Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  By this time he was not only a priest. He had been elevated to the Monsignori. Moreover, he was a conscientious administrator, excessively scrupulous, excessively inflexible.

  Paradoxically, while he despised the obscure, the simple, the illiterate, the seemingly worthless, the unimportant, he was merciful towards them. He poured out much of his fortune in their behalf. It was only when they, with no excuse of blood, no noblesse oblige, no station, took on an ignorant arrogance and bragged and oppressed in their stupidity that he became ruthless. It was very uncomplex to him: the humble should realize that they are humble; the ignorant should understand their ignorance; the unimportant in the world’s eye should be aware of their unimportance. Their Lord had been humble and meek and gentle of heart. They acquired stature if they followed Him in humility, meekness and gentleness. But when they became rich beggars on horseback they should be pulled down, the reins taken from their hands. It was notorious that when given a ‘little brief authority’ they trampled their fellows.

  Ian MacVicar said to his Bishop, “There is nothing so vile as a stupid gross man in a position of authority, or in an assumption of authority and importance.”

  The Bishop was inclined to agree. He did not think it proper that a man without training in the arts of civilization should aspire to public office, or authority. That led to chaos and eventual despotism and madness. It was notable, the Bishop admitted, that the most ferocious of tyrants almost inevitably rose from the base and the men of no family. It was also notable that they were merciless to their former companions and hated them, and that they hated, also, their new associates for their nobility and station, and envied them and tried to humiliate them. For the man of low breeding knew in his heart that he had no right to the position he occupied and so avenged himself on all men.

  “It was the market rabble of Jerusalem who howled to Pilate, ‘Give us Barabbas!”’ said Ian Mac Vicar to his Bishop.

  “But,” said the Bishop, “it was the aristocratic Pharisees who incited the market rabble, the subtle, well-born and cynical Pharisees. A man should remember that.”

  It was a long time before he knew that the young priest was a Pharisee. It was a long time before he understood that he and Ian had not been speaking of the same thing at all.

  The Bishop tried to be patient. He tried to explain, sympathize and enlighten. But Ian had gone too far in his pride and his anger, which now embraced almost all mankind. He was harsh to sinners and cowed them; he absolved, but with contempt. He said Mass with an expression that implied that those who knelt in the church were committing blasphemy by their very presence before the Most Holy of Holies. He was furious in his authority; some of the Sisters fearfully considered him mad, as time passed. He terrified his curates with his scorn for their lowliness, their simplicity, their gentleness with the stupid and bewildered and the sinners. He strode through his parish like a tyrant, condescending to speak only to those who bowed low before him and treating those who met him eye to eye with a violent look on his face. He would look at the quiet faces of those to whom he administered Holy Communion and they would be affrighted by his glance of outrage and disgust. The Bishop sent for him again, and this time the old man was censorious. Ian must go into retreat, there to learn the humility he lacked, there to learn that all souls were precious to God, and loved by Him, and it was not for Ian to judge, and judge so cruelly and with such vindictiveness.

  At this sentence of discipline Ian almost lost his mind. He tore off his clerical collar and flung it at the Bishop’s feet. He tore off his cassock, and hurled it at the Bishop. He did this with silent violence, not uttering a word. Then he looked at the Bishop with naked rage and hatred, and said, “I am done with it. I will serve no God who is alleged, by you, to love the wretches I have in my parish, and in the parishes before, and the trollops, and the drunkards and the filthy and the evil and the illiterate and the fools! No longer will I be commanded to pray with the old women and listen to their senile whimperings; no longer will I sit in the Confessional to hear vile little sins worthy only of dogs and not men. No longer will my eye be offended at the sight of these creatures who claim to be mankind, but are but the most degraded of animals! I shall give the Sacred Host no longer to the unworthy and the criminals, or the sly, whining beasts who smell of whiskey and peat and manure! This is not for me —

  He had flung himself from the Bishop’s aghast presence and had walked in his bitter proud silence to his rectory and, not speaking to his curates, had packed his bags and had left without a word.

