The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  “Protestantism may benefit,” said Stephen. “But quite honestly, I can’t see what Roman Catholicism stands to gain.”

  Dr. Whiteman was affable with a difference. “Suppose you change ‘Roman’ to read ‘American.’ Wouldn’t certain changes flow from such a shift in emphasis?”

  “For example, Doctor.”

  Hubbell K. Whiteman launched into a demonstration of the benefits that might accrue to Catholics if they organized, as he put it, “on an American basis.” During the mulligatawny soup (which Rabbi Mordecai did not taste) the author of Protestantism on the March made the point that American Catholics, divested of “foreign allegiance,” would be regarded “less suspiciously” in many quarters. Consequently, they would be eligible, he argued, “for a larger role in American political life.” Stephen replied that American Catholics were bound by no foreign allegiance—unless, possibly, God could be regarded as a foreigner. While the assemblage hacked away at broiled chicken, and Rabbi Mordecai clasped his wrinkled hands in resignation, Dr. Whiteman suggested that a stronger and really beautiful Christianity would result if all American faiths would federate, loosely perhaps, in the manner of the several states. He was pumping three hundred words a minute on this federation idea when Chairman Quincy A. Howson, professor of moral philosophy at the Manhattan Theologic Seminary, arose and said:

  “The Convocation will now hear grace after meat, offered by that distinguished exponent of orthodox Judaism, Rabbi Jonas Mordecai.”

  Everyone felt very democratic, very fine, when the puzzled Rabbi, not having touched a morsel of the luncheon, intoned the ancient Hebrew prayer of thanksgiving after food.

  Professionally swift on the uptake, Chairman Howson now introduced the keynoter of the occasion, the Reverend Bradbury Towne, D.D. (Cantab.), LL.D., Harvard, and rector of St. Barnaby’s, New York City. Handsome and erudite in the high-Anglican manner, Bradbury Towne had worn the surplice of special grace for so many years that it now hung quite easily from his fine shoulders.

  In diction and content Dr. Towne’s address was a thing of frank charm. “We are met to honor God and ourselves,” he said, “by considering those things which ought to be done, indeed which must be done, if His kingdom is to prevail in our midst. Although the imperfect arcs of existing (and sadly enough, competing) faiths are not capable of being wholly fused, as the poet Browning suggests, into a ‘perfect round,’ yet a beginning can be made. With a little less insistence on dogma perhaps, not quite so much emphasis on differences of ritual, and a more sincere attempt to understand the purely historical nature of those differences, the work of unification could be greatly advanced.” Dr. Towne went on to say that advantages both spiritual and temporal would flow from such a consolidation of faith. The Church United—“federalized” was possibly a better word—would be in a more strategic position to combat the materialism of the day. Sectarian rivalries at an end, less prosperous churches could merge with congregations more—ah—substantially founded. Harassed rectors would find themselves (a benign humor accompanied Dr. Towne’s descent into the idiom) using not quite so much red ink. And lastly, the miasmas of bigotry and intolerance having been blown quite away, religion in the United States could soar on new-found pinions into clear American ether.

  Without ever saying so, Dr. Towne implied that he was both willing and ready to lead the wandering denominational tribes into the Promised Land of Unification.

  Prolonged applause and a grim benediction by the Most Reverend Timothy Creedon, Catholic Bishop of Newark, followed the keynoter’s remarks.

  Stephen could almost hear Tim Creedon muttering to himself, “What in God’s name am I doing here among these psalm singers?”

  With the amiable aroma of Dr. Towne’s speech still hanging about them, the delegates proceeded to various seminars and forums to consider specific problems. Stephen was assigned to a discussion of “Religious Tolerance as an Instrument of Democracy.” With five other clergymen, including Rabbi Mordecai, he sat at a table facing an audience of probably a hundred laymen. The panel moderator, a white-eyebrowed veteran of the sectarian wars, explained that each speaker had ten minutes, and that a question period would give the laymen their chance later on. Meanwhile, no heckling, please.

