The Good Shepherd (19 page)

The front door clanged, rescuing them from an awkward pause. Matthew Mahan peered into the hall. Dennis McLaughlin was hanging up his coat. “Back so soon?” he said. “I thought it would be an all-night party.”

Dennis shook his head. “Leo ran out of booze.”

“Obviously God is watching over him. Why don’t you come in and have a drink with us?”

Dennis walked slowly to the door. “I really - don’t think - I should - Your Eminence,” he said. “I’ve already - had enough.”

“Well, you can have some strong coffee and a sandwich then. I need someone to give me some answers to this eighty-year-old heretic and his accomplice.”

“I could use some coffee,” Dennis said and walked cautiously into the room with the step of a man who felt like he had pillows tied to his feet. Matthew Mahan introduced him to Bishop Cronin and Mike Furia. “He’s a refugee from the Jesuits,” the Cardinal said.

“Oh?” said Davey, sipping his drink. “Catalogue the rest of his virtues. A man with sense enough to depart the company of those intellectual egotists may be just the sort of fellow you need around here.”

“Sit down,” said Matthew Mahan. “I’ll go see if I can get some coffee started in the kitchen and do a little icebox raiding on the side.”

He had told Mrs. Norton that his dinner at the Athletic Club would satisfy him, but she had made up two or three cold plates anyway. Sometimes he swore that the woman was a witch and could foretell the future or at least read his mind. The coffee was in the percolator ready to be plugged in. He put everything on a tray and carried it all back to the sitting room and parked it on the gilded walnut secretary.

Old Davey was practically crowing with delight. “Matthew,” he said, “you didn’t tell me this guy was a historian.”

“A real historian, unlike a few others I could name.”

“Listen to him,” said Cronin. “He’s perpetually trying to cast aspersions on the grand project of my old age.”

“What would that be?” said Dennis, smiling in a relaxed way that Matthew Mahan had never seen before. A little liquor obviously did him some good.

“To bring down and pin into the mud where it belongs once and forever the whole cursed doctrine of infallibility.”

“You see what I have to put up with in my own parlor?” Matthew Mahan said. “He comes and drinks my whiskey, insults me for not running the diocese his way, and then he tries to blow up the cornerstone and bring the whole Church down around our ears.”

“The cornerstone, my foot,” said Cronin. “It’s the millstone around your neck, Your Eminence. Around your neck and the neck of every other bishop in this godforsaken world. Since the day that prince of fools, His Holiness Pius IX, proclaimed that insufferable doctrine on July 18, 1870, the Church has been reeling toward destruction like a man drunk on absinthe. Infallibility with the help of the Jesuits has infected every part of the mystical body of Christ. ‘Tis like a cancer that destroys freedom everywhere it crawls.”

“How do you explain Pope John?” asked Dennis.

“There are moments when even the most terrible drunkards have episodes of shining sanity. Their friends rejoice; the members of the family cheer and praise God. But unless you smash every liquor bottle within reach, or, better, blow up the still where the noxious stuff is being cooked, the mania soon reappears, just as it already has in Rome. Do you think the next one will be any better than the fool they have in there now? Don’t be silly. If anything, he’ll be worse, or at least more obvious. They aren’t going to allow this power to pass from their hands without the most desperate kind of struggle. Someone must strike it from their grip.”

“But how?” asked Dennis McLaughlin. He was clearly interested, but puzzled.

“By writing the true history of Vatican Council I. By proving that there was no more holy liberty in St. Peter’s during that council than there is in the Kremlin when the Supreme Soviet whatever-you-call-it meets to ratify the decisions of the Presidium. That Pio Nono - I spell that
p-
double
e-o -
used everything from bribery to threats to physical force to whip a majority out of those poor sods, trapped there in the heat of summer with half of Rome dying of the plague all around them. And a council without holy liberty - a council engineered by the one man who stood to gain by its decision - that was no more of a council than was the Battle of the Boyne.”

“And do you think you can prove this?”

“I
know
I can prove it. At the very least, I’ll make enough of a noise to scare the spaghetti out of them over there and maybe interest some real historian like yourself to tackle the job and do it with every footnote footnoted.”

“Unfortunately, I majored in American history,” Dennis said.