  His stricken family turned their faces from him. Independently rich, broken in heart but not in spirit, he fled from them to the most obscure place he could find, his wrath undwindling, his outrage growing, his bitterness increasing. He wanted no more of the Church, or even of God. He would find a place where he could rule, reward the humble suitably, strike down the presumptuous, and where his word was law. He would be a full man again, among men of his choosing, and not a prudent priest who must always suppress his nature. He would marry. He would beget children in whom he would instill his own pride and haughtiness, and make them rulers in their own right. And so he had come to this remote and isolated hamlet and had set up his own laws and his own rule, his own measures of justice, his own penalties, and not a man would dare say him nay nor question his word.

  He had, in short, as Father Tom had so innocently said, set up his own little hell, devoid of God. He had exiled himself. He had, in all ways, excommunicated himself.

  His grandfather, the richest of all the family, must have understood. He left Ian his fortune, to the embitterment and fury of the other members.

  Virtuous, secretly merciful, just, Ian had many of the attributes of a saint but one: he had no humility. He had stubbornly thought that saintly humility had meant, exclusively, wallowing in the gutters with the vile and the sub-human, not to raise them, but to be one with them. This he could not do, when he was a priest and when he was not a priest. He had not understood in the slightest.

  When he was past his youth he married. After six months of marriage he was paradoxically horrified, and withdrew from his bewildered young bride. He led the ascetic life of a priest. His wife thought he did not want her, and she had died in her misery. He had a beloved daughter whom he had looked upon, in the dark and bitter places of his heart, as an eternal virgin, pure, undefiled. She had married and he had almost lost his mind. Not until it was almost too late, on the day Father Tom had come to his house, did he realize that he had never once spoken to his child of his own history and that he had never given her his old Faith. He had only blamed her for his own sins, and threw her from his house and tried to obliterate her from his memory. She became a symbol to him of his apostasy, of his excommunicated state. She was a violation of himself.

  No one in the hamlet had known, of course, and no one had understood this complex and wretched man. Every man had feared him; his own agony fed on their terror. At each gesture of servility, at each craven and humble word, at each glance of a fearing eye, he had become more arrogant, more hating, more ruthless. His own son-in-law had trembled at the sight of him. Earlier ministers had crept from him. Earlier priests had considered him a cold and brutal man, and their personal enemy.

  Then Father Tom had challenged him, in the innocence and purity of his soul. Father Tom had not been afraid of him. Father Tom, for all his shyness, had accepted him. Father Tom had even looked on him with a boyish affection. This had shattered Ian MacVicar. He had determined to try to subdue this childlike courage, to trouble this youthful soul, to throw the young priest into bewilderment, and finally into sniveling subjection. Within a few short days he had utterly failed. And Father Tom had brought to him, in stunning revelation, what it was indeed to be a priest.

  Father Tom did not understand, himself, what he had done to Ian MacVicar, but the wise old priests around Grandmother’s fire knew exactly. Father Tom, as an old man, could only say, “He had reached the breaking point, that poor m
an. He was ready for his saving.” The other old priests smiled and glanced at each other.

  Old Father Tom said, “I had never thought to encounter the problem of intrinsic virtue. But there it was, and I was confused and startled.”

  “And what did ye do?” asked Grandmother.

  “He had confessed to me, that gloomy, windy and raining day in that lonely and isolated place. And then I wrote to my Bishop, and then, fearing that I hadna expressed myself rightly, I went to my Bishop and laid Squire MacVicar’s case before him. I was afraid that I hadna behaved myself in the proper fashion. But the Bishop smiled. He wrote to Ian, himself, and Ian went to him.”

  Old Father Tom lighted his pipe. “Ian was a priest again in all ways. He spent the rest of his life in such humble and isolated places as that hamlet, as a parish priest. I saw him only once after that time. He was the happiest of men, and the most loved. When he died all mourned, even those who were not of the Church. The Bishop, himself, sang the Solemn Requiem Mass.

