The Accidental Pope

by Ray Flynn

  Silently, almost menacingly, Cardinal Motupu stood up and walked over to where Bill was standing. He gestured toward the empty chair beside the camerlengo’s desk. “Sit down, Bill,” he said in a friendly tone of voice.

  Bill did as he was bid and without further ado Moputu placed his hands on Bill’s head. “As cardinal I consecrate you Bishop William Kelly.”

  Immediately Cardinal Comiskey wordlessly laid his hands on Bill’s head. And then, with a confidential smile, he pressed the rosary he had given Bill when they graduated from St. John’s back into his hands. Robitelli was next, inaugurating a procession of cardinals as one by one they laid hands on Bill’s head in silent consecration and fealty to him as bishop of Rome and pope.

  Unbelievably, it was over! After two taps of the gavel Cardinal Robitelli announced, “My responsibility as camerlengo is finished. We have a pope. Please rise, Your Holiness, and tell us your name.” Loud applause and laughter, even shouts, rang within the hall for several minutes. When it had settled down the cardinal stepped from behind his table.

  “Brothers, as continuing Vatican secretary of state, unless the pope changes his preferences, for we all know a pope is not bound by promises made before he officially takes over his position…” The cardinal gave the new pope a questioning look, and Bill Kelly shook his head. “As secretary of state I suggest that we now take some time to decide exactly what I am going to say to the crowd outside and, through the media, to the watching world before we get round to sending up white smoke.” He turned to the pope-elect.

  “Your Holiness, what name will you choose? As you know, that is the custom.”

  All the friendly smiling eyes were turned to the new leader. Bill nodded. “I will take the name of the first Vicar of Christ, who like myself was a fisherman and a married man with children. Peter! I am Peter II!”

  A brief, sharp shock—some of the cardinals obviously thought that assuming the one name that no other pope had ever had the temerity to consider bordered on sacrilege—was followed by tearful applause. Perhaps they did not have as much control over Bill Kelly as they had thought. More astonishing, however, was the suitability of this name for the coming new millennium.

  Cardinal Robitelli began formulating the short but crucial speech he would deliver to the hundreds of thousands of faithful who had patiently waited for days to hear the announcement. A deep, collective sense of accomplishment was enjoyed now by the college of cardinals as it realized that it was actually doing something never done before, or considered a possibility for many centuries, namely enthroning a pope of the laity who had been ordained.

  A second revered custom was suggested to the new pope. He must be fitted into a white cassock. The Gammarelli brothers, fifth generation of a family of Vatican tailors, were let into the Sistine through the emergency door. They carried several cassocks of varying sizes. Thinking that Robitelli had surely been elected they proffered the garment tailored to fit him, but when confronted with the tall, strapping, burly fisherman, Peter II, they were embarrassed and dismayed. However, they quickly set about tailoring two white cassocks into the largest one ever known to have been made, using a corner booth of the chapel as their workshop. Peter the Second was soon clad properly for his presentation to the teeming crowd waiting outside in the famous St. Peter’s Square.

  As these preparations proceeded, Brian Cardinal Comiskey was on the emergency telephone calling Monsignor Timothy Shanahan, rector of the North American College just a few blocks from Vatican City. The moment Bill Kelly had signified his desire to accept the papacy; Brian had tapped Shanahan as the one man most competent to become private secretary to this first, relatively untutored, American pope.

  Robitelli then borrowed the plain gold wedding ring Bill was wearing. “The Vatican jeweler will have the ‘fisherman’s ring’ ready by tomorrow.”

  “Then, Your Holiness, we must all individually step forward, kneel, and kiss the ring as a show of our unity and fealty,” Cardinal Comiskey explained.

  “I respect your customs,” Bill replied, resplendent in the newly fitted white cassock, “but I must confess I don’t feel very comfortable with all of them. Tell you what, Brian,” he confided, “I’ll accept it all as you say this first time, but if I find them too hard to deal with I may end up putting the ring in my hip pocket.”

