by Jan Morris
When at last His Holiness appears, attended by an obsequious cardinal or two, and further attentive acolytes with hands clasped in the mantis position, then it really is like seeing God himself up there, so old and distant, so angelically attended; and when his voice comes echoing over the great piazza, slightly delayed, it seems, like a conversation on a bad overseas telephone connection, at once very near and far away, it might indeed be the voice of Heaven, so unimpeachably platitudinous are its sentiments and so irreproachable its turn of phrase – just the sort of speech of welcome we may expect, if we are fortunate enough one day to stand at the gates of paradise.
27 Christian power
‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ Stalin sneeringly but ingenuously asked. In fact, of course, Christian power has been incalculable in European history, and it is the presence of the Pope, far more than the President of Italy, that makes Rome one of the great cities of the world. Many other European cities have become internationally important specifically because of their Christian connections – the great pilgrimage destinations, like Santiago de Compostela in Spain; the great centres of dissent or heresy, like Canterbury, Avignon or Luther’s Wittenberg; powerful archbishoprics like Trier or Mainz; or cities which have been the sites of crucial Christian conferences, affecting the fate of the continent. Constance – Konstanz in German – is one of these. It is a middle-sized city, situated grandly at the site where the Rhine flows out of Lake Constance, but otherwise not very remarkable. The resonance of its name depends still upon the fateful Christian Council which was held here between the years 1414 and 1418. The Council formally condemned the propositions of the heretics John Wyclif and Jan Hus, treacherously burning Hus at the stake (he had gone to Constance with a safe conduct), and it succeeded in ending the Great Schism which had divided the Catholic Church between rival Popes at Rome and Avignon. But when I wander the streets of the city I do not see in my mind’s eye the empurpled ecclesiasts at their conclave in the cathedral, or the triumphant Martin V who emerged as the one and only Pope. I see instead the amazing ragbag of followers who jammed the city for four years, and have remained part of its legend ever since. Going to the Council of Constance in 1414 was like going to an Olympic Games city today. Heads of State, ambassadors, scholars and lawyers filled these old houses, together with thousands of servants, guards and courtiers, and the city was turned into an enormous trading fair and emporium. Some 100,000 people, it is said, came to Constance for the Ecumenical Council, and most of them were not greatly interested in theology, for they included every sort of trader, mountebanks and con men of all kinds, peregrinating actors, street musicians, clowns and vast numbers of prostitutes. I can see them clearly still, milling around the cathedral square while Hus was burning: and I can imagine the squabbles there would be now over the sale of television rights, or the propriety of displaying advertisements around the stake.
28 The uses of faith
During my fifty years Christianity in Europe has been most obviously influential when it has provided defiance in oppressive times, or plain pleasure. (Nowadays it seldom represents, as it still does in America, social pride or business advantage.) I shall never forget the magnificent outpouring of ritual and ceremony which surrounded the Catholic Church in Poland in the days when it stood alone against the dingy autocracy of Communism – so resolutely that every chapel of the pilgrimage church at Czestochowa, the holiest shrine of Polish Christendom, was bugged by the secret police. It hardly struck me as a sacramental effulgence, though. In Warsaw on a weekday evening in the 1950s one often saw citizens slipping into church, out of the cold and snowy city, rather as commuters elsewhere popped into a bar before catching the train home: entering hurriedly, crossing themselves as one might sign in at a club, and emerging a few moments later buttoning up their coats, pulling on their thick gloves, and hurrying away to the trolley-bus – stocked up, as it were, with some reviving stimulant. And when on a festival day Catholicism displayed itself in all its glory, all shine and incense, all tremendous fugues and stately priests, then the huge shabby congregation was elevated in the same way as an audience at some brassy musical in the capitalist West, given just for an hour or two a spectacular escape from reality.
