The Good Shepherd

by Thomas Fleming

  “I’d like to send a cable to the Vatican. Roma locuta est causa finita non est.”

  Matthew Mahan tried to laugh. But it died in his chest. He sensed he had to say something, he had to reach out to Dennis, not simply for his sake but for the sake of his own soul.

  “Dennis, I’ve been thinking - thinking a great deal about you and Helen Reed. Praying, too. I’ve decided to speak out. Not the way you probably want me to do it - in public. But on the floor when the bishops meet in Washington next month. I’m going to see what I can do to change their minds about that statement on celibacy they’re planning to make.”

  Dennis nodded glumly, old familiar dissatisfaