by Sam Cabot
More so if you actually used it productively, of course. Or, on the other hand, found a way to relax. Maybe he should go down to the Thames and sail a real boat, not a metaphorical one. Instead of spending his days sifting through the disordered collection of papers left behind in 1850 when the American journalist Margaret Fuller sailed for New York. Although, he reminded himself, that journey ended in a shipwreck that took the lives of all the passengers, Fuller included, and most of the crew. So much for real boats.
Thomas glanced at his watch. What he should do was stop daydreaming and get back to campus. He had a meeting soon at his office at Heythrop College with a student whose thesis he’d agreed to advise even while theoretically student-free. Why not? His own academic career had received generous help from some of the Church’s top scholars. Now that he was regarded as in those ranks—a standing Thomas viewed with skepticism, but there it was—it was his duty to offer help in the same spirit.
It was not an entirely altruistic gesture, though. What was? On days like this it was good to feel you’d gotten something done. Thomas’s morning had been a waste. The letter with the dire phrase (“shatter the Church,” indeed!) had been written by Mario Damiani, a fiery anti-Papist poet of the Risorgimento—the nineteenth-century uprising of the Italian people against the power of the Church. Thomas considered the idea that any document could be that dangerous flatly absurd. For one thing, Damiani’s politics plus his tendency toward hyperbole suggested he might be putting forth more hope than fact. For another—and Thomas said this as a churchman who’d himself been through a momentous crisis of faith, who loved his Church yet saw it with clear eyes—if the scandals, disasters, and wrong turns of the past decades, or millennia, hadn’t shattered the Church, he suspected there wasn’t much that could.
He was curious about what Damiani thought had that power, though; but his real interest in Damiani grew from another part of this letter. Thomas’s focus as a scholar encompassed the Risorgimento and the other Italian political movements of the time. He’d written a number of groundbreaking papers, and two books, in that area, and when he’d found Damiani’s letter to Fuller the implications made his scholar’s heart pound. The Vatican Archives had been looted in 1849. The letter made it clear Damiani had been involved; in fact it claimed he’d led the troops himself, though Thomas suspected the poet of being a bit of a blowhard. Church scholars had long given up hope of recovering treasures stolen in that raid, partly because Vatican record-keeping had been so imprecise it was hard to know exactly what was gone. But no one, to Thomas’s knowledge, had taken the route he was following: through Garibaldi’s partisans.
He’d struck a vein with this letter: Damiani had sent a copy of something to Margaret Fuller and hidden the original. Whatever it was, the copy no doubt went down with Fuller, and the location of the original must have died with Damiani. But maybe he’d done it more than once, or maybe others had done the same—hidden things or sent them away. A study of Damiani’s papers and those of his circle might, just possibly, lead somewhere new.
It was the lot of historians to interpret events, to stand to the side and study, not participate. Thomas had chosen that role and for the most part was content. But as he gathered his coat, laptop, notepad, briefcase, and errant pencil, he thought—not for the first time—how satisfying it would be to be instrumental, just once. To be a part of history instead of a follower of it. One small discovery, one document found because Thomas Kelly had thought to look where others hadn’t—well, well, if that wasn’t the sin of pride rearing its ugly head. Thomas grinned and, probably to the gratification of the other researchers, left the Transcendentalist Archive.
Heythrop College stood at the other side of Holland Park. Since coming to London from Boston seven years earlier, Thomas had become rather the sedentary scholar. A fast walk, he decided, would do him good, and he trotted down the steps and into the park. The brilliant gold of linden leaves overhead and their crunch underfoot called forth from him a silent prayer of thanks. Thomas loved the change of seasons, both the fact of it and the idea. Yellow leaves, bare branches, pale buds, bursting blooms, then yellow leaves again: it all happened whether you wanted it to or not. If at the height of summer you couldn’t quite believe in winter, if in the depths of winter you thought summer would never be back—it didn’t matter. Flowers, autumn colors, snowfall, they were all on the way; faith not required. For Thomas, that very fact was enough to bolster faith.
