Kelly hung a jeweled pectoral cross around Manning’s neck. A symbol of the office of a bishop, it dangled on the cardinal’s chest. He clutched it for a moment with his right hand and fingered it lovingly. On his left hand, he wore his archbishop’s ring, only slightly more modest than a Super Bowl ring. His ecclesiastical “bling.”
The cardinal was already moving toward the door when Krakowski handed him a silver crosier, a six-foot-long staff meant to recall a shepherd’s crook. Kelly plopped a gold and white miter, a sort of pointed hat, on the cardinal’s head. Manning paused for a moment in front of a full-length mirror to admire himself. The miter added at least a foot to his height of six feet. Fully vested, he looked ready for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Cardinal Manning struggled to get his bulk up the steps. Halfway up, he stopped to catch his breath. Wheezing a bit, the archbishop pushed himself up the last flight of stairs. He emerged from behind the high altar into the sanctuary, where the priests and a few bishops had already been lined up by the bossy young master of ceremonies.
From the loft at the rear of the cathedral, the choir director saw the cardinal arrive. He raised his baton and signaled to the small orchestra in the loft and the organist to begin the prelude to Mozart’s Requiem.
Nate felt a thrill as the choir intoned, “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” The two lines of pallbearers had already been moved down the center aisle to the main entrance of the church. As the music started, they moved out of the cathedral and down its front steps to the hearse waiting at the curb. By the time the procession with the cardinal reached the great cathedral door, they had lifted Sullivan’s bronze casket out of the hearse and carried it to the main entrance.
It was a struggle getting the heavy coffin up the stairs. Moving slowly, they strained to keep it level as they carried it up the first set of five steps. At the landing they wobbled a little. Nate felt his sweating palms slipping on the coffin handle. Two New York City policemen raced up to help them lift the casket up the last three steps to a cart waiting to receive the coffin on the vestibule level.
Disaster averted, Nate and the other pallbearers breathed a sigh of relief as they set the coffin down on the “church truck,” a cart with four rubber wheels. The undertaker pushed the coffin forward a few paces, so that it was flanked by the huge bronze doors. The pallbearers stepped back a step and allowed Sullivan’s family to come up to the casket. They were all clearly visible from the street in the bright sunlight.
The two rows of priests parted like the waters of the Red Sea when Cardinal Manning approached. Winded from his walk down the aisle, Manning paused near the head of the casket to greet Sullivan’s widow and family.
Cardinal Manning worked the crowd of family at the top of the steps, giving them that super-sincere politician’s handshake—his left hand on their elbows, grabbing their right hands with a firm squeeze. He looked them each straight in the eye and offered some brief words of comfort. Manning was good with people. If he hadn’t been an archbishop, he would have made a great mayor or governor.
Having greeted the family, Manning stepped closer to the head of the casket and was now fully in the sunlight. Nate watched admiringly as the sunlight glinted off the cardinal’s jeweled crozier. The cardinal made the sign of the cross. Nate and the others around the casket followed suit.
Catholic funerals begin with the blessing of the body with holy water to recall baptism. Manning reached to a small bronze bucket of holy water, carried by an acolyte, and grabbed an aspergillum, a brass stick with a little orb on the end that spritzed out water when Manning shook it.
Spritz, spritz, spritz, the cardinal sprinkled water on the casket as he prayed out loud, “I bless the body of John Francis Xavier Sullivan with the holy water that recalls his baptism.”
Nate liked the drama of the blessing. Manning amplified the moment by walking around the casket, sprinkling it from all sides. Nate and the other pallbearers stepped back to avoid getting hit with the holy water as the cardinal circumnavigated the coffin. As Manning returned to the head of the casket, he placed the aspergillum in the bronze holy water bucket.
The undertaker stepped forward with the pall, a large white cloth bigger than a bedsheet. Manning signaled to the family to step forward and drape the cloth over the casket. As the family struggled to unfold the heavy cloth, Manning prayed, “On the day of his baptism, Francis put on Christ; on the day of Christ’s coming, may he be clothed in glory.”
