The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  His audience was clearly unimpressed. Not even the McAvoys responded to this historical approach. Matthew Mahan had to admit to himself that it was pretty uninspiring. The party broke up with lackluster good nights. It was an off-key ending to what should have been a very happy evening. Mary Shea sensed his emotion and with her good night said softly: “Don’t let it upset you so much, Matt. You can’t change the facts.”

  Alone in his room, Matthew Mahan gulped a half-dozen Titrilac tablets to defend his stomach against the Asti Spumanti and decided Mary had given him good advice. He tried to turn his mind to tomorrow, Sunday. He had reserved it, thank God, as a day to relax, think, pray. He needed time to ponder the spiritual significance of this major event in his life as a priest. He thought of tomorrow as a mini-retreat that would, he hoped, recall memories of the five-day retreat he made before his consecration as bishop. Pope John had sent his own personal confessor, Bishop Alfred Cavagna, to see him each day to give him subjects for meditation.

  The fragile old man had led him through the labyrinthine passageways of the human soul, with his eyes fixed on the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew Mahan had asked for and received profound advice in dealing with his chief failing, the sin of pride. With beautiful simplicity, the old priest had spoken to him of the necessity of letting go of every wish, every personal desire, of the importance of handing them over to God, so that whenever one was fulfilled, the victory belonged to God, and if it was unfulfilled, it was God’s will, as well as an opportunity to be embraced, a chance to learn through suffering God’s true intentions.

  How hard it was to keep this wisdom in mind while sitting on an archdiocesan powder keg. Matthew Mahan took out the wrinkled list of maxims Pope John had given him. He had compiled them when he was a seminarist. It was ominously symbolic, the way they had drifted to the back of his dresser drawer, he thought, fingering the faded paper ruefully.

  The emphasis, the recurring word throughout the list, was love.

  I will love thee as I am loved by thee.

  Love is the fulfilling of the law.

  The aim of our charge is love.

  A sweet word multiplyeth friends and appeaseth enemies.

  Some of them made discouraging reading for Matthew Mahan. Number 34, for instance. “The best remedy I know against sudden fits of impatience is a silence that is gentle and without malice. However little one says, pride always comes into it, and one says things that plunge the heart into grief for a whole day after.”

  Or 47. “The things that thou hast not gathered in thy youth, how shalt thou find them in thy old age?”

  Fortunately, to console him, Matthew Mahan also now had Pope John’s book, The Journal of a Soul. This, too, had come to Rome with the Cardinal-designate. In it there were more than a few sentences underlined. He turned now to one that lifted his spirits a little, the entry for January 24, 1904. “My pride in particular has given me a great deal of trouble because of my unsatisfactory examination results. This, I must admit, was a real humiliation; I have yet to learn my ABCs in the practice of true humility and scorn of self. I feel a restless longing for I know not what - it is as if I were trying to fill a bottomless bag.” The extraordinary resemblance to his own feelings as a seminarist and young priest had inspired Matthew Mahan to jot an exclamation point in the margin of the book.

  He had paid even closer attention to notes Pope John had made at the Villa Carpegna, March 13-17, 1925, when he was preparing for his consecration as a bishop. The first words of John’s meditation troubled Matthew Mahan when he read them. “I have not sought or desired this new ministry.” He had desired his elevation, desired it intensely because he saw the appalling things that Archbishop Hogan was doing to the Church in the diocese, the almost desperate need for a new approach. But he had given up all hope of achieving it by the time it came to him in such extraordinary fashion. So he could join heartily in the next words: “The Lord has chosen me, making it so clear that it is His will ... so it will be for Him to cover up my failings and supply my insufficiencies. This comforts me and gives me tranquility and confidence.”

