They showed him the Vatican grounds, elegant gardens that were too trimmed and too neat. They showed him the Vatican post office. They took him around to the Vatican radio and TV studios.
“Holiness. Holiness.”
“Willie’s okay.”
“Yes, Holiness.”
They took him to the Vatican library and showed him the hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts that were kept there and the rare documents that men had written centuries before and Bibles that were elaborately scrolled, huge tomes that had been made by monks back in the eleventh century.
The scholars in the library rooms looked at the pope as he came through, and some of them smiled and some of them frowned. Vague whispers followed him as he went.
There were thousands of scholars in the Vatican, ransacking the past for various proofs positive.
They took him to the new glass building which housed the RevCon office and the computers which were writing the documents issued by the recent computerized council.
Cardinal Tisch was in charge here. He tried to explain to Willie and Felder what the computers were capable of doing. “These council documents, you see—”
Felder said, “The pope is interested in Etherea at the moment—in getting food there.”
“We can run the problem through,” said Tisch.
“We want planes,” said Felder.
“That is another department, Herr Felder.”
Excitedly Willie said, “Do you really think you could organize something, Herman?”
“I’d like to try,” said Felder.
It took him three weeks to do it—three weeks of phone calls, telegrams, press releases and what Profacci called unseemly pressure on JERCUS diplomats—but Felder succeeded in organizing an airlift of fifty-nine planeloads of food and other supplies to Etherea.
The planes were turned back, but Felder moved into the RevCon office to organize whatever could be organized using the computers.
Willie, though saddened by the news of the planes, rejoiced in the Herman Felder who had been born into the world.
* * *
One fine afternoon the officials drove him to the palace at Castel Gandolfo where the popes of many years had spent their summers.
On the way they passed an old gate where the legions of the Caesars had once entered the city and which the government of Italy had spent a great deal of money trying to restore.
Monsignor Taroni and Cardinal Liderant and Cardinal Profacci explained the meaning of the gate to Willie.
But Willie did not hear their explanation. He was looking at the sprawling gold-tinted slums that rose on every side, an enormous crumbling jungle of tenements which had been built ten years earlier for the poor of Rome.
“This housing—” he began.
“Our urban renewal program,” said Profacci. “Considered exemplary.”
“Beyond the hill there,” said Liderant, “is the catacomb of Priscilla. Perhaps you would be interested in a visit?”
The slums gave way to newer public housing, which featured much glass so that the poor could look at one another and also see the older slums they had left and the even poorer people who still lived there with the rats.
They were not the worst slums Willie had seen, but they were slums all the same, gold-tinted slums, with glass.
When they came to Castel Gandolfo, they were in the ancient times suddenly: flowers, little shops, quaint, cobbled streets, a sparkling sixteenth century village.
They showed Willie his castle.
Willie sighed. “It’s very nice,” he said, and made little circles with his hands.
“Perhaps you would wish to spend some time here?”
Willie said no but asked if Cardinal Profacci could arrange that the castle be turned into a playhouse for the children of the slums they had passed through.
“This is the papal palace,” said Profacci.
“The children could pretend many things,” Willie said, a little excited by his idea. “I’m sure we can make it a nice place to play.”
“The value of this estate—” Profacci began, but Liderant cut him off.
“Let us go to the catacomb of Priscilla. His Holiness would find that interesting I am sure.”
But Willie found the catacomb full of staleness and death. There was something in the depths that frightened him, and he wanted to leave as soon as they had descended.
“The heroism of the first ones,” said Liderant.
Willie felt the chill of the place, the damp hand of the enemy reaching out.
“Let us go up, please,” he said.
So they went up into the sunshine where hundreds of tourists stood about in bright summer clothes. When they saw the pope, they applauded and cheered and took pictures. Willie tried to smile, but it was sad to see them there. He could not understand the attraction of the catacomb of Priscilla.
On another day they showed him the works of art that belonged to the Vatican—sculptures and jewels and chalices and splendid paintings and gold mosaics.
They went from gallery to gallery, looking at it all until the art was a blur to Willie.
The paintings were of Jesus and the saints and the Virgin Mary and the Fathers of the Church and emperors and popes and kings and queens and the heads of families from Florence and Naples and Milan.
Cardinal Liderant did much of the explaining, and Willie listened politely, but as Profacci said later, “It was all lost on him.”
All the while Liderant talked, Willie made those same little circles with his hands that the three men puzzled over.
What Willie thought when he looked at those treasures concerned things the cardinals had no understanding of, the ways men have of trying to save things, of making something for after school that the professor could not claim.
At noon each day they led him to a window of his apartment that looked out over the piazza of Saint Peter, where the obelisk pointed a finger to the sun and the fountains splashed and where thousands of people were gathered, all looking up at the window.
Willie would wave to the people and then bless them and wish them happiness and ask them to help the poor a little more.
VIVA PAPA! VIVA PAPA!
