The Good Shepherd (4 page)

“On the contrary. I got the distinct impression that you had two very contented curates until this business came up. Why shouldn’t they admire you? This is one of the two or three best-run parishes in the diocese. Now, have you given this thing a little more thought?”

“Yes,” said Monsignor O’Reilly coldly, still looking at the screen, where the home team’s best hitter was in the process of striking out. “I can’t see any solution that would let me live with my conscience as a pastor other than the one I have proposed.”

Rage boiled in Matthew Mahan’s brain. Part of it was anger at himself for the conciliatory tone he had just taken. He switched off the television and let O’Reilly have it in a voice that could be heard on the third floor. “I may not have a Roman education, Monsignor. But I am not stupid when it comes to motivation. I consider this entire charade an oblique attack on me. Now, by God, I have never let you arouse my enmity - but you are very close to doing it now. Do you wish to continue as pastor of this parish? Answer me.”

For a moment, a triumphant hatred - there was no other word for it - gleamed in Monsignor O’Reilly’s eyes. In this same moment of the naked display of his power, Matthew Mahan felt a twist of defeat. He had been forced to say what O’Reilly would have said to him if their positions had been reversed. You’d better get used to saying that sort of thing, he told himself bitterly.

“You know the answer to that question, Your
Excellency.
”

“Then listen to my solution to this mess.” He quickly summed up the compromise he had extracted from Fathers Cannon and Novak. “This seems thoroughly fair to me. They have agreed not to make any statement of their views from the pulpit or in any other public forum. You can’t ask more than that.”

“I say they should interrogate every woman that comes into the confessional on what she is doing and thinking about the Holy Father’s encyclical.”

Matthew Mahan almost smiled grimly. Monsignor O’Reilly had overreached himself and given the Archbishop an easy answer. He had been expecting and dreading the issue of the confessional.

“I absolutely disagree, and if, I get any evidence that you are doing such a thing, I will revoke your faculties,” Matthew Mahan said. “The confessional is not a witness box in a law court, and a priest is not a prosecuting attorney. The care of souls, Monsignor, does not involve forcing them to reveal their guilt.”

“Would you put that in writing?”

“No,” Matthew Mahan said. “Will you or won’t you accept the compromise I have just outlined?”

“If you order me to accept it, I will accept it.”

“I order you. I also order you to restore civil discourse to this rectory, to give Fathers Cannon and Novak the housekeeping services they require, and their seats at your dinner table. I must also insist that you give them keys to the front door so that they can go and come as they please.”

“As you say,” said Monsignor O’Reilly. “I trust you will also take responsibility for the gross misconduct that may arise from this freedom? Particularly on Father Novak’s part.”

“Father Novak is thirty-five years old. He will take responsibility for his own actions.”

A contemptuous nod. “Is there anything else?”

“Nothing else,” said Matthew Mahan, “except a little advice. I think it was Cardinal Mercier who said that the besetting sin of priests was not liquor or women. But jealousy. I urge you to think about that, Monsignor.”

Matthew Mahan walked to the door and paused for a moment. Monsignor O’Reilly sat in the chair, his face immobile. He switched on the television set, and the announcer said: “Well, that’s all for the home team in the bottom of the sixth. The score -”

Matthew Mahan shut the door and trudged up to the third floor again. There, he told Fathers Novak and Cannon what had been decided and urged them to do or say nothing that would further aggravate the situation. He looked hard at Father Novak as he said this. Did he get the message? One could only hope.

As he walked down the rectory steps to the street, Matthew Mahan was again engulfed by a tremendous rage. He saw O’Reilly’s face contemptuously staring past him at the television set. Should he go back? No.

He struggled to calm himself and gradually succeeded. With calm came exhaustion and a severe attack of doubt. Would it have been better to capitulate, to take the hard, heartless line that the Pope - apparently without realizing its heartlessness - had laid down? Had
he -
Matthew Mahan - won anything in this compromise? He rubbed his twinging stomach. He had tried to meet them as a fellow priest, a brother in Christ. But how do you maintain that stance when you have to deal with shifty, resentful double-talkers like Novak and sons of bitches like Paul O’Reilly?

