The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  Monsignor O’Reilly and his curates entered the sanctuary and took seats to the right of the altar table. Matthew Mahan remained in the center aisle, waiting for the organ music to end. As the last notes died away, he opened his arms and said, “Peace be with you, my clear friends, and especially with you, my dear young people who are going to receive your confirmation today. First though, I’m supposed to find out if you’re ready to receive it. Let’s see. Do you know why I am here? Why couldn’t Monsignor O’Reilly or Father Novak give you this sacrament? Can you tell me?” He pointed to a towhead in the first row. “What’s your name, son?”

  The boy stood up. “Thomas Maloney, Your Excellency.”

  “Now, now, don’t call me Your Excellency. Just call me Father. The popes don’t want us to use all these titles anymore. Pope John even told me that he would rather be called Don Angelo. Don is an Italian title of respect. But I couldn’t manage that one. I called him Santo Padre. That’s Italian for Holy Father. Somehow it sounds better. Anyway, I want you to call me Father. I don’t stop older people from calling me Excellency because I’m afraid of hurting their feelings. But I want to start you people off right. You’re the ones who will really change the Church. Now, why am I here, Thomas?”

  “Because only a bishop can administer the sacrament of confirmation.”

  “Right. Sit down now, and let me find another victim. Why am I wearing this ridiculous getup?” He gestured to the miter on his head, the cope, and the chasuble on his shoulders, the crosier in his hand, and eyed a boy with a head of blazing red hair, four rows back. “How about you, Red? Don’t you think this outfit is pretty ridiculous?”

  The boy stood up, his cheeks turning the color of his hair. He shook his head.

  “You don’t? Come up and take a closer look. Come on. Right up here.”

  The boy climbed out into the aisle and timidly approached him. Matthew Mahan took off his miter and put it on his head. Everyone roared with laughter. “Now tell me the truth. Wouldn’t you feel pretty silly walking around with that thing on your head?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Then why do you think I’m wearing it? I look like a pretty sensible fellow, don’t I?”

  “Well, you’re wearing it because other bishops wore these things” - he took off the miter and studied it for a moment - “a long time ago.”

  “Right! I’m wearing these robes, as we call them,” Matthew Mahan said, speaking to all the children now, “to remind us that the sacrament of confirmation goes all the way back - almost 2,000 years - to the Apostles, who were the first bishops. This getup only looks silly until you understand why I’m wearing it. What does this mean?”

  He pointed to the crosier and chose another redhead, a girl this time. Her hair spilled down over her shoulders almost to her waist. “That’s to remind us that you’re the shepherd of the people.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like Jesus.”

  “Right. He was the Good Shepherd. I’m only mediocre.”

  It was amazing, thought Dennis McLaughlin, watching from the sacristy. The total transformation of the man from the moment he began talking to the children. He suddenly seemed to emanate a kind of psychological radiance. Excitement, joy, were visible on his face and audible in his voice. Was he basically an actor? Or was the smooth reserve that you saw most of the time an act, a mask he wore for his own good reasons?

  With a pat on the shoulder, Matthew Mahan sent the red-haired boy back to his pew. “You’re doing awfully well. If you’re as smart as you look and sound, I think I may tell Pope Paul the next time I go to Rome that we all ought to resign and let you people start running the Church when you’re eighteen or so. There are just one or two more things I’d like to hear. You, young lady,” he said, pointing to a plump dark-haired girl in the first pew. “Tell me who received the first confirmation.”

  “The Apostles,” she said.

  “Right. Where?”

  “In the same room where Jesus had the Last Supper with them.”

  “Right again. And how did they receive it? What did they see?”

  “Tongues of fire above their heads.”

  “Right again. Do you think you’ll see some tongues of fire today?” Whirling, he pointed to a handsome dark-haired boy sitting on the aisle in the second pew. “What do you think?”

  “I - I don’t know,” he said.