Every two days there would be a public audience held in a huge room that looked like a hall out of an old-time movie dealing with kings and knights.
Willie liked the audiences because he could see the people and hear them sometimes individually, and they looked happy and exceedingly good to him as they stood cheering and waving their handkerchiefs and sometimes calling out the names of their hometowns.
They carried him into this hall in a chair that was fun to ride in, but Willie did not want to be carried around by men, so he took to walking down the long length of the corridor, though the security guards advised against it, and the journey often took thirty to forty minutes because everyone wanted to touch the pope or give him a white cap in exchange for the one he was wearing, and he would chat with the people as much as he could, though he could not understand anything not spoken in English.
The people were happy and excited to see him, and it made him happy to see them that way.
“Viva!” they would shout. And, “Wee-leeee!”
Always and everywhere they wanted to take his picture with their shiny miniature TV cameras or their self-developing movie cameras and they would ask him to speak certain things and bless them or walk or motion to them in some way so that what they filmed would be personal to them, and though he tried to do all that they asked, there was never enough time to make a movie for everyone; and when the audiences ended an hour, sometimes two hours late, the men who were to keep him on schedule were always upset. Profacci told him that the audiences were not the main job of a pope, and Willie always promised to try to do better but instead, at the next audience, he would do worse.
He took to celebrating Mass in the evenings, at about six o’clock, with Father Benjamin and Felder, Truman and Joto, who were with him now almost con
stantly.
Felder had taken rooms in a small pension not far from the Vatican, but he spent most nights at the RevCon office. The other Servants lived at the Vatican with Willie.
The presence of the Servants in the Vatican bothered the officials, especially Profacci and Liderant.
“Who are they?” asked the vice-prefect of the Congregation of Rites.
“Strange, deluded, perhaps dangerous men,” his companion replied. “Cardinal Profacci has warned the pope about associating with such people.”
“Felder is not a lawful person,” another official said in another office on another day. “Yet he controls RevCon.”
“He killed a man once, it is said,” his friend replied. “Cardinal Orsini is conducting an investigation.”
“Who is Benjamin Victor?”
“The one man, the dumb man, is not even a believer in God. Yet the pope gives him Communion.”
Willie heard none of this gossip, or if he heard it, he did not listen. Nor did he listen to the other criticism he was beginning to stir up. Almost everything he said or did caused criticism somewhere.
When Willie told an audience that Christ was coming, the Congregation of Sacred Doctrine complained that the pope spoke as a Jew, as if the Christ had not come many centuries ago.
When he told a group of journalists that whoever had built the Vatican on a circus ground had made a great mistake in judgment because most circuses are holier than most churches, every ecclesiastic in Rome raised an eyebrow.
The next day the eyebrows went up even higher when Willie, joking along in the same vein, said that he had been giving the matter of the circus further thought and had changed his mind. The builders of the Vatican had been right after all—they had taken an old, tired circus ground and built a new perpetual circus where it stood, and he asked the people if they did not agree: had they ever seen such a funny circus as this one, with so many clowns running around, himself being the biggest clown of all? And with that he tilted the tiara he had worn for the occasion and winked at the crowd and did a little jig as the crowd laughed uproariously.
“Disgraceful!” said Cardinal Liderant.
“A travesty!” said Cardinal Profacci.
“A sacrilege!” said Cardinal Picalli, whose hands were always pressed into a thin white cathedral and who was regarded as the most pious man in Rome because he always looked at the floor and let other people go through the door first.
But much as Willie smiled and clowned before the people, he was deeply troubled inside. When he was alone, a look of unutterable sadness came over his face. He could not get his mind off the sufferings of Angola and Etherea and of the people in other places of the world who were sad, starving, in jail, ill, drugged or spirited out of their human ways.
When the learned men who headed the various congregations of the church came to him, Willie would listen to their problems attentively and with a sincere desire to understand.
But their problems, the matters that concerned them, did not seem important compared to the sufferings he knew to exist in the world and he would ask them suddenly, “Yes, but what of Angola?” or, “We have got to help the starving people of Etherea.”
The learned men, whispering among themselves, said the pope did not understand the problems of the church or the ways of the church, that he wanted to talk only of war and starvation and poverty, as if these evils were new in the world and as if they, the learned men, did not also deplore them and as if they were in a position to do anything about them.
One day Willie asked to see Cardinal Liderant, the canon lawyer who had temporarily taken over the chairmanship of the Papal Commission on International Justice after the death of a man who had held the office for thirty years. Monsignor Nervi came with Liderant as the chief writer of past papal documents.
Willie spoke of the conditions in the countries he had recently visited. He told his visitors of the people who were starving everywhere in the world and of the wars that were going on in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America. They listened to him with a weary air, Nervi making notes. In his briefcase, Liderant had a thousand pages of statistics on poverty, hunger, war and other illnesses of the world.
“I have to do something; we all must do something,” said Willie. “Do you have any suggestions?”