Only a dozen feet away from the cardinal, Nate had a great view of the ceremony, but the traffic noise on Fifth Avenue made it hard to hear the prayers. Nate leaned in a little, looking at the cardinal’s face, trying to hear what was being said.
A red spot of light appeared on the archbishop’s forehead, looking like a Hindu bindi. It seemed to dance around for a split second. Suddenly the cardinal recoiled. Nate saw blood spurt from the place where the red spot had been. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Nate saw Manning’s mouth open wide as the cardinal’s eyes rolled upward in his head, so only the whites were visible.
My God, thought Nate. The cardinal’s been shot!
The impact of the bullet propelled Manning’s head backward, in a kind of whiplash. His miter fell forward and tumbled to the floor. The cardinal staggered back a step or two and collapsed into the arms of the two monsignors, Kelly and Krakowski. Unable to hold his weight, they let him go, and the archbishop crashed to the floor.
Standing beside the casket, Mrs. Sullivan screamed.
The pallbearers dived into the shadows of the vestibule, seeking cover. Nate hit the deck, tripping over one of the other pallbearers as he fell to the floor, very near the body of the fallen archbishop. He could see a little pool of blood oozing out behind Manning’s skull.
In the choir loft above, the choir was completely unaware that the cardinal had been shot. Seeing people running down the aisle, the choir director became confused. He signaled to the choir to intone the “Dies Irae,” the solemn hymn that begins with the Latin words for “day of wrath.” Oddly, it was the perfect accompaniment to the chaos unfolding below.
As everyone on the cathedral steps and in the vestibule scattered to find shelter, Frank Sullivan’s bronze casket sat alone for a moment, shining in the brilliant sunlight.
After seeing the commotion, New York City police officers raced up the cathedral steps, guns drawn. They secured the area and stood facing the crowd on the street, looking for a shooter. There was no obvious gunman.
At the other end of the cathedral, the dignitaries stood in their pews, straining to see what was going on at the main entrance. It was not clear what had happened. The Secret Service at the Fifth Avenue entrance radioed their comrades guarding the vice president, who was standing at his place in the second pew. His bodyguard detail formed a human shield around him and hustled him out of the church. They went down the steps to the sacristy where Manning had vested and then through an underground passageway to the cathedral rectory on Madison Avenue.
Firemen and EMTs from the ambulances stationed on Fifth Avenue shoved their way through the panicked crowd on the sidewalk with a hydraulic stretcher, trying to reach the cardinal. Unceremoniously, they shoved Sullivan’s casket aside, almost toppling it from the church truck. Policemen pushed Nate and the other pallbearers deeper into the vestibule.
Unsure if there were other wounds, the EMTs tried to undress the cardinal, but his weight made it impossible. In seconds, they cut the silk chasuble from top to bottom and all Manning’s multiple layers of clothing down to the skin.
By now, blood was everywhere. The bullet had entered Manning’s forehead and exited through the back of his skull, making a larger exit wound just above the cardinal’s neck. The EMTs’ efforts were futile.
The Archbishop of New York was dead.
2
TELLING THE POPE
NEWS OF MANNING’S ASSASSINATION REACHED ROME before Nate could reach the lobby of his Park Avenue apartment build
ing. Even in the chaos after the cardinal’s shooting, Monsignor Krakowski managed to reach his cell phone in the pocket of his cassock and call his office. He told his secretary to notify Rome immediately of the cardinal’s death.
The secretary pushed speed dial on her desk phone. Seconds later, an English-speaking operator in the Vatican answered. The call was immediately relayed to the pope’s personal secretary, Monsignor Mario Ranieri. When he answered the phone with a cheerful “pronto,” he was hardly ready for the news he received. “O Dio,” he said breathlessly.
Pope Thomas was in the middle of a late afternoon ad limina meeting with twenty-eight bishops from the southeastern African countries of Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.
Only a few weeks past his eighty-fifth birthday, Pope Thomas hardly ever felt well. He suffered from gout. He also had arthritis in his hips. His perpetual cough, caused by chronic bronchitis, was made worse by the drafty rooms in his apartment in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. And the swelling in his feet and ankles marked the beginnings of congestive heart failure.
