The Good Shepherd (38 page)

Our silent brother.
Back in his seat, Matthew Mahan fingered the hat on his head and pondered the words, which now seemed to have a voice of their own, repeating themselves again and again in his mind.
Frater noster taciturnus, our silent brother.

He knew precisely what they meant. Old Davey was right. They were aware of his silence on the birth control encyclical, the great issue of Paul’s pontificate. Yet he did not feel that the words were a rebuke. No, it was typical of the man at the moment of conferring the greatest honor in his power to bestow. All he could do was whisper these heartbreaking words. Not a rebuke, but a plea, a sad, somber plea.

Then that insidious word
Romanita
flowered in his mind. The moment, the most precisely, cruelly effective moment, had been selected to deliver the essential message. What was the message? This honor that we are bestowing on you, Cardinal Mahan, has nothing whatsoever to do with your three decades of labor on behalf of Holy Mother Church and even less with what slim pretensions you might have to spiritual stature.

You have been bought up, Cardinal Mahan, as part of a worldwide, astutely managed political campaign. When we dangled the bait, you snapped at it on the first pass, and now we are pulling on the hook.

No, Matthew Mahan told himself desperately, no. He refused to believe that appallingly cynical explanation. There was no proof, no proof whatsoever, that anyone, above all, the sad-eyed man on the papal throne in front of him, was party to such a demeaning, dehumanizing, demoralizing plot.
Frater noster taciturnus.
It was perfectly natural for Paul to think of him as a silent brother. Yet he had placed the red hat on his brother’s head. Couldn’t that be interpreted as proof of his generosity, his willingness to tolerate reasonable dissent, loyal freedom within the Church? Yes, yes, Matthew Mahan told himself, he would not, he could not, allow his mind to accept the cynical explanation.
Romanita.
The word quivered down his nerves like fingers scratching a blackboard.

Cardinal Yu Pin, the Archbishop of Nanking, China, was now replying on behalf of the new Cardinals, expressing their gratitude to Paul and vowing their fidelity to him. He was not, in Matthew Mahan’s opinion, the best choice to represent them. According to stories he had heard from several Italian friends, Pius XII had berated Pin for fleeing to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek when the Communists took over China. But the speech was only a formality, and Pin had probably been chosen for the color of his skin. It was Vatican policy to emphasize the Church’s international composition these days.

After thanking Pin, Pope Paul announced a major change in his cabinet. Cardinal Jean Villot was to become Secretary of State, replacing Cardinal Amleto Cicognani. He summoned the eighty-six-year-old Cicognani to the platform beside him and asked Villot to join them. He praised both men for their devotion to the Church and their tireless efforts on her behalf, and particularly on behalf of the Chair of St. Peter. There was applause from the audience. Villot looked tough, and Cicognani’s lumpy old man’s face was sour. In his twenty-five years as apostolic delegate to the United States, Cicognani had shown himself to be a blundering authoritarian, repeatedly sticking his nose into American church affairs and throwing his Roman weight around. Yet John XXIII had appointed him Secretary of State, the second most powerful man in the Vatican after the Pope. It was a tragic commentary on John’s helplessness. Except for his epochal breakthrough, the council, he had been a prisoner of the Curia.

The consistory was over. Paul went down the aisle and vanished through the curtains at the back of the hall. Laymen and priests swarmed around their Cardinals for another round of congratulations. Matthew Mahan smiled, nodded into familiar faces, shook dozens of hands while the words echoed in his mind.
Frater noster taciturnus.
A sullen ache crept across his stomach.

They drove directly to the Hotel Excelsior, where all of the Mahanites, as Dennis McLaughlin occasionally called them, were giving a dinner for their favorite Cardinal. It was a pleasant evening, but a little embarrassing. Speaker after speaker heaped praise on him until he began to wonder if they were talking about somebody else. He heard himself extolled as a war hero, the finest chaplain in the U. S. Army, a friend of the blacks, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, even the Protestants.

He stood up finally, to cries of “Speech, speech,” and good-humoredly denied it all. “I just happen to be a very lucky fellow,” he said. “I’ve been in the right place at the right time again and again.” Informally, without the slightest pretense to having a prepared talk, he rambled from memory to memory, speaking to individuals in the audience. He asked George Petrie if he remembered the time the schedules got scrambled, and the girls’ basketball team from Holy Angels found themselves pitted against the downtown mugs of St. Sebastian’s parish. He asked Madeline McAvoy if she remembered the dedication of Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Home for the Aged, when he inadvertently became the straight man for an eighty-year-old Irish lady. She asked him, “How old do you think I am?”

“I flattered her and said seventy. Then I asked her how old she thought I was. She took me seriously and guessed forty. I told her she was off by ten years, and she didn’t bat an eye. ‘Well, glory be to God, Bishop,’ she said, ‘you never worked a day in your life.’”