  Laughter again filled the room as this colloquy was repeated. The cardinals seemed to be enjoying this artless new pope. Each cardinal came forward, pausing to speak to him. Holtz of Belgium was the last to engage Pope Peter’s attention. Cardinal Comiskey winced, knowing Holtz was a hard-line traditionalist and undoubtedly profoundly disturbed by the abrupt and totally unexpected turn of events.

  “Your Holiness,” Brian overheard Holtz address the pope, “I am by nature so set in the traditions of the Church that I would beg to hear your view on what you honestly think about papal power and jurisdiction. How will you attempt to make your authority recognized and accepted by the people?”

  Brian was quick to come to the assistance of his friend. “Your Eminence, the pope has stated he needs our help in all areas of Church affairs. I think that’s an unfair question to ask of him so soon.”

  “It’s OK, Brian. I can speak for myself.” Bill stepped up to the podium vacated by Cardinal Robitelli, and silence quickly descended on the clamorous conclave.

  “I don’t have all the background of you fine, learned, and dedicated Churchmen, but I suppose I could offer you an analogy, as Christ himself did so often through his parables. I believe that we have many examples of the Church as the bark of Peter, since he himself was a fisherman. Well, I’m a fisherman also. Professionally so. I recall the day that my father gave me my first boat to captain. It was after I was laicized, and I had no little concern about an ex-priest being in charge. I asked him straight out, ‘Dad, how do I go about telling my crew that I’m the captain?’

  “My father looked me in the eye for a moment, then said, ‘Boy, you just go and do your job as best you understand it.’ To quote my father exactly, he said to me the following, which I never forgot. ‘Son,’ he exclaimed, ‘if you have to explain that you are the captain, you are already in deep trouble with the crew and may as well hang it up.’”

  Bill smiled apologetically. “Peter I never got over his direct fisherman’s language either. In any case, I found out in due course that merely taking over worked out very well.”

  Cardinal Holtz nodded as he seated himself. Brian seized the moment to break in. “Well spoken, Your Holiness.” He clapped loudly. The others, enthusiastically if now somewhat automatically following his lead, confirmed his statement and fell into line.

  Assured finally that a new pope had been positively elected by the cardinals, a Sistine Chapel official burned all the ballots that had accumulated from the “joke,” adding the chemical that sent a rush of white smoke billowing up the chimney.

  * * *

  All the speculative babble in St. Peter’s Square was abruptly brought to a halt when a call came from one of the camera crewmen stationed outside the Vatican. White smoke pouring out of the chimney! The conclave was over! A great event in the world had taken place. Newsrooms were busy worldwide and TV stations were going to cut into whatever programming they were broadcasting to switch to the Vatican. Soon the new pope would come out on the balcony to give the faithful his customary blessing.

  It was after three P.M. in Vatican Square, nine A.M. in Washington, as Ed Kirby heard his assistant, Patrick, shout down the hall from the Nancy Reagan Sun Room, “Hey, Ambassador! White smoke!”

  Ed Kirby found himself laughing as he pictured the scene at the State Department. The European Desk officers would be just assembling to chortle over one more nonconforming political appointee on his way out. Or so they thought! Then he turned his attention to the main event.

  Ed and Catherine, with Patrick, watched the television to see close up who would emerge on the balcony below to address the faithful, Maureen among them, crammed by the te
ns of thousands into St. Peter’s Square. Was it really possible that Bill Kelly of Cape Cod would indeed be introduced as the new pope? And if it wasn’t, would Ambassador Kirby at least be able to verify the story of his assistance to the conclave and Cardinal Comiskey? Or must that remain a secret to cover up the cardinals’ “joke,” which Ed was beginning to feel was no joke at all but rather some act of divine intervention? In any case, if it was not Bill Kelly who emerged sometime within the next hour, Ed Kirby knew that his fledgling diplomatic career was over. He began to ask himself about the next office for which he would run. Maybe Congress, where he could be the harasser rather than the harassee of the arrogant State Department.

  The cardinals, led by the pope and guided by the Sistine Chapel official, began their procession out through the back. They crossed the Regal and Ducal Halls of St. Peter’s Basilica toward the loggia, a central balcony overlooking the spreading square filled with over two hundred thousand faithful—Italians, foreign pilgrims, and tourists gathered to see and hear the new pope.