He’d traversed the park, reached the campus, and was climbing the stone steps to the doors of Charles Hall when his cell phone rang. Juggling briefcase and office keys, he stuck the phone to his ear. “Thomas Kelly.”
“Buongiorno, Thomas. It’s Lorenzo.”
“Father!” Thomas stopped, smiling in delight and surprise. He hadn’t spoken to Lorenzo Cardinal Cossa in three or four months. His own fault, he knew. His former thesis adviser—and spiritual adviser and friend, more to the point—had much to occupy him since his move to the Vatican four years ago. It was Thomas who should have made the effort to keep in better touch. “An unexpected pleasure! How are you?”
“Very, very well, Thomas. And you?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“You sound out of breath.”
“Rushing as usual, is all.”
“With your coat unbuttoned and your arms laden.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You’re busy.”
“Always. But don’t—”
“You’re about to be busier. Thomas, I need you.”
“Of course.” Thomas shifted his load and started up the stairs again. “Tell me what I can do.”
“Here.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Here, Thomas. I need you in Rome. And now. As soon as you can get here. Much is happening. The day has finally come.”
“I—I’m sorry, I’m lost. What day? What’s happened? Is everything all right?”
“Much better than all right. I’ve wanted to call you for the last few months, since Father Bruguès took ill, but of course that wasn’t possible. But now it’s official. Two weeks ago he took a well-earned retirement. Thomas, I’ve been honored with both of his positions. I’ve been made Archivist and Librarian of the Vatican.”
“Oh!” Thomas stopped again, causing a rushing student to plow into him. The student, seeing he was on the phone, mouthed, Sorry, Father. Thomas smiled and waved him off. “Oh, that’s wonderful! Congratulations! Both positions—what an honor.”
“And a responsibility. Thank you, Thomas. Now come help me.”
“I— My classes, my students . . .”
“You’re on sabbatical, aren’t you?”
“I’m advising three theses.”
“Our Lord has given us glorious new technologies to allow you to do that from here.”
“I—”
“Thomas. You and I spoke about this back in Boston, when it was barely a dream. This priceless, irreplaceable, and deeply chaotic collection needs a comprehensive stewardship, an approach of methodical care it hasn’t seen yet. The opportunity to participate in that work was why I came to Rome. The chance to take the lead in it has been what I’ve wanted most, for a very long time, and I don’t deny it. Assisting Monsignor Bruguès was the beginning. Now the entire Library has been given into my care. It’s always been my intention that you should have a role.”
“Yes, of course.” Thomas entered the building and turned down the hallway. Outside his office the waiting student jumped to his feet. Thomas held up a delaying finger, unlocked the door, and shut it behind him. “And I hope—”
“A specific role,” Lorenzo went on. “The overall work is important, but there’s a particular task I need you for. Your skills and your knowledge. It’s something we haven’t discussed yet. I was waiting for the right time, and now the time has come.”
“I’m supposed to start teachin
g again in the spring semester,” Thomas said weakly.
Lorenzo Cossa sighed. “Your obsessiveness as a scholar is the positive side, I suppose, of your . . . lack of flexibility. Thomas, I’m a Cardinal. I’m the Vatican Librarian and Archivist. I can get you reassigned and Heythrop College will be proud, not dismayed. I promise you. Please, come help me here.”
Thomas shrugged out of his coat, looking around. His plants, his pictures, his books and papers. Seven years of settling in. He tossed the coat on the chair. “Yes,” he told the Cardinal. “Of course.”
• • •
The call to the priesthood had been the most compelling force in Thomas Kelly’s life. A rangy Irish redhead, he’d found baseball, girls, and garage bands also part of his South Boston youth, and he had a nodding acquaintance with illicitly acquired six-packs and smokable non-tobacco products. But behind it all, beyond the breathless rush of childhood and above the clang and crash of adolescence, hovered something still and silent. Something as calm and deep, endless and inviting, as the sea. Later he would come to understand this as faith; early on, he only knew the peace, the sense of being home, that he felt at Mass. It took him years to recognize most people didn’t feel what he did, even longer to see the path open to him. When he understood, he took to his vocation with joy and gratitude.