  “He gave half his fortune to his daughter and the wee minister. The authorities in Edinburgh then thought the hamlet ‘beneath’ the minister and brought him home. They had a lovely son.”

  Father Tom worked at the dottle in his pipe. “The son was named Ian. He became a priest.” Father Tom smiled at his friends. “Strange and wonderful are the ways of God!”

  Chapter Ten

  It was still early, though the darkness outside pressed itself solidly against Grandmother’s house. Everyone considered the tale of Father Weir and his problem of virtue, and Squire MacVicar.

  “There is nay black or white,” said Grandmother, as if in relief.

  “Oh, but there is!” said a priest, Father Joseph Shayne. “There is sin and there is innocence. Those who believe that they meet, somewhere, sometime, are what the philosophers are beginning to call relativists. In short, they are dispensing with values, with the Absolutes of God, with all moral laws. No matter how intricate the subject and the men, there will invariably emerge, after study, the fact that there is but sin — or innocence. It is true that the innocent in their innocence sometimes commit evil, but if the evil is not in their hearts or in their intentions, then they are not guilty.

  “It is true that the wicked sometimes do good, but that is not their inner intention, but the mercy of God. For what is black cannot become white, and what is white cannot become black, except through intention.

  “It always comes back to the inner soul of man. What did he intend? Good or evil? His outer acts do not always follow his intention.

  “At one time I came into contact with a situation which appeared to be evil, but it was not truly evil. I must tell you, dear friends, if you have patience.”

  Father Shayne and the Problem of Evil

  “To the very young, the absolutely innocent, the truly saintly, evil is no personal problem. Ah, they’ll be thinking, this is good and this is bad, this is light and this is darkness, and where is the man who cannot see, for his soul’s sake? But the Fathers of the Church have known always it is not the simple thing. They’ve discoursed on it through the centuries, and many there are of our divided brethren who have come to the conclusion that Satan is a useful fantasy, evil only in the ignorant eye of man, and if there be a problem of evil it can be solved by government fiat and humanitarianism. But, and this I am telling you, my children, this night, evil is not an abstract, but also it is not very clear. This could be one of the machinations of the Evil One, himself. It is one of his confusions which he throws among us, so that we pause in our trouble and ask: What is good, and what is evil?

  “And not always, as I tell you now, can we be sure. Only God can be certain. And that is why He is the All-Merciful, and All-Loving.”

  Father Joseph Shayne was sent to his second parish when he was thirty years old and tolerably seasoned, being one of the new kind of priest just emerging in the Isles, sharp, quick, slightly worldly, tolerant and considerably polished. He had a high sense of humor, courage, strength, and he looked on man and the world with an eye that was becoming urbane. He was just the man, thought his Bishop, to manage the small but rather luxurious parish some twenty miles from London, and not too far from Windsor Castle. The village, containing some three thousand souls, housed retired colonels and other officers of rank, elderly and comfortable widows from London, gentlemen farmers, slightly rich spinsters who had inherited money too late in life to take advantage of it, retired schoolmasters who had pensions and private means, prosperous shopkeepers, teachers, three physicians and several lawyers. What working class there was served these pleasant and kindly folk who lived mostly in the past and were very clannish, looking down their noses at London but going to town several times a year for shopping and visiting with old friends or dropping in at their clubs.

  Father Shayne, thought the Bishop, would be very suitable in that village, though there were only about five hundred or so Catholic souls and none of them were gentry, except for a few here and there. The priest was Irish, but ‘respectable’ Irish, as the English called it. His family in Dublin had been very comfortable, themselves, and he had lived a happy and leisurely and pampered childhood — he being the only son — and he had gone to the best Seminary, where he had associated with easy young men like himself and somewhat worldly priests. He was a Latin and Greek scholar, and liked to spend what time he had in translating Homer and Virgil for his own pleasure; he was also proficient in German, French and Italian. He had an eye for art, and did a little dabbling in water-colors, and knew good painting from bad. His Irish accent would not offend his new parishioners, and he had the good nature, deep, kindly, and pleasant, of those Irish who had never known poverty and hunger. In fact, some of his fellow-priests said, if he had gone to America he would have been a politician of no mean prowess.

