“Did you expect a foreign pope?”
The fiesty little man lost his patience completely.
“In the Church there are no foreigners, no boundaries, no divisions. There are no foreigners in the church.”
Then he flashed his famous smile and disappeared into his car.
It was not much better up at the North American College on a hill overlooking the Vatican. Cardinal O’Neill took over before Cardinal Krol could crow about the victory for Poland.
“The Pope and I are very good friends. I recently spent ten days living with him in his home in Cracow. I had lunch with him the day before we went into the conclave. His election is a great victory for Chicago.”
Even the other cardinals could not help look askance at this shameless nonsense.
Someone asked Cardinal Krol whether the Pope had been married as a young man and begun to study for the priesthood after his wife died.
The Cardinal blew up.
“That is a complete lie. It is a dirty Communist propaganda trick.”
“I thought marriage was a sacrament, Cardinal?”
Krol was too angry to respond.
Several other cardinals told pious stories of how they had felt the Holy Spirit in the flowing of the votes.
The vehemence of Krol’s reply made suspicions all the stronger.
The Pope himself answered the question later, quite calmly. “No, I never entered through that door.”
“Strange metaphor,” I said.
“Maybe not, Chucky. He’s a poet after all. As well as all those other things.”
A rumor persisted for some time that the young Karol Wojtyla had indeed been in love in the drama group of which he was a part. However, they had not married and were never intimate. She had died during the war. This rumor probably wasn’t true either. None of the later biographers would pick up on it.
Cardinal Krol had embarrassed the Church and insulted the married laity by his vehement denial of a possible marriage. Other popes had been married men, even perhaps into the nineteenth century and taken major orders only after they lost their wives. It would not be the last time Cardinal Krol put his foot in his mouth.
We went back to the hotel and began to pack. There was a TWA flight to Chicago on Wednesday at three. We should be able to make it after the photo shoot.
The next morning we presented ourselves at the Sala Stampa at ten with our camera and lights. We both could hardly wait to get it over with and get away from the Vatican and Rome and Italy and back to our home and family.
No one seemed to be in charge, so we went to S’ter’s cubbyhole.
“We’re supposed to do a portrait of the Pope today at ten-thirty,” I said tentatively.
“It is not permitted,” she snapped. “It is absolutely forbidden.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The Pope will not meet with degenerates.”
“I see,” I said, my fists clutched in rage. “What makes my wife and me degenerates?”
“You support mutual masturbation!”
“We served on the birth control commission for Pope Paul—”
“Pope Paul is dead!” she said triumphantly.
“May we speak with Monsignor?”
“Monsignor is gone.” She seemed equally happy. “He is no longer the president of the Sala Stampa!”
Rosemarie grabbed my sleeve.
“Come on, Chuck, let’s get out of here. We don’t need his picture or anyone else’s.”
I followed her out of the Sala Stampa.
“Do we have a shot of her?”
“We do,” she said, scribbling rapidly in her notebook. “And I’m writing down the dialogue … Chucky, as I keep telling you, you’re one of the great Catholic laymen in the world. They need you more than you need them.”
“We could find Rae …”
“We could go back to the hotel and pack.”
Never argue with your wife when you know she’s right.
Well, she was wrong about my importance. However, no Catholic ought to be told by the Church that he—and by implication his wife—are degenerates because they served to the best of their ability on a papal commission. This was not going to be a good papacy.
In our suite Rosemarie threw garments into her large collection of luggage with reckless fury.
I took her in my arms.
“Rosemarie, cool it!”
“They’re evil, Chuck.”
“Let’s say they have a different style than we do.”
She remained rigid in my arms.
“I did say cool it,” I continued.
“Look who’s giving orders in the family.” She giggled and then relaxed.
The phone rang.
“Chuck O’Malley,” I said.
“Adolfo here. I call to apologize.”
“You didn’t do it … Don’t try to say it was all a mistake.”
“No, it was not a mistake. It was done deliberately. The new president of the Sala Stampa is a layman from Opus Dei. They have their own agenda. The Pope did not know of it.”
“He appointed the man.”
“Yes, he did … Chuck, if you come to the gate of the courtyard at three, I will be there with the Swiss Guards and they will let you in. The Pope will see us at three-thirty.”
“Adolfo?” Rosemarie whispered.
I nodded.
“We don’t have to take that shit from anyone, Rae.”
“Sister?”
“She said we were degenerates. Suppose I call some of our friends in the media and tell them … Catholic photographer thrown out of Vatican Press Office on charges of degeneracy?”
“You won’t do that, Carlo. You would have done it already, a point I have made. I personally would not blame you if you did.”
“Does the Pope know?”
“Yes he does.”
“Will he apologize to us?”
“By deed at least.”
Rosemarie had grabbed the other phone.
She nodded decisively.
“Okay,” I said grudgingly, “we’ll be there.”
The Swiss Guards knew us well enough to salute us even before Adolfo appeared. The poor man was very apologetic.
