The Cardinal

by Henry Morton Robinson

  THE PART of his episcopal duty that Stephen enjoyed most—and labored hardest at—were the diocesan visitations.

  Chauffered by Peter Tuohy, he would start off without breakfast (even a bishop must fast if he expects to say Mass) for an inspection of some parish in his domain. The purpose of these visits, as defined four hundred years ago by the Council of Trent, was “to maintain orthodox doctrine; to defend good, and correct bad manners; to incite the people to religion, peace, and innocence by sermons and warnings; and to arrange all things according to the prudence of the bishop for the good of the people.” Notified well in advance of the Bishop’s visit, rectors would have their books ready, their churches in order, and often enough their hearts in their mouths as Stephen, attired in rochet and mozzetta, alighted at their door.

  A strictly observed ceremony then took place. The rector, accompanied by cross-bearer, thurifer, and acolyte, would extend a small crucifix for his Bishop to kiss. Removing his biretta, Stephen would kneel for a brief prayer in the doorway. Rising, he would receive the aspergil from the rector, sprinkle his own forehead with holy water, then sprinkle those around him. Preceded by a thurifer, altar boys, curates, and pastor, Stephen then would go up the aisle, blessing the congregation. Mass might now be celebrated, or the sacrament of confirmation administered. Stephen would address the people briefly, then, seated on his faldstool—a kind of movable throne—he would hear the pastor read, first in Latin, then in English, the indulgence granted by the visiting Bishop:

  The Right Reverend Father and Lord in Christ, Stephen Fermoyle, by the grace of God and of the Apostolic See, Bishop, gives and grants to all persons here present fifty days of true indulgence, in the customary form of the Church. Pray to God for the good estate of His Holiness, Pius XI, by Divine Providence Pope, of his Lordship the Bishop, and of Holy Mother Church.

  Afterwards (and this was the part that Stephen liked best), the Bishop stood at the main entrance of the church to receive the people. In theory, this was their opportunity to air grievances, if any; in practice they shook the Bishop’s hand or kissed his ring (either was considered good form), then went home and spent a good part of the next year telling their neighbors, families, and each other what a handsome, young, stern, holy, and democratic man the Bishop was. And with reason they might. For, at thirty-eight, Stephen Fermoyle’s lean figure, his dark hair, parted on the side and rising above his grave, ascetic face, his powderblue eyes, and vibrant low-pitched voice—all combined to make him an endearing human being and an inspiring leader of his people.

  The physical inspection of the church property would now begin. Attended by the rector, Stephen walked about the interior of the church, examining the altar, confessionals, pulpit, fonts, and pews. In the sacristy he inspected the sacred vessels, vestments, and stock of holy oils. A bit of lunch might be taken at this point to give the rector strength for the financial audit and scrutiny of the parish register that followed. On the last used page of the account books and register, Stephen wrote the word visum, accompanied by his signature and the date. The Bishop now made whatever remarks, complimentary or otherwise, that the state of affairs called for. Then, after a final visit to the Blessed Sacrament, he was off.

  Stephen’s manner during these visitations was a blend of personal cordiality and ecclesiastic reserve. Coming in as a steward-general to inspect morale, supplies, and fortifications, he discovered that he must repress much of his natural warmth. One simply couldn’t play the good-fellow role; undue geniality might lead to a fatal weakening of discipline. On the other hand, hard-working rectors mustn’t be chilled by a too-frosty demeanor. Stephen chose the middle path; he was liberal with praise, firm and constructive in criticism, and particularly alert to avoid being taken in by the deference that he encountered during his visits.

  The rectors fell into two groups: graying field veterans who, after long years of service, found themselves in charge of important city parishes; and younger men (around Stephen’s own age) enjoying their first taste of parochial command in smaller towns. Though few geniuses appeared among them, they were solid administrators, the steel vertebrae that supported the physical body of the Church. Their financial accounts and parish records were usually well kept, their churches tight, trim, and in good repair. It would be easier, Stephen sometimes thought, to wrest Hercules’ club from his hands than to criticize the pastoral labors of such men.

