What? I am Joseph, your brother. Not permitted. The iron faces of the past, the old men in the first rows, glared up at him like weapons, forbidding his wish to move past them, to offer a cigarette to Father Forgotten-Name, to shake Father Disalvo’s hand, to assure them that they were one in the spirit. Only details, petty details from the past, separated them. But it was both too early and too late.
A shifting among the pastors, a visible, audible uneasiness that flowed back from them to the rest of the deanery. They were waiting for him to finish his sentence.
“- I am very sorry to see this visible hardening of our hearts toward one another. For me, this is the real tragedy that is happening here. I dismiss - I disregard my own personal - humiliation. I want to prevent this other thing - this other terrible thing - from growing worse. I will go anywhere, meet with anyone, discuss any proposal to prevent it.”
“Will you permit our committee to examine the books?”
“I’m willing to discuss it. But let me point out that it is not a practical idea. To make it worthwhile, you would have to understand accounting procedures. You would have to understand why we do a great many things in ways that are not - financially orthodox. But I’m willing to discuss it.”
Father Disalvo rose to his feet. “Your Eminence, we are sick of discussing things with you. We are sick of being talked to - talked down to like children. You’re like all the rest of our so-called leaders. All you want to do is talk while babies fry in napalm in Vietnam and die of rat bites on the next block. I move that we respond to this offer with a vote of no confidence.”
“As chairman, I must rule that question out of order,” said George Petrie crisply. “Votes are only taken on specific issues, where the advice and counsel of the deanery can be of value to His Eminence.”
“I think the results of this vote would be of great value to His Eminence,” Disalvo shouted.
“The question is out of order. The meeting is adjourned.” George Petrie brought his gavel down on the walnut table. For Matthew Mahan, it had the thud of an executioner’s ax. A silly metaphor. You have never heard an executioner’s ax fall, except in the movies. The death of Thomas More. A Man for All Seasons. Once you had comfortably considered yourself a worthy candidate for that title. Alas, alas, on what sad days has the old smoothie fallen.
Usually at the end of one of these meetings, the pastors and often the curates clustered around him to exchange a few words. Today they all hurried away, heads bowed, defeat on the faces of the majority. His defeat, which they charitably tried to avoid showing him. It did not help. He could see it in the angle of their heads, the droop of their shoulders. He and George Petrie and Colin McGuiness remained behind their table on the platform until the gymnasium was empty, except for Dennis McLaughlin sitting forlornly in the last row. “Can I give you a lift home, George?” he asked.
“No,” said his vicar-general, avoiding his eyes. “I drove down.”
“I hope there are still four wheels on the car when you get outside,” Colin McGuiness said.
A fleeting smile from George Petrie. For a moment, Matthew Mahan felt Colin McGuiness’s eyes on him. Was he going to beg his pardon, plead for forgiveness, pretend that the whole debacle was his fault? Be quiet, please, Matthew Mahan prayed. Silence was easier.
It was also inevitable. There was nothing Colin McGuiness could say to his fallen hero. They walked down to the door of the gymnasium. A sad-faced Dennis McLaughlin joined them as they went out into the sunlit blacktop school yard. A burst of laughter greeted them. The Ad Hoc Committee was caucusing on the steps of the rectory, just beyond the iron fence on the other side of the yard. Heads down, like the rear guard of a defeated army, Matthew Mahan and his aides trudged out of the school yard to the littered street and their waiting cars.
Dennis McLaughlin stared gloomily at the letter on his desk from Monsignor Thomas Barker, head of the diocesan marriage tribunal, sometimes called the Rota. It was the fourth or fifth letter in the past two months from Monsignor Barker. He was constantly seeking advice, worrying or complaining about Cardinal Mahan’s program for receiving good-conscience divorced Catholics back into the Church. This time, he wanted the Cardinal to know that he had just returned from a regional conference with other canon lawyers, and they all agreed that Matthew Mahan was breaking sharply with tradition in permitting people to return to the sacraments based on their “individual subjective” consciences. “It was pointed out that the Church has never acted in this way in the past,” Monsignor Barker wrote. “It was agreed that any decision to undertake this practice should be a decision of the whole Church and not of one bishop or a group of bishops.”