  Along the processional route Brian, walking closely beside the man who was once Bill Kelly, now Peter II, whispered softly to him, “We will make one stop along the way and let the others proceed.”

  As they passed the offices of the curia between the Sistine Chapel and the basilica, Brian entered a small reception room that he had designated and, taking the pope by the arm, led him away from the others. “We’ll catch up with you,” he said to a surprised Robitelli. “I need a few words with the Holy Father.”

  Robitelli obviously was not pleased but could say nothing to his pope, who had acquiesced to Cardinal Comiskey’s suggestion.

  Away from the procession, Bill found himself facing a pleasant-faced priest, a man of about fifty, he estimated, almost as tall as Bill though little overweight, with thin, graying light-brown hair.

  “Bill, this is Monsignor Timothy Shanahan, originally from St. Louis but currently the rector of the North American College—NAC, as we call it.”

  “Your Holiness,” Shanahan murmured as he knelt and took the pope’s hand to kiss the ring, which was not yet in place.

  “Tim, a great pleasure to meet you,” Bill said.

  “Tim is also a longtime friend of Ambassador Kirby’s,” Brian explained. “I know that Ed will join me in expressing great confidence that Tim, if he can bear to leave the college, would be your ideal private secretary and mentor to you in your early days here.”

  “All right. That’s just the kind of support I need at this moment.”

  “Bill,” Brian said, “Let Tim Shanahan here serve you in the way he knows best, following protocol that nobody understands better than he, as rector of the college teaching young priests here.”

  “Whatever you say, Brian. That is, until I get the hang of things around here and can take care of protocol myself.”

  “I will be honored to be of service, Your Holiness.” There was a sincerely respectful timbre to Tim’s voice, and he clearly appreciated Bill’s usual openhearted, ingenuous approach to any potential new associate.

  Brian began, “I thought that Tim could give you some pointers on your first pontifical talk to the world. Meaning right now, Bill.”

  Bill looked with pointed interest at Monsignor Shanahan, who smiled back. “I surely will not pontificate,” Bill declared. “Never have, never will.”

  “That’s certainly the right attitude to keep, Your Holiness. Please go out and be yourself. Be the fisherman turned pope we haven’t had since our first leader, two millennia ago. Instinctively I sense that you bring us a new soul. I believe that the Holy Spirit prevailed in this conclave, as it did when Pope John Paul II was elected. At that time Communism was the blight on the world and only the prayer and courage of that Vicar of Christ could have ended it.”

  Shanahan’s gaze searched Bill’s eyes. “This time, certain challenges and actual threats on the Church we know will need to be addressed in the new millennium and we will need a man who speaks for the average Catholic who has now, somehow, miraculously been delivered to us. Family deterioration, Islamic fanaticism, the Russian Orthodoxy, plagues are all afflicting humanity like AIDS in Africa. It will take all the resolve of Pope Peter II to save the Church and the world from the terrors that threaten them all.”

  “Tim, that’s quite a mouthful. I don’t know how to say it, but I guess I can get your point across. I’ll start out with a few words in the very bad Italian I learned from my fishing crews.”

  “Please be yourself and in your own vernacular say what you believe. The people will rest easy knowing that one of their own is at the helm. Always remember, Christ chose you, not the other way around.”

  Cardinal Robitelli appeared at the door. “Your Holiness, the world outside waits to meet you.”

  “Be right with you, Your Eminence. Come on, Tim, Brian, let’s greet our people.”

  Word rapidly spread through the Eternal City as new crowds swarmed into St. Peter’s Square to get a glimpse of their new pope. With bands playing and the crowds jostling, at precisely four P.M. the balcony door of the basilica pulled open. The massed faithful were awed and then fell silent when they saw Secretary of State Cardinal Robitelli step out. This itself was a surprise. Traditionally the first cardinal to appear would introduce the new pope, and it had been taken for granted that Robitelli was the front-runner. So much for the predictions of cognoscenti like Father Farrell.

