Vatican Vendetta: A thrilling battle of power and politics

by Peter Watson

  And it might have worked had not Castro himself decided to go to New York to address the United Nations.

  The main assembly hall was packed for the occasion, and he did not disappoint them. He strode to the lectern in his familiar fatigues, as if he’d just been fighting a bush fire. It was some time since anyone had seen him – he hardly travelled these days. His beard was greyer but every bit as bushy as they remembered. All his virility was still there.

  He stood, while the applause lasted, neither smiling nor acknowledging the meeting. After it died away, he waited like a good actor for the silence to take command. He had everyone’s attention.

  Slowly, deliberately, he raised his right arm. His hand held a bulky sheaf of white paper. The United States ambassador to the UN turned to his deputy and whispered, ‘If that’s what I think it is, the shit’s about to hit the fan.’

  ‘This,’ boomed Castro, his Spanish lilt big and buccaneering, ‘is a contract.’ He paused, slamming the document down in front of him on the lectern. ‘A contract between Cuba and the United States of America.’

  ‘No!’ breathed the American ambassador. ‘Please God, no.’

  ‘This contract,’ continued Castro, ‘is an agreement between our two countries. Despite our differences, Cuba has always allowed the United States to maintain its naval military base at Guantanamo Bay. We had no choice. Under an old – a very old – agreement, provided it paid two million dollars a year, the USA could keep its marines on Cuban soil. But for the past six months Americans and Cubans have been negotiating a new agreement.’ He tapped the contract. ‘To last for ten years. Under this agreement America keeps its base and in return Cuba will receive –’ and in an entirely unnecessary flourish he pulled his spectacles from his pocket and opened the contract as if to read. ‘Two point four billion dollars.’

  He looked up and over the top of his glasses. Suddenly he slapped the lectern with the open palm of his hand. ‘Not now!’ he bellowed. ‘Not now! This contract remains unsigned.’ Dramatically, he shoved the papers to one side so that they fell off the lectern and slumped to the floor. Press cameras clicked to capture this theatrical gesture. The more enterprising also focused on the American ambassador. He looked furious and embarrassed.

  ‘Cuba may be a poor country by American, by western, standards. But we are an honest country.’ Castro slapped the lectern again. ‘We will not negotiate with liars, with murderers, with assassins. With people who give money and asylum to brigands, tawdry exiles who enjoy nothing more than midnight adventures with weapons and boats and other people’s money.’ He glared around the hall. ‘I am going back to Cuba tonight. Straight away. I would not wish to sleep in a country where murderers breed so easily, where religious leaders, so-called, mix politics with worship. But I came here today to tell Americans – the west – three things.’ Again he paused. Reaching for a glass of water with one hand, he raised the other hand aloft, a single finger extended.

  ‘One!’ he bellowed. ‘The United States is, as from today, given notice to quit Guantanamo Bay on 31st December next year. We want every ship, every marine, every hamburger, every American cornflake OUT! Or we shall attack American forces on Cuban soil.

  ‘Two! The Cuban representative to the Holy See is withdrawn. The Catholic nuncio in Havana is expelled.

  ‘Three! Cuba’s diplomatic relations with Italy are severed as from this moment. We cannot – will not – do business with a government that harbours and nourishes such reactionary forces on its soil.’

  The spectacles went back into his pocket and he said more quietly, ‘My secretary was killed in the attempt to murder me. You didn’t know him like I did so you won’t miss him as much. But I’ll let you into a secret. Pino was about to leave his job with me. I had tried to stop him but he was determined. He intended to become a priest.’

  *

  At the beginning of his Presidency, James Roskill had not enjoyed the Tuesday press briefings at the White House. Many journalists were frighteningly well-informed. Also, they had a way of putting questions that riled him – and they seemed to enjoy that. However, the balance of the meetings had now changed, as the President grew more skilled and as his political successes made him more relaxed. He knew the journalists better, too, he could joke with them and he knew the simple power of referring to a bumptious pressman by his first name.