  From the window of his hotel, Matthew Mahan could see the illuminated dome of St. Peter’s. Suddenly, with the words of the book on his lap before him, he remembered sitting in the papal library, the day before his consecration, and listening as the bulky old man recited with amazing power of memory his favorite passage from the Pontificale Romanum, the ritual for the consecration of bishops. “Let him be tireless in well doing, fervent in spirit; let him hate pride; let him love humility and truth and never forsake them under the influence of flattery or fear. Let him not consider light to be darkness or darkness light: Let him not call evil good or good evil. Let him learn from wise men and from fools, so that he may profit from all.” With a flash of humor in his brown eyes, John had added, “That last sentence is perhaps the most important, when it comes to running a diocese.”

  Now, Matthew Mahan’s eyes moved down the passages from the Pontificale that John had noted in his retreat at the Villa Carpegna in 1925. Two immediately caused him pain.

  “Always to be engaged in the work of God and free from worldly affairs and the love of filthy lucre.”

  “To cherish humility and patience in myself and teach those virtues to others.”

  How often he had failed to live up to the highest levels of these ideals. Where, how, had he lost touch with them? Perhaps the truth was in another sentence he had underlined, from Pope John’s meditations during his first retreat as Patriarch of Venice. “I could never have imagined or desired such greatness. I am happy also because this meekness and humility do not go against the grain with me but come easily to my nature.” Yes, Matthew Mahan thought moodily, there was a fundamental point: Meekness and humility did not come easily to his nature. Not by accident was his nickname in high school “the Mouth.” On the playing field, in debates, in classroom discussions, he was always yakking away, monopolizing the limelight, and loving it. Was it a reaction against his father’s unnatural silence? Or an imitation of his mother’s constant loquacity?

  The rapidity and intensity with which his mother could talk was a standing joke among her family and friends. Nobody could get the floor from Teresa Scaparelli Mahan once she started talking. Again he felt the curious experience of separation from his mother here in the city of her birth. The movement toward a new self. The progress had been slow and painful over the past ten years, but it was time, and past time, to complete the passage.

  It was also time to let go once and for all those dreams of glory that had raced so tumultuously through his brain for the first year or two after his consecration as bishop. He had seen himself succeeding Cardinal Spellman as the kingmaker of the American Catholic Church. But reality had soon shriveled this wild expectation. John was too absorbed in his council to give much thought to episcopal appointments, so he let the Curia make the suggestions, and in America the Spellmanites, Romans all, continued to run the show. At the council, mingling with his fellow American bishops, listening to their North American College reminiscences, he had realized how isolated he was and had gravitated into the company of Europeans, particularly the Germans and Dutch with their call for an international Church less controlled by the Curia, reaching out to men of all faiths.

  John’s death a year later had turned his pipe dreams into the petty ashes that they had always been destined - and deserved - to become. Reality had been the order of the day for the past six years. Not so much as a deliberately conceived policy but as a way of life with no visible alternative. Five months after cancer killed John XXIII, John Kennedy had died, and America had reeled off course like a rudderless ship in a midnight storm. Looking back, it was hard to say whether the Church had merely succumbed to the madness or had contributed to it. Perhaps that unanswered question was another reason why he had lost touch with the memory of John XXIII. Had he, like many other bishops he met at the national conferences, begun to make a deprecation out of the phra
se “Good Pope John”? In his case, he did not say it aloud, but perhaps he had been saying it in his inner mind, which could be more destructive spiritually.

  Yes, Matthew Mahan thought with a sigh, it would do him a great deal of good if he spent most of the following day reading The Journal of a Soul and meditating on those maxims.

  The telephone rang. “Your Eminence, a cablegram. . . .” said the desk clerk. Five minutes later, it was handed to him by a bellboy. He opened it and read the brief message, then slowly folded it again and slipped it into his wallet. He sat down at the desk and wistfully fingered the pages of The Journal of a Soul. He would not be reading it tomorrow after all. The cable gave him one of those rare opportunities to reach out as a priest to a fellow priest. He could not pass it up for his own spiritual gratification. John would understand. Santo Padre, he prayed, forgive me for my neglect. Stand beside me now and in the years to come.