Thomas was a nice man, but ineffectual. The religious zeal of his youth had been supplanted in old age by a desire for rest and comfort. He had been elected six years before by a group of conservative cardinals who wanted a “placeholder” pope. They mostly got what they wanted.
Basically, the Roman Curia, the papal bureaucracy, wanted a man who would do nothing and disturb no one. After a succession of non-Italian popes, they chose a “safe” Italian. They wanted no waves, no drama, and no initiatives.
Church politics, like secular politics, is divided into three camps: men who want change, men who want no change, and men who want power. Even more than secular politics, church politics is all men. No women are allowed in the biggest and most powerful “old boys’ club” in the world.
When he was elected, the pope chose the name Thomas. The name itself was a surprise. He was the first in a line of 265 popes to ever bear that name.
Supposedly, he picked the name to honor St. Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian. That pleased the conservatives, who love St. Thomas, because he has a settled answer to every question. His Summa Theologica, written in question-and-answer format, gives the illusion of dialogue, but only an illusion, since it is a dialogue with the self. The big questions about God, truth, justice, grace, and salvation are neatly answered. That’s what conservatives wanted: definitive answers.
But after five years of Pope Thomas, the conservative prelates had buyer’s remorse. They thought he was too weak. He had not crushed the liberals as they had hoped. They joked that he started out as Thomas Aquinas but ended up as a doubting Thomas.
What most irritated the Roman Curia were Thomas’s attempts to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. Thomas wanted to take away their perks and their privileges. He wanted them to live like ordinary men. Even worse, he expected them to be followers of Jesus, the poor man of Nazareth. They had worked most of their lives to get the benefits of high office, and now he wanted to take them away. What would we be, they said to themselves in their heart of hearts, without our watered silk and jeweled pectoral crosses? Thomas’s answer did not please them: disciples of Jesus.
Pope Thomas hated meetings. He especially hated afternoon meetings, because they interfered with his nap. In his little hometown, overlooking the Bay of Naples, everybody slept for a couple hours during the midday heat. They were made drowsy by a big pranzo with wine, topped off by the local lemon liquore, Limoncino. Nap time to people like Pope Thomas was more than customary; it was necessary. He was not the only person in the Vatican who liked an afternoon nap. Most Vatican clerics worked only in the mornings. Returning to your office after pranzo was considered optional.
Pope Thomas rested his cheek on his fist, with his elbow propped on the arm of his chair, as he listened to the African bishops drone on about places he’d never heard of and people he would never see. He was bored out of his mind.
Thomas’s lackadaisical attitude toward work would have been anathema to the Polish and German popes before him. Northern Europeans generally thought that people should put in a whole workday. Thomas thought that was heresy. Humanity could not be perfected by human striving, he thought, especially after lunch.
If the pope hated afternoon meetings, his special ire was reserved for these ad limina visits that filled most weeks of the year. Each of the more than three-thousand Catholic bishops in the world is required to make a trip to Rome every five years. The pious reason is to visit the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul, to go ad limina apostolorum, “to the threshold of the apostles.” However, ad liminas are more administrative meetings than pilgrimages. Bishops make a pit stop at the tombs of the apostles, but they spend most of their time making the rounds of the Vatican offices.
Ad liminas are not frank exchanges between equals. They are more like a visit to the principal’s office where bishops are called in to account for themselves.
The Vatican is a monarchy, and bishops are its courtiers. Like courtiers everywhere, they flatter the monarch.
They kiss the pope’s ring. They make a great fuss over how well he looks, even though they gossip among themselves that he looks like death warmed over.
They laugh at all the pope’s feeble jokes. They pretend they are inspired when he reads an address to them that they usually have written themselves. When it is all over, they praise the pope for his brilliant statement to them.
Bishops from poor countries want ad limina visits, because they are an opportunity to raise money or curry favor with Vatican bureaucrats. Sometimes, they angle for jobs in Rome. Mostly, they promote special projects back home for which they need money.