  The Tuesday after the Castro performance at the UN was clear if none too warm, but Roskill liked that. As he walked to the briefing he felt confident and not a little aggressive. He knew he looked a young sixty-three, energetic but experienced, too.

  As he entered the room all the journalists rose, for the office if not the man. Roskill was wearing a dark blue suit and a knitted woollen tie and in his hand he carried several sheets of paper.

  As they sat the journalists muttered expectantly to one another. They knew what those papers in Roskill’s hands meant. This was no routine briefing. The President was going to make a formal statement.

  He placed the papers on the lectern, looked up and smiled at his audience, nodding to one or two people in particular. That old vaudeville trick never failed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said and, as he did so, he raised the papers and held them high above his head, just as Castro had done at the UN. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he now repeated. ‘This is the contract. Yesterday, President Castro of Cuba, who is not a democratically elected leader, trashed this contract on American soil, soil that we gave to the United Nations in the hope that it would aid peace.’ He took the sheets of paper, turned them, and made as if to tear them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Until the attempt on President Castro’s life all that was needed on this contract was his signature and mine. It was an important contract for both countries. For the west and for peace. And it still is. For Cuba it provides aid – schools, hospitals, roads, barns, houses. There is a clause which ensures that the US will buy several million Havana cigars every year, a cause dear to my own heart.’ He patted his breast pocket where the tips of two cigars peeked out. ‘For the United States there is a guarantee that we shall keep our base in Guantanamo Bay well into the twenty-first century.

  ‘President Castro trashed his copy – or maybe it was a photocopy – because he believed that the US government, in concert with a team of thugs funded by the Vatican, had attempted to kill him. That is not true. The United States government had no part in, or knowledge of, this crazy adventure, and we thoroughly deplore all such actions.

  ‘I am also assured that the Holy Father in Rome also had no part in, or knowledge of, this fiasco. I may say that I personally regret that these Vatican funds, so worthwhile in their aim and so imaginatively raised, should be so poorly administered that they can be abused in this way. But who can doubt Pope Thomas’s word? It is shameful that President Castro should accuse him in this way.’

  His tone became more conversational. ‘Popes – and here I speak as a Catholic – are in a difficult position and I think we should all recognize that. They are democratically elected leaders only in the very narrowest sense: the Sacred College of Cardinals is barely a hundred strong and yet His Holiness’s constituency numbers fifty million in the US alone. His moral leadership cuts across national boundaries – and that gives him access to the countries of eastern Europe which have neither the privilege of free elections nor free churches. So his moral leadership is much needed, quite as much as the funds he has raised so spectacularly. But the funds, like his authority, must never be abused. The funds, like the Pope’s authority, are for charity, not politics.’

  His homily over, Roskill resumed a more brusque tone and he again raised the papers. ‘I shall not tear this up. The fact that the Cuban government and the American government got this far shows there is a need for cooperation. Last, and by no means least, I’ll let you into a secret.’ Now Roskill thumped the lectern exactly as Castro had done the day before at the UN, with the flat of his hand. ‘Contract or no contract, the United States is not leaving Guantanamo Bay!’


  He stepped down amid a chorus of ‘Mr President, Mr President’. But that day there were no questions. Roskill turned and walked briskly out of the room. Castro may have known how to make an entry but there was none better than the President when it came to making an exit.