“I don’t give a damn what you majored in. That Yale Ph.D. would mean more than my poor old S.T.D. from the Gregorian University, God save the mark. When I think of what a charade that place was in my day, I have to laugh.”

“Really? I thought that was the
crème de la crème.
A lot of Jesuits went there.”

“It’s run by the Jesuits, lad. You know what we had to do to get our degree in sacred theology?”

“Write a thesis, I hope,” Dennis said.

“That’s right, that’s right. A thesis of 900 words’ length.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I were. I would have taught a little more theology and a lot less blather in my day if they gave me an education instead of a degree.”

“You think there’s something to what he’s saying about Vatican I?” Mike Furia asked as Matthew Mahan poured the coffee.

“The theory makes sense,” Dennis said, reaching almost too eagerly for his cup. “There are a number of councils that have been declared invalid for one reason or another - mainly because the things they passed would blow the whole theory of infallibility into outer space.”

Bishop Cronin crowed with delight. Matthew Mahan plunked the plates of cold roast beef and potato salad on the antique end tables. Dennis wondered uneasily if the sound conveyed disapproval of what he had just said or was simply one more example of the Cardinal’s disinterest in the valuable furniture that surrounded him.

“Do you read German?” Bishop Cronin asked, thrusting a piece of roast beef into his mouth without benefit of fork.

“A little. I passed a test in it to get my degree.”

“Germany’s where the gold is. The best Germans went home after Vatican I and broke away, you know. They formed the Old Catholic Church. They were true to that church, they said, not to the New Church that Pio Nono had created. That was a monstrosity.”

“Did they take any bishops with them?”

“Does anybody ever take a bishop with them? Did Luther?”

“All I can say,” said Dennis, finishing his sandwich and taking a long swallow of his coffee, “is wow. If you can do half or even one-third of what you’re saying, it would be fantastic.”

“Give him a day off, Matt, and let him come out to the seminary and look over what I’ve written. I’ve got 300 pages done.”

“Do you expect to get my imprimatur for this book?”

“I should say not. The days of imprimaturs are dead and gone. But if you’d like to give it to me for friendship’s sake, I won’t refuse it.”

“How can you be so brazen, when you’ve got one foot in the grave?”

“That’s what makes me brazen, Matthew me boy. I wish I’d had the courage to be brazen twenty years ago when I had something to lose. That’s the real test, and I flunked it.”

“I’ll admit this much,” Matthew Mahan said. “It explains what happened at Vatican II.”

“What do you mean?” Dennis asked.

“The Germans ran Vatican II. They organized all of continental Europe except Spain, and they knocked the Curia’s control of the council into the Adriatic. If John hadn’t died, I’m almost afraid to think of what that council might have decided. They were fully capable of kicking infallibility even farther than they kicked the Curia. They made a run on it a couple of times in the second and third sessions, but by that time Montini was Pope and he intervened at just the right moment in just the right way and the Germans settled for what they could get. Which was a lot.”

“But not enough, not enough,” said Bishop Cronin. “They should have nailed an annually elected assembly of bishops to the Chair of Peter like James Madison glued the Congress to the presidency.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” said Matthew Mahan.

“Why is it ridiculous? Would you rather be ruled by your peers or by Van Lierde and the rest of that curial crew?”

“Van Lierde?” Dennis asked.

“He’s a Belgian, Peter Canasius Van Lierde, papal sacristan, vicar-general to His Holiness for Vatican City. He didn’t mean to do it, but the fool -”

“He’s not a fool. He’s a good man,” said Matthew Mahan.

“The good man summed up the whole reason for the spirit of somber prophecy which sits upon my head. In fact, I have committed a passage from his book on the Vatican, pages 160 to 161, to memory. Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course,” Dennis said.

Cronin stood up and recited in a mock basso voice;

“‘Two simple words, Holy See, serve to designate the Supreme Pontiff and the Ensemble of the Curia. The Pope and the Curia cannot be separated, as two parts of the whole of which the Pope is the head.’ Have you ever heard such rot? It’s a travesty on the Scriptures, a travesty on truth, and a damn menace!”

Bishop Cronin brought his fist down on his antique table hard enough to cost the Cardinal $5,000 or $10,000. His fork jumped onto the rug.