Bishops from rich countries, like the United States or Germany, have a shorter agenda. They want to influence Rome. They bring gifts, generally checks for Vatican foundations or papal charities. Their money gets them respect in the Vatican. For them, the money flows to Rome.
In some ways, the Vatican operates as a giant currency exchange, passing money from one part of the church to another, generally from rich to poor. That is why it needs a bank, or at least thinks it does.
During World War II, when money was hard to move around the world, Pope Pius XII started the Instituto per le Opere di Religione, the Institute for Religious Works. Sometimes it is referred to by its initials, IOR, but mostly people just call it the Vatican Bank.
The setting for this afternoon ad limina meeting was the pope’s private library, an elegant room on the top floor of the papal palace. The coffered ceiling thirty feet above Pope Thomas’s head was gilded, and the massive crown molding featured chubby cherubim mounted in each corner.
The pope sat at one end of the room, on a raised carpeted dais. His cream-colored armchair was similar to the chairs the bishops sat in, but it was raised up above them to indicate his superiority. Though Pope Thomas had tried to change this atmosphere, the Vatican remained resistant to change. Certainly, none of the bishops in that room entertained the idea that they were equal to the pope, despite the fact that he called them brothers.
On the pope’s right-hand side sat Cardinal Michael O’Toole, an American and a native of Boston. He was the head of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, the Vatican’s missionary office. African bishops wanted to keep Cardinal O’Toole happy, since he was the guy who held the purse strings for the third world.
O’Toole was the consummate insider. He knew the bureaucratic game and played it well. That was how he had risen to be the most influential American in the Vatican Curia. At sixty-five years old, he was just a little overweight. His face was reddish, but not wrinkled. His manner was reserved. Only when he went home to Boston did he ever really relax. In Boston he was just plain Mike. There he could drink a beer and cheer for the Red Sox. He might even tell an off-color joke. But in Rome, he was always on his game.
O’Toole had endured dozens of these meetings. He feigned interest while the Bishop of Lilongwe, in Malawi, was standing at the microphone, dr
oning on about the conflict in his country between the Chewa and Tumbuka tribes. O’Toole knew the dispute. It was like tribal disputes everywhere. We have the same thing in Northern Ireland between the Protestants and Catholics, he thought.
Behind the pope, a door opened noiselessly. The pope’s secretary, Monsignor Mario Ranieri, glided silently into the room. A good servant, he had mastered the art of making himself invisible. His feet, concealed under his black cassock, moved across the polished floor as if they were in slippers.
Monsignor Ranieri was not only the pope’s secretary, he was also his boyhood friend. As children, they had worked in the lemon groves near their hometown of Sant’Agata, a tiny spot on a hill overlooking Sorrento and the Bay of Naples. When they were fourteen, they went off to the high school seminary together in Naples. Later, they studied at the Capranica in Rome, the school that produced most Italian bishops. Ranieri was the only one in the room who could speak to the pope as an equal.
He moved to the pope’s side and leaned in close to his ear. The Bishop of Lilongwe stopped talking, curious about the interruption. “Paolo,” breathed Ranieri, using the pope’s boyhood name, “Abiamo una crisi.”
The pope raised his eyebrows and sat up straight. He leaned closer to Mario.
“Cardinal Manning in New York is dead,” he said in Italian. “Assassinated in his cathedral. Sparito.” Ranieri puffed out a little bit of air to make a gunshot sound.
The pope blanched. “Perche?” he asked.
“Non sapiamo,” said Ranieri.
Almost as a reflex to the news, the pope stood stiffly, steadying himself on the armchair. Without hesitation, the African bishops all jumped up.
Pope Thomas made the sign of the cross and began the Our Father in English. The bishops followed along, perplexed. Nobody asked why he was leaving mid-meeting, even mid-sentence. Popes don’t have to explain themselves, and they seldom do.
Leaning on Ranieri, the pope stepped off the dais and left the room by the same door from which Ranieri had emerged. It led to a private office. The pope gestured for Cardinal O’Toole to follow.
Strange Gods Page 2