  The press loved it. ‘Roskill calls Castro’s bluff’, announced the Los Angeles Times; ‘Prez nixes Cuban’, spat the New York Post. ‘In Cuba, like it or not’ yelled the Miami Herald. But it was perhaps the Observer in London which assessed the speech most thoughtfully on the following Sunday. Under the headline, ‘A stoning for Castro, a sermon for the Pope’, the paper’s Irish columnist, Slattery Doyle, wrote: ‘Amid the fuss that has followed President Roskill’s tough speech last week, when he reminded the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, of a few facts of political life as seen from Washington, one important factor has been overlooked. That is why the president felt it necessary to devote a whole segment of his speech to Pope Thomas. Indeed, so different was the president’s tone when referring to the Pope, that it was almost a speech within a speech. In his opening remarks, Roskill made it clear that, as all of us know, neither the US government, nor the Vatican, was involved in the doomed adventure to butcher Castro. This was a freelance operation – there have been similar ones before and there may well be others again. The Cubans in Florida, frankly, are a sorry bunch. All that made this operation different was the connection with the St Patrick’s Fund, set up by the Pope to help the poor from the proceeds of selling Vatican art treasures.

  ‘Why then did Roskill feel it necessary to go on and, in the nicest possible way, wearing the most expensive pair of kid gloves, warn His Holiness that his very popular policies for dealing with poverty must not go awry again? Is it because he is jealous of the Pope’s successes, which have made Roskill only the second most influential Catholic in the world today?

  ‘Or is it something else – a feeling, shared by several politicians around the world, that an active Pope, with funds and that moral authority which Roskill made so much of, could in time change the political map, making life a little more difficult, and a little less comfortable, for the old-style network? Perhaps Roskill would like us to see Pope Thomas as an interfering busybody? For certainly the Pope is now in a position to upset the best laid plans of misers and mendacious politicians.

  ‘This column’s job is to put the right questions, invite our readers to think for themselves, not provide facile answers. So here’s one more question: what would have been Roskill’s attitude to Thomas, and his fund, if the assassins had succeeded and Castro, not his secretary, had been killed?’

  David thought Doyle’s article interesting enough to call Bess in Rome and read it over to her. They had, as she put it, renewed diplomatic relations, though they were still tense. David had told her about his visit to Hale, and Hale’s reply, and that slender ray of hope was all they had. But, while they were both in such emotional, and moral, turmoil, she thought it better if they didn’t meet.

  Bess seemed concerned at Doyle’s piece.

  ‘What really bothers me is that both Roskill and this Doyle character know that relief work, if it’s done on any scale large enough to have an effect, cannot entirely ignore politics. Poverty is, after all, sometimes a result of political policies. Thomas knows this too. He’s aware of the dangers. But can’t Roskill see that if he lets them worry him he’d end up doing nothing?’

  ‘How did Thomas take Roskill’s speech?’

  ‘Basically he’s got other things on his mind. More important things. The encyclical is published next week. That will show what Thomas’s main concerns are.’

  Entitled Dignitas humana, the encyclical appeared as planned. It was a long, carefully argued document which concluded, as Bess and David knew all too well, that birth control by artificial methods was now permissible in the Catholic Church but that divorce was not. Thomas, who wrote the encyclical himself, argued that while there was no sanction for birth control in the gospels, neither was there anything which forbade it. He pointed to the obvious hardships brought on by over-population and argued that the absence of contraception was one of the factors that kept the poor poor. He reiterated that it was the duty of the Catholic families to have children. There need be no limit but the way was now open, he said, for men and women to follow their own consciences and stop when they felt enough was enough.

  He then went on to say that, if allowing contraception permitted parents to decide the number of children they had, then this should mean that the love which parents felt for their children should be undiluted by worries over whether they could be fed and educated. After long and painful consideration of the matter, after lengthy discussions around the world, he had concluded that the best way to ensure the greatest good for the greatest number of children was to maintain the traditional ban on divorce. Any weakening of the commitment between a man and a woman, anything that made separation more likely, impaired family life and was a psychological risk to the growing children in that marriage. Divorce, he said, was in many cases a self-indulgence on the part of parents, who needed to be reminded that their marriage was a sacrament and that their first duty was to bring up their children in God.

