The Priest's Madonna

by Hassinger, Amy

  It was this imagination of hers, her ability to speak of the distant past as if she’d witnessed it, that I relished. I listened eagerly to her tales of the Cathars, who lived six centuries before I was born and practiced their heretical religion on our little hilltop just as they did throughout the region.

  The Cathars ate no meat, eggs, or cheese—no food that came from flesh, for they believed that flesh had been created by the devil, whom they knew as Rex Mundi, the king of the world. It was Rex Mundi who had moved upon the face of the waters and sculpted an Adam from dust. The true God reigned solely in the heavens, having nothing to do with the earthly creation. “Have you ever wondered, Marie,” Madame asked me one afternoon, “how a good God could have created the guillotine?” The Cathar God, she said, was pure perfection, and as such, could not have made our world. Only the souls of men housed a spark of divinity. These souls traveled from body to body, life to life, over time, until they attained perfection and could finally join with God in the heavens. This was accomplished by renouncing the material world through the sacrament of the consolamentum, a spiritual baptism that had to be received before death in order to achieve salvation.

  “So many of the peasants of that time,” she recounted, “ate only two meals a day of porridge and weak ale and wore their tunics until they became rags on their backs. They spent their days threshing the grain on fields they didn’t own, weaving endless skeins of flax and wool into cloth. Of this meager income, the Church demanded ten percent. And for what? To pay for the ermine-trimmed albs, the satin miters, and the golden staffs of the bishops, to fund their feasts of wild boar, goose, and hare, their debauched nights with well-kept concubines. The perfecti”—these were Cathar monks who traveled through the countryside, fasting and preaching like Jesus’ own apostles—“simply appeared holier than the so-called holy men of the Catholic Church. You can imagine the appeal.”

  That the God of Genesis, the God who had created man, should be thought of as the devil was a great heresy in the eyes of the Catholic Church. But an even greater heresy was the Cathar disdain for the cross. For they believed that Christ did not die on the cross. They believed, in fact, that he didn’t die—because he had not truly lived. Being perfect as his Father, Christ could not have taken on the imperfections of human flesh. His appearance on earth in human form was a semblance, a divine optical illusion. Cathar theology rendered the Church’s central symbol—ritually kissed by the priest at the beginning of each Mass, piously traced by congregants over their own hearts—meaningless.

  During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this region, our region—from the Pyrenees, along the Mediterranean all the way to the Rhône, and as far west as Toulouse—graciously hosted this burgeoning religion. Nobles protected its practitioners; many nobles practiced the religion themselves. As it gained power, it threatened the Church, which responded by launching the brutal Albigensian crusade.

  In her accounts of the crusade, Mme Laporte dwelt on the gris liest details, describing the butchering of torsos, the mass inciner ations of bodies—hundreds at a time. She told of the massacre of seven thousand at Béziers, Cathars and Catholics alike, spurred on by the Abbot of Cîteaux, who commanded the balking soldiers to “kill them all. God will know his own.” She described the flight of hundreds of Cathars to seek refuge in mountaintop fortresses like Montségur or Peyrepertuse. There they faced sieges that, if they didn’t bring immediate death by a blow to the head from a catapulted stone or an arrow lodged in the heart, threatened a more protracted one by dysentery, starvation, or dehydration. “Death by dehydration can occur within just three days,” she told me with her usual impassive expression. “You go mad, you know. Raving mad.”

  I would walk home, my head filled with images of charred skin, gutted corpses, wild-eyed children spinning in a final fury before they fell, desiccated, to the ground. I began to have nightmares: visions of mobs approaching with buckets of steaming tar ready to slather on my naked skin; the sensation of rope looping at my ankles and wrists and the ominous tugging of restless horses at the other end. And yet I read the books Madame gave me and returned week after week, to eat cakes and hear her tales. They quickened my pulse, filled me with a sumptuous fear.

  At first I did not question why she knew so much about the Cathars and their barbarous end. Her affinity for their philosophy seemed consistent with what I knew of her: her temperance, her apparent indifference to her own possessions (except, perhaps, her books). She embodied the virtue of renunciation that Bérenger so extolled. Yet she was not a Catholic and so was unaffected by Catholic doctrine. It surprised me that someone so apparently irreligious could be so virtuous.

  “How is it that you know so much about all this?” I finally asked her one afternoon after she’d told me of the bloody siege of Carcassonne.

  She appeared startled at the question and did not answer me right away. I sipped my coffee, worrying that I had somehow offended her. Finally, she replied, “It interests me. The history of the area. I suppose I like to have a sense of where it is I live.”

  I let the subject drop, though her answer seemed incomplete.

  I suppose confessing my secretive relationship with Madame—particularly the pleasure I took in her gruesome tales—would have been enough to satisfy Bérenger. But what I could never confess to was the seedling of doubt, planted by my father and now pushing its way toward the surface of my mind. I had always assumed, as my mother had told me, that my father was like the prodigal son who would someday return home to the Church. “And when he does,” she said, “God will welcome him with open arms.” But as I came to know Mme Laporte, my opinion changed. I began to wonder if perhaps my father was right. The Church, it turned out, was fallible; more than that, it was capable of corruption, hypocrisy, and great evil. This institution that called itself God’s own bride, that claimed to be the only true messenger of his holy word, that promised salvation and won the trust and faith of so many—this institution was guilty of terrible crimes.

  It sickened me, this new apprehension. How could the Church that commanded us not to kill be capable of massacring thousands in the name of God?

  I raised my questions with Mme Laporte, but she could not answer them. “I’m not a proper counselor for you on matters of religion, Marie,” was all she would say. It was clear that she held the Church in contempt, though she never said so outright. I did not want to talk to my father about it—his reaction was too predictable. Neither could I talk to my mother; it would hurt her to learn of my doubts. Michelle had lately become oblivious to anything but Joseph and her upcoming wedding. And Claude was too young to be of any help. I was left, then, with Bérenger.

  I did not know him well enough yet to be able to predict his response, and this made me both curious and wary. Would he scold me for expressing my horror at what the Church claimed—albeit hundreds of years ago—was a righteous war? Or would he acknowledge the Church’s fallibility? Would he punish me for my doubt? Tell my mother? Or, worse, forbid me from seeing Mme Laporte again? I feared this last the most, not only because I was loath to give up my visits with Madame, but also because if he assigned me such a penance, I would be compelled to obey, and as a result might resent him, a thing I could not stand. Instead, I carried my unspoken questions within me like an ulcer until they began to cause me psychic pain.

  When the smell of stale incense and melted wax—smells that had once comforted me—began to fill me with dread, I resolved to speak with Bérenger. My motives were genuine, I believed: I hoped he might tell me something that would reconcile the Church’s past foibles—even sins—with what I believed was its present beneficence.

  Bérenger, I knew, was in the habit of taking a midday walk just before dinner, and I hoped to intercept him on his way. I chose an afternoon when my mother had gone to Espéraza for the day to visit a friend who was ill. Michelle and I were normally responsible for preparing the midday dinner, which would have prevented my leaving the house just before noon, but I s
tarted the meal early. I worked quickly and nervously at the rest of my chores that morning, hastily milking Geneviève, our goat, and beating the dust from the carpet in a fury. I told Michelle nothing—we shared little with each other now. She knew and disapproved of my visits to Madame and I could not bear to hear her fretting over her lack of a trousseau or repeating word for word Joseph’s latest declaration of love. After hanging the wash, I stole down the path that led to the château, then passed the château by and continued downhill toward the road that Bérenger would be traveling.