  The discussion was opened by the well-known Methodist preacher, John Fort Newcomb. “Tolerance,” he said, “is the virtue by which liberated minds make conquest of bigotry and hatred. It implies more than forbearance. Properly conceived, tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs without necessarily sharing or accepting them. In the words of Phillips Brooks, Tolerance expresses a perfectly legitimate and honorable relation between opposite minds.’ I disagree with my friend. I want him to be true to his convictions, yet I claim the right and duty of trying to persuade him to my belief.” The speaker wound up by pointing out that tolerance is the basic ingredient of democracy, “the meeting in perfect harmony, or earnest conviction and high personal privilege.”

  The next speaker, a Presbyterian minister named Alonzo Runforth, made the nice point that tolerance should not be confused with pallid indifferentism. He quoted John Morley: “Much that passes for tolerance is only a pretentious form of being without settled opinions of our own.” Danger lurks in this form of slothfulness, said the Reverend Dr. Runforth, “because tolerance, a fragile plant, has to be diligently tended, else it withers and dies. As it fades, another growth—the poisonous mushroom of intolerance—takes its place. A privilege is shorn away here, a censorship is erected there, hatreds take root, and soon we are living in the black forest of intolerance, sunless and fearsome for all.”

  Thus far the discussion had gone forward on a high level of decorum. Now arose the Reverend Twombly Moss, a Southern fundamentalist, who slammed his open palm onto the table and exploded sulphurously. “Tolerance my necktie! What this country needs is a good five-cent stick of brimstone!”

  The shocked moderator lifted white eyebrows. Who had put this zealot on the program? Whereupon Twombly Moss ripped off his necktie and brought the rod of Aaron down on the backs of the unrighteous.

  “How can anyone be tolerant to violators of the Eighteenth Amendment?” he bellowed. “Take a man who says he has the right to sozzle in rum and use tobacco in all its forms—pipe, chew, and cigarettes. Isn’t license what he means? License to befuddle his brains and stunt his body with poison? And if you don’t believe tobacco is poison, just try this experiment. Tuck a plug of chewing tobacco under your armpits, then sit down in a rocking chair and try to be comfortable. Just you try! Inside of three minutes you’ll be sicker’n a gangrened beagle pup with the collywobbles.” The fundamentalist Savonarola raged on. “And another thing! There’s too much bunnyhugging going on to suit the Reverend Twombly Moss. This cheek-to-cheek dancing has got to stop. Clean house, I say. Cut out this tolerance twaddle and let’s put an end to booze, cigarettes, dancing, and cardplaying, or the country’ll wake up some Tuesday morning and find itself raking ashes in hell.”

  An astonished hush settled over the hall. The hush was broken by the voice of some nameless wit in the back benches.

  “What’s your stand on popcorn, Reverend? Agin that, too?”

  A wash of laughter cleansed the sulphur-laden air. In the deluge Twombly Moss sat down, his five-cent stick of brimstone very much dampened.

  It was hard to get the forum on the track again, but the white-eye-browed moderator finally succeeded. Two more speakers gave their views on religious tolerance. Then it was Stephen’s turn. This is what he wanted to say:

  My dear friends, I find myself in agreement with most of the vague agreeabilities proposed in this forum. I would be lacking in frankness, however, if I did not tell you that the Catholic Church takes a most uncompromising stand in matters of faith and morals enjoined upon it by God. You will find the Church notably lenient in contemplating human frailty; but you will find it grimly unyielding when asked, in the name of tolerance, to deviate from the divine revelations and th
eologic dogmas on which Catholic doctrine is based. We hold our teaching to be the only true teaching. We will not alter any part of it; indeed we cannot, because man is powerless to alter the truth of God. In view of these facts, I see no point in extending my remarks.