  Still, they had their troubles. For some mysterious reason, collections weren’t what they should be. “People are buying hooch and gas with the money they used to put in the plate” was the explanation advanced by Dan O’Laughlin, rector of the biggest church in Fairhaven. Other pastors told similar stories of dwindling collections—of dimes and quarters taking the place of heavier silver and folding green. Then, too, pastors were finding it difficult to weld a mixed population of Yankee aborigines with second-generation Irish and first-generation Italians and Poles. “It gets harder every Sunday to give a sermon they can all carry away with them,” complained Father Matt Cornish, rector of the Sacred Heart in Bridgeton. Worst of all, the Catholic population seemed to be falling off slightly. “Five years ago we’d have fifty or sixty kids in a First Communion class. This year we had twenty-nine,” was the way Andrew Brick, Pastor of Waterville’s Star of the Sea, put it.

  These waning rays of financial, moral, and procreative energy gathered themselves into a perfect focus, one cold February day in 1928, as Stephen was inspecting St. Anselm’s in Springford, a medium-sized manufacturing city on the eastern border of his Diocese. He was greeted at the door by Father Peter Mendum, a tense wiry man who gave the impression of running while standing still. After the usual ceremonies, Stephen went over Father Mendum’s accounts; revenues were checked against expenses, and both were diligently compared with those of preceding years. The audit showed that the parish income had fallen off by almost a thousand dollars. Stephen asked why.

  “I don’t quite know, Bishop.” Father Mendum’s knees and elbows were tensed like a relay racer waiting for the baton. “Your Excellency realizes, of course, that people are losing their jobs every day. Take Eagle Hardware, for instance—they make locks and hinges, everything that builders use. I was talking to their sales manager, Ben Mackey, the other day—Ben’s one of my parishioners—and he told me that Eagle’s cutting down on production. Building hardware just isn’t moving.”

  The man needed motor release. “Let’s take a walk around the church,” suggested Stephen. With Father Mendum well in front, the physical inspection of the church property began. First, the outside: yellow firebrick, granite trim, slate roof—a triumph of no-period design. Inside, St. Anselm’s was stucco-plastered and oak-timbered, like so many of the smaller suburban churches built since World War I. Its stainedglass windows were standard items purveyed by ecclesiastical-supply houses. Altar and stations of the cross, ditto. Neat enough and scrupulously clean, yet without a single touch of distinction.

  Why do they make them look so much like bungalows, thought Stephen. “I’ll glance at your parish register,” he said aloud.

  Scrutiny of the marriage and birth records brought out the interesting fact that marriages were up and christenings down. “How do you account for this, Father?”

  “Birth control, Your Excellency,” said Peter Mendum, striding up and down the sacristy.

  “Have you pointed out to your people that birth control is a mortal sin?”

  For a moment Father Mendum stood still. “I might just as well talk to the east wind, Bishop. It’s not that people don’t want children. It seems that this birth-control business is all tied up with their jobs and way of life. I’ll illustrate: say a nice Catholic couple get married and make their down payment on a little home. They have two children—three seems to be the limit. Anything over that—well, what with the payments on the house, and a car, perhaps—they feel they can’t afford to risk having any more. Someone tells the wife she can buy a tube of jelly that’ll do such and such.” Father Mend
um tapped the cover of his parish register. “No more christenings in that family.”

  Riding back to Hartfield, Stephen concentrated upon the social and economic aspects of the birth-control problem. He knew well enough that the decline in the birth rate was most noticeable among the upper and middle classes; the very people who could afford to have children weren’t having them. Why? Did a genuine feeling of insecurity threaten these people, or were they merely using the economic argument as a false front for the murderous practice of contraception? Stephen decided that mere pulpit thundering wouldn’t solve the problem; it needed fresh and realistic examination from every point of view.