  It was a late summer day, hot and dry, and the red dust settled in my mouth and nostrils, tasting of iron. I thought of a legend we’d heard from Mme Paul: that the devil had buried a treasure in these mountains, and one morning, when he had nothing else to do, had spread the millions of pieces of gold over the earth. “Gold’s all around here,” she insisted, when my mother raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Monsieur Flèche found a piece once when he was a boy. Ask him yourself.” We later did, and though he denied finding any himself, he told us a story about a shepherd who, while looking for a lost ram, had fallen into a cave somewhere on the hillside and emerged hours later with both the ram and a kettle full of gold coins.

  As I walked, I kicked at pebbles in my path, idly searching for a glint of yellow. When I approached the slope descending from the graveyard, I saw Bérenger. He was stepping carefully to avoid the rocks and brambles that interrupted the narrow trail. He wore his cassock, which set off his face, square and tawny above his clean white collar, his cheeks dark with the shadow that clung to them. “Good morning, Monsieur le curé,” I said, affecting a tone of mild surprise.

  “Marie!” He lifted his walking stick toward me in a salute, then studied the path again until he reached a level.

  “I was just going for a walk,” I said.

  “Well, then, we’re of the same mind, you and I. May I join you?”

  As we descended, the panorama opened before us. There were the fields, planted with wheat, barley, maize, and grapevines, bursting with green and the first tinges of autumnal brown. Bordered by wild growth—large bushes of broom, dwarf and umbrella pine, Kermes oak and cypress—the fields appeared, from a distance, to be patches on a great quilt, laid over the swells and dips of a recumbent body. Above the valley rose the mountains, increasing in height as they increased in distance. They stretched on, one after the next, the larger ones hovering ancestrally over their smaller companions. The ruined ramparts of Coustaussa and Blanchefort hulked over the valley, as natural as if they’d grown out of the rock, wild castle-plants. Limestone broke the surface of the hills now and then, like the bones of an ancient buried skeleton gradually becoming unearthed. The soil, as I’ve said, was red, but there were places where the red blended to brown or beige, as if the color had bled in the rain.

  This vista was what we gazed upon as we walked, Bérenger and I. It relieved us of some pressure, for there could be no such thing as awkward silence in the presence of such beauty—silence was the only way to approve of such a sight. So we walked a ways without speaking, listening to the pebbles crunching beneath our feet, the clucking of hens and the occasional call of a rooster from the village above.

  He spoke first. “I had a view of this hill from my bedroom window when I was a boy. I used to scan the hillside, looking for caves.”

  “Did you ever find any?”

  “Oh, yes. Not from my window, of course. But when I searched on foot, that’s when I got lucky. I noticed a draft coming from within some vines, and when I parted them, sure enough, there was my cave. I was so thrilled, I just squatted there, feeling the cold, smelling the earth. I thought I’d found my own special place, assigned to me by God.” He laughed a little and shook his head. “Foolish. I crawled in. It was deep—it extended straight back for a hundred feet or so and then dipped suddenly into pitch darkness. I had no light with me, so I couldn’t continue.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Nothing. Only a ring of stones and some charred wood, which disappointed me, since it meant that someone had been there before. I vowed to return with a light, and I did try, several times, to find the place again. But I never could. I found other caves, but none of them were as deep or as intriguing as that first one.”

  “There’s supposed to be a secret underground passageway through the caves here,” I offered timidly. “That people used to use as an escape route.”

  “Oh, there are all kinds of stories. Secret passageways, tunnels, hideouts. Hidden treasure. The kind of thing boys love.”

  “Not just boys.”

  He stopped his striding for a moment to regard me, an amused expression on his face. “Don’t tell me you’ve been searching, Marie?” My abashed silence gave him his answer, and he guffawed, as if at a clever joke. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “And have you found anything?”

  “No,” I admitted. Then, encouraged by his evident pleasure at my interest, I continued, “I’ve become very interested in the legends, though. I’ve been interested to hear, especially, about the Cathars—how they might have used an underground passageway to escape the crusaders.” I faltered, losing courage.