The tap of the Archbishop’s ring on the car window interrupted Dennis McLaughlin in the middle of Goggin’s last paragraph. He hastily stuffed the letter into his pocket and opened the door. Matthew Mahan eased himself into the back seat. “God help us, what a mess,” he said. “I feel like a member of a United Nations truce team.”

“How did it go?”

“It’s solved, temporarily.”

Dennis, who knew only that it was an argument about birth control, ached to hear some details. But Matthew Mahan obviously had no intention of giving him any.

“Just got a news flash on the radio,” Eddie Johnson said. “Ike’s dead.”

“I’m not surprised,” Matthew Mahan said. “When I was in Washington yesterday, several people told me there was no hope.”

“You knew him pretty good, didn’t ya, Y’Excellency?” Eddie Johnson said as he started the motor.

“No. I just shook hands with him once or twice.”

For a moment, as they rolled through the quiet streets of the Golden Ghetto, Matthew Mahan had an impulse to tell Dennis McLaughlin everything that had just happened inside Holy Angels’ rectory. In fact, it was more than an impulse, it was a need - a need to share with someone the agonizing loneliness of the role he was playing. Perhaps even more important, a need to communicate, really communicate, with the priests of Dennis’s generation. He could endure the hostility and contempt of the O’Reillys. He had toughened himself against their cruelty a long time ago. But the subtler, more indirect and impersonal hostility of Dennis’s generation disturbed him enormously. The averted eyes, the down-turned mouth, of Fathers Novak and Cannon rose before him in memory. To his dismay, as he turned to Dennis, he saw the same patina of negation on his somber face.

Abruptly Matthew Mahan began talking about the death of General Eisenhower. “It makes you feel old,” he said. He began telling Dennis where and when he had seen Ike in Europe. This led to one of his favorite World War II stories. “It was right after the Bulge. Everyone was shaky. It was hard to tell what was going to happen next. Suddenly, we got word that Ike was inspecting the division in exactly one hour. The general - the division commander - started screaming for his orderly. He wanted his boots polished. The poor guy came running in with the shoe polish and a rag and a cardboard box. The old man forgot he was wearing carpet slippers and put his foot on the box - and the orderly started polishing the slipper. I couldn’t repeat what was said next without a papal dispensation.”

It was a story that had never failed to draw uproarious laughter from previous listeners. Dennis managed the merest ghost of a smile. Matthew Mahan sighed and rubbed his aching stomach. “It reminds you of the grim fact that we are getting pretty old, all of us World War II types. Is it true what they say, that for people your age and the kids in school, it’s just a lot of history like the First World War and the Civil War?”

“For a lot of them it is. Then there are some, like me, who’d like to forget the whole thing for personal reasons.”

“What are they?”

“My father was killed in it.”

“Dennis - I had no idea -”

For a moment, the young eyes flashed almost wickedly at him, a penetrating glare that seemed to see as well as hear the hollowness of his automatic sympathy.

“Where - was he killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“What outfit was he with?”

“He was a pilot. That’s all I know. My mother never talked to us about it.”

The sad implication of those words was instantly clear to Matthew Mahan. But now, he sensed, was not the time or place to try to do anything about it. He let Dennis continue talking on about World War II.

“I think it’s your enthusiasm that turns the kids off, more than anything else. They just can’t understand how you could be enthusiastic about any war, even if Hitler was as much of a monster as everyone says he was.”

“I don’t think we were enthusiastic,” Matthew Mahan said warily. “Not the people I was with, the ones who were getting shot at. The enthusiasm came later, after we won.”

“It amounts to the same thing,” Dennis McLaughlin said. “Nobody over thirty seems able to understand why we don’t have the same attitude toward Vietnam.”

“I see,” Matthew Mahan said, “I see.”