  He began his investigation by looking up the state laws regarding the sale of contraceptives and the dissemination of birth-control literature. Rigid statutes existed against both; State as well as Church had set its official countenance against criminal tampering with the life stream. But the laws were weakly enforced; every drugstore sold contraceptive devices, and recently a new organization—the Planned Motherhood League—had begun passing out birth-control pamphlets at street corners. Stephen obtained and studied one of these pamphlets, entitled, with unconscious humor, What Every Free Woman Should Know. He was puzzled by the morbid, whining tone of the pamphlet:

  American women! [it began] Your health is being destroyed, your happiness wantonly laid waste, by a conspiracy on the part of priestridden legislatures, a backward medical profession, and a gagged press. This cruel triumvirate keeps you in a condition of debased ignorance regarding your true nature and function. Not until birth-control literature and contraceptive devices can be placed in the hands of every woman who has suffered the wracking torments of childbirth, not until American women and mothers are armed with knowledge of the risk and dangers accompanying unwanted children, will they shake off the chains of this shameful bondage.

  What a blast! Maybe, thought Stephen, I’ve underestimated the pangs of labor and the ruinous effect of childbearing on a mother’s health and happiness. He compared the martyrish tone of the pamphlet with the tender cooing sounds he had heard Celia make while she nursed and bathed her babies. Against the neurotic statements of What Every Free Woman Should Know he placed the joyous testimony shining from the eyes of a thousand young mothers whose infants he had baptized. Someone was maltreating the truth. …

  Stephen’s impulse was to ask the Honorable Aloysius Noonan, Mayor of Hartfield, why the statutes against the dissemination of birth-control literature weren’t being enforced. Testing the idea on Ambrose Cannell, he got thirty seconds of meditative pipesmoke and a well-considered “I wouldn’t do it, Bishop” from his Vicar-General.

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” said Ambrose Cannell, “your vestments would get all chewed up in the interlocking gears of Hartfield politics, industry, and finance. They do interlock, you know. And some of the most important levers are thrown by the delicately gloved hand of Mrs. F. Dennison Towle, president of the Planned Motherhood League.”

  “Should I be impressed? Frightened? Tell me more.”

  “I’ll tell you all I know.” Amby Cannell turned portraitist. “Mrs. F. Dennison Towle (born Imogene Barlow) is that not-unusual combination of wealth, blood, energy, and social position often encountered in American cities of the second magnitude. She’s a Mayflower descendant, a personage in the D.A.R., and a prominent alumna of Bryn Mawr. As you might suspect, she’s unhappily married—and childless. What you mightn’t suspect is that she’s not unattractive in a pince-nez sort of way.”

  Amby Cannell selected a fine brush for the next detail. “Lady Imogene, as we call her, is full of gushing kindliness to insects and animals. With my own ears I’ve heard her call them ‘wee beasties.’”

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Two years ago she brought out, privately, a puce-colored volume of verse entitled Rustlings from a Quiet Garden. It was reviewed in Horticulture, Opera Lore, and, of course, the Hartfield Item—in which Lady Imogene owns considerable stock. With the editors of these periodicals she keeps up a spirited, chatty correspondence about the gay bright faces of her petunias, the haunting overmelodies of Parsifal, and the wretched condition of the childbearing American woman.” Amby Cannell concluded his sketch with an interesting bit of information. “Under the rose, Your Excellency, What Every Free Woman Should Know dripped from the pen of Imogene Barlow herself.”

  “Has our well-placed Mrs. Towle a special dispensation to break the laws? A court test might cut her down to size.”

  Tact, courage, and a British distaste for unedifying spectacles were in Amby CannelTs reply. “Legal action would be … messy. Why not fight her with moral weapons—a pastoral letter, perhaps—exposing the fallacies and roundly condemning the dangers of birth control?”

  The Bishop of Hartfield was able to recognize a good idea even when it came from a subordinate. “Thanks for the suggestion, Amby. I’ll think it over.”