Dennis McLaughlin sat in the back of the hall listening to the adulatory laughter. Beside him, Bishop Cronin was laughing as heartily as anyone in the audience as the Cardinal reminisced now about his failings as a seminarian. “I am morally certain,” he was saying, “that I am the only Cardinal in the history of the Church who got zero in a theology examination. I wasn’t totally ignorant, but the teacher, a fellow named Cronin, only asked one question on the examination. If you didn’t know a lot about that one subject, you were in deep trouble. That year, he asked us to discuss in depth the influence of the Council of Ephesus on the development of Christian theology. I got Ephesus mixed up with Chalcedon and a half-dozen other towns in the Middle East. I wrote pages and pages of absolute baloney, but I thought they were worth something. When I got a zero, I went to see this fellow Cronin and asked him why. He answered, ‘Because there was no lower mark I could give you, Mahan.’”

What is the reason for your nonlaughter, Dennis? Was it the memory of this afternoon’s lovemaking - an idiotic word, but somehow descriptive - in the Pensione Christina that made you unable to tolerate this sentimentality? Who knows, who knows. Jesus said no man can serve two masters. Loving one, hating another was inevitable. Or was it? Didn’t the mind, the sovereign intellect, as someone called it, have something to say about such decisions? Or was democracy also a psychobiological phenomenon?

Was there a voice of the cells, the genes, that was summoning him now to reject once and for all this big bulky man in the red cape and incongruous lace skirt smiling at him from the head table? Why in the steady motionless light cast by electricity did shafts of sunlight repeatedly break across his eyes? Why did those rows of smiling faces turn without warning into white crosses? Why was there a hand on his arm, a heavy father’s hand and a father’s voice speaking, not the harsh words of contempt, condemnation (no, you spoke those - how merciless we will be to ourselves if we finally do get rid of God), but gentle forgiving words? Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

He stood up. The Cardinal was still talking. There was only the slightest break as their eyes met. “I don’t want you to think of me as Cardinal Mahan. I hope I’ll always be Father Matt to every one of you. There’s only one way in which I want to be a Cardinal. In Latin, the word means hinge. I want to play that part in our city. I want to be a man who opens doors for everyone, doors to hope in the future, doors to faith in God, doors to love for every person in the city, no matter what his religion or his color may be.”

Tremendous applause. Dennis McLaughlin turned his back on those noble words and rushed to the door. He tripped over someone’s foot and almost fell on his face. His hand groped for the gold doorknob, cold beneath his sweaty fingers. Out in the hall then, gulping antihistamines, his chest expanding only to a point where pain awoke, like the thrust of a dagger. No, no, no. It was freedom that he was fighting to preserve. His precious birthright, stolen from him by Holy Mother Church. Yes, freedom.

He was breathing again. Freedom from Wholly Mother.

Did those ironies mean anything now? Weren’t you really running away from that sentimental man at the speaker’s table? That complex man who combined roars and smiles, power and guile, fear and love. Summed up in one unbearable word. Father.

Matthew Mahan’s miter pressed painfully on his throbbing temples as the procession of white-and-gold-robed Cardinals left the Chapel of the Pieta and began the long walk to St. Peter’s main altar. As they entered the immense nave, through the open front doors, they could hear the distant sound of bands playing and crowds cheering. It was May 1, and Rome’s Communists were filling the city’s streets with pageantry and protest. Out there, some might say, was the voice of the future. Here they were about to pay obeisance to the past, to re-enact a ceremony that was 2,000 years old.

Rome’s streets had echoed to the march of many men, Caesar’s legions, Napoleon’s chasseurs, Hitler’s troopers. It was easy to say that the Communists were another false faith, another easy answer to man’s perpetual search for worldly happiness. While here within these sacred walls was the true answer, a faith that said life was not merely a puzzle to be solved. But recent years had made Matthew Mahan wary about this glib use of resounding truths. The hostility of the young had sharpened his eyes and quickened his ears to incongruous details like those distant Communist bands. Ahead of him marched thirty-three men like himself, Princes of the Church, dressed in white and gold. Should a church created by a man who said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” have princes? His eyes rested for a moment on the chapel of Pius X where he knew the bronze relief of John XXIII reached out to the pleading faces behind bars. A moment later he stared at the white marble monument of tiared Gregory XIII, sitting on his coffin. Two statues symbolizing science and religion gazed in awe at his great achievement, dramatized on the side of the sarcophagus, the reform of the calendar. The Church had power in those days, unquestionably. But according to old Davey Cronin, Gregory had a natural son and used to spend most of his time during mass gossiping with his Cardinals. His chief interest was building the chapel named after him, the Capella Gregoriana. When he died, he was buried like a pharaoh, his body drenched in balsam and aromatic herbs, wearing full pontifical robes and a golden miter. What did monuments to these egotistical Renaissance princes have to do with Christianity, with the simple men in dusty robes who trudged the roads of Palestine?
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.