  At ten-fifteen, the following morning, Dennis McLaughlin and Matthew Mahan rolled out of Rome in a rented Mercedes with a handsome talkative young Italian named Tullio as their chauffeur. Dennis looked puzzled but vaguely pleased. He seemed to think Matthew Mahan was still worried about his health and was taking him for a little trip into the country for a quick rest cure. They headed south along the Via Appia Nuova, past numerous ancient ruins, and glimpses of new white high-rise apartments, and in their shadows tin shacks built by the poor from discarded construction materials. Tullio assured them that he would have no difficulty finding the town of Nettuno. He often drove down there during the summer. It was one of his (and Rome’s) favorite bathing beaches. But too crowded in recent years. He preferred the sand at Anzio, softer, no rocks. But that, too, was crowded. The smart swimmers were now going to Sperlonga or San Felice Circeo. While Tullio talked, he drove at a pace that (Dennis remarked) made Eddie Johnson look like a National Safety Award winner.

  In a half hour, the white buildings of the town of Nettuno were visible ahead of them on the lush flat coastal plain. Matthew Mahan peered out the window until he spotted a sign that read: Sicily Rome American Cemetery. “That’s what we want,” he told Tullio. In another five minutes, they were there.

  The cemetery rose in a gentle slope from a broad pool. In the center of the pool was an island with a somber cenotaph on it, flanked by rows of Italian cypress trees. From the parking lot, they walked down a wide grassy mall toward a white-pillared memorial at the end. The thousands of white crosses were in precise rows on each side of the mall beneath rows of Roman pines. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and the whiteness of the crosses was redoubled beneath the dark, brooding trees. On one side of the memorial was a chapel. On its walls were the names of 3,094 missing in action whose bodies were never found. On the other side was a museum room with wall maps describing the operations of the American forces in Italy.

  A pudgy gray-haired man smoking a cigarette emerged from an office off the museum and introduced himself as George Carmody, the superintendent of the cemetery. He wore the doleful expression of an undertaker. “Would you like to look at the grave now, Your Eminence? I’ll be glad to lead the way.”

  “No,” Matthew Mahan said, “we’ll find our way by ourselves, if you don’t mind. Just give us the directions.”

  Carmody gave them a map on which he had drawn an arrowed path in red. Halfway down the mall, they turned right and strolled down a shadowed lane between two rows of Roman pines. Dennis McLaughlin looked bored. He now obviously thought that this was just another episcopal aberration born of World War II combat neurosis. They stopped, and Matthew Mahan counted the rows of crosses they had passed thus far: ten. eleven, twelve, thirteen. At the head of the thirteenth row stood a cross with the name carefully lettered on the horizontal arm: Richard McLaughlin Lieutenant, USAAF.

  Dennis McLaughlin stared at the knee-high marble cross, his face frozen in astonishment. “He’s here,” he whispered. “Here?” He turned to look at Matthew Mahan as he said the last word.

  Matthew Mahan nodded. “I wrote to the American Battle Monuments Commission in Washington, D.C. I still hadn’t heard from them when we left home, and I sent them a very stiff telegram. Their cable arrived last night.”

  Dennis returned his eyes to the marble cross, his head nodding automatically. He heard what Matthew Mahan was saying, but the words meant nothing. He was in the void now, falling like that figure on the Manzu doors of St. Peter’s, dying in space. “I never knew him,” he heard himself saying. “I never knew him. I was three years old when he - went into the Army.”

  “Yes, you told me,” Matthew Mahan said. “But I thought - you should know this much about him. At least know where he died. He was copilot on a B-26. The plane was hit by German antiaircraft fire only a couple of miles from here. He was badly wounded, and the pilot was killed. He held the plane on course long enough for the rest of the crew to get out. He got the Distinguished Flying Cross for it.”

  “I never knew anything - about him. My mother hated him for dying.”

  Tears were strangling his throat. The airlessness of St. Peter’s was nothing compared to this agony. Suddenly, there was a big hand on his arm wrenching him up like a drowning victim toward sunlight, air. “It’s all right, it’s all right, Dennis,” said Cardinal Mahan in a voice he had never heard before. “Don’t be afraid to cry. Everyone should cry for their dead. I cried almost every day during the war. So did a lot of other men, even tough mugs like Mike Furia.”

