Collected Essays (41 page)

One is reminded sometimes in these addresses of the controversy between Henry James and the popular Victorian novelist, Walter Besant. Besant had made fun at the notion of a woman writing a novel about men’s affairs, and James replied that any girl with sufficient talent could write a novel about the Brigade of Guards after once looking through the window of a Mess. It was a question of talent, not of knowledge. What is true of the writer is true of the priest, who from a hint in the confessional has to build his knowledge of a whole world outside his experience, and one finds in these private addresses of the Pope – what one seldom finds in the encyclicals – an intuitive genius. For example here is this celibate, this hermit buried in the Vatican cave, addressing a special audience of newly married couples on the heroic energy required in everyday life, the boredoms and frustrations and torn nerves of two people living under one roof. ‘When one should remember during a chilly dispute that it is better to keep quiet, to keep in check a complaint, or to use a milder word instead of a stronger, because one knows that the stronger word, once it is out, will relieve, it is true, the tension of the irritated nerves, but will also leave its darkening shadow behind.’

Many soldiers, Allied and German, Protestants, atheists, Jews, had their audiences with the Pope during the war. The Neutrality of the Vatican was rigidly guarded: Rome was protected from the Allies as from the Germans to the best of the Pope’s ability, but soldiers of all sides were welcome as pilgrims. Many stories have been told of these wartime audiences. Here is one more.

While a London priest was making his rounds in his parish a year or two ago, a working man shouted to him from across the road that ‘his bloody Pope’ was the greatest man alive. The priest, who supposed the man was drunk, stopped and spoke to him since the view he had expressed was hardly common in that area. The man told him that he had lost his only son in the war and that they had been very attached to one another. The thought that he would never see his son again was driving him crazy, for he had no religious faith to help him. He was in the army and went to the Vatican with a military party to see the Pope. As the Pope moved amongst them, chatting to this man and that, the father shouted after him. The Pope asked him what he wanted and he said that he wanted to know if there was any hope of his seeing his son again. The Pope replied that that was one of those short questions which required a long answer. He told one of the attendants to bring the man after the audience to his private room. There he sat down and for an hour explained the reasons for believing in the immortality of the soul. The man left the Pope convinced that he would see his son again and happy in the knowledge.

This is the Pope whom most of us before the war regarded as a diplomat. Even his photographs, where the eyes have lost expression behind deep glasses, where the lips keep their thinness and lose their sensitivity, add to the impression of an ex-Secretary of State. It is true he keeps that office still in his own hands, assisted by Monsignor Montini,
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but one who has had close dealings with the Pope, denied to me that diplomacy was important in his eyes. This is not a world where diplomatic action counts for much. In the last thirty years the Pope has seen the consistent failure of diplomacy, but it is a world he once knew well – the world of ambassadors and visiting Ministers – and he retains these contacts in his own hands much as a man keeps the trophies on his wall of a sport long abandoned. The world cannot be saved by diplomacy.

What can save it?

So much time for audiences public and private, so much time for work (the light in his study over St Peter’s burns till one in the morning), so much time like any other priest for his breviary, and in the background one is aware of the huge threatening world, the conferences in Moscow, the speeches at Lake Success, the troops pouring down in Korea, big business bulling and bearing in the skyscrapers of Wall Street. He presses into one more visitor’s hand a little green envelope with the Papal arms containing a small nickel holy medal. Can this Thing – so defenceless it seems – survive?

Every morning at breakfast the Pope lets loose his two canaries and his favourite bird – a small bird with a green breast, I don’t know its name. They walk over the table pecking at his butter, and his favourite takes crumbs from between his fingers and perches on the white shoulder. ‘He talks to children’, my informant said, ‘as though they were his birds and to his birds, as though they were children . . .’ That was why he called the Pope Franciscan, and the Franciscans next to the Jesuits are his favourite Order. Even in this short period of relaxation he seems to be making a hieratic gesture symbolizing charity. If a man loves enough, every act will represent his love.