Was it really remorse when, in the later years of Franco’s dictatorship, the burghers of Málaga or Seville took to the streets on a saint’s day carrying their enormous images of the Virgin, led by an official on a horse with sword drawn and medals jangling? Group by group came the penitents then, with tall conical hoods on their heads and wands in their hands, looking eerily from side to side, swaggering in a rather lordly manner, and behind them vast gilded icons swayed in the lamplight, carried by ranks of bent-backed, cowled and cassocked devotees. A hooded major-domo kept them in time with the clang of a bell, rather like that drummer with the dead Pope, and in a sad and dreadful rhythm they made their slow way through the streets. Yet I used to notice that when they stopped for a rest those sweating slaves of God often waved convivially to friends in the crowd, called for Coca-Colas or lit cigarettes. Those were not really processions of contrition: they were partly reflections of the forces that ruled Spain then, Church and State in almighty tandem, but partly expressions of the national delight in effect.
In the spring of 1996 I was walking through Bratislava, the capital of the newly created Republic of Slovakia, in search of my supper, when I became aware of groups of merry and noisy young people all making for some common destination. A promising wine-cellar? Some jolly café with music? I fell in with the stream of them, feeling like a wine-and-music evening myself, and found myself drawn into the jam-packed and festively rococo church of the Jesuits, where the undergraduates of the university, all apparently in the highest of spirits, were assembling for their student mass. In Ireland I sometimes suspect that the harshest rituals of Catholicism are undertaken in a spirit of enjoyment – masochistic enjoyment, perhaps, like the wonderfully jolly ascent of Croagh Patrick. One of the most demanding of Irish pilgrimages takes the faithful to a grim island in Lough Derg, a remote and dispiriting mountain lake in Donegal, where they endure a three-day fast, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot peregrinations over stony tracks and the compulsory recitations of 63 Glorias, 234 Creeds, 891 Paternosters and 1,458 Hail Marys. I was once at a wedding reception at Drogheda, away on the east coast, when I heard a woman ask a worldly young guest with a carnation buttonhole and a glass of champagne where he was going for his holidays that year. I expected Barbados or Mykonos, but no. ‘I thought of giving myself,’ he said, ‘the three days at Lough Derg.’
29 A prince of the Church
Certainly the best-known Catholic martyr of my time was considered in his lifetime more an ideologue than a saint. Cardinal József Mindszenty first came into my life in 1949, when during my vacations from Oxford I was sub-editing on The Times in London. He was the Primate of Hungary, and a nightly stream of news passed through my hands concerning his trial for treason at the hands of the Communist Government in Budapest. After days of torture and a show trial he was sentenced to jail for life, but re-entered the news even more spectacularly when he was briefly set free during the Budapest Rising of 1956. The Communists having regained control, he took refuge in the United States Embassy in Budapest, and there he remained for fifteen years, repeatedly refusing invitations to go into exile abroad. For people of my generation Mindszenty was a household name, a living symbol of anti-Communist inflexibility – he later fell out with the Vatican itself because he thought it too soft on Stalinism.
Mindszenty died and was buried in Austria, but when the Communists finally lost power in Hungary, in 1991, his body was reburied in the basilica at Esztergom, the seat of the Hungarian primates, and there I made a pilgrimage to his tomb. What a conclusion for a prince of the Church! The huge domed basilica of Esztergom stands on a high bluff above the Danube. Far below it a broken bridge to the Slovakian shore, blown up during the Second World War, adds an extra note of tragic violence to a truly epic site
, and in front of the building a vast never-completed piazza, leading upwards to a classical colonnade, makes you feel you are approaching one of Christianity’s power-centres. The church is claimed to be the fifth largest on earth, and its treasury contains a fabulous hoard of gold and silver objects. Mindszenty is buried in its crypt, which is sustained by walls fifty feet thick, is guarded by two female colossi representing Resurrection and Immortality, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of immensely portentous gloom. Many of his predecessors are commemorated by tablets in the walls, and one of them is portrayed in effigy sheltered beneath the wing of a gigantic black angel: but nothing down there matches the significance of Cardinal Mindszenty’s tomb, which is one of the great shrines of Hungarian Catholicism. When I was there, two decades after his death, a mass of wreaths, ribbons and memorial messages still surrounded it, together with photographs of papal visits to the sacred site. An organ played gigantically in the basilica above, and as I emerged into the sunshine I reflected wryly upon the days, long before, when I had wrestled with the problem of writing a two-column headline around a name with ten letters in it.