Who was sending him these thoughts? Was it the voice of John XXIII speaking to him? His mind drifted back to last night. The party had ended in his suite, with Mike Furia, Mary Shea, the McAvoys, Bill Reed, his sister in law Eileen, Monsignor Frank Falconer, and a half-dozen other members of his seminary class killing off some very good champagne. That was why his head was aching and his stomach twinging, and maybe it also explained his wayward mind. They had spent the last half hour discussing the difference between Popes John and Paul. He had surprised himself by rather strenuously defending Paul. He needed time. Turning the Church in a new direction was an immense responsibility; it had to be done slowly.

But inevitably, so it seemed, he soon found himself talking more about John.
When the editor of
Osservatore Romano
came to see him, it was the first time he’d been inside the papal apartment in thirteen years. Pacelli kept him at arm’s length. The old guy proceeded to start interviewing John, on his knees. That was the way he talked to Pacelli. John told him if he didn’t sit down, the interview was over.

They call Montini the poor man’s Pacelli, Mary Shea had said.

He loved to walk. The first time I met him, in Paris, we had lunch and then he suggested a stroll over to the Left Bank. He walked my legs off. And I was a chaplain in an infantry regiment

So was he, come to think of it. Anyway, Pacelli told him to stop walking around Paris. It was undignified for a papal nuncio.

I never could figure out what we had in common. He was really an intellectual, you know. He used to call me his American education. He must have asked me a couple of hundred questions about America, that first day. We were the future, he said. Later, he called me his American son. It sounds better in Italian. More playful.
Mio figlio Americano.

Somewhere behind Matthew Mahan a roar of acclaim filled the cathedral. The crowd was greeting Pope Paul. On a raised platform to the right of the high altar, Dennis McLaughlin and Bishop Cronin sat next to a woman who obviously had no ticket to these select seats. She was Italian, as far as Dennis could gather from the prayers she murmured. She wore a red and black kerchief around her head, and a coat that was several decades old. In a bundle at her feet, there seemed to be almost everything from cheese and bread on which she dined to handkerchiefs, books, a veritable portmanteau. With her was a small thin boy of about ten who knelt beside his mother and prayed with equal intensity.

When Pope Paul came into view, walking at the rear of the procession, his hand raised in blessing, the woman went berserk.
“Evviva il Papa, Evviva il Papa,”
she screeched, almost fracturing Dennis’s eardrum. To anyone even a few feet away, her howl was swallowed in the general applause. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face now. With surprising strength, she raised her son high so he could see the Pope, too. She murmured to him in Italian, and the little boy began to cry.

Dennis pondered the paradox that the woman presented. Back at the university, they had all agreed like good intellectuals that the Church must return to simple first-century Christianity if it was to serve the poor. Away with gold miters and bejeweled chalices, immense cathedrals with their stained-glass windows and overwhelming statuary. But what if the poor didn’t want first-century Christianity? What if they
wanted
splendor, solemnity, mystery?

At a table on the high altar, the Pope and the thirty-four new Cardinals began concelebrating mass. They looked like a flock of exotic birds, Yeats’ golden birds from fabled Byzantium, perhaps, except that these birds were flesh and blood, living anachronisms, Dennis thought.

On the altar, standing between Cardinals Cooke and Carberry, Matthew Mahan raised his eyes above the blaze of light that engulfed them and glimpsed familiar faces in the stands. It was a little like dying, he thought, watching the circle of loving faces recede from flesh to wavery vapor. There was Mary Shea and Mike Furia and Bill Reed, all looking very solemn. And his sister-in-law, Eileen, and Timmy. He had paid very little attention to them since he arrived. Timmy was probably sneering that he only had time for the big givers. But their pastor, Monsignor Frank Falconer, was taking good care of them, Eileen had told him at the dinner last night. Matthew Mahan said a prayer of gratitude for the good solid steady priests like Frank Falconer who refused to permit the current turmoil to distract them from the fundamentals of their job - an abiding concern for their people that showed itself in 1,000 ways.

In gaps between the masses of spectators winked the red eyes of the television cameras. The old and the new. The Church was trying, trying so desperately, to come to terms with the transformed world. Somberly now, his eyes sought the face of Pope Paul, whose hands were outstretched, reading in Latin the prayer of the mass, asking God for the grace to follow the example and intercession of St. Joseph. Next he read the Epistle from St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians, which began, “Brethren: Have charity which is the bond of perfection.” How difficult it was to live those simple Gospel words.