A white lie. He did not see. Everything about the young had been growing more and more opaque for two, perhaps three years now. With a sigh, he let the conversation lapse and began worrying about his next appointment, lunch with Monsignor Harold Gargan at Rosewood Seminary. They were a half hour late already. It would not improve Gargan’s mournful mood. But it would take a miracle to manage that feat.

“How did things go with the apostolic delegate yesterday?” Dennis McLaughlin asked. “Did Roma locute?”

“I’m afraid not. He spent most of the time telling me to avoid a scandal. They don’t want a repetition of Los Angeles, McIntyre’s brawl with the Immaculate Hearts.”

“It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Having to take a problem like that to the A.D. It sort of contradicts what they said in Vatican II about the Pope treating bishops as equals.”

This corresponded so closely to what Matthew Mahan thought that he reacted with uneasy caution. “It’s the way the system works,” he said.

“Have we ever had a decent A.D.? They were all lemons from the very first one. He talked the Pope into condemning the so-called Americanist heresy.”

“Oh yes,” Matthew Mahan said, although he only had a vague idea what his secretary was talking about. “They gave us an earful of that one at Rosewood in my day.”

“Most contemporary theologians consider it a myth. Not that it really matters. All the things that were condemned - freedom of conscience, for instance - were overwhelmingly approved in Vatican II.” Dennis McLaughlin hesitated for a moment and then added, “Maybe it’s just as well that history is the worst-taught subject in Catholic seminaries.”

“I’m not sure I agree with you,” Matthew Mahan said. “God knows all the Americans could have used a lot more history at Vatican II. It would have helped us understand why the Germans and the Italians were at each other’s throats, for instance. If we had a little more perspective on our own past, we might have had a lot more impact as a group. Most of us just voted with the liberals by instinct. We were the dogfaces, the troops,” he added, seeing Dennis did not understand the World War II reference. “It was a pretty unnerving experience, let me tell you. When I came home, I got out a couple of biographies that Davey Cronin out at the seminary recommended. One on Cardinal Gibbons and another on Archbishop John Ireland. I think I learned more from those books than I have from anything I’ve read since I was ordained.”

“Who did you like most?” Dennis McLaughlin asked. It was the first time that Matthew Mahan had seen him genuinely interested in their conversation.

“I admired Ireland’s guts, but I have to admit I preferred Gibbons. He had the judgment, the finesse -”

“Yes,” Dennis said in the listless automatic tone that Matthew Mahan had learned to read as disagreement. “I suppose you’re right.”

Irritation flickered through Matthew Mahan’s weariness. In the sulky silence, he found himself asking tense questions.
I suppose you think finesse is old-fashioned, or, worse, cowardly. Where in God’s name did you people get the idea that the Church was supposed to wade into every issue and conduct a running brawl with all comers? You can say what you want about the guidance of the Holy Spirit, common sense is also a very valuable commodity.

He tried to still this ranting voice by saying something intelligent. “Of course, Gibbons had some guts, too. He did go to Rome and stop the Pope from wrecking the Church by banning labor unions.”

“True,” Dennis said mildly. “But he had practically unanimous backing for it here in America. That was the way he always operated. He waited for the parade to form and then took charge of it. I prefer that line from Ireland. ‘Seek out social evils and lead in movements that tend to rectify them. Laymen need not wait for priest nor priest for bishop nor bishop for Pope.’”

“I wonder if he felt that way when he found his priests or his nuns not waiting for him.”

The episcopal tone was growing ominous, Dennis decided. He dropped the subject and was grateful to Eddie Johnson, who filled the next ten minutes with a discussion of their local baseball team’s chances in the upcoming season. Archbishop Mahan seemed at least as interested in this subject as he had been in the relative merits of John Ireland and James Gibbons.

A half hour later, Matthew Mahan sat in a booth of the local Red Coach Grill listening to Monsignor Harold Gargan tell him what was wrong with Rosewood Seminary. It was like a visit to the Wailing Wall. The white hair, the veined eyes, the drooping face, dominated by the pendulous nose, seemed to add ten years to Gargan’s age. Matthew Mahan had to remind himself that this man had graduated only a year ahead of him. He could not be more than fifty-six or fifty-seven. This was a man who had once confided to Matthew Mahan in his peppery curate days that he had played the piano in a nightclub to pay his way through the seminary. What had happened to him? What was happening to everyone?