  TO LAY BARE the moral and psychologic errors of birth control and to rebut them in a pastoral letter was no casual week-end task. Stephen’s first step was to familiarize himself with the best medical opinion on the subject. Much of it was contradictory, yet with curious unanimity doctors of all schools agreed that four, five, or even a half a dozen children would not jeopardize the health of a well-nourished, properly cared-for American woman of the middle or upper class.

  Still, such women were in the minority. What about homes blighted by poverty and already overcrowded with children? What of wives whose ill-health made further childbearing dangerous? To cover these cases, the Church prescribed one of two courses: the admittedly difficult practice of continence or the newly discovered rhythm system based upon careful calculation of female periods of fertility.

  Lastly, Stephen studied the papal utterances celebrating the sacramental nature of marriage and advocating economic measures that must be taken to protect the family. In Leo XIII’s Arcanum he followed the closely reasoned argument that the vigor and welfare of civil society depends upon the “domestic society” of the home. When the home is weakened by laxity, licentiousness, or economic want, said Leo, the State is in grievous danger. In the encyclical Casti connubi of Pius XI, the reigning Pope exalted children as the prime blessing of marriage, and a source of compensation for the sorrows of life. Pius XI restated Leo’s teaching that “the State should adopt economic measures enabling every head of a family to earn as much as is necessary for himself, his wife, and the rearing of his children. … To deny him this wage, or to pay him less than is equitable, is a grave injustice, placed by Holy Scripture among the very greatest of sins.”

  Collating his material in the light of Catholic morality, medical science, and human happiness, Stephen wrote his pastoral letter on the subject of birth control. He made several drafts, trying always for greater clarity of thought and simplicity of language. On the second Sunday in Lent the following letter was read from every pulpit in the Hartfield Diocese:

  Beloved Brethren:

  The special grace conferred by God on the sacrament of matrimony perfects human love and makes both husband and wife holy. In the excellent mystery of wedlock the married partners joyously yield themselves to each other for mutual solace and the propagation of mankind. To tamper with these mysteries is an offense against God, an affront to nature, and a defeat to conjugal love. Yet the partisans of birth control criminally propose such tampering. In defiance of moral and natural law, they disseminate theories of marriage contrary to Catholic teaching, hurtful to the individual, and ruinous to die State.

  It is my duty, as Bishop, to counsel you against the errors set in motion by the advocates of birth control. They will approach you with arguments unfounded in medical science or economic truth. You will be urged to thwart, by means of drugs and devices, the deepest instincts of parental love. In exchange for the jubilant promise of the Catholic nuptial Mass, “Thy children shall be as olive plants about thy table,” you will be offe
red the barren husks of a Planned Motherhood pamphlet.

  By stressing the physical risks of childbearing, birth-control literature conveys a false and morbid picture of maternal fruition. Labor is indeed a heavy ordeal, yet as our Saviour Himself has said: “A woman when she has brought forth a child remembereth no more the anguish for joy that a man-child is born into the world” Physicians will tell you that women who refuse to accept children as the crowning fulfillment of life pay a penalty more prolonged and infinitely heavier than the temporary pangs of childbirth. No frustration is deadlier than that of the woman who deliberately evades the responsibility of motherhood.

  Exponents of birth control often ask: “Why should more children be brought into a world plagued by economic insecurity?” To these the Catholic Church sternly replies: “Our duty is not to prevent life from entering the world, but to make the world a better place for life to enter!” Squalor, disease, and undernourishment are caused not by large families, but by social inequities condemned long ago by Leo XIII. Pinching off the life stream is not the cure for poverty and unemployment. These are evils that must be remedied by economic, not criminal, measures.

  It is not the mission of the Church to frame social legislation. It is, however, the duty of the Church to warn society that unless these problems are solved, fearful dangers will engulf our people and destroy our State.

  I remind Catholics in particular that the practice of birth control is a crime not only against the body and the State, but, more importantly, against the immortal soul. As Pius XI has said in his encyclical on Catholic marriage: “Since the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.”