The Judas Cloth

by Julia O'Faolain

  The service was inaudible. Could the poor acoustics in this Council Chamber be deliberate? A way to muffle dissent and make us all harmonise like bells?

  Now, with much shuffling and rustling, the Council Fathers filed up to kiss the Pope’s hand, knee or – according to rank – toe. In the gallery reserved for lay dignitaries sat the ex-King of Naples, the Empress of Austria, the Czar of Russia’s sister, the former Duke and Duchess of Parma, and other ornaments of old Europe. Glittering like amphibians, they were perhaps dreaming of a time when their kind had been secure in its own element.

  Monsieur de Banneville was doyen of the diplomatic corps. The Emperor, who had for a while upset Pope Pius by sending him free-thinkers, now sent aristocrats – perhaps to satisfy in small ways a man he planned to throw to the wolves? Among whom, thought Dupanloup who knew his nickname, Pius is wrong to count me. He would know his friends better if he had laboured to more purpose on the political treadmill.

  Dupanloup had learned about that when helping Prince Talleyrand de Périgord to make a Christian death. Thirty-one years ago now! The prince had been the most skilled of turncoats, and news that he had turned to God when His kingdom was about to come for him had aroused widespread hilarity. But the Abbé Dupanloup – who had been the butt of some of it – had not doubted a repentance rooted in what the old prince described as ‘moral fatigue and deep disgust’. Politics had left the arch-politician with ashes in his mouth and the abbé had caught the burned-out effluvium. Talleyrand, ex-royalist, ex-revolutionary, ex-Bonapartist and ex-bishop, had in the end signed a paper repudiating the world’s excesses and his share therein. This had satisfied the priest in Dupanloup but disturbed the man. Thinking of it now, he found more detachment in the great worldling than in himself – who was heartbroken to be seen as an enemy here, in a city which he loved. He was suffering too at Mastai’s coldness for, entwined with his exasperation, he felt tenderness for the obstinate old pope and had been trying not to hurt him when he warned that to define the doctrine would be ‘inopportune’. But the word was a red rag to the Curia.

  *

  The main body of the basilica was surmounted by a cloud. Many in the congregation had arrived soaked and, as the place warmed up, vapour rose, feet steamed like puddings and now, five hours later, it looked as though a locomotive had driven through.

  ‘Libera nos, domine.’

  Maximin Giraud was trying to do his Zouave uniform honour by standing as straight as the nobs from the Noble Guard, but was tormented by an itch. Fleas? Bedbugs? Lice? In a crowd like this there must be congregations of all three. He was shocked to hear the Zouave behind him parody the litany. Some chaps in the battalion were none too stable. Maximin, whose own stability had been put in doubt, recognised an alien brand of crackiness.

  ‘Good Lord deliver us …’

  A priest looked around. Maximin knew he was French by his neckband. He had thought of being a priest himself once.

  ‘… from Bishop Félix Dupanloup …’

  That Zouave was looking for trouble. The priest looked at Maximin who didn’t move a muscle. His confessors had told him that he owed it to God and man to get respect. This, he argued, was a burden with which he needed help. ‘But,’ the last one had said, ‘you’re not easily helped, Maximin!’ He’d got him into the Zouaves, though, and maybe something would come of that? There were bigwigs here today. One might take him up.

  ‘Our Lady,’ the last confessor had said, ‘didn’t show herself to you for your own sake. You bring hope to millions.’ Humanity’s worst fear, said the priest, was that God had forgotten it and so any divine message was a consolation, even a stern one. Maybe indeed stern ones were best? Prophesying plagues and penalties, Maximin and Mélanie had explained the potato blight, the failed walnut and cereal crops, and the famine. People were consoled by that. They preferred punishment to random bad luck.

  The word stuck in Maximin’s head. Had he, while delivering other people from randomness, got stuck in it himself? ‘If I’ve to get respect,’ he’d argued, ‘wouldn’t it be safer if …’

  ‘Not money, Maximin.’ The confessor was curt. ‘You’re getting no more out of me. It doesn’t help you. I’m sorry.’

  Maximin’s hopes had been raised, then cruelly dashed. On his way here from France, he’d met someone who’d had the same experience. A former boy-soprano, the chap had had a taste of fame until he lost his voice and couldn’t, he explained, take to anything else. Not after the professional satisfaction he’d known.