  Had Stephen been attached to an American diocese or speaking under the jurisdiction of an American bishop, he would have said these things (very probably Bishop Creedon was saying them this minute in another room). But because Stephen was attending the Convocation as a representative of the Apostolic Delegate, he felt obliged to protect Quarenghi from the controversy that certainly would result from such a forthright statement. Discretion rather than expediency prompted Stephen to temper his utterance as follows:

  “Mr. Moderator, respected colleagues: It occurs to me that in our discussion of tolerance we have somehow overlooked its spiritual origin. No one has yet mentioned that tolerance is an extension of God’s great commandment, ‘Love thy neighbor’—an injunction that all of us, irrespective of creed, are bound to obey.”

  At this acceptable Christian doctrine the moderator beamed. Stephen continued:

  “May I point out that tolerance has two meanings: to suffer and to bear. Both meanings were combined into a single act when the Son of God became man in order to bear His cross and suffer on it for our redemption. It is my thought that we shall best fulfill God’s commandment when we imitate the tolerance of His son.”

  There was a genteel patting of hands as Stephen sat down.

  Rabbi Mordecai was the last to speak. He rose slowly, his bowed figure emaciated with advanced age, and gazed about the hall with eyes dimmed by seventy years of poring over the Torah and Kethubim. He fingered his beard, as if amused by what he had heard from the cleanshaven ministers of younger faiths. Then on the withered parchment of his forehead, bewildered wrinkles appeared.

  “What can I say that will be helpful here?” he began. “It is not that I am old or tired, or wish to heap ashes of self-pity on my beard. But we are so far apart that not even the wisdom of Maimonides could bring us together in understanding. The food that sustains you is denied me. Your words are kindly intentioned, yet they do not fill my heart with gladness. Phillips Brooks is good, John Morley is good”—the Rabbi contemplatively rubbed the blue vein at his temple—“but because I have spent my life hearkening to Moses and Isaiah, I have lost my ear for prophets less majestic.”

  Stephen wished that his brother George could have heard and seen Jonas Mordecai. The Rabbi was neither modern nor near to modern; he had made no concessions to contemporary culture. Outmoded but modeless, appearing rarely yet constantly among men, Jonas Mordecai was the very pattern of the dedicated priest. Out of the bickerings and doctrinal differences, the Rabbi’s voice emerged in beauty and wisdom as he went on:

  “But now lest you go away saying what a cynical, weary old man this rabbi is, I will speak to you in a parable. There was once a king who owned a wonderful diamond. He was proud of his jewel, but one day by accident it was deeply scratched. The king called in gem cutters to repair his stone—yet try as they might, they could not polish away the scratch. At last there appeared in that kingdom a lapidary artist of surpassing genius. With skill and patience he carved a beautiful rose on the part of the stone that was flawed. And by his cunning art, he contrived to make the deepest part of the scratch the rose’s stem.”

  Rabbi Modecai turned his palms outward in a gesture that might have had several meanings. All of which, in the tradition of parables, he left unstated.

  The Inter-Faith Convocation ended next day. In none of its sessions did a lapidary artist of sufficient skill step forward to carve a rose on the scratched diamond of faith. In fact, during the forums on divorce, birth control, and religious education, the diamond received several new scratches.

  Acrimonies were hushed, but not ended, by adjournment. The formal resolutions of the Inter-Faith Convocation, published some months later, were unanimous only in agreeing that bigotry and intolerance, like the grade crossing and the man-eating shark, must be eliminated.

  Annus mirabilis 1927. The Book of Calvin was drawing to a close. Over the strayed homespun in the White House the Delphic mantle of double talk had descended; whatever he said or did was undiluted paradox. His fame rested on six words: “We must have law and order.” Yet during his presidency the law of the land was in a virtual state of suspension while mobsters proclaimed the statute of the tommy gun and rival beer kings dealt out the leering justice of the ride. Thrift was Cal’s religion; he could save fifty thousand a year on his salary and haggle about the number of hams to be served at an official dinner. But he made no protest against the orgy of stock gambling and financial thimblerigging that went on under his codfish eye. He sounded no trumpets, tilted at no windmills, and dodged every problem that could not be solved on an abacus. Having made the nasal announcement that the business of America was business, he sat back in his rocking chair and watched his countrymen engage in a breakneck scramble for the prosperity that still bears his name.