Paul bowed his head, and they joined him in the Gospel prayer which he recited in heavily accented English. To Matthew Mahan, it would always sound better in Latin.
Munda cor meum ac labia mea omnipotens Deus. Cleanse my heart and my lips, O Almighty God, Who cleansed the lips of the Prophet Isaiah with a burning coal. In Your gracious mercy, deign so to purify me that I may worthily proclaim Your Holy Gospel.

The Gospel was from St. Matthew and told the story of Jesus’ failure in the synagogue of his native Nazareth. “How did this man come by this wisdom and these miracles? Is not this the carpenter’s son?” the people asked. Mournfully, Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, and in his own house.”

Matthew Mahan thought of Pope John. To these Romans, he had been the peasant from Bergamo, and now they were doing their best to keep him in the grave by calling him Good Pope John, the people’s Pope. Good for an illustration on a holy card, but it would take a hundred years to repair the damage he had done to the Church. Whose voice was that? Not the voice of the Church, the people of God. It was the voice of the realist, the administrator, the man who wielded power.

Was this the voice that had whispered
Frater noster taciturnus
to him yesterday? The modern power broker, coolly rounding up the lost sheep by tempting him with trinkets of red and gold? No, he still refused to believe it. The sadness, the sadness with which the voice spoke, this was proof of the other meaning, of the man’s innocence.

The Gospel was over. The concelebrating Cardinals descended from the altar and sat in seats reserved for them there. Pope Paul walked to a gold lectern and began to speak. He opened the sermon in Latin, then went to Italian, then to French, German, English, Spanish, and ended with Latin again. He talked about the Christian dignity of work and said it was something that should bring men together, not separate them. He lamented the “painful inequities” that existed between the various classes and urged his audience to bring the Church’s social teaching to a world that desperately needed it. The end of the class struggle must be achieved not with violence, but with the meekness of the Gospel. Yet, it must be done with the moral force of justice and with the explosive force of love. Finally, he urged the Cardinals to become more faithful disciples of the poverty of Christ.

After the sermon, Pope Paul descended to a simple chair at the foot of the altar. One by one, the names of the new Cardinals were read out, and each advanced to kneel before the Pope while he placed a plain gold ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. Solemnly, Paul repeated in Latin the formula:
“Receive the ring from the hand of Peter and may the love of the Prince of the Apostles strengthen ever more your love of the Church.”

Again Matthew Mahan was one of the last names called. He knelt before the Pope, and their eyes met and he found himself searching desperately for the truth he was seeking on Paul’s face. For a moment, he thought he found it in the remarkable mixture of concern and sadness, gentleness and resignation. The stark contrast between this man’s delicate, almost feminine personality and John’s earthy reality overwhelmed him. He almost heard himself saying to this visibly suffering man John’s unforgettable greeting at the opening session of Vatican II - I
am Joseph, your brother.
It would have the double meaning that it had in the Old Testament, when Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, forgave them from his heart when they appeared before him as starving supplicants. What was the full quotation?
I am Joseph, your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.
Yes, Matthew Mahan thought, those words not only would proclaim his fraternity but would also declare his forgiveness of this man, who had betrayed him into bondage. As the Pope slipped the plain gold ring onto his finger, Matthew Mahan found himself compressing his lips as if he feared he might actually say the words.

To his dismay, with those almost spoken words came a surge of unexpected anguish - the very opposite of the peaceful humility he had hoped to achieve in this ceremony. To him this Pope suddenly personified the fragility and weariness of the old world, struggling to come to terms with the new world that was being born all around it. As an American, a man of the new world, he could cope with this birth agony. It was his continent and his country, America, with its vision of freedom as a new human dimension, an absolute spiritual necessity, that was creating this travail.
Trust us,
he wanted to whisper,
trust us. Have faith in us
,
and we will make you free.

He walked back to his seat in a daze, catastrophic voices shouting inside him. Who do you think you are, Mahan? The accidental Archbishop lecturing the successor of St. Peter. Perhaps you should have said it, perhaps you should have whispered the first sentence at least, whispered it in Latin.
Ego sum Joseph, frater vester
(I am Joseph, your brother.) Wouldn’t that have been interpreted as insolence? Almost a sacrilege? Mahan, you are a fool. By now, he did not know where he was. Cardinal Dearden had to reach out a hand as he passed him and gently guide him to his seat, preventing him from blundering into the audience.

As he sat down, his entire body was shaken by a fantastic throb of pain. It was a new dimension, a shift from primitive weapons to some kind of futuristic death ray. Or flamethrower, he thought as it happened again. A twentieth-century weapon. No need to reach for extravagant metaphors to describe this agony. He had learned to live with the first primitive visitor, why couldn’t he convert this one into an old acquaintance, if not a friend? Was this his burning coal that would enable him to worthily proclaim the Gospel?