  The next moment was even more disconcerting. The cardinal did not announce at first the customary “Habemus papam! We have a new pope!” Rather, he raised his hands to motion for silence and tapped the microphone to make sure it would amplify him sufficiently. He seemed more in a sermonizing mode than about to make a momentous announcement.

  “Dear friends of the Church,” he began, “we have caused you such anxiety and wonderment. You have been waiting patiently on us during this extended conclave. I mention also a necessary trip undertaken by Cardinal Comiskey of Ireland. We in the magisterium of the Church can tell you now that we were in these, as in other important issues, seeking enlightenment from the Holy Spirit on how best to serve the Church and its people. God alone makes the fitting choice for St. Peter’s successor.”

  The cardinal paused and his eyes traveled over the huge crowd looking up at him from below. “In my lifetime,” he continued, “I have been amazed how the Holy Spirit has given us such great, holy men in sometimes startling ways. But today I have such incredible good news for you that we find it necessary to … how shall I express it … lead you, our beloved laity, gently into our interpretation of God’s will.”

  Once again the cardinal, spacing his words to carry, benignly turned his head from side to side, gauging the temperament of the multitude below. “You are all aware of the increased role we have asked you, our lay people, to take within the Church since Vatican II. We, as the Church hierarchy within the Church, have felt often that no matter how hard we’ve tried, a great gap slowly has grown between the clergy and the laity. This last gathering of the college of cardinals took our concern for the laity as its centerpiece. After much, often heated, debate we finally concurred the Holy Spirit had indeed revealed to us the way to bridge this terrible gap. Thus, dear brothers and sisters, in the name of Christ, I have the providential honor of announcing to you that a layman and former priest—not one of the cardinals—has been elected our new Holy Father!”

  The awesome effect of these words was like nothing that ever had been experienced in St. Peter’s Square before. The multitude, even the news media, stood spellbound in wonderment. Cameraman Augusto Dante from the Vatican TV station, Tel Pace, was so stunned that he failed to focus his camera on Cardinal Robitelli. It dipped down instead to a crowd of people standing at the fountain of St. Peter’s that included Maureen Kirby and her group from the Marymount School in the forefront. Their looks of amazement and disbelief said it all. The silence was the forerunner to a great explosion. Slowly the words began to filter through numbed minds that could bar
ely comprehend what they had just heard.

  Some began to mumble softly. “What did he say? A layman? Former priest? What does he mean?”

  Robitelli allowed his statement to exert its full effect on the crowd and then concluded: “My dear friends, may I present to you, from the United States of America, His Holiness, Pope Peter the Second, an ordained and later laicized priest, a true fisherman in the tradition of St. Peter, our leader and founder pope. Habemus papam!”

  16

  THE ACCIDENTAL POPE

  Maureen Kirby found herself trembling. She was standing in the square with her classmates from Marymount. They had been there long before the puffs of white smoke flew skyward above the Sistine chimney, hoping to catch a glimpse of the new pontiff. Maureen’s mind darted back to her father’s mission and his return with Bill Kelly, metamorphosed from fisherman to monsignor, who had allowed her to call him “Bill.”

  Well, Cardinal Robitelli had not appeared in the white cassock! He had visited the residence and Maureen had a fairly good idea of what kind of pope he would make. From what she’d heard at home and from Vatican denizens she knew, this was all to the good. He was an old hand set in traditional ways, hardly understanding of her youth culture. But whoever the pope would be, she could now always say she had been in the square that day to see him. Someday, too, she would find out what was written in the documents that she had seen Bill carry into the conclave. It was all secret, but one day he might tell her.

  “Bill! Mio Dio!” A scream of surprise, shock, and joy was wrung from a stunned Maureen as Peter II came onto the balcony, clothed in his hastily but meticulously tailored white cassock. Julie Rogers, a geometry teacher at Marymount, stared at the usually rather reticent young woman in astonishment but said nothing.

  “I drove with Bill—Pope Peter—to the Sistine Chapel this morning,” she shrieked. The young students were certain they had not heard her correctly amid the cheering of the crowd.