  “Well, you won’t. The only tongue you’ll see is mine. Here it is, wagging away.” He stuck his tongue out and walked down the aisle while everyone burst into laughter again. “Just a poor old bishop’s tongue,” he said as the laughter died away. “Not much good for anything but trying to persuade people to do what they should be doing without being told. Those tongues of fire the Apostles saw - that was to help them believe that they were receiving the Holy Spirit. No one had ever received it before, you see, and Jesus knew how hard it was to create faith in people, faith that inspires people to do things. But when the Apostles went out and started converting people, right in the Temple at Jerusalem before the eyes of the men who had killed Jesus, then people began to see what the Holy Spirit really meant. How many did they convert in the first few days, does anybody know?”

  Four or five hands shot up. He picked one in the back row on the boys’ side. “Eight thousand,” said a deep voice, whose owner did not bother to stand up.

  “Eight thousand people. Can you imagine that? And the Apostles laid hands on them, and the Holy Spirit entered into these converts. Then what did they do?” He chose a hand in the back row on the girls’ side.

  “They went out and converted more people.”

  “Well, some of them did that. But they all did something even more important. What was it? What are Christians supposed to do?”

  This time there were no hands. He selected a girl in the pew nearest him. She was tall, bony, and a little stupid-looking. She furrowed her brow and said: “Obey the commandments?”

  “That’s important. But what’s even more important for Christians to do? Come on. Somebody tell me. This is the most important question I’ve asked yet.”

  “Love one another,” said a clear, sweet voice from the center of the girls’ side of the aisle.

  “Right. From the very start of the Church, this was what made the Christians stand out. The Romans, the Jews, everyone, used to say: ‘See those Christians. How they love one another.’ That’s how I hope you’ll show everyone - your father and mother, your brothers and sisters, your friends, classmates - show them all what it means to receive the Holy Spirit. We don’t have time here to discuss what it means to love each other. It’s not easy. It’s easy to say but not easy to do. I hope you’ll discuss it in class this week and write a letter about it. Give me at least one example of how you decided to prove you were a Christian by loving someone and doing something about it.”

  In the sacristy, Dennis McLaughlin almost groaned aloud. He would have to answer all those letters. You are an incurable romantic idiot, he fumed at himself. This man did not talk you into becoming his secretary. You talked yourself into it with your absurd illusions about penetrating to the heart of the power structure. All he wanted and needed was an energetic, reasonably intelligent drudge.

  “Now I think we’re ready to begin the mass and administer the sacrament of confirmation,” Matthew Mahan said. He entered the sanctuary and took the bishop’s chair behind the altar. Monsignor O’Reilly said the mass. After the Gospel, Matthew Mahan gave a brief sermon. He talked about his own confirmation, how he had come home convinced that he possessed the Holy Spirit and attempted to convert his younger brother, Charlie. “I didn’t think he was a very good Christian,” he said. “I told him he had to stop calling me names, that he had to loan me his baseball glove whenever I wanted it, share his candy with me, and give me the last helping of dessert, if there was no more left. That shows what kind of a Christian I was, in those days. I had it all backward. I thought it was my job to start converting everyone else, on the assumption th
at I was more or less perfect. It took me thirty or forty years to know better.

  “Now I know that the most important gift of the Holy Spirit is the power to love. That may sound strange to you young people. Of course, you love your fathers and mothers, your brothers and sisters. Love seems easy at your age. But when you grow older, it’s much more challenging. Especially the kind of love that Jesus urges us to practice. The love for the lost sheep, for sinners, for people who are in trouble. Read what he says about it. He tells us that it is better to go looking for one lost sheep and let the ninety-nine obedient, faithful sheep stay on the hills. That’s risky, hard. Not many Catholics - in fact, not many people of any religion - practice that kind of love. It’s the kind I hope you’ll practice when you grow up.”