  ‘That’s it!’ Maximin had never before met anyone who understood. They’d met in a Marseilles café and, by the evening’s end, got as drunk as lords. Before that, the singer had tried, gravely and wistfully, to sing. Then he wept and Maximin almost joined in. The parallel with his own life was striking. He had been a famous visionary when he was eleven. He was now thirty-four.

  When the singer passed out, the waiter explained that he was a castrato who had left Rome after losing his voice. ‘The poor bastard lost the other thing when he was eight. He’s one of the Italian exiles here. The police know him well. He’s a Garibaldino.’

  Maximin, who was joining the Zouaves to fight Garibaldini, left the place hurriedly.

  ‘… from Archbishop Georges Darboy …’

  There must be some row going on between bishops. Maximin wasn’t surprised. Since the age of eleven, he had seen a lot of churchmen. They were what he knew best: churchmen, not God. God hadn’t bothered with him again – if it had been God the first time – but churchmen took an interest in him and he, for the most part, kept his doubts to himself. After all – who cries ‘stinking fish’?

  ‘Beware of Doubting Thomases!’ a priest had warned. ‘They’ll stick their fingers into the wound of your doubt. They did it to Christ, so you can expect it too.’

  That was after he’d been caught out in contradictions by the Curé d’Ars whose questions had reduced him to saying he wasn’t sure he had seen a vision, after all. There had been a terrible scandal then and threats of punishments for deceit and blasphemy. Luckily, the thing was patched up and Maximin told not to talk openly, even to priests. Holy things, he was told, should be mysterious. The hunt for precision was the vice of our time.

  He agreed with that. Life was a cloudy business. Look at today! Hours of standing had made his head swim and brought on a kind of fever which, at moments, swept you up, only to return you later to the throb of back pain and the ache of a full bladder. Judging by the smells, some had succumbed to that.

  6–7 January, 1870

  At night now Cardinal Amandi was often agitated and couldn’t settle. Instead, he rose, creaked open drawers and could be found riffling papers. Sometimes a desk-top banged. Courtesy and patience with the world were deserting him.

  Tonight the papers rustled like restive doves: images of the Holy Ghost who was, Amandi had contended over dinner, ‘mute and muzzled’. Archbishop Darboy with some of his priests had been his guests and they had sat up late, drinking sweet wine into which the cardinal liked to dip biscuits. There had been a special cake too, for today had been the Feast of the Epiphany.

  Talk was interrupted by the scraping of metal, as the cardinal’s knife encountered a miniature king, a reminder from the cook that the Epiphany was also called the Feast of the Wise Kings. Amandi put the effigy on the side of his plate.

  Nicola tapped at his door. It was 3 a.m. ‘A little opium?’ he suggested, but Amandi ignored this. The Church, he declared, standing there in his nightshirt, was threatened from within! He tapped his forehead. ‘He’s put himself above the Council.’

  ‘Eminence, what about a tisane?’

  ‘Don’t soothe me, Santi! Twenty-four years. It’s the longest reign since St Peter’s, which was twenty-five. Do you remember the old prophecy?’

  ‘That if any pope’s reign matches it the Church will founder.’

  ‘No need to laugh. It’s what the habit of power does to a man that’s dangerous. Lord Acton is shocked by the fo
rm chosen for the conciliar decrees. Listen.’ Amandi read from a paper. ‘“Pius, Bishop, Servant of God’s Servants” – here, you read it.’

  Nicola read, ‘‘‘… with the approval of the Sacred Council orders …’’’

  ‘Exactly! “Orders”! He does. Not the Council! So why summon it? To deceive the world? At Trent – Acton tells me – they said, “The Sacred Synod, etc., ordains …” And now the Prefect of the Sacred Archives, Father Theiner, has been forbidden to let us see the Trent agenda! He doesn’t want it known that our predecessors, in 1545, did their own ordaining!’ Amandi’s grimace smudged his face like smoke.

  ‘You need your sleep.’

  ‘We’ve been asleep.’ Pouncing on papers, the cardinal’s hand was a fox in a hennery. ‘Read this.’ His ring glinted like an eye.