The two men were silent for a moment. Then Liderant said, “An encyclical on these subjects would perhaps do no harm. Monsignor Nervi, the last letter the computer drafted for Felix—you have it with you?”
“Ah yes, Peace, Joy and Light,” said Nervi and handed Willie a fifty-page booklet.
Willie slowly read the first paragraph of Peace, Joy and Light then put it down.
“Most people wouldn’t understand that,” he said. “I do not understand it, for instance.”
With one blue hand Monsignor Nervi returned the booklet to his briefcase.
“We must remember that the world press received the work of our esteemed and august predecessor with great respect. Our hearts were full of joy,” said Nervi.
“But what difference did it make?” said Willie.
“One can’t expect immediate results, Your Holiness,” said Liderant. “The problems you speak of are very old. And also very complicated.”
“There’s a better way than writing a statement.”
“What is that, Holiness?”
“I don’t know.”
“If our conscience moves us to speak,” said Nervi, “we could, with burning sorrow, begin a new encyclical. Our title might be War, Sorrow and Darkness.”
Willie said, “Something new is called for—a certain way of living—a way of being, I don’t have the words for it,” and he made the little circles with his hands. “It is not enough to only write and speak; I know that much.”
“Writing and speaking are what a pope does,” said Liderant, wiping his forehead. “Practically all that a pope can do. You must remember, Holiness, the nature of the office.”
“Jesus wrote nothing but a few words in sand,” Willie replied. “And after all he didn’t say so very much.”
Willie, going to the window, looked down at the fountains bubbling in the piazza.
“We are supposed to bring abundant life,” he said, “not words.”
Liderant said, “The recent council proposed various courses of action. But I am told those documents are being delayed. The computers work on other things.”
“The council’s proposals are only—principles,” said Willie. “Like what we had in the seminary. Cardinal Tisch showed me the outline of what the documents will say. Brother Herman Felder then asked to use the computers to form a new strategy—a design he calls it.” He turned from the window. “I have great faith in Brother Herman. He is a good organizer. I do not believe much in computers, but we must be patient and try all things. As we wait though, the children starve. Will you pray tonight that our hearts be ready to attempt completely new things?”
They went away, Nervi like a wisp of smoke, Liderant like a frustrated tutor.
“He doesn’t know anything about anything,” Liderant told Profacci that evening. “An absolute simpleton.”
“We are proceeding with our investigation of the Society,” said Profacci. “Meanwhile, perhaps we should investigate other possibilities?”
“Like what?”
“A pope judged mentally inadequate could be brought to retire.”
“Talk sense, Ernesto.”
“If he scandalizes souls—”
“Stop it, please. Be a little reasonable. There is no question of scandal. It is just the prospect of years of disorganization and nonsense.”
“I do not think you appreciate the influence he has upon people. Tisch is beginning to come under the sway of Felder. Then there is Taroni.”
“What about Taroni?”
“He was in my office this morning,” Profacci said. “He said that the pope had told him that if people had greater love for one another, the problems of the world would not be so bad.
”
“So?”
“Why, it is such a stupid statement! Don’t we all agree and understand that indeed it would be a fine idea if the nations of the world loved one another? Who can fault that? A pope must show some sophistication. A pope is a figure of world—respect.”
“How does this concern Taroni?” said Liderant.
“Taroni said to me with a ludicrous expression on his face, ‘He’s right too, when you think about it. That’s what really matters after all.’ And Taroni is a man of the world.”
“Ah well, there is something touching about the fellow.”
“Don’t tell me he’s getting to you, Henri.”
“Touching, I mean, to certain types of people. Simple people. I’ll have another strega.”
Chapter two
The lights of the RevCon office burned on, night after night.
At first the Vatican specialists distrusted Herman Felder, but soon they gave way to his obvious administrative gifts.
Even Cardinal Tisch, still the titular head of the office, admitted grudgingly, “He has a genius for directing a complicated operation.”
Each morning Willie met with Felder, whose reports he did not usually understand. But Felder gave him the feeling of a great enterprise soon to be launched.
One morning Felder showed him a printout map of the world that had been prepared by one of the computers.
The map showed the global distribution of food and mineral and other resources, what Felder called the real productive wealth of the world.
The real wealth, concentrated in the northern JERCUS countries, appeared in red on the map.
The lower sections of the map were pink, shading into white.
“We’ve got seventeen, eighteen percent of the world using almost ninety percent of the goodies,” Felder explained. “What we have to do is spread it around,” his hand swept over the non-JERCUS nations, “through new economic strategies.”
“How?” Willie asked.
“Not through any of the aid programs, which amount to only a fraction of one percent of GNP and come back to the rich countries anyway. We need big-push outlays—tremendous capital investment from the north, so that the twelfth century countries can get on their feet. We have the machinery for redistribution in the old World Bank. Long-term, low-interest loans—”
The Last Western Page 38