Earthly Powers (97 page)

       The next morning at breakfast Cardinal Casorati, the aging (they were all aging but he more than the others) Patriarch of Venice, looked ill. He recovered after a swig of Brandy Stock (con ii gusto morbido) and all proceeded to the Sistine Chapel for the first ballot. On the tables were papers with the printed formula Eligo in Summum Pontificem. The cardinals wrote down the names of their choice, disguising their handwriting as best they could so that nobody would officially know who was voting for whom, and, with the paper folded in two, went one after the other to the altar, knelt in prayer, and said "I call to witness Christ the Lord who will be my judge that my vote is given to the one whom before God I consider should be elected." The terrible musclebound Christ of The Last Judgment looked down as the papers were tipped into the chalice. The papers were shuffled and then scrutinised by the three scrutineers. The names were read out and the cardinals made their own scores. Manfredini 25. Casorati 23. Campanati 21. Giustolisi 10. Schneider 8. Parenti 6. De Neuter-Strickmann 4. Trione 2. Geblesco 2. All the rest were single votes for names like Chin, Ngoloma, Sacharov, Lang, Prado, Willoughby, Rasy, and (unjust but impossible) Papa. That the Pope had to be an Italian was, in those days, taken for granted. Manfredini, a Florentine set over Florence, a favourite of the defunct pontiff, anemically saintly, desperately conservative, was heading the list in a mere gesture of respect and affection. He did not stand a cat in hell's chance of commanding the two-thirds votes needful. This was why, in the second ballot, he went down to 10. But Guistolisi, who had been shoved forward by a cabal in the Curia, shot up to 30, with Casorati just behind with 28. Campanati had sunk to 19. The third ballot, taken after lunch and presumably a measure of hot discussion in corners, drove Casorati well ahead with 56, while Giustolisi dropped to 27. Campanati went up to 31. At the end of the day a searchlight from the Gianiculum fingered black fumes from the stovepipe. Try again. And again.

       The next morning the Frenchman Chassagny received, after God alone knew what nocturnal pressures, 5. The Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, F. X. Murphy, got a surprising 2. Casorati had, perhaps because he had looked ill again at breakfast, only 50. Campanati had risen to 33. Campanati and Casorati rose and fell, fell and rose as the hot October day crawled to exhaustion and dinnertime.55, 27.51, 33.57, 34. Neither could climb to the necessary 80. Black smoke again.

       It was on the third day that the event occurred which bred much fanciful speculation of a horrific kind and even inspired a detective story called Murder in the Conclave. In the early afternoon the ballot recorded 91 votes for Casorati. There were murmurs of Deo gratlas. And then the venerable Patriarch rose from his seat, thrust out an arm, cried "No no," then collapsed onto the fawn wool felt carpet. He had had a terminal heart attack. Secrecy forbade the conveying of the news to the outside and even the importation of a doctor. The younger and fitter cardinals carried with some difficulty the corpse to the nearest cell, which was not far from the Sala Borgia. Prayers were said and the ballot was resumed. Its result was definitive. Carlo Campanati gained his own votes as well as most of those of the dead Patriarch. It was a walkover.

       It was the right time of day for the gushing of the white smoke. People were coming home from work. There had been a light rain on the city at about the hour of the Patriarch's collapse, but now the sun was radiant before bedding down in clouds shot with all the colours that Italian painters had ever, sighing or frowning or triumphant, ground. The piazza was packed, cameras dollied or were held ready to click, the one hundred and forty saints stood high (journalistic cliché) and waiting. Cardinal Focchi appeared on the central balcony of St. Peter's and said to the microphone: "Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum. Habemus papam, eminentissimum et reverend issimum Dominum Carolum, sanctae Romanae ecclesiae cardinalem Cam panati, qui sibi nomen imposuit Gregorium Septimum Decimum." The crowd gaudiated magnally: old ladies in black wept, teeth gleamed in stubbled faces, strangers shook hands with each other, children jumped as though Mickey Mouse were soon to come on, the horns of Roman cars rejoiced plaintively. And then, to roars, Carlo appeared in a skewwhiffed skullcap, all in white, fat and loving, everybody's daddy. He stilled the roars with fat arms and said: "Ho scerto er nome Gregorio—" The laughter was immense and affectionate. He was speaking the Roman dialect in a deep Roman bass. Then, as if to remind himself that this was only appropriate in a parochial context—relevant for a Bishop of Rome but not for the Father of All the Faithful—he switched into plain television announcer's Italian and told the crowd briefly why he had chosen the name Gregory. It was primarily because of Gregory the Great, who had reformed the Church and spread the Gospel. There were other Gregorys too, not all great: Gregory VI bought the pontificate from Benedict IX; Gregory XII got into trouble and was banished to Naples. The annals of the Gregorys comprised all the shames and triumphs of which man was capable, and he, Gregory XVII, was no more than a man with no claim to greatness. But he would keep the shining image of Him who was Great constantly before his eyes. Then he said: "Praised be Jesus Christ."