  Given the fatness of these years, what happened in the United States? Was there a renaissance of the arts, a quickening of religion, a tranquil deepening of thought? No. Living under conditions nearly perfect (according to the advertising pages) for the expression of man’s nobler self, the people abandoned themselves to diversions, which, though not out of place at a Shriner’s convention, were scarcely creditable to a great nation at the peak of its material fortunes. While millions of children developed rachitic knobs from malnutrition, and the League of Nations floundered impotently without Western support, the American people gave themselves up to marathon dancing, pole-sitting, and kindred freak contests, each dizzier and more meaningless than the last.

  Stephen Fermoyle, observing the Washington scene at close range, found little that was instructive. Only his intuitive belief that millions of private citizens were living lives of unproclaimed nobility and goodness saved him from outright pessimism. His state of mind was shared by many of the ecclesiastic friends he had made in the Cathedral chapter of St. Matthew’s and at the Catholic University, where he was preparing for his doctorate in philosophy. Whenever this set gathered for an evening, a single overwhelming question arose: “At what point might the Catholic Church legitimately draw America’s attention to the fact that ‘business morality’ and a laissez-faire theory of economics were forcing men into practices criminally at variance with divine and natural law?”

  The question was neither academic nor theologic; it carried grave reality for employers and wage earners at every point where economics touched upon morals. Pope Pius XI described the struggle as one “in which only the strongest survive; and the strongest, often enough, means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience.”

  Had the administration chosen to fulfill Leo XIII’s ideal of a Christian state, it could have done much to prevent the landslide of mischief that was about to be loosed upon all classes of society. But the government, impervious to spiritual influence, displayed the typical weakness of a state that excludes God from its deliberations.

  AS ASSISTANT to the Apostolic Delegate, Stephen was learning a great deal about the Catholic Church in America. Most of his information came by way of diocesan reports clearing through Quarenghi’s office en route to Rome. From the study of these documents two facts emerged: in great centers of population, Catholicism was vigorous and thriving; under the guidance of competent bishops and hard-working pastors, large city parishes were expanding; new churches were lifting crosses and bell towers to the sky. But when one turned to outlying areas, the picture was less encouraging. Here and there, an energetic bishop managed to keep roofs on the shabby churches in his diocese. Generally speaking, however, the Roman Catholic faith was not prospering in the poorer agricultural regions of the United States. In fact, it was barely holding its own.

  Quarenghi’s “office of vigilance” bound him to investigate this laggard condition; yet his manifold dut
ies in Washington made a personal visitation impossible. Early in March, 1927, he looked up at Stephen from behind a rampart of official documents and casually asked:

  “Would you be willing, Stefano, to undertake a mission above and beyond the call of paper work?”

  “Try me.”

  Quarenghi laid his finger tip on a wall map of the United States. “I want you to make a tour of this region,” he said, indicating the area between the Great Smokies and the Mississippi River. “Find out, if you can, what is happening to the Roman Catholics in the South and Southwest. Take three months, more if necessary, and make a report of your findings.”

  In three months Stephen traveled ten thousand miles through a part of the United States he had never seen before. On muleback, in jerking day coaches and battered Fords, he traversed a terrain clothed with fern-brakes and pine—a land desolate at best, but made uglier where ruthless logging had pimpled the landscape with stumps. It was a region of starveling scarcity, where even the razor-backed shoat could not prosper and the black-snake whip cracked loudly in the hands of invincibly ignorant men. Stephen entered counties that had never seen a priest; in some states, paintless churches were supported on a vaguely missionary basis or not at all. White families traditionally Catholic were losing their faith by default, and the spiritual neglect of the Negro had permitted nearly ninety per cent of the colored population to fall uncontested into Protestant hands.

  Stephen was shocked to see the linkage between economic poverty and religious hatred. In counties where the Church was poorest, the Klan flogged Roman Catholics relentlessly. But wherever a bold bishop thundered—though his altar might be hundreds of miles away—there, Catholics were least molested.