According to Rector Gargan, almost everything at Rosewood was bad and getting worse. They had caught another three seminarians saying an unorthodox mass using Gallo wine and Rye Krisp in the locker room of the gymnasium. The class of 69 had dwindled from a paltry thirteen to a pathetic ten. Total enrollment had fallen below 100 for the first time in twenty-five years. The desperate Gargan could think of only one solution - improve their public relations. A very good man who had handled public relations for the Air Force Academy was available. What did Matthew Mahan think? He wanted a very good $25,000.

“I think we’d both need our heads examined if we hired him. All these kids are antiwar. Can you imagine how they’d react? They’d probably be out on strike in ten minutes. We’d be in every newspaper in the country.”

“What about these amateur liturgists?”

“Discipline them - mildly. No weekend privileges, something like that. I don’t want the kind of trouble Krol got into in Philadelphia or worse, what Cushing wound up doing in Boston - throwing out half the senior class.”

“But I get this desperate feeling when I wake up in the morning. We’ve got to do something - to reverse the slide.”

“I get the same feeling most mornings, multiplied by ten, Hal. But I don’t see what we can do about it except pray. And be patient. Just because some people - or even a lot of people - are losing confidence in the country and the Church doesn’t mean we have to do the same thing. The one thing we’ve got to avoid is public humiliation.”

Gargan nodded glumly. He looked very tired.

“I think the best thing you could do is get away from the place for ten days or two weeks. When is the last time you took a vacation?”

“Oh, I got down to the shore last summer for a couple of weeks.”

Matthew Mahan took his checkbook out of his briefcase and wrote out a check for $1,000. “Let’s see what two weeks in Florida does for you.”

“Thanks, Matt,” Gargan said, his voice charged with emotion. “I think it might do me a lot of good. I don’t think I’ve slept more than three hours a night for the last month.”

“I’m not doing much better,” Matthew Mahan said as he laid a $20 bill on the check that the waitress brought him. He peeled another $20 off the roll of cash he had in his pocket and said to her, “This will take care of the young priest who’s lunching in the next room with my chauffeur.”

All the way back to the seminary in the car, Monsignor Gargan complained about his seminarians’ lack of interest in athletics. They had been forced to abandon most of their intramural sports program because so few came out for the teams. “Yet they’ll march their legs off down in Washington, or at City Hall, to protest against the war or pollution or eating the wrong kind of lettuce or grapes.”

“As long as they act as individuals, Hal, we’ve got to give them the right to do those things,” Matthew Mahan said. “You know what I went through in the forties and fifties every time I opened my mouth.”

“I know, I know,” said Gargan in a totally unconvinced voice.

For a moment, weariness swept over Matthew Mahan again. He felt as tired as Gargan looked.

“Remember what I said, Hal, patience.”

Gargan nodded glumly as the car swung through the gate of Rosewood Seminary and swept up the curving path to the administration building. Emotion stirred in Matthew Mahan as he looked across the broad lawn at the drab fieldstone building. Here was where his priesthood had begun, where he had spent six of the happiest years of his life. At this time, on a Friday afternoon toward the end of March, there would have been at least two softball games going strong on the north and south lawns. Today, three seminarians played with a Frisbee on the south lawn. They weren’t even doing a good job of catching it.

“They all clear out on weekends these days,” Gargan said.

Next year, Matthew Mahan thought, suddenly as morose as Gargan but concealing it, the seminarians will demand the right to live in off-campus apartments. These young people were insatiable. They already had so much more freedom than his generation ever dreamed of achieving, yet they were still morose, sullen, dissatisfied. And what were they doing with their freedom? That was the tormenting question. Mostly thinking up new ways to embarrass, harass, or disturb the Archbishop, so it sometimes seemed. But that was unfair, Matthew Mahan chided himself. Most of his harassment today had come from a hate-filled seventy-two-year-old monsignor.