“I should have come with you. Sister would not have dared to stop me.”
“Not only did she stop us,” I replied, “she insulted us.”
“Sister is not the Pope,” he said simply.
“Chucky is in a very bad mood, Monsignor. The last effects of his terrible cold.”
“There will be mistakes made,” he sighed. “A different kind of mistake than used to be made. We will be able to correct most of them.”
“I understand that,” I said in a tentative concession to graciousness.
“It could have been so much worse,” he said mysteriously.
Upstairs we were introduced into the papal antechamber. A young, lean secretary with a round Slavic face glared at us, apparently to make sure that my wife’s clothes would meet the papal standards of modesty.
He turned to Adolfo, who pointed at his watch. The punk obviously felt that no one should be admitted to the papal office without being made to wait. If they tried to delay us, I would simply walk out, no matter what my good wife thought.
See how tough I am!
Adolfo stared him down. The invisible man could be quite visible when he wanted to be. Patently he had lost none of his clout.
The young man stood up and walked grudgingly to the door of the papal office, opened it a slit, and slipped in. He seemed to be afraid that we might rush in after him.
He returned in a moment, opened the door wide, and bowed respectfully.
Rosemarie, who had picked up some standard household expressions from Missus, said something to him as she went in, first of course.
He flushed and smiled, a rather nice young man.
The Pope was waiting just inside the door.
The wife greeted him in Polish as she bowed to kiss his ring.
He replied and she answered.
They both laughed.
The Pope might be a charmer. Today he had met his match.
He took my hand and squeezed it.
“We have two Charleses in the room, do we not, Dr. O’Malley? Do they call you ‘Charley’?”
“Chuck usually, sanita,” I said as I kissed his ring. “Sometimes even Chucky.”
“Chucky, I like that … Monsignor, thank you very much for bringing Dr. and Mrs. O’Malley to my office. Please stay and correct my English.”
He was not as tall as he had looked the other day, maybe only two or three inches above me, which is not a heck of a lot. He was, however, solid with broad shoulders and a husky body. I could believe that he loved to ski, an activity which I thought to be folly. His face, like the rest of him, was square and solid and also handsome in an Eastern European way. His eyes were frosty blue and his smile slow and friendly.
He brought us over to his desk, on which were opened copies of Kids and After the War, my first book of pictures about Germany in the late nineteen forties.
The latter was open at the picture of Trudi, my sometime German mistress. The title was Hitler Youth.
“This one lives now? She wants so much to live in the picture …”
“Yes, Your Holiness, she lives in Stuttgart. Her husband is an official in a manufacturing company. Her son flies for Lufthansa and her daughter is in university.”
There was no point in telling him that her son was my son.
“Chuck saved her and her mother and sister when the Russians wanted them,” Rosemarie said.
The Pope had an interesting facial mechanism. He would purse his lips, roll his frosty blue eyes, and nod. It was an expression which could mean absolutely anything. The first time he made it, I think he approved of my saving Trudi and her family.
“And this one, the one waiting at the train for her husband to return from Russia? Did he ever return?”
“Yes, Holy Father,” my wife answered for me. “He was the rector of the University of Bamberg for many years and his wife a Frau Professor. He is a senator now for the CDU.”
The Pope laughed at the complexity of German titles.
“They came over to America for Chuck’s fiftieth birthday last month.”
This time the papal expression seemed to mean that it was impossible that I should be that old.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“And she was there when he got off the train?” the Pope asked me.
“It’s not that kind of story, I’m afraid, Holy Father. She was at the Residenz, the American headquarters that afternoon, acting as a translator for the then Herr Oberbürgermeister of Cologne.”
“So you were there to greet him for her?”
That was a good guess, a damn good guess.
“She had a feeling that he would come on one of the few days she was not waiting for the train from Leipzig. That day she asked me to represent her.”
The hopes and the sorrows, the loneliness and the folly of my time in Germany all raced pell-mell through my imagination. It had been so long ago and I was so young.
“You were how old then, Chuck?”
“Eighteen, nineteen.”
This time his enigmatic expression seemed to mean that I was far too young to have had the adventures which the pictures implied.
He then turned to Kids and flipped through the pages.
“These three are yours, Mrs. O’Malley?”
“Rosemarie, Holy Father … Yes, those are my three Irish cavalrymen. The middle one is studying to be a priest.”
“In Chicago?”
“Certainly.”
He nodded.
“And this young woman”—he picked out Moire Meg—“must have red hair like her father.”
“That’s when she graduated from grammar school. She’s in university now. She is just like her father, except much prettier.”
“Four children?”
“Six, Holy Father. And two grandchildren with another coming. This is our youngest.” She pulled Siobhan Marie out of her purse. “She too has red hair as you see and is an imp like her father.”
He smiled at Siobhan Marie, like everyone must when they see the little kid’s goofy, magical smile.
“And Chuck, what do you try to do in your portraits?” He was looking at Jack Kennedy and John Paul I.