  He returned to the bishop’s chair, and the children streamed up onto the altar in two lines. Matthew Mahan anointed each with the holy chrism and laid his hand against their cheeks. Watching, Dennis McLaughlin remembered the wild rumors that had circulated through the school before his own confirmation. Most were about the blow on the cheek that had no biblical basis whatsoever and was added to the rite to remind the Christians that they must be ready to suffer martyrdom for their faith. There were tales of bishops knocking smaller boys unconscious, especially if they failed to answer correctly a question from the catechism. The whole scene had been projected as melodrama, a personal confrontation between quivering eleven- and twelve-year-olds and the toad-faced old man whose picture glared down from the wall of the principal’s office. High Noon in the sanctuary. Instead, they had all been marched to the communion rail and told to stand, not kneel, on the highest step, so His Excellency would not have to bend over so far.

  Then the old man, surrounded by altar boys carrying the oil and priests obsequiously holding his robes, had gone down the long line mumbling Latin and daubing on oil and touching an occasional cheek with his hand whenever it occurred to him. Dennis had been one of those touched. He could still remember the scaly coldness of those ancient fingers, the involuntary shudder they had sent through him.

  Everyone had gone home bewildered, wondering why they had spent the previous four weeks memorizing dozens of catechism questions which they had never been asked. That night Dennis had lain awake in his bed trying to detect some sign of the Holy Spirit in his body. But he did not feel braver, stronger, or happier. The next day, in school, the bullies were back tormenting “Brains” McLaughlin, as they called him, Sister was screaming imprecations and whaling away with her ruler, the girls simpered and tattled on the boys and on each other, and the standard topic of male discussion was still Mary McNamara, who would, it was rumored strongly, drop her drawers and hold up her skirts for a nickel. So passed away the light of that world.

  After mass, Dennis helped Matthew Mahan take off his vestments. He noticed that the long white undergarment, the alb, was soaked with perspiration. “That’s hot work,” Matthew Mahan remarked. “I don’t know why it is, but whenever I speak in public, I sweat like a steer. It’s enough to make me wonder about my vocation sometimes.”

  “I thought you were having a good time out there,” Dennis said.

  “I was, I was, and I hope the kids were, too. How do you think it went?”

  “I thought you were great,” Dennis said.

  For a moment, Matthew Mahan looked at him with something close to anger on his face. “You’re not joking, are you?” he asked.

  “No - why - no,” Dennis said, totally confused. “I - I mean it.”

  The pain flowered in Matthew Mahan’s stomach. Another misunderstanding. Would he ever be able to talk naturally with this enigmatic young man? “Take these out to the car, will you?” he said, giving the vestments a pat and trying to sound friendly. “And keep Eddie company. I have to pay that little courtesy call on Monsignor O’Reilly.”

  Dennis was tempted to say good luck. But having collected one rebuke for candor, he decided silence was safer. Miter and crosier in one hand and vestments folded over his other arm, he went out the sacristy door leaving Archbishop Mahan to his fate.

  Out in the car, rotund Eddie Johnson, the Archbishop’s black chauffeur, had a grapefruit-league baseball game on the radio. The home team was getting walloped as usual. Eddie had played semipro baseball in his long-gone youth and considered himself an expert on the national sport. He started monologuing the home team’s deficiencies. All Dennis McLaughlin had to do was nod and murmur yes every other sentence or so. Meanwhile, he revised on a pad on his knee a draft of a speech that Matthew Mahan would be making next week to the Knights of Columbus. The subject was the renewal of the Church since Vatican II.

  It was, he thought sourly as he neared the end of it, a model of intellectual elegance. Full of “on the one hands” and “on the other hands,” like so many statements that emanated from chancery offices and bishops’ conferences and the Vatican itself, it had everything in it but passion. It praised the idea of renewal, it committed the archdiocese to it, but there was scarcely a single specific issue discussed - and the last paragraphs were full of cautionary maxims against going too far too fast.