He’d been an exemplary seminarian, drawn to the cerebral, scholarly life. After ordination he’d headed along an academic route, happily exploring obscure byways of Church history. His powerful intuitive gift for research had drawn the attention of other scholars, of journals and publishers. Doctoral, postdoctoral, and teaching positions had sought him out, for which he was thankful. Whatever intellectual talents he possessed were matched—no, actually, overshadowed—by a pronounced clumsiness as a pastoral counselor. His efforts to comfort the occasional undergraduate or old friend who came to him at times of crisis only left Thomas feeling intrusive, cliché-ridden. He greatly admired priests who ministered directly to people’s spiritual needs, but he accepted that his own contribution to his Church would be less immediate, more ethereal. That his work was unlikely to rock anybody’s world, however, did not lessen his joy or confidence in his vocation and the direction he’d chosen within it.
It had therefore been a shock to him when, the fourth winter after ordination, he’d found himself plunged into a terrifying abyss by a single word.
In the midst of consoling the young widow of a high school classmate who’d died unexpectedly (one of those times when Thomas felt it his duty to attempt the solace a priest should be able to offer), a previously unheard voice came whispering inside his own mind. “The Lord has a plan for each of us,” he’d said to the distraught woman. “It’s not ours to know, but you must never doubt it exists. To everything, there is a season, and a time—” He’d stopped, dumbfounded, hearing a silent question: Really?
The widow, mistaking his stillness for pastoral manner, smiled sadly and completed the phrase. “—to every purpose under heaven. Yes, Father, of course.” She had, he recalled, taken strength from whatever he’d gone on to say and left with renewed hope. He, on the other hand, sat motionless in his study for the rest of the day. The afternoon faded and the streetlights spread an anemic glow across the slushy sidewalks. The voice that had asked the question didn’t stop, asking others, all different but with only one meaning. Are you sure? How can you be? Isn’t it convenient that God has for each of us what we most desperately want—a purpose, a reason to exist—but keeps it secret? Thomas, the voice whispered, you’re a smart man. Isn’t it just as likely we invented all this, a huge absurd theological security blanket, because we’re scared? That nothing has purpose, nothing has meaning, and God is just a lullaby we sing ourselves? Thomas—really?
• • •
“Thomas, the only men of God who’ve never felt what you’re feeling now are sheep. Hah! Lambs of God. Followers. Not thinkers.” In his austere, book-crammed study Lorenzo Cossa flicked the Red Sox lighter Thomas had brought as a gift and grunted in satisfaction at the steadiness of the flame. He pulled in air until his cigar glowed, and settled his long, gaunt frame in an armchair. “It’s a crisis of faith. Everyone goes through it.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Doesn’t help at all, does it? Knowing that?”
Thomas shook his head. Three weeks after his counseling session with the widow, he was still spiritually dazed and unable to find footing. He’d requested a leave and flown off to Chicago, hoping his mentor could help him make sense of this onslaught of uncertainty.
When Thomas was in graduate school at Boston College, Monsignor Lorenzo Cossa’s history seminars were legendary for their rigorous intellectual demands and equally for the priest’s galvanizing oratory. Monsignor Cossa maintained the Church had long ago strayed from the spiritual high road and, far from being a path to salvation in the debased world, was itself in danger of being devoured by it. This wasn’t a belief Thomas shared—where was the Church, and where was it needed, if not in the world?—but such was the flair of Lorenzo Cossa’s rhetoric that Thomas would have studied algebra with him for the pleasure of hearing him talk. That his courses fit Thomas’s interests was a bonus. That Lorenzo Cossa seized on Thomas Kelly as the most promising student he’d had in years was a mixed blessing. He leaned harder on Thomas than on other students; but even alone in the library at three a.m. Thomas understood he was being forced to his cerebral best, and, though exhausted, was grateful. The year after Thomas got his doctorate, Monsignor Cossa had been elevated and given charge of Church educational programs in the Midwest. They’d remained in touch, but such was the power of this earthquake that Thomas knew the telephone and computer screen would be powerless against it.