“All right, you old soothsayer,” Matthew Mahan said, “if all the terrible things you say about the Curia are true, why are we going to Rome in two or three weeks to watch me stagger around in my cappa magna?”

The wizened old Irish face with its shiny beak of a nose bored into him for a moment. “Romanita,” he said.

“I hate to keep sounding like a dummy,” Dennis McLaughlin said, “but what’s
that?”

“Romanita, my lad, is the Roman way of doing things. Now, this fellow here, who’s midway between being His Excellency and His Eminence, so that there’s no need to call him anything but his Christian name, he’s marked by the boys in the Curia and their yes-man, Montini, as undependable.”

“Why?”

“First of all, I don’t believe a word of it,” said Matthew Mahan. “This ancient revolutionary is trying to picture me as a church burner because I took a very strong stand on the birth control issue. I collected a lot of cases right here in this diocese.”

“One of them your own brother,” Mike Furia said.

“Yes, one of them my own brother - cases where attempts to follow the Church’s teaching and have unlimited numbers of children with the only alternative rhythm or abstinence led to family tragedies. Drunkenness, mental illness, complete family breakdowns. I sent them to the Papal Commission on Birth Control with the strongest letter I could write, telling them that, in my opinion, the Church had to change its position. I even did local surveys to back up the national surveys. I thought that this city was particularly significant because we have such a high percentage of Catholics. You can’t say that we’re succumbing to the dominant secular culture when two out of every three people in town are Catholics. Believe it or not, our surveys showed a higher birth control position here than in the country at large.”

“Perfectly understandable,” said Cronin with a chuckle. “The poor Catholic fools in Iowa are so busy standing tall among the WASPs, they haven’t time to ask themselves whether what they’re saying makes any sense.”

“I might as well have thrown all my surveys and case histories and letters into the wind, for all the good it did. His Holiness gave us his decision last summer, as you well know,” Matthew Mahan said.

“And you published it in your paper and noted with an absolute minimum of enthusiasm that the Pope had spoken,” said Cronin with a look that struck Dennis McLaughlin as remarkably affectionate. It was the first time he had ever thought of anyone feeling affection for Cardinal Mahan. He began wishing he were not quite so drunk.

“Right,” said Matthew Mahan. “Where does Romanita come into it?”

“Seventy-eight American theologians published a paper calling Pope Montini a damn fool. Every one of those guys would have stopped shaving for a month if they could have included a bishop in that statement, an Archbishop, in fact. But you held your peace.”

“Now you’re being silly. Do you seriously -”

“I’m seriously saying that you
could
have made one devil of a rumpus over here. You shut your trap - and now you have your reward. That’s Romanita.”

Matthew Mahan sipped his milk and shrugged. “You might be right. It’s the best explanation I’ve heard yet.”

“Romanita,” said Father Cronin, turning back to Dennis McLaughlin, “really has only one principle.” He ran his hand along the gilt edge of his antique table. “Smooth, keep everything smooth. No bumps, no shouts, no yells, scarcely a word said above a whisper. But the business gets done their way.”

“That happens to be an attitude I share,” said Matthew Mahan.

“So stop wondering why you’re getting a red hat. They’re saying more or less the same thing old Pio Nono said to all those bishops and Cardinals he bribed with honors and favors at Vatican I - ‘Welcome to the club.’”

Matthew Mahan was finding the conversation less and less amusing. “Are you suggesting I should have taken a trip to Rome à la Cardinal Gibbons?”

“Of course not. It wouldn’t have worked,” said Cronin. “Those spaghetti benders only understand money and power. If you sat in New York, Matt, or Los Angeles or Chicago, I would have said go the minute you mentioned it. In fact, I would have mentioned it a few hundred times meself until you were even sicker of the sight or sound of me than you are now.”

That one hurt. Matthew Mahan struggled to keep the conversation casual. “But Baltimore wasn’t that big in Gibbons’s day.”

“No, but Gibbons was. If you’d only take my advice and follow his example, you could come close to the same kind of leadership, Matt. Now, here’s a lad with a good head, and if he’s as Irish as he looks and sounds, a good pen, no doubt. Let him write a book for you, put your name on it, and if it goes well, do more of the same. There’s an intellectual vacuum in the American Church right now. Fill it, fill it with bold, brave words about the Church and the modern world.”