  It was headed ‘Fetters placed on the Council’s Freedom’. Vertical Roman numerals vibrated blackly. Nicola read on. ‘“One, bad acoustics; two, oath of secrecy; three, prohibition to print.’’’

  ‘That only applies to us,’ said the cardinal. ‘The toadies can print what they like.’

  Nicola read, ‘“Four, prohibition to meet in groups of more than fifteen.’” The strokes of the numerals made a cage.

  ‘Ditto,’ said the cardinal. ‘Only to us!’

  ‘“Five, the Curia prepared the agenda before we got here.”’

  ‘They rigged the elections to the key commissions! His minion, Manning, did that. The Commission on Faith hasn’t one anti-infallibilist on it! So now the Council is in his hands.’ Amandi’s eye pierced Nicola. ‘Yet the doctrine hasn’t been officially mentioned. Why? Are they planning a sudden move? To spring it on us? Have it passed by acclamation?’

  ‘Surely, Archbishop Darboy put a stop to that?’

  Darboy had let it be known that if such a move were attempted one hundred bishops would walk out ‘and take the Council with them in their shoes’.

  ‘It’s whispered,’ Amandi suffered a spurt of laughter, ‘that Pius expects a celestial apparition to do the job for him.’ His laughter turned to a groan. ‘I’ve grown blasphemous! I’ll end by damning my soul.’

  Scenes like this – there had been many – kept Nicola in a state of distress. By now even innocent Liberal bishops were worried and the alert were on the rack. He, lying low as he had resolved to do, watched anger mount like a man watching a storm through glass. At least the fear of a definition by acclamation had, he assured Amandi, been warded off. The proof was that the infallibilists had got up a petition begging Pius to put the question on the agenda.

  ‘And that means a debate and a vote.’

  Since opposition within the Council had been all but throttled, battles were fought in corridors and alcoves and, on nights like this, in Nicola’s head where Amandi and Prospero pulled in opposite ways. The wrangle was bitter. His view of himself as an agent conciliateur was proving over-optimistic and he knew that if his understanding with Prospero became known, Amandi would be deeply hurt. Yet his reason for not surrendering the role still stood – another agent would take his place – so he had to continue. Neither could he warn the Minority lest exasperation drive them to some excess. Meanwhile, his friends’ minds were in a fume; they were angry with each other and each accused him of belonging to the ranks of the tepid whom Christ spewed out of his mouth.

  Last Saturday, meeting Prospero on the Pincian Hill, he had assured him that the anti-Infallibilists did not, in their innocence, see any need to intrigue. To help that sink in, he added: ‘Surely the Holy Ghost doesn’t need a rigged Council?’

  Prospero admitted that His Holiness had in fact favoured letting one member of the Opposition onto the Deputation on Faith. ‘For the look of the thing. Manning, however …’

  ‘Is he out of control?’

  Oh, said Prospero, Westminster lacked Roman suavitas.

  Close by a band struck up. Children were rolling hoops. Avoiding the din, the two bishops moved towards the parapet. Across the river lay the Vatican in a prospect of fields. Controversy, Prospero acknowledged, was quickening.

  And the Minority, said Nicola slyly, had had a victory! A bill dogmatising the first part of the Syllabus of Errors had been sent back for redrafting. Bishops had described it as ‘verbal dysentery’ and ‘fit only for a decent burial’. Pius, who had expected a docile Council, was said to be shaken and the Curia which had drafted the bill, stunned. No doubt, retorted Prospero, German bishops, knowing themselves tainted with Protestantism and related heresies, had acted from fear. Was Nicola sure no intriguing was going on?

  Nicola, fearful of being replaced by a more hawk-eyed agent, promised to stay on the qui vive.

  Prospero, meanwhile, declared himself unruffled by the Minority’s victory which would surely be their last. ‘If we change the electoral rules so that a bill can be passed by a majority of one, they will be unable to obstruct the Council’s work. Why should two hundred men out of seven hundred and fifty be allowed to do so?’

  Nicola protested that those figures were meaningless, since the Minority bishops represented great and populous dioceses such as Paris, Prague, Orléans and Cologne, while men like himself and Prospero represented imaginary ones. ‘There are two hundred titulars voting with the Majority. We’ve been used to pack the Council. Half the so-called Majority are Italians! Do you think we represent half the Christian world?’