  The priest before him, who had just died, had been of another kind of Irish, gloomy and astringent, and there had never been any margin in him for compromise. He had never known when to turn an insult into a joke, a snub into a smile. “It is not, of course, my thought that you will compromise with principle, dogma or doctrine, my son,” said the Bishop. “But one does not use one’s head as a battering-ram, does one?” To which Father Shayne had replied, a little wryly, “One does not.”

  The Bishop briefed him on his new parish. Most of the villagers were Anglo-Catholics, except for the farm hands, the domestics and the shopkeepers and such, who were Low Church, or ‘Chapel’. “But all were very pleasant to your late brother, my son,” said the Bishop. “The gentry were especially kind. However, he upset them, antagonized them. I had, myself, several complaints from the communicants of your new church, St. George’s, because the poor old lad was so adamant on so many matters that were not important at all. The Sisters did not care for him, either. Of course, the good Sisters are usually intolerant of priests, anyway, but they were particularly intolerant of poor Tom.” The Bishop sighed.

  “Prudence is necessary then, I am thinking?” said Father Shayne.

  “Ah, yes, prudence! One of the major virtues.”

  Father Shayne agreed, but he could not help thinking of the old priests of his boyhood who were not prudent at all, and never knew when to hold their tongues if their consciences were challenged or a difficult problem arose, and who were like the prophets of old: fiery, fiercely dedicated, passionate with love for God, and let the devil beware. But these were new days, and if the Church were to prosper in Protestant England the priests must move with caution and urbanity. And prudence. Suddenly, and it vexed him, Father Shayne took quite a dislike to prudence and did not consider it, at least for a moment or two, as one of the more shining virtues.

  The house was small but nice, the Bishop said, with a pleasant garden of flowers and trees and a vegetable garden. He could potter there in the evening, though a gardener did the heavy work. His housekeeper was an elderly lady who did not need the small wages, but worked in the rectory for the love of God and lived with two widowed daughters down the roa
d, middle-aged women in quite comfortable circumstances. “You’ll find many a quaint thatched cottage there,” said the Bishop, “and there are three Old English inns. In short, you will like it very much.”

  It sounded, thought Father Shayne, who was still but thirty, like a cozy refuge for some benign old priest who had been sent out to pasture. He looked a little sharply at the Bishop, and the Bishop smiled back serenely and said, “Ah, yes, there is a squire there, of a fine old Irish family, and his wife and children. Mr. Geoffrey Gould. Unfortunately, poor old Tom did not get on with him, and so Mr. Gould is, I fear, a lapsed Catholic. Mrs. Gould is Irish, also, but Presbyterian, and from Belfast. The children are Catholic, of course. The parents were married in the Church, and I understand that Mrs. Gould is a very lovely lady, and only nominally a Protestant. Poor old Tom was very fearful of her.”

  “Why, my lord?”

  The Bishop tapped his lips with his finger, thoughtfully. “You might as well have the whole story. Old Tom knew, and it frightened him half to death. You see, Mr. Gould was tried for the murder of his first wife, in Belfast. The present Mrs. Gould was a girlhood friend of the late lady, and she also came under suspicion. Mr. Gould was acquitted. He then moved to that village near London, and only Tom knew the story. You see how insular those people there are. Anything that occurs outside England is not of the slightest importance, and none ever seemed to connect Mr. Gould with the rather notorious case in Belfast. I doubt they even read of such Irish doings in their newspapers, though the English dearly love to read of murders and find the whole subject entrancing. I’ve often wondered why. Perhaps it is because they have become so respectable and restrained and polite in this century of Victoria, and their ancient merry blood seethes unappeased in them, the merry blood that sends them out to conquer the world and have a riotous time while doing so.