30 True faith
But at some places, in eastern Europe especially, one may still experience Christian belief at its most transcendental. One such site is the city gate called Aušros Vartai, the Gates of Dawn, at Vilnius. The city is largely Polish in population, and the holiest thing in it for Polish Catholics is a miracle-working icon of the Madonna which is housed in a little chapel above the gateway. Old pictures show the street below crowded with kneeling worshippers, gazing up at the chapel above, and in the late 1990s I found the strength of adoration unabated. The Gates of Dawn remained a place of daily pilgrimage, conducted so far as I could see in a spirit of purest devotion. Mass was said there every day, its music sounding in the street below (the chapel windows were opened, to allow people to see the Madonna): and when one weekday morning I found my way into the staircase which leads up to the holy place, it was crowded almost to suffocation with Christians in a state of ecstasy – some singing, some praying aloud, some trying to shuffle up the steps on their knees, all pressing joyfully towards a glimpse of the sacred picture, radiant there in black and gold among a shimmer of priestly ritual.
Another gateway alive with faith is the right-angled Stone Gate which leads into the upper town at Zagreb, in Croatia. On a Sunday especially this provides an unforgettable spectacle of Christian dedication. In the gate’s shadowy interior there stands another miraculous Madonna icon, within a grille, and before it the faithful stand in silent supplication, or kneel in rows of pews half-concealed in the darkness. A small cavernous shop sells votive candles, and these the supplicants hand over to attendant nuns to light and put in place. There were two candle-nuns when I was there – unsmiling, preoccupied women. A mass of candles burned before them on a large tray, its flickering light a blaze in the gloom, and they worked incessantly with metal spatulas to make room for more. The scores of candles had coagulated into one big waxy flaming mass. The nuns separated them into clumps, as though they were working on a cake in a medieval kitchen, cutting them into slices, shifting them here and there, scooping huge lumps of molten wax out of the tray, slicing, scooping, shifting without a pause, while the faithful stood silent and immobile before the Madonna, dim figures crouched in the pews behind, and a line of believers queued with unlit candles to add to the furnace. Cut and scoop, cut and scoop, the nuns continued with their sacred duties, silhouetted against the flames (it sacrilegiously occurred to me) like a pair of imps in Hades. From outside the gate sounded a monotonous sing-song mantra, kept up by two beggar children, one on each side of the path – faltering sometimes when they ran out of breath, renewed whenever a likely votary emerged.
31 Passion Flower
Such has been the popular force of faith like this that even in my time un-Christian ideologies of Europe have sometimes requisitioned the trappings of Christianity. When I was working on a book in Spain in the 1960s an undeclared anathema applied to the name of Dolores Ibárurri Gómez, ‘La Pasionaria’, one of the supreme Communist heroines of the Spanish Civil War. Under the left-wing Republic of the 1930s she had been elevated to an eminence hitherto only occupied by the Virgin Mary herself. In the great political processions her icon was actually carried in place of the Madonna’s, preceded by candle-bearers and drummers just as in the Easter processions of other times. Her Civil War battle-cries were quoted like holy decrees – ‘No paserán!’‚ ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees’ – and even her nickname referred explicitly enough to the Christian story. This flaming prophet of Marxism was created in the pattern of holiness. If history had gone a different way we might well have had miraculous statues of her, or liquefactions of her blood. During my time in Spain La Pasionaria was an exile in Moscow; but religions being what they are, whether sacred or secular, after the death of the Catholic dictator Francisco Franco she came home again, and died in 1989 as a respected member of Spain’s new democratic parliament.