       "Now and forever," the crowd went.

       "Dear brothers, dear sisters, my brother cardinals have called a new bishop to Rome. We are sad with the knowledge of the death of our beloved father Pope Pius the Twelfth. We are sad with a more recent knowledge. This very day, when God called him, and not myself, to the throne of-Peter, our dearly loved brother Giampaolo, Patriarch of Venice, collapsed and died." The crowd hushed; some crossed themselves; a number of men covertly warded their balls against evil with horning fingers. "God's ways are mysterious. God's time is not ours. In the moment of choice our brother was snatched to beatitude by the operation of another choice. Requiescat in pace."

       "Amen."

       "I come to you, then, as a second best. I come in humility. I come with neither the holiness, nor the fortitude, nor the learning, nor the pastoral skills of our deeply mourned brother. Nevertheless, accept me for what I am. Let me now divulge a truth which has been long a secret. I come to you as an orphan. I come as one who has known neither father nor mother, neither sister nor brother. The very name I carried was not my own. Today I am reborn, with a new name. Through the mystery of God's will and the benison of his even more mysterious love I am become a father and a brother. You are my family now. Accept my love. Give me your own. God's blessing be upon you." And then the fat arms blessed urbem et orbem and the crowd wept and howled with joy and pity and affection. I could imagine him going inside and saying to his brother cardinals: "That seemed to go down all right."

       The vaticanologists have deliberated hard on the circumstances of Pope Gregory XVII's election. It is certain that the Italians did not want him, nor did the French. The anglophone cardinals, on the other hand, saw him as one of themselves. The cardinals of what is now known as the Third World appreciated the dynamism of his social philosophy. The piquancy of referred scandal was something of a recommendation in America, the home of the cult of personality. But he would never have become Pope if the conclave had not been thrown into fearful confusion by a death which seemed to many a sign from heaven that, despite the qualifications of the stricken candidate, the wrong choice had been made. The Holy Spirit seemed to have bullied the enemies of Carlo Campanati into a flash of revelation that they had better not be his enemies. As for the theory that Carlo had willed the death of the Patriarch of Venice, or even poisoned his coffee, such a supposition was unworthy. Of the holiness of Pope Gregory XVII there has never been much doubt. Was I not one of the agents of his canonization?

       On that early October evening in 1958 Carlo Campanati left my life and his ample flesh spilled over from the confines of memoirs into the arena of history. You know as much about Pope Gregory XVII as I. Henceforth I was to see him only blessing fatly in the media, kissing the feet of the poor, weeping with earthquake widows, treading the Via Crucis, embracing criminals and comIflunist leaders, inaugurating the Vatican Council which, under his leadership, h15 goading and coaxing and bullying rather, was to modernise the Church and bring it closer to the needs of the people. He was, as you know, everywhere: in Montevideo and Santiago and Caracas, pleading inviolate the rights of man against corrupt and tyrannical regimes; in Kampala, encouraging the formation of an African Church; in Canterbury, fraternally embracing an archbishop who presided over the morganatic legacy of an uxoricide; in Sydney, responding to cries of Good on ya. There were strip cartoons in which he was the hero. Kids in jeans and T-shirts sang songs about him.

       Pope Gregory, Pope Gregory Free our souls from sin. Rescue the world from beggary, Let the light shine in.

       One of the new Gregorian chants. The Holy Spirit had spoken.