“I try to catch who they are when that which is best in them is present, not so much to flatter as to challenge them.”
The face again.
“So you will perhaps challenge me.”
“I’ll try.”
I glanced over at Adolfo. He was smiling happily. The young secretary was beaming. We—that is to say, my wife—were doing a fine job. I was too excited by the conversation to remember how angry I had been an hour earlier.
“So, Rosemarie”—he gestured at the books and pictures—“do you think your husband is a genius?”
“I knew that, Holy Father, when I was ten years old and he was the obnoxious brother of my best friend.”
There was no way to stop the woman when she was on a roll.
The frosty blue eyes sparkled.
“I’m not a genius, Holy Father,” I protested.
“God has blessed you, Dr. O’Malley … Chuck … with enormous talent. You have done very well with it. I know you will continue your work. I will ask God to bless you and your work and your family … Now we must see how you can challenge me.”
“I think we can still use available light,” I said to my assistant, as she bustled around the papal office, setting up equipment.
She took a reading with a light meter.
“Probably you can for another half hour or so. Let’s do it both ways to be sure.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was not difficult to find the right shot. Despite his many layers of complexity, the Pope was an easy man to photograph. What you saw was what you got—mostly. I tried to get a brilliant and gifted man who had grown up under oppression and was ready to fight for his beliefs, an intellectual garrison commander with gentleness and charm.
I managed a number of wonderful shots. I knew it would be hard to choose among them.
Rosemarie nodded approvingly.
“I think that will do it,” I said finally.
“So quick?” He rolled his eyes and pursed his lips again.
“You’re an easy model, Holy Father.”
“Ah.”
“Now we must have a picture of the three of us,” he said. “Father Stefan, do you know how to operate Dr. O’Malley’s camera?”
“Yes, Holy Father. It is a Hasselblad.”
I put a new roll into it and gave it to the priest.
“Shoot the whole roll.”
He did. There was nothing wrong with his eye.
The Pope blessed us and gave us medals to commemorate his election to pass out to our children and grandchildren.
“And one for the sister who was the best friend.”
He made us promise to send him a copy of the picture and the book of portraits, blessed us, and said good-bye.
Outside in the antechamber, Rosemarie said something in Polish to the secretary. He nodded in agreement or approval or something.
“You two are very dangerous,” Adolfo said, as we rode down in the elevator. “He realized immediately that you were not the degenerates that the people in the Sala Stampa said you were. That was very good. He will not forget you. You must stay in touch with me if there are ever any problems.”
Yet the posters were up on us. We sent copies of the print of the Pope to both Adolfo and the Pope. Adolfo sent a nice letter. We heard nothing from the Pope. The same thing happened to the catalogue of our Art Institute exhibition.
When the Pope came to Chicago we were not on anyone’s list to be invited to anything. The Lady Jane—Jane Byrne, the new Mayor of Chicago—was not on the list either because she and Cardinal O’Neill had become bitter enemies. She in turn managed to ke
ep Sis Daley, the Mayor’s widow, off the list though the local Polish clergy arranged for her to meet the Pope at the Polish parish he visited in the Bridgeport neighborhood. At the Eucharist in Grant Park it had been arranged that the Pope would give Communion to a hundred people, not including the Lady Jane. So the Mayor elbowed her way to the head of the line so she could be the first to communicate. At the end, there were two people and one host. The Pope shrugged and broke the host in half.
We didn’t feel left out. We still had the huge enlargement of Father Stefan’s picture, which we displayed prominently in our family room.
“He’s been a bit of a disappointment,” friends say to me.
I reply, “You can never really leave your neighborhood behind.”
I don’t receive invitations to lecture at Catholic colleges much anymore, which is fine because I’ve given up on lectures. The archdiocese pretty much leaves us alone, despite our charitable gifts. When Notre Dame awarded me its Laetare medal, Ted Hesburgh wondered why there had been a call from the Nuncio asking why the award had been made.
“I told him exactly why: you are a very important Catholic layman and a distinguished alumnus. What’s the problem?”
“My wife and I are degenerates,” I said.
I didn’t point out that I had been thrown out of Notre Dame on a trumped-up charge of drinking on campus—Chucky O’Malley who doesn’t drink! I didn’t because the good wife was there watching me to make sure that I didn’t start a fight.
“What makes them say that?”
“The birth control commission report.”
Ted shook his head in dismay.
In my remarks I vigorously advocated honesty and fairness in the Church. It was received enthusiastically by everyone. Some of our friends who were there—Vince and Peg, Ed Murray and Cordelia—savored the irony with us.
The institutional Church left us alone and we left it alone. We are to the core of our beings parish Catholics, which is where we belong.
Anyway, Rosemarie and I were drained by the excitement of the visit with the new Pope on that Wednesday in October of 1978. We held hands in the back of the car, speechless and baffled.
“He’s a great man,” I said finally.
“And a very good man.”
“It was kind of a spiritual experience meeting him.”
“I know, Chucky, that I’ll never forget it.”
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