  Reaction around the world varied enormously but again, curiously, it was Slattery Doyle, in the Observer, whose comments seemed to David the most penetrating. This time Doyle’s article was headed: ‘The Pope, the pill and politics’. It read: ‘Are we now entering an age of the political Pope and if so is it a good thing? Once upon a time, of course, such questions would have been irrelevant. Until the nineteenth century, Popes were temporal as well as spiritual rulers and exercised their earthly powers with the same courage and ruthlessness as the next man.

  ‘But the situation now is rather different. We have, or we appear to have, a man who is willing to use his spiritual power in political ways. I am not on this occasion referring to the Holy Father’s sale of Vatican art treasures to pay for charity work, but rather to his new encyclical, Dignitas humana.

  ‘Now this encyclical has been in the papal works for some time. As I understand it, it was produced by the Pope himself but has been through several versions: the Holy Father’s views have been changing.

  ‘All well and good. But what bothers me, as much as the content of Dignitas humana, is the manner of its publication. It is hard to escape the impression that the encyclical was published last week in order to deflect the criticism of His Holiness which James Roskill, the US President, had offered the week before. I do not for an instant suggest there is anything wrong in this, but it undeniably represents a most unusual state of affairs. Traditionally the Vatican has been an institution that thought in centuries. Suddenly we have a Pope who times his spiritual announcements like any politician, so that he will get the best press.

  ‘And what about this latest spiritual announcement? Its timing, as argued above, clearly suggests that the Holy Father expects the liberalizing of contraception to be a popular message. It is possible, nonetheless, that the Holy Father will divide the Church with this encyclical – and not in the way he might expect. It is not a document which some will like and some will hate. Rather, and more insidiously, it is a document which will have a different appeal in different parts of the world.

  ‘Since birth control is an issue that primarily concerns the entire Third World, the encyclical will therefore be welcomed in Africa, South America, parts of Asia. Divorce, on the other hand, is an issue that concerns chiefly people in the developed west. Many of these people practise birth control already so that part of the encyclical will have no effect on them, save to remove some of the guilt. But the same people will tend to be unwilling to accept the Holy Father’s continued prohibitions against divorce, and so will stray further and further from Rome.

  ‘The end result, then, may well be that Dignitas humana will be much more popular in the Third World than in Europe or North America, and that, in general, it will make Catholicism more a religion of the Third World have-nots, rather than o
f the haves, wherever they are.’

  *

  ‘Which house number, sir?’

  David looked at the note in his diary. ‘Fifty-three, please.’

  The Ford pulled in.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be, Pat. But wait please.’

  Patton grinned. It was 6.15 now and time served after 6.30 was overtime and worth double pay. He switched off the engine and took out a book of crosswords.

  David got out. He was late for his appointment with Wilde. He had learned that afternoon that another big country house was coming on to the market – Duffield Manor in Somerset – and the auction of its contents had gone to Steele’s. Was it chance – or did the PM have a hand in that, too? The Chorlton family, who lived at Duffield, were staunch supporters of the Prime Minister’s party so it was perfectly possible. Averne had called an emergency board meeting for next week.

  David pressed the bell. Wilde came to the door himself. He was a small man, dark-haired with very blue eyes.

  ‘Saw you on telly the other night,’ he said, showing David to a seat in his study. ‘You were shaking hands with the Queen. And in all the papers. You’re nearly as famous as the Pope himself.’ He offered David a drink.

  ‘Whisky, please,’ said David.

  Wilde poured two. He added ice and water and handed one to David. ‘Try that; then you can tell me why you are here.’

  Wilde sat on the edge of his desk as David told him about Ned’s attempted suicide and the earlier conversation he had had with the housemaster during the rugby game.

  Wilde was thoughtful for a moment after David had finished. He fingered his tie – a pale pink silk.

  He said, ‘My first question is: are you going to send Ned to me?’

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

  ‘What you mean is that to do so would acknowledge the problem, such as it is, to Ned and to his chums at school? Yes?’