  On the radio, another voice was somberly announcing that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had just died in Washington, D.C. “My, my, did you hear that?” Eddie Johnson said. “Poor old Ike.” It meant no more to Dennis than the latest score of the baseball game. He finished his revision and took from his coat pocket two letters he had received yesterday morning. One, from his mother, was still unopened. The second, from his friend Andrew Goggin, S.J., in Rome, he had already read twice. He had brought it along to read after Mother’s epistle, much as in boyhood he had always kept a glass of cherry soda handy when he was forced to take milk of magnesia.

  Dear Dennis:

  I thought you had promised to write me a letter once a week. It’s been three weeks now without a word. To my amazement, your brother Leo has turned out to be a much more faithful correspondent. I had to find out from him about your wonderful promotion. I’m not surprised, really. I knew they would realize they had one of the most brilliant young priests in America in their employment sooner or later. And I knew God would not disappoint me twice. You know how upset I was by your decision to leave the Jesuits.

  I can’t tell you how pleased I was to hear that you are out of that dreadful slum neighborhood. I was sure one of those people was going to stick a knife in you, or hit you on the head while you were busy trying to save their souls. That’s the only kind of gratitude they’ve ever shown for all the help the government and other Americans have given them, since the day they freed them from slavery. I guess you’ll be reading this in your office at the Archbishop’s residence. I hope I can get a chance to meet him when I come back home again. I’m not sure I will come back, except for a visit, however. Living is so much cheaper down here, and I’ve made a lot of friends, mostly people from the city who have retired down here. I can put an air conditioner in the bedroom of my house and be as comfortable here in the summer as I ever was in our fair city. It gets almost as hot there as it does in Florida. We had an awful lot of rain in the last month down here, and I started getting a lot of pain again. The doctor put me back on cortisone, and it cleared up, thank God. Maybe I should give you the credit instead of the cortisone. I know you are remembering me every day in your masses. Now that you are promoted, I guess you won’t be getting a vacation for a while. That’s too bad because I was hoping you might spend a week or two down here with me, like you did last year. Leo sounds like he’s working awfully hard, and I can’t see why the editor of the paper won’t give him a raise. Can’t you speak to the Archbishop about it?

  I hear a horn outside. My neighbor, Mrs. Green, is taking me for a drive down to Miami. It ought to be a nice outing. This is a short letter, and they’ll get shorter until you write me a good long one.

  Love, Mother

  Good old Mom, Dennis thought, stuffing the letter into his pocket, first a knee in the solar plexus, then a foot in the crotch. The memory of t
he two weeks he spent with her last year made him shudder for a moment. He had been trying to decide whether to leave the Jesuits or the priesthood or both, ignoring the advice of St. Ignatius that, in time of desolation, one should never make a change. But then it had never occurred to Ignatius that there could be a fourth reason why a priest was in desolation besides the three he had listed in the Spiritual Exercises. Perhaps because he never tried to cure his desolation by talking it over with his mother.

  How strange it was to discover at twenty-nine that this woman who had always seemed to embody everything that was spritely and courageous was also stupid and dull, that her little maxims about praying together and keeping the heart pure, culled from Grit and similar magazines, were the fifth-rate philosophy of the world, tag lines for Salada tea bags. Why, why, why hadn’t you seen it before, why, Dennis?

  Because you had spent ten years of your life in an intellectual balloon, smiling grandly on Mother and the other Lilliputians, seeing their shortcomings as no more than mildly amusing. But when the desolation came, when the balloon ran out of hot air and you found yourself in the streets surrounded by leering faces, asking why, why, the intellectual had to go to the roots of his life. He was appalled to discover that his intelligence, which he had always assumed he inherited from Mother, must come from nonexistent Father, the man with the smiling face and the pilot’s cocky hat, that bodiless being who grinned with such idiotic confidence from Mother’s dresser. To see that Mother, once regarded without the ground fog of love in the eyes, was stupid, trite, querulous, there was desolation, St. Ignatius, the desolation of the void. How could a man find sustenance of the sort the intellectual was seeking from a ghost? Perhaps this hunger explained your capitulation to Matthew Mahan. If you were looking for a father there, Dennis, you’ve found one in the classic mold. A combination slave driver and SOB.