Father Lavelle sat on his bed, his back against a wall, his feet drawn up beneath him, his shoes still on, soiling white sheets. He was in his middle fifties, with tufts of whitening hair above his ears and a deep tan on his bald forehead. He had sad round eyes and the sort of tender face many small men seem to have, perhaps through buffeting up against a larger world.
He wore a white polo shirt, so wrinkled that Jim assumed he had slept in it for the last few days, yet Jim knew cleaning was available through the ever-present bustling nuns who serviced the Vatican. There was no match for someone who thought she was serving her God when she ironed a shirt.
The most significant fact about Father Lavelle was that he was doing nothing when Jim entered. There was no book in front of him. No radio on, no form of entertainment or any other visible occupation, such as prayer.
“Hi, I’m Jim Folan, I’d like to talk to you,” said Jim in English.
“So you are the one,” said Father Lavelle. His English was accented but not burdened by his native French. The English was good enough so that Jim did not have to concentrate on deciphering the words through the French-slurred consonants.
“I assume you mean that I am the one chosen to investigate this thing. Are you hurt about that?”
“In the hierarchy of my pain, that is not even a novitiate.”
Jim nodded. Even a despairing witticism was better than none in the man’s condition.
“May I sit down?” asked Jim, and when he got permission he put a manila folder on a small bare table and sat three feet from Father Lavelle.
Only Father Lavelle’s eyes moved.
“Father Lavelle, from what I gather you have been a Communist once?”
Lavelle nodded. “It is so.”
“And you changed, and became a Dominican late in life.”
“Yes. Yes. That is so.”
“I was wondering why you became a Communist?”
“So you can explain away things as a Communist plot, no?” A weak, pitiful smile crossed his delicate face.
“No,” said Jim. “I want to know why you believe things, and then Why you don’t. There is something that happened in that cave on …” Jim reached for the folder, careful not to let the contents be seen by Father Lavelle because it had a short dossier on his life. “Haneviim Street.”
“That is pronounced Hanava … eem,” said Father Laville. “I became a Communist because they seemed like the only ones willing to stand up against the Nazis.”
“And how long did you believe that?”
“Until they got into bed with the Nazis. The invasion of Poland and the peace treaty between the two ended that. They are not all that different, you know, they just have different classes of Untermenschen, ‘subhumans.’ Those who are to be hated.”
“And being anti-Nazi was important to you?”
“Certainly you have in that file, Jesuit, that my mother was Jewish.”
“And then you became a Catholic. Why?”
“Because I came to believe that Christ was the answer. He was the answer to the wars, to the hate, to the despair of the world. It was a world of sin that I saw so clearly and Jesus was the only answer to that.”
“And the Talmud lacked the answers,” said Jim, referring to what could best be described as the guide to a good Jewish life.
“I was not raised as a Jew, or even as a Catholic, for that matter. Of course, having a Jewish mother was enough for Nazis. A Jesuit should know that, yes?”
“How did you know first that I was a sole investigator, the one, and then that I am Jesuit?”
“You are, aren’t you?”
Jim nodded.
“It was not that hard to reason through,” said Father Lavelle. “There was such a concern for secrecy. Who did I tell? Who told me? These things the Pope himself asked. So I knew that when this was looked into it would not be a commission, it would be a single man.”
“And the Jesuit?” asked Jim.
“It would have to be from the Jesuits.” There was that smile again.
“Why?” said Jim, remembering Cardinal Pesci making a point that he himself, not the Pope, chose the Jesuits.
“You don’t know about taint, and blemished blood?” asked Father Lavelle.
“I think I know what you are talking about,” said Jim.
“Jewish blood is considered tainted. How many generations back can your Church be sure you have no Jewish blood? How many, Father? Five, ten, sixteen? Eh? What is the fear there? That some distant blood relative of Mary sneak into your order. The Vatican would have to have a Jesuit to be safe.”
“Father Lavelle, you are referring to a sixteenth-century law made by frightened and foolish people in Spain because of a fear of Moorish and Jewish influence in the Jesuit order. It is a fact that Jewish converts played an early and prominent part in the Jesuits. There was resentment. There was the Inquisition. There were Marranos, Jews who ostensibly converted on the outside but remained Jews. Some of them were Jesuits. In a foolish act during a horrid time, a law was passed that prohibited anyone who had Jewish blood up to ten generations back from becoming a Jesuit. Even at that time St. Francis Xavier fought against those prohibitions. And as a fact, those laws have been changed.”
“Modified,” said Father Lavelle.
“I know personally a Jesuit whose father is a rabbi,” said Jim.
“With a dispensation. You see that’s how the law was changed. It is still there, the one thing the Church would know when it called on the Jesuits to provide its one man was exactly how much Jewish blood he had. Taint. Free of taint.”
“An unfortunate term in an unfortunate time.”
“And you are here, aren’t you, Jesuit?”
“Do you think I was brought in because your findings are invalid because your mother was Jewish, Father? Is that what you think?”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“Is that what you think?” asked Jim.
“It would not be the most impossible event, even if it is certainly one of the more minor ones.”
“Is that what you think?”
“You heard a yes.”
“You think that?” said Jim, his voice rising on purpose.
“Yes. Yes. I think so. Yes.”
And then Jim’s voice dropped very low, almost a whisper.
“You’re missing an important fact, the most important fact,” said Jim. “Why you could not be the one.”
“Yes?” said Father Lavelle.
“You believed the body was His.”
“I do.”
“But you see, that means your investigation ended when you left the cave. And that is where the Church’s has to begin.”
Father Folan had made his point. But it was really setting up something else. All the framework for pulling out Father Lavelle’s personality had gone into this next question.
“When you entered that cave, I see from what little information I have, you believed in the Resurrection. When you left you did not. What was it, ten minutes, a half hour? And it was totally changed.”
“I saw Him. I read the plaque. I saw the stone. I saw the Golban data. It’s Him, Father, and unrisen.”
“Pierre, I am not an archaeologist, but I do know the Romans crucified thousands. In one rebellion in Galilee alone three thousand men were crucified in an afternoon. They used to give those things out like parking tickets. Why that body? Why so quickly did you accept that it was Him?”
“There is the time, the data, the plaque. The body was crucified. It was found in a rich man’s tomb, which is odd in itself, because usually only the lowest were crucified. But Jesus, in the Gospels, was placed in a rich man’s tomb, and so was this.”
“And in the Gospels the sign above Jesus’ head was in Latin and Greek, too.”
“No, just according to St. John, and that is considered the least accurate Gospel. It was written to convince not to report. Or are you one of those who believe those paintings with the silly sign above the
crucified head reading INRI, using Roman abbreviations for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews?”
“Why did you accept Dr. Golban’s data?”
“You mean I should have investigated her tainted blood?”
“I asked a question,” said Jim.
“She is an archaeologist, why should she lie?”
“I didn’t say that, Father. Please, I know you are in great pain, and I feel for you. I do. Let me carry this now. This is mine. The Holy Father has given it to me.”
There was no answer but the beaten lifeless stillness in the man whom Jim wanted to cradle in his arms and tell that everything would be all right. He wanted to tell him all the stories Jim knew he would not respond to but should, about the darkness before light, and the death before the Resurrection, that sign that the sin of the world had been conquered, the victorious Christ, who could be victorious over this man’s hell.
Father Lavelle’s dossier had said he had often gone into the wilderness alone for days at a time, and so Jim began with that question, how long had it been since he had gone to the Judean wilderness?
“A month. I would go there, and return, and return from the nothingness. You see, there the question is clearest. Are we all an interruption of nothingness, or do we come from something and go to something? Have you been to the wilderness? You can walk there from Jerusalem.”
“And who asked you to observe the body? Dr. Golban?”
“No. No. A representative of the Ministry of Religion, Christian Affairs. Mendel Hirsch.”
“And how did he hear about it?”
“I presume from Dr. Golban. She discovered it.”
“I see. Why did she dig there? What caused her to dig in that spot on Haneviim Street?”
“It was an assigned dig. You see, when people want to build and they uncover something of archaeological value, by law the area must be excavated properly before they can continue.”
“What had been discovered, the cave?”
“I don’t know. Sharon just said it was an assigned dig.”
“Are you friends?” asked Jim.
“We knew each other,” said Father Lavelle.
“Do all archaeologists in that area know each other?”
“We all know of each other.”
“But you knew her.”
“Yes.”
“How well?”
“I once lectured at a class of hers.”
“And she knew you were a priest?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t go around in vestments. Or even a collar. I lived at the House of Isaiah, on Agron Street, near the American Consulate. Do you know about the House of Isaiah?”
“It’s a Dominican residence. You all work in Israel,” said Jim, leaving out Cardinal Pesci’s comments that the residents of that house had to be assumed to be pro-Zionist. Pesci had stressed that.
“Do you know who suggested that you be chosen to examine the dig?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know why you were chosen?”
“It is possible they knew me as a Christian and an archaeologist.”
“There are others who fill the same bill, Father. I’m trying to determine why you were chosen, why the Catholic Church. Certainly there are Protestants who are archaeologists. It appears that the Catholic Church was chosen.”
“It is Him in that cave tomb. Why are you looking for all sorts of dirt under fingernails and time of day and who said what and who did what because of what and intended what? It’s Him.”
“That someone like you, Father, believes that, is exactly why the Church wants to know who said what to whom and why. We want to know every speck of dust in that cave. Because we don’t want to lose you, Father, we don’t want to lose one soul because of this thing, and if we’ve lost you …”
Jim’s voice cracked. On one hand, he was the professional working toward building his facts, on the other, he was feeling for this man’s despair. “We don’t want to lose you, Father.”
“Are you through, Father Folan?”
“I can come back tomorrow.”
“I want to finish today.”
“I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“Whatever you want, but let us get through this thing today.”
Jim did not want to continue. Father Lavelle needed rest and relief. But most of all Father Folan felt he needed Him, the One he no longer believed in.
“You know, there are lots of possibilities yet to be explored, including some scientific dating that I have yet to fully understand. But have you ever thought that that cave came from one period and the body another? You don’t know yet. You don’t know, we might not have some proof, putting the body twenty years after Pontius Pilate was back in Rome. You don’t know. It is you, Father Lavelle, who has made the leap of faith by declaring it is Him.”
“Ah, the Jesuit mind,” said Father Lavelle, impregnable to compassion, imprisoned in his grief.
Father Lavelle did not look at Jim or even nod but stared at the crucifix on the wall with the lettering both of them knew was unlikely ever to have hung over the head of Joshua, son of Joseph, later to be called in Greek, Jesus the Christ … the man who came from Galilee one spring for a Passover in Jerusalem and an appointment with eternity.
The rumpled sheets of the bed had dark lines where Father Lavelle’s shoes had made marks. Jim paused at the door and returned.
He reached under a light blanket covering the feet, and untied the shoes, and put them neatly under the bed, and then removed the socks. He pulled the blankets back up over Father Lavelle’s feet. How fragile the feet had seemed, thought Jim. They had blue veins and tiny bones and yet they had carried that poor man such a long, long way.
The physical evidence about Christ was as Jim had suspected. None. Pesci’s office had set up a meeting for him with an elderly Belgian priest, teaching at a seminary near Rome. Why this man was chosen, Jim was not sure at first. But he confirmed what Jim had expected to hear.
“What we know of Christ Himself we know through the Gospels. Nowhere in the Gospels is there any description of Him,” said the elderly priest.
Pesci had given Jim an office for such meetings. It made Jim uncomfortable just to sit in it, because this was the sort of ornate presence that required a cassock. It was European royalty, not American Jesuit.
“Do you think that the writers of the Gospels refused to describe Him because of the Jewish tradition of not describing God?”
“That is an interesting theory,” said the old priest. “But I would say that there was nothing extraordinary in his appearance. For we have an example of Muslim tradition against graven images, which is also from the same root as the Jews. And they speak of specific features of their Mahdi, the one who is to come. So then, it might be allowed.”
“In which case, the Gospels might not have described Jesus because He was so ordinary for his time.”
“More than likely. How much do you know about the Shroud of Turin?”
“I know that the Church has never come to a position on the shroud. I believe a study was done outside the Church that showed it was not forgery. But what else, I do not know.”
“Well, it shows the negative imprint of a crucified man. Many believe it is the shroud that covered our Lord.”
“The shroud is just too dubious. I need firmer stuff. That isn’t something solid enough. It is physical, but unproven whom it covered.”
“I know by how quickly I was summoned that what you are doing is important,” said the old priest. “I can say no more but to look at the evidence on the shroud.”
“The Church hasn’t done work on the shroud, has it?” said Jim.
“Cardinal Pesci can get you whatever has been made available to the Church,” said the old priest.
“I should look for something through Pesci on the shroud?”
The old man nodded.
At the afternoon reserved for Jim, Cardinal Pesci allowed as how he had heard rumors of a report done on the shro
ud. He would be able to get that report for Jim through His Holiness, if it existed. He reminded Jim that, in deference to His Holiness, he too was making efforts to adhere to papal secrecy. Jim’s name was not in his appointment calendar. This afternoon Pesci would be officially listed as ill.
“I have one outstanding question that you might answer for me, Your Eminence. Why did Israel choose us? Why the Catholic Church?” asked Jim.
“Ah,” said Pesci, beaming. “The main question? Why? Why should the government of Israel, whom we don’t recognize, invite us to be the one to share this secret? Why?”
“I don’t know, why?”
“Maybe you will help us find out why?” Cardinal Pesci lit a long cigarette. The cigarette paper was colored green. There was wine, which he offered to pour for Jim himself. Jim refused. Cardinal Pesci began an explanation of the Church and the Middle East which lasted the afternoon, the intricacies of Arab interaction, Western interaction, Church interaction. But one thing was clear from all of it, the great events never seemed to end, not even the Crusades, which Cardinal Pesci said he believed still lingered in the back of the Arab mind.
“The resentment is abated now because they have Israel to focus on, but let their hate turn to us and you will see how vulnerable our Arab communities are, how vulnerable our interests are.”
“Is that why the Vatican never recognized Israel?”
“We do not recognize Israel because its borders have never been settled with Jordan.”
“That means the Church does not have to recognize Israel until the Arabs do. Or just about that,” said Jim.
Pesci smiled.
“Well, quite obviously there are dealings between the Vatican and Israel, Your Eminence,” said Jim. “We have holy places there, many that I know of.”
“You only offend an Arab by what you do publicly for his enemy,” said Pesci, nodding with an even broader smile. “The enemy is always more important to the Arab than the friend.”
“So it is only the public relations with Israel that are a danger. Obviously we have private ones, because frankly, Your Eminence, you seem to have everything in order and working rather well.”
Pesci nodded. “Understanding all this, we must now ask ourselves, how have the Jews survived? By their cunning. And now we have a Jewish state afloat in a sea of hate, sending us a Zionist who has discovered the body of Christ. Come, come. You don’t have to be a secretary of state to be just a little bit suspicious.”
The Body Page 8