  ‘So that’s the kind of talk going on!’ Prospero’s smile congratulated his friend for keeping his ear to the ground. Forget numbers, he advised. Or remember this one: almost two thousand years of continuity lay behind the Church. Were we to trade that for some trumpery notion of fairness? ‘Bishops do not represent anyone. They are the successors of the apostles!’ His hand on Nicola’s arm propelled him gently through the throng of promenaders.

  ‘There’s your devil!’ he murmured of a small, ascetic-looking prelate who was walking with a bearded gentleman. Manning of Westminster had been called ‘the devil of the Council’ because of his intrigues, and indeed had the look of a spider, being thin as a whip, with clenched jaw and a mouth like a slit. Nicola recognised his companion as the British agent Odo Russell.

  ‘Conspiring?’ he wondered.

  ‘Oh I think it’s the Minority who whore after secular governments. They have had telegrams to the effect that Count Daru, the new French Minister for Foreign Affairs, is “ready to be of service”. The telegrams were seen, by the Post Office – and we know the sort of help France can give.’

  ‘I can’t think why you need me. I didn’t know this.’

  ‘Well, you should try to know such things! Monseigneur Dupanloup’s friends meet in the Orangerie of the Palazzo Borghese and are called “the Orangistes”. Join them. Find out whether Daru’s appointment means that the Emperor will withdraw his troops.’

  ‘No bishop would want that.’

  ‘Who knows?’ Prospero turned into a leafy side alley.

  ‘They are more innocent,’ Nicola insisted, ‘than you think. I’ve met several who are amazed to be treated here as enemies. Amazed and hurt! These are men who think of this as their spiritual home. Who come from divided countries and …’

  ‘Are contaminated?’

  ‘No, are used to respecting people with whom they disagree.’

  They had moved in under close-knit evergreens. There was only one other promenader here, Father Grassi, who caught and held Nicola’s hands in the stemmed, pale chalice of his own. Prospero was gone before Nicola knew it – had this then been arranged? – and he was alone with the Jesuit in a seaweedy dimness so oppressive that a small boy, running in after a ball, bolted like a rabbit which has found a ferret in its warren.

  Darkness suited Grassi. Like celery, he might have grown in it, for he was now bald and his pate glistened. Swaying and rubbing Nicola’s imprisoned hands, he explained that Prospero had not wished to appeal to their friendship. From delicacy. ‘He felt you would find it easier to refuse me! We hope you will work with us.’

  Pu
shing aside a branch, he made a window in the greenery to reveal Manning and Russell strolling in a contiguous alley. They were out of earshot. As the branch swung back, it sprayed drops on his cassock which reflected the purple at Nicola’s throat.

  *

  That had been last Saturday and now here was Amandi too looking for a declaration of solidarity. Tremulous in his night attire, he made a show of tidying his papers and tried not to beg for this from Nicola whose holding back – due to scruples – he divined. ‘Those who are neither hot nor cold …’ He let out a self-deriding cackle. Today’s ceremony had left him on the boil.

  It was to have been the first Open Session designed to publish the Council’s findings in the presence of Pope and public. But, having rejected the schema on the Syllabus, the Fathers had nothing to publish and were told that a stopgap ceremony had been devised wherein each must solemnly retake his ordination oath and declare his loyalty. They were being called publicly to heel and saw the humiliation as a signal from Mastai who had let it be known that he could feel his infallibility. The Catholic press was publishing similar claims and, back in their dioceses, every biddable Tom, Dick and Harry was encouraged to sign petitions urging the bishops to follow the Pope’s line. Caught between grinding stones, episcopal consciences were being reduced to chaff.

  ‘Well,’ demanded Amandi at last, ‘do you agree with me?’

  Nicola told him he did and said, for good measure, as he had to Father Grassi, that he prayed for harmony in the Holy Spirit. Surely we could all agree about that? Well, no! Both Amandi and Grassi – at one in this – thought the Holy Spirit needed help.

  ‘You disapprove of intrigue?’ Grassi had asked. ‘But should we not prevent others intriguing? Will you agree that whoever is sending information from inside the Council to a German newspaper – thus breaking his oath of silence – is a traitor?’