  Bérenger chuckled, “Yes, well. They’re intriguing, all those tales. Unreliable as anything.”

  Forcing myself to continue, I said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Monsieur le curé. About the Cathars and the Albigensian crusade. All the thousands of people who were slaughtered, burnt at the stake—by the Church. I’ve been, well, thinking about it …” I trailed off. He had stopped walking and had raised his head, casting his eyes to the distant hills.

  “By the Church’s army,” he said.

  “Yes.” I hesitated a moment longer. “I hope you’ll pardon me, Monsieur le curé, but I’ve been troubled by it. I can’t understand how the Pope could have ordered those men to kill all those people like he did.”

  Bérenger smiled sadly at the ground. “What have you been reading?” he asked.

  “Oh, history books. Father bought them for me in town.” I might have told him of my meetings with Mme Laporte, but his sudden change in demeanor unnerved me.

  “I didn’t know you were interested in history, Marie.”

  He squatted to examine a thistle, his thick fingers probing the spiny bulb beneath the washed-out purple flower. “The Marian thistle.” He picked it and handed it to me. “They’re supposed to protect one’s faith.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He began walking once more. “It’s not an easy thing, the question you’ve asked, Marie,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “The crusades were hundreds of years ago, of course. Things have changed.” His walking stick scraped against the stony path. “The Albigensian heresy was a great danger to the people. It was leading hundreds astray. You’ve read, I suppose, about their beliefs, what they claimed to be true?”

  I nodded.

  “It was heresy, pure and simple.” He sighed again. “You know the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, Marie.” And when I didn’t respond, he began to narrate the story, enunciating the words emphatically, as he did in his sermons. “In Israel under King Ahab, there were hundreds of false prophets, men who worshipped Baal. One day, Elijah called all these prophets to the top of the mountain. There he proposed a test to prove to them who was the one true God. They would prepare two bulls for burnt offerings—one to be sacrificed to Baal, the other to the Lord. Then they would each call upon their God to light the fires. The God that sent down fire to burn the offering would have proven himself as the true God.

  “So they prepared the offerings and set them on two pyres, one next to the other. And the prophets of Baal called on their god to come and light their pyre. All morning and all afternoon they called. But Baal didn’t answer. Then Elijah stepped up to his pyre and commanded it to be drenched with water. And the people poured vessel after vessel of water on the offering until the bull and the wood were drenched, and the pyre stood in a
pool of water. Then Elijah called on the Lord. And immediately God answered him with a searing flame that leapt from the sky and consumed the bull, the pyre, the stones it stood upon, even the pool of water beneath it. And the people, when they saw this miracle, lay down and declared glory to the Lord God, the one true God of Israel and of all the world.”

  The story was familiar—I had heard it before—but in Bérenger’s telling, the characters suddenly took on more majestic proportions. Even God himself, whom I had remembered as being helpful, sending the fire down in order to save Elijah from his predicament, became ireful and destructive. Then Bérenger added the final, damning conclusion to the tale, one I had not remembered.

  “And then, Marie, Elijah gathered up the prophets of Baal, those false prophets who had led the people of Israel away from their one true God, and he slaughtered them. According to the Law of God, false prophets are condemned to die. Deuteronomy 18:20.”

  This ending dropped like a rock into the pleasant morning and the tenuous webbing of my faith.

  “The Cathars were false prophets, Marie.” He spoke more gently now, aware that he’d shocked me. “Pope Innocent the Third was obliged to kill them. He was kinder, even, than Elijah. He tried other methods first: discussion, debate, appealing to the nobles to stamp out all signs of the heresy among them. But none worked. And so he finally followed God’s Law.” He studied my face. “The heretics were always given the chance to renounce their beliefs and return to the true Church. Those who chose to return were accepted with joy. Those who didn’t, well …” He paused. “Sometimes war is necessary in the name of God.”