CHAPTER 69

He was in the United States at the same time as myself. I was trying to assuage my loneliness, not, like his, deliberately elected, with a fairly lengthy lecture tour of the universities. My agents were ACM (American Circuit Management), 666 Avenue of the Americas, New York City: they took a commission of thirty percent and arranged meetings, travel and hotels. The hotels were mostly Holiday Inns—the same double-bedded room from Florida to Maine, with its ghost of a reek of old tobacco and air-conditioning machinery, its sanitised toilet and television set. The Pope was here to bless the American people, whose tongue he spoke so well, to address the United Nations, to officiate at masses with huge congregations in football stadia and baseball parks. I watched one of these latter ceremonies on television in, I think, Prescott, Arizona, lying on my bed the afternoon before a lecture, Coke can in hand. There were several thousand worshipers in this stadium in Newark, and the holy words boomed and rebounded rah rah rah from a multitude of loudspeakers. The mass was in English, an English direct and businesslike rather than arcane and mysterious. There was no nobility, which was in order, but there was a certain ineptitude of phrasing. "The Lord be with you" had to be answered by "And with you," but the need to stress that second you produced a kind of petulant squeaking. There were gimmicks of audience participation like the kiss of peace. The altar had taken on the look of a lacy conjurer's table or even butcher's block. But you got the full round face of Carlo, with his huge complicated nose and his shrewd eyes glazed in devoutness, swigging the chalice in unabashed view, instead of his broad back engrossed with the cross. The host was administered by a host of delegates: I thought of the bushels of wheat entailed. I was sourly moved.

       In Boise, Idaho, the evening before my lecture, I saw and heard Carlo on a prime-time talk show. Beaming sweatily in the studio lights, in slightly soiled papal white and rakish cap, he fielded questions from unbelievers. A spotty girl in jeans wanted to know what proof there was that there was a God.

       Carlo said, "I could give you the famous traditional five proofs, but first I'd better ask you what you mean by a God. What do you mean?"

       "Like somebody up there who like made it all, you know, and knows what we do and is hot against, you know, sin and sends people to heaven or the other place."

       "The universe exists," Carlo said, "and somebody had to make it. You accept that?"

       "It could have like made itself."

       "Can a clock make itself, or a television set, or a book or a piece of music?"

       "That's like different."

       "The same rules apply. The constellations and the planetary systems are far more complex than a clock or a radio. There has to be a Creator. This Creator created everything, including us. You want to know what creating a universe has to do with virtue and sin and heaven and hell—"

       "Right."

       "The whole complex movement of the universe represents order. The Creator loves order and hates chaos. Virtue is order. Sin is chaos. Virtue is creation and the maintenance of creation. Sin is destruction. The sinner often doesn't understand the extent to which he destroys order. He has to find out. That's why we have the doctrine of hell. The soul dedicated to order joins the ultimate divine order."

       "What do you mean by a soul?" a sporty-looking man with a postiche asked.

       "What's left of the whole human complex when the body is taken away. The part of the human totality concerned not with the business of living in the world but with values—those essences which we call truth, beauty and goodness."

       "How do you know that goes on existing after death? Nobody comes back from the dead. Except in ghost stories."

       I won't mention the resurrection of Christ, which is the cornerstone of the Christian faith," Carlo said. "Nor the resurrection of Lazarus. Let me say instead that there are things we know go on existing after the death of the body. Certain truths, for instance, like a plus a equals 2a. If Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was not played by an orchestra and all the printed and manuscript Copies of the music were destroyed by fire, we wouldn't be right in saying that the work doesn't exist any more. If ideas, if works of beauty and truths exist outside the mortal flesh, they have to exist in a sort of mind belonging to a sort of observer. You see now what I mean by a soul?"

       "Okay," a woman with a castellated hairdo said, "but what do you mean by a soul in hell?"

       "A soul at last aware that truth and beauty and goodness, as expressed in what we may call the personality of God, go on existing but quite beyond the hope of that soul's being able to get at them. The condemned soul knows what it wants, but it can't have what it wants. That's hell."

       "But," the same woman said, "can you really accept that a merciful and loving God would send souls to it?"