“No,” Thomas said, in Lorenzo—now Bishop—Cossa’s study. “It doesn’t help.”
The Bishop wasn’t fazed. “Of course not. It’s like going to the dentist. Knowing everyone who ever sat in that chair suffered the same agonies doesn’t reduce your pain. But remember this: they all survived.”
“I’m not sure about that. Some men leave the priesthood. Some leave the Church.”
Around the cigar, Lorenzo grinned. “I was talking about the dentist. Thomas, in all seriousness. Yours is one of the strongest vocations I’ve ever come across. But what made you think you’d never have doubts? Jesus himself had doubts. Doubt is the coin which buys our faith. That this never happened to you before might be lucky or unlucky. You’re farther down the road than most when the first crisis comes. But eventually everyone arrives at this chasm and has to find a way to jump it.”
“First crisis? I can expect this to happen again?”
“Forget I said that.”
“No, it’s actually hopeful. It almost gives a context.”
Lorenzo regarded Thomas in silence. Knocking ash from his cigar, he said, “I saw this coming.”
“You did? Why didn’t—why didn’t I?”
“Why didn’t I warn you, you mean. Could I have said anything you’d have believed? What’s happened to you is one of the hazards of scholarship. Knowledge is power, isn’t that what we say? But power corrupts. An institution based on knowledge and learning can’t help but be a corrupt institution.”
“You’re calling the Church corrupt?”
“There’s the flaw!” With a joy Thomas remembered from the classroom, Lorenzo pounced. “The Church isn’t based on knowledge! It’s built on faith! What drew you to the priesthood, Thomas? The spiritual magnet of faith. Indefinable. Mystical, even. If you’d chosen the contemplative life and locked yourself in a monastery you’d have been fine. But you made the mistake of engaging your faith with the world. In your case, through the study of history.”
“With you as my guide.”
“Yes, all right, I made the same mistake. And had a similar crisis, if that’s what you’re fishing for. Until I realized that all the knowledge in the world can’t stand aga
inst faith. No matter what you learn, Thomas, your faith is still there behind it all. The magnet’s still pulling.” The Bishop’s cigar had gone out; he lit it, puffed on it, and resumed.
“It’s the learning that’s troubling you, isn’t it? The evidence is too heavy to ignore: that no one associated with this enterprise, by which I mean the Church, is divine, with the exception of our Lord. It’s a shining exception. But the discovery makes you wonder. Thomas, I want you to remember this: Knowledge is about facts. Faith is concerned with truth. They’re not necessarily the same. That’s what you’ve flown halfway across the country to discuss, isn’t it? Come, it’s time for dinner. I don’t think there was ever a discussion of faith not improved by a bottle of wine.”
• • •
That evening didn’t set Thomas back on firm ground, but it gave him a life preserver to cling to in the frightening waters of misgiving. They talked for three days; it was, finally, a practical suggestion by the Bishop that realigned the world, showed Thomas a direction to follow while he waited to see if his faith would return.
“One of your strengths as a historian,” Lorenzo said as morning sun poured through the window, “has always been your broad range of interests. Periods, places. Now I’m going to suggest another approach. Something different has happened to you, Thomas, and perhaps it calls for a response in kind.” The Bishop stretched out and crossed his legs. “The intellectual life of the nineteenth century, in America and Europe, revolved around faith. What it was, who had it, where and when it was needed. It was a powerful set of questions, sometimes created by, and sometimes creating, political and military movements. Questions of faith moving secular societies. I’m suggesting you focus your attention in that arena.”
Thomas considered. “Randomly? Or do you have something specific in mind?”
“Of course I do. You sure I can’t give you one of these?” He gestured to the humidor. As always, Thomas shook his head. He couldn’t think of half a dozen times outside of meals and the celebration of Mass that he’d seen Lorenzo without a cigar. Early on he used to take one to be polite, but he’d never enjoyed them, and their friendship hadn’t required that sort of courtesy for years.