Attached to the letter was a column by Daniel Lyons, the super-reactionary priest columnist of the National Catholic Registry. Lyons denounced in scorching terms the trend toward easy annulment and the acceptance of divorce in the Church. It was “such a scandal that the Vatican will have to rule against it,” he intoned.
Dennis was tempted to throw both the clipping and the letter in the wastebasket. He knew that Monsignor Barker might use a non-answer as an excuse to bring the good-conscience program to a dead stop. Yet, he hated to put the letter on the desk of the weary man in the next room. It meant another hour of his time consumed cajoling, persuading, soothing Monsignor Barker from overt hostility to sullen docility again. These days, Matthew Mahan seemed to be spending most of his time on this sort of thing with almost everyone in the chancery office. Was there a single one of them who hadn’t double-crossed him in one way or another in the last few months?
The telephone rang. “Hello,” Helen Reed said, “Are you busy?”
“No more than the usual.”
“Oh good. Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? Dad’s meeting with the hospital’s trustees. I’m eating alone.”
The word tolled like an ominous bell in Dennis’s mind. He knew - and certainly Helen knew - what had happened the last time they had spent an evening alone. First a kiss, then a caress, then half-guilty, half-defiant love, leaving him more muddled, more discouraged, than ever. Wasn’t Helen saying with ever clearer boldness that it was time to stop feeling guilty, time for a decision?
“I’d - love to come. I really would. But there’s a possibility that the Cardinal may need me. He had another bad night. Vomiting blood again.”
“If he’d do what his doctor tells him -”
“I know, I know. Look, I’ll call you back. I’ll ask him.”
“All right. But call me by five. So I can cook something decent.”
Dennis hung up and sat there for a long moment, moodily contemplating his mess of a life. A little therapy was in order, he told himself. Ventilation. A letter to Goggin.
September 31, 1969
Dear Gog,
How are things in ye anciente tymes? Found any secret gospels lately? Or better, a secret diary of Pio Nono confessing that he really didn’t believe in infallibility, the whole thing was just a political ploy? The simplicities of the past become more and more appealing to me, as I grapple with the incredible intricacies of the present.
I told you in my midsummer communication the horrible impact of the series of articles that my brother, with my unholy help wrote on the Cardinal. The explosion of disaffection and disloyalty in the chancery office staff, right up to the chancellor and vicar-general. The outrageous scenes at the deanery meetings, with the vicar-general (now also our Most Reverend Auxiliary Bishop) entertaining every kind of insulting motion from conservatives and liberals like a Republican presiding at a Democratic caucus, practically encouraging them to tear each other and the Cardinal apart. It only proved, I know, just how fragile the whole situation was in the first place. How much discontent and rage and rebellion were seething beneath the surface. The Cardinal dismisses Leo’s articles as the cause of the chaos. But I know (and it does not help my morale) that this is not true. Those articles have inflicted a near-fatal wound on his authority, particularly among the younger priests
. I don’t think people realize (at least I didn’t) how much, even in a hierarchical, not to say authoritarian organization such as the Catholic Church, the man at the top can be incredibly harassed and frustrated if he loses the respect of those in the lower levels - the troops, as the Cardinal would call them.
The Cardinal’s reaction to the situation has driven me even closer to distraction. He absolutely refuses to fight, much less suppress the various outbreaks of chaos, defiance, hysteria, and sheer brainlessness which keep erupting all around us. Six months ago, he would have taken on all these birdbrains (I have grown a little partisan) and eaten them alive, feathers and all. A few bellows, a few twisted arms, a few transfers, and maybe a few secret flourishes of the checkbook, and peace would have been restored. Yet, he has deliberately, consciously, refused to do any of these things. He is trying to be a different kind of bishop - one that really practices Pope John’s holy freedom. The tragedy is, my brother’s devious slanders have shrouded the effort in a miasma of meanness and distrust. And the liberals and the conservatives, who are creating most of the chaos, are so blinded by their own obsessions, they can’t see what’s happening in the first place.
Yet, it’s all perfectly visible. How can they be so blind? His Em. has sold off all those beautiful antiques which filled our residence, and replaced them with Grand Rapids traditional junk. Even our baroque chapel has gone to the auctioneers, and the money to the archdiocese. He also traded in his Cadillac for a Ford and sold his shell collection for a whopping $250,000. All without a peep of publicity, in spite of my pleas not to pass up a chance to look good for a change.
He was speaking last week at the annual reunion of the 113th Division. I wrote an absolute masterpiece of a speech. I talked out of both sides of the mouth, as only we intellectuals can. I supported the war in Vietnam in a major key and criticized it in a minor key. I added a scherzo on Korea and a pastoral hymn for World War II. It was symphonic, it was hypnotic. By the time he ended, the audience was guaranteed to have no idea what the point of it all was, beyond the need for personal courage. Then without warning, His Eminence departed from my text. With tears in his voice, he said, “But let us never, we who lived through it, let us never glorify war - above all this war. Let us listen not only to the voices of the living, but the voices of our dead. They have a claim not only on our devotion, but on our consciences. They speak to me often in the small hours of the morning. I kneel beside them again and hear their tears, their cries of pain, their death rattles.”
It tipped the whole speech in a dangerous (politically speaking) direction. Afterward, the reporters swarmed all over him, asking him if he was planning to denounce the war. He pretended to be (or perhaps really was) baffled by their reaction. This enabled the New Lefties to put him down in their books as something worse than a convinced conservative - a cowardly liberal.
Cowardice or weakness has become the standard explanation for everything he does. When he refused to endorse a resolution of the Archdiocesan Association of Priests, condemning the Vietnam War as intrinsically immoral, he “yielded to conservative pressure.” When he decided to keep St. Clare’s Hospital open at the cost of $1 million, he “yielded to liberal pressure.” When he appointed a black pastor to St. Peter and Paul, and revamped the policy on the neighborhood use of church facilities downtown, he “yielded to black pressure.” I suppose, when he refused to comment on the only true statement in Leo’s diatribe, the gifts of money to his sister-in-law, they said he “yielded to family pressure.”
The personal money thing is complicated by the reality of the diocese’s financial structure. Unlike the Episcos and other Protestant churches where the laity are the legal owners, our bishops own it all. They have no board of laymen to whom they must present an audited report each year. An R.C. bishop is the corporation sole - with absolute control of all the diocesan cash - and of all the property, too, if he chooses to exercise it. When you own it all, there’s not much point in paying yourself a salary. If Mahan did get a salary in line with his responsibilities, he could probably afford to give his sister-in-law twice what he has been giving her. But all this is impossible to explain in public. In a very ironic way, he is a victim of the system.
Anyway, the Cardinal would never try to explain it because it would only embarrass his sister-in-law. He also has much bigger money worries. The conservatives (read rich) have departed in droves, to give their money to the John Birch Society or some other institutional idiocy. The religiosos among them have formed a claque called St. Urban’s League. I think it’s in honor of Urban II, who proclaimed the first Crusade and tried to heal the Eastern schism. But it might equally be in honor of Urban VI, who was certifiably insane and created the great schism of the West by establishing an Italian majority in the College of Cardinals. The liberals don’t have a patron saint (naturally); instead they have lawyers, and I think more than anything else they worship the Supreme Court. Currently, they are suing the Cardinal to force him to make a complete revelation of the archdiocese’s finances. He issued a financial report which was as thorough as anything you can get from a U.S. corporation, and much more comprehensible than any accounting I have ever seen from a city, state, or federal government. But the libs, led by my brother and our would-be Savonarola, Vinny Disalvo, will not be content until they have the Cardinal legally bound to ask their permission every time he writes a check.
I have tried to do some missionary work among the liberals. I met with Father Disalvo and my brother Leo, who is busy radicalizing the local chapter of the National Association of Laymen. The meeting was a waste of time. As long as I continued to work for Mahan, I was de facto despicable. Everything I said about the Cardinal’s attempt to change his style was greeted with hoots and sneers.
The effect of all this on me? My hours have improved considerably. The Cardinal no longer hurtles about the archdiocese like a berserk rocket. He turns down most invitations to speak; in fact, he has almost become a recluse. I have had time to plow through most of the mass of documentary evidence Bishop Cronin compiled against Vatican I. This has only confirmed my fear that the old boy was reaching for the unreachable star, trying to knock out the whole council with his lack of freedom argument. But it has whetted my appetite to write a serious history of the Church from a new point of view. Unfortunately, I haven’t found this necessary needle in my historical haystack yet.
At this point, I’ll shock you by snarling - the hell with me intellectually. I am a lot more concerned about the state of my soul - which is rotten. I find myself yearning for a scourging. In a way, I am in the process of getting one, sometimes on a physical level, and more often on the spiritual plane. You know what was happening between me and Helen Reed. It stopped when I got back from Rome. Maybe, thanks to your offensive malediction at lunch beside the Tiber, I became determined to prove I was not in love with my cock. I like to think it had more to do with Helen’s reaction when we made love for the first time as a man and a woman and not a pair of separate spiritual freaks. I also know it has something to do with the Cardinal - my new respect for him.
Stopping didn’t mean - and doesn’t mean - that I stopped loving Helen. In fact, throughout the last three agonizing months, I can honestly say there was never a day or a night when I did not want her in my arms. To make my torment more exquisite, I have been seeing her constantly.
Among the Cardinal’s first moves when he got back to the city was a conference with Bill Reed. He asked him to reorganize and expand the outpatient services at St. Clare’s Hospital. He warned him that this would involve working with his difficult daughter, who had been sent back to the hospital as head of nursing services by her Mother Superior, Sister Agnes Marie. Reed succumbed to His Em.’s reminiscences of their army days, when he had displayed organizational genius, etc., etc. I was told to work on Helen, to make sure that she cooperated.
Ironically, I was already making efforts in that direction. The Cardinal had described his attempt to reconcile father and daught
er in Rome. I was outraged, yes, genuinely outraged (a remarkable fact in itself for someone so proud of usually feeling nothing). Was I angry because she was so unkind to Mahan? Or was I simply feeling sorry for her father, a pathetic man? Or was I genuinely concerned for her, as a priest rather than as a lover? You may marvel, but I prefer the third explanation.
I found myself with an unexpected ally. Her Mother Superior, Sister Agnes Marie, had apparently received a letter from the Cardinal telling her about the incident. Sister Agnes is a formidable character with a gentle but amazingly direct manner. Helen is in awe of her. She is one of those deceptively simple types who make holiness seem easy. Then she scares the bejesus out of you by telling you how hard it is. She knows St. John of the Cross like you know the Code Sinaiticus or one of the other original Gospel manuscripts. At any rate, once she went to work on Helen, my pastoral ministrations receded to a walk-on. I suspect there was also something hierophantic and intensely feminine involved, but I am weary of my search for explanations for everything. If the tree bears good fruit, let us praise it and go on to other things.
Dr. Reed also deserves a lot of credit. He threw himself into working at St. Clare’s at the rate of ten and twelve hours a day. Watching him deal with patients and staff, Helen realized he was neither the Protestant ogre that the nuns of her youth had portrayed nor the militant reactionary that her New Left friends painted. In a month, she went from raging antagonism to guilty adoration. Soon, she was talking about leaving the convent to become a doctor. She is currently on leave from the order, living at home with her father. Dr. Reed is naturally ecstatic and is inundating her with biology and chemistry books.
To soothe my frustration, Helen has constructed a fantasy future for us. She gets her M.D., and I get a quiet country parish from my friend the Cardinal. By this time, marriage will be a licit option for us diocesan padres. I will minister to my small congregation and write history, novels, poetry, while she practices medicine, dividing her time between our parishioners, whom she will treat for nominal fees, and the poor of the inner city. A lovely dream in which I consistently point out one large flaw. The chances of my becoming one of the first generation of married clergy in the last 1,000 years of the Roman Church are very slim. Do you hear anything sotto voce in the Vatican corridors that would alter this dour prophecy? If so, for God’s sake rush the news to me. Because the more involved I get with Helen, the more burdensome my priesthood becomes to me. If it wasn’t for the Cardinal, I am sure I would have walked out weeks ago. But I couldn’t do that to him now.
The Good Shepherd Page 42