  He opened his arms, yes, Dennis McLaughlin, the sardonic smiler, who perpetually confronted the world with arms crossed on his chest like a shield, opened them and flung them around the solid bulky blackness that confronted him. He was weeping, yet he was breathing, miraculously breathing. “I never knew him,” he said for the fifth or sixth time. “I never knew him. She didn’t want me to know him.”

  “She couldn’t help herself, Dennis. Some people can only give their love once, and when it’s refused or lost by the person they give it to, they can’t forgive them.”

  “Sometimes - I try to be him. But you can’t be - something you don’t know. Every time you reach out, all you get is emptiness.”

  “Now you know where he is, Dennis. Here with his friends.” Softly, gently, the big hand patted him on the back. He was being held, yes, caressed, like a child, yet miraculously he felt no resentment. “The older I get, the less I grieve for those who died in battle. I think there’s a poet who said they remain forever young. It’s true, especially if you’ve known them, loved them before they died. You loved him, Dennis, even if you didn’t know him. Someday in Heaven you’ll know him - and love him even more.”

  But how do we know he’s in Heaven? How do we know he didn’t die in mortal sin? What if you go to Heaven and find out he’s in Hell, what would you say to God? Out of my way, I’m going to Hell with my father. The favorite fantasy of fifteen-year-old Dennis McLaughlin, president of the Sodality, winner of general excellence medals galore. Through his tears, he tried to tell something of this to Matthew Mahan, interlacing it with sardonic laughter. Was he collapsing into hysteria?

  “I’m sure he’s in Heaven, Dennis. This is a dangerous thing for a bishop to say, but I believe that every man who dies in battle fighting for a good cause goes there, just like the Mohammedans say he does. Courage is a better absolution than any priest can give.”

  Ten minutes ago, Dennis McLaughlin would have laughed this idea into oblivion. Now he accepted it in silence broken only by his sobs.

  “I’d like to say a prayer for him, Dennis.”

  The Cardinal knelt before the cross. Dennis knelt beside him. He could find no words in his numbed brain. He stared down the long rows of crosses, trying to comprehend the immensity of death’s grasp. I had not thought death had undone so many. “I can’t pray, I can’t pray at all,” Dennis whispered.

  “Would you let me pray for both of us, Dennis?”

  He nodded.

  Matthew Mahan was swept back to a dozen, no, 100 days in France and Germany when he
knelt before the bodies of men he had joked with or blessed only hours before. Here the sunlight, the soft green grass, and the white crosses were different, creating a serenity that was never there in the blasted landscape of war. He was grateful for it, because it helped him to struggle against the memory of the anguish, the helplessness that he had felt in those days, yes, even the terrible doubts about the worth of his priesthood, of all priesthoods. Slowly, he let his mind empty, as he had done in those awful days. Anguish made all formal prayers - except the prayers of mass - meaningless. The words would come as they had always come, even on the worst days.

  “O God,” he said, after almost a full minute of silent waiting, “we kneel here in search of comradeship. Two lonely men, dedicated to your service, in search of comradeship with this brave man, Richard McLaughlin, and his friends. Help us to see them as they were before they died, Lord, young and full of laughter. Help us to remember their courage. We know it wasn’t a constant thing, Lord. They weren’t heroes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes they were afraid and cried out to you. You came to them, especially to those who died trying to help their friends. Greater love than this, no man has, Lord. No one knows this better than you.”

  For another minute, there were no words. But Matthew Mahan knew the prayer was not over. So, apparently, did Dennis McLaughlin. He did not raise his head. “O Lord, we believe that no sacrifice is in vain, that its graces are stored in Heaven to be used for the works of love. Pour into our hearts, O Lord, especially into the heart of Richard’s son, Dennis, the grace he needs, as we all need it, to love himself, his fellowmen, his priesthood. Thank you, O Lord, for giving us this day. Your ways are a mystery to us, but we shall always believe in your justice and your love.”