32 St Scrooge’s Day
Some of the great festivals of Christianity, themselves inherited from paganism, have maintained something of their immemorial popular sanctity. Going to church on Easter Sunday, a purely Christian festival, is still a great occasion among congregations across Europe – almost obligatory, for example, among millions of organically agnostic Anglicans – but I have never noticed that it has any immediate effect on the manners or morals of the continent. On the other hand Christmas, directly descended without a doubt from pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, still works. Christmas Day is St Scrooge’s Day. Perhaps because it is a children’s festival, because the Christmas story is so charming and Christmas carols are such good tunes, somehow on Christmas Day all Europe is a better place. Pickpockets stay home on Christmas morning. Grumps are less grumpy then. Smiles come easier, and all across the continent one feels the peoples moving into a slower and gentler mode, as the goose, the duck or ever more commonly the tasteless turkey browns in the oven. One Christmas in Vienna I went for a stroll in a park before returning to the Sacher Hotel, where my own Christmas dinner was roasting. There was hardly a woman in the park. Everywhere the husbands of Vienna, with their children, aimlessly but expectantly loitered, expelled from under the womanly feet of the city while Gretchen and Helge got on with the job. Christmas is a time when old hierarchies are restored. ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ I could hear the housewives of all Europe grumbling that day, ‘go and get yourself a bit of fresh air, and take the children with you!’
33 Christmas with the Pickwick Club
Scandinavian Christmases are especially convincing. Santa Claus lives up there, after all (visited, on direct flights to Swedish Lapland, by countless package tourists and their children – who sometimes find it bewildering that only the day before they had seen the old gentleman in a plastic grotto at Toys ’R’ Us). At Christmas a smell of spiced mulled wine, onomatopoeically called glögg, pervades the city markets of Scandinavia, and the stewardesses of Scandinavian Airlines put candled crowns on their heads and appear in aircraft cabins to sing squeaky hymns. Some of my own happiest Christmas memories are of the restaurant called the Operakällaren in Stockholm, where dark falls long before the festive meal is over, and through the great plush dining-room the flambeaus outside send their lurid light.
There, as evening draws on, and more and more of the Operakällaren’s house aquavit is poured by merry waiters of the old school, the Christian spirit of Christmas seems to me exemplified in a way Dickens would have loved – almost as though one is dining with the Pickwick Club itself. All ages are there, and everyone gives the impression of being related to everyone else. Marvellously goes the elk-meat, swiftly pass the herrings, one great salmon succeeds another on the buffet, and very soon you find yourself on familiar terms with the Swedes at the next table, complimenting them on their fluent English, admiring little Eva’s Christmas frock or little Erik’s blue bow-tie, exchanging grandmotherly confidences with
Mrs Andersson, toasting them all with yet more aquavit. Stockholmers are not especially religious people, and I imagine they have been eating those Baltic herrings and downing fiery liquids at least since the days of the heathen kings of Old Uppsala up the road: but still if I wanted to show visitors from outer space an exhibition of Christianity ritually in action I might well take them behind the flambeaus to try a Christmas smorgasbord at the Operakällaren. Devilish good dinner, as Mr Jingle would say – cold, but capital – pleasant people these – well behaved, too – very.
34 Are Christians kinder?
Of course spirituous conviviality is not what Christianity is about, and, Christmas or no Christmas, people from Iceland to Bulgaria generally assume that practising Christians will probably be kinder persons than the rest of us. Perhaps they are. In Bucharest, not I think the most compassionate of capitals, I once paid a visit to the little Patriarchal Cathedral. It was a festival day of some kind, and the church was full of people queuing up to kiss the sacred icons. Old women in kerchiefs, distinguished-looking gentlemen, ragamuffins, drop-outs, through the candle-lit musty space they patiently shuffled; and when they emerged from behind the iconostasis a tall thin priest was standing there to bless them and sprinkle them with holy water – stiffly, with jerky bird-like movements, right and left, one after the other. At first it seemed to me a perfunctory devotion, and I sat watching the scene out of the shadows with a cynical eye: but presently there entered the church a madwoman, all disjointed, paraplegically stumbling and falling here and there, shouting what I took to be imprecations. I thought they would eject her, or at least try to silence her, but they took no notice of her insanity, allowing her to lurch and shove and shout her way among the waiting faithful. Now and then a kindly hand reached out to pat her on the shoulder, or help her through the crowd.
