with married priests at the Houston meeting. Recalling what he had heard there, the sadness and the anger in some of the statements of the married priests, renewed his determination to speak out.

  At the flight gate, Dennis somberly handed him his heavy briefcase, with a wry remark that he did not have to worry about something to read on the plane. The final draft of the celibacy statement was on top of the briefcase’s load of papers. There was no sign that Dennis had even read it, Matthew Mahan thought gloomily, as he paged listlessly through it. Then he reached the last page and a scrawled note.

  Did it ever occur to you that maybe we’ve got the whole sex thing backward? The more I think of it, the more I see the current policy as interference with the most essential human freedom - the freedom to love. The Pope’s idiotic encyclical threatens this freedom within marriage itself. Archaic canon laws cripple those who attempt to recover from the failure of a first marriage. A meaningless celibacy prevents priests - supposedly men dedicated to love - from realizing it on the deepest level of their lives.

  The passion in those words made Matthew Mahan wince. Dennis was obviously writing lines that he envisioned his Cardinal hurling at his fellow American bishops. Even subtracting the passion, Matthew Mahan mused, there was a lot of truth in Dennis’s words. Except for abortion, everything about the Church’s teaching on sex was against life, against joy, against forgiveness, against the young. How else could anyone explain the Furey statement - its total refusal even to consider the thinking of the priests of Dennis’s generation?

  Cardinal Mahan could have spent the evening strolling about the Statler Hilton lobby collecting congratulations on his elevation from other arriving bishops. He fended off a few of these as he checked in. But he had arranged a special after-hours admission to the National Museum. It had been years since he roamed their 5-million shell collection, and he wanted to see some of his old favorites. Once more, he gazed in loving admiration at Sthenory
tis pernobilis, a tiny pure white shell with deep volutes in its spiral. Utterly unique, it came from the Barbados. Equally rare was the big brown and white Pleurotomaria salmiana from Japan, with its almost perfectly oval spirals. Only a half-dozen living specimens had been discovered. It was a link with immense blank eons of prehistoric time. Loveliest were the two glowing yellow valves of the Lima dalli from the Philippines. Was there better proof of God’s infinite creativity than this awesome profusion of shapes and colors?

  As he left the museum, he mused over the theory that Dennis had tried to explain to him the other night, about the dynamic spiral being an image of the Church’s growth. Dennis seemed particularly excited by the difference between a spiral and a dome. One was open-ended, potentially infinite, the other rigid, encompassing. He saw what Dennis was trying to say, but it did not particularly stir him. Symbols were not his bag.

  The next morning, the American bishops, 300 men in sober black, gathered in the ballroom of the Statler Hilton to make decisions. The president, Cardinal John Dearden, began the meeting with an almost rhapsodic report on the recent Synod of Bishops in Rome. He heaped compliments on Pope Paul for his recognition of the rights of his brother bishops. Dearden quoted the Pope at length, with special emphasis on the “love which bishops must nourish among themselves.” He closed with a call to his fellow American bishops to cooperate in attacking the nation’s spiritual and social problems.

  The applause was warm. It was hard to argue with such sentiments. They turned to the agenda of the meeting. A committee report recommending the establishment of a national office for Black Catholicism was overwhelmingly endorsed. The English translations for the new order of the mass were also approved with little discussion. Another committee reported that eighty-seven men had been enrolled to train as deacons at four national centers. Six dioceses were planning to begin diaconal programs in the coming year. Deacons could perform many parish duties. They could also marry. Was this the answer to celibacy? On numbers alone, Matthew Mahan thought, the answer would have to be no.