I have said he gives the impression of a man patiently waiting for martyrdom. He has already barely escaped it. At his coronation, the German ambassador was heard to remark, ‘Very moving and beautiful, but it will be the last’, and a moment came during the war, under the German Occupation, when the end was expected. Hitler was said to have uttered the threat that he would raze the Vatican to the ground, and it is certainly true that the administrator received orders one day from ‘him up there’ to produce a plan for summoning the ambassadors of the powers at a moment’s notice to St Peter’s so that the Pope if necessary might make an announcement of grave importance. But the threat of exile or death passed: the order was revoked. Now again the danger threatens. The Church’s borders are widespread, in Poland and Korea, but war travels fast these days. Hitler was handicapped by the presence of the Church in Germany: in Russia the Church is represented only by a few priests in hiding.

Sometimes a Pope can be known by the saints he canonizes. Pius XI, the pugnacious priest, canonized Thomas More and John Fisher, over-ruling the requirements of miracles: they were men who fought the totalitarian state of their day. Pacelli has canonized the child Maria Goretti, who died forgiving her murderer.

It is a long time since a Pope has awoken, even in those of other faiths, such a sense of closeness. One remembers Henry James’s description of Pius IX among his guards coming up the Via Condotti in his great rumbling black-horsed coach ‘so capacious that the august personage within – a hand of automatic benediction, a large, handsome, pale old face, a pair of celebrated eyes which one took, on trust, for sinister – could show from it as enshrined in the dim depths of a chapel’.

Pius XII gives no automatic benediction, though there are still dim depths, one feels, in the Vatican, in spite of the Roman sunshine glinting on the orders and the swords, as one is sieved from one audience chamber to another by scarlet flunkeys, who will later grab the guileless visitor and extort the money for drinks. The huge civil service has to go on functioning, and sometimes in our irritation at its slowness, its caution, or its pedantry, we may feel that it is obscuring the white-clothed figure at the centre. But a feeling like this comes and goes: it is not the impression that remains.

One visitor replying to a polite formal enquiry of the Pope said that there were two Masses he would always remember: one was at 5.30 in the morning at a side altar, in a small Franciscan monastery in Apulia, the Host raised in Padre Pio’s hands marked with the black ugly dried patches of the stigmata: the other was the Pope’s Jubilee Mass in Rome, the enormous crowd pressed into St Peter’s, and men and women cheering and weeping as the Pope passed up the nave, boys flinging their Scout hats into the air: the fine transparent features like those on a coin going by, the hand raised in a resolute blessing, the smile of ‘deep affection’, and later the Pope alone at the altar, when the Cardinals who served him had stepped aside, moving with grace and precision through the motions of the Mass, doing what every priest does every day, the servant of the servants of God, and not impossibly, one feels, a saint.

But how much more difficult sanctity must be under the Michelangelo frescoes, among the applauding crowds, through the daily audiences with the bicyclists and the tram conductors, the nuns and the ambassadors, than in the stony fields of Apulia where Pio is confined. It is the strength of the Church in Italy that it can produce such extremes, and exactly the same thought came to one kneeling among a dozen women one early morning in the Franciscan monastery, and pressed among the cheering crowds in St Peter’s. lit was not after all the question, can this Thing survive? it was, how can this Thing ever be defeated?

1951

3. Eighty years on the Barrack Square

T
HIS
book is hardly more for general reading than is a Manual of Infantry Training: the comparison is not too loosely made.
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Here and there, as I hope to show, flashes of illumination occur, phrases typical of the old man we learned to love, but the greater part of the book, begun when Angelo Roncalli was fourteen years old at the minor seminary of Bergamo and concluded in 1962, a year before the Pope’s death, is a record of retreats, spiritual exercises, meditations.

It begins with a section called ‘Rules of Life to be observed by young men who wish to make progress in the life of piety and study’ and it ends in old age with a section ‘Summary of great graces bestowed on a man who thinks poorly of himself’. Open the book at random anywhere and you may be discouraged: ‘I will observe the greatest caution and reserve in my conversation, especially when speaking of others. Free and open-hearted, yes! but always with prudence’ (age twenty-two, a seminarist in Rome); ‘Know how to preserve silence, how to speak with moderation, how to refrain from judging people and their attitudes, except when this is an obligation imposed by Superiors, or for grave reasons’ (age sixty-four, Papal Nuncio in France).

How dull it often seems, this long discipline on the barrack-square from boyhood to old age, and then suddenly a phrase occurs, not couched in the terms of the King’s Regulations, and we are in the presence of the saint we knew, with his genius for simplicity – ‘I really need a good box on the ears’, ‘I have always been a bit crazy, a bit of a numskull, and more than ever so in recent days. This is all my virtue amounts to!’ He was still the raw recruit aged eighteen, when he wrote that, but surely there has seldom been so unchanging a character from youth to age. He describes, at a much later period, his imagination as ‘the crazy inmate of the house’, and he seems always to have been aware of a kind of divine folly. He is Patriarch of Venice when he writes: ‘I would not mind being thought a fool if this could help people to understand what I firmly believe.’

I found it a great aid in reading the Journal to concentrate on certain threads which run throughout: one thread was the sense of time passing. When Roncalli was elected Pope at the age of seventy-seven he had no illusion about the motive of the Conclave (‘everyone was convinced that I would be a provisional and transitional Pope’), but the sense of so much to do and so little time frightened him not at all, for that sense had always been there – ‘the crazy inmate’ had seen to that. ‘Time is running out. Today at twenty-one I must start at the beginning again’, and in his fiftieth year, ‘Everything to be done at once, speedily and well: no waiting about, no putting lesser things before the more important.’

No wonder that there is an exultant note in his eightieth year – the exercises have borne fruit, the barrack square had been no wasted ordeal, he ‘vas prepared. ‘Here I am, already on the eve of the fourth year of my pontificate, with an immense programme of work in front of me to be carried out before the eyes of the whole world, which is watching and waiting.’

Another thread I found it fascinating to pursue through the retreats and the formal conventional meditations is the presentation of his own faults. In what he considered his faults we see so often indications of the man we loved. ‘I am really very greedy about fruit. I must beware, I must watch myself.’ ‘I tend to linger too long in the kitchen after supper, talking things over with my family.’ ‘The longing to read newspapers.’ ‘Excessive mirth’ (all these at the age of seventeen); and at nineteen ‘all the words, the witticisms prompted only by a secret desire to show off how much I have studied, all my castles in the air, my castles of straw and castles in Spain’. (How many are praying now that the Vatican Council will not prove to be one of these?)

A little later, ‘As regards purity . . . I do not feel any strong temptations contrary to this virtue – yet I must confess that I have two eyes in my head which want to look at more than they should.’ (He had a certain fear of women only possible for a man of normal passions, and he noted with relief in 1940, ‘Advancing years, when one is in the sixties like me, wither the evil impulses to some extent, and it is a real pleasure to observe the silence and tranquillity of the flesh.’) As for some of his other young faults, they amuse us and sometimes surprise us: ‘the rather mischievous expression’ (that surely he never lost), ‘the affected gesture, the furtive glance, that strutting about like a professor, that carefully-studied composure of manner, with the well-fitting cassock, the fashionable shoes . . .’

There are a few pages in this book which, I think, all readess of any creed will find profoundly moving. They describe the day of Roncalli’s ordination as a priest in Rome. The ceremony is over, be has written to his family, and now in his joy he cannot stay indoors.

I went out. Utterly absorbed in my Lord, as if there were no one else in Rome. I visited the churches to which I was most devoted, the altars of my most familiar saints, the images of Our Lady. They were very short visits. It seemed that evening as if I had something to say to all those holy ones and as if every one of them had something to say to me. And indeed it was so.

Someone else, too, had spoken to him that day, and history contains few more touching scenes than this encounter between a young priest of twenty-three, who was to become the great Pope John, and Pius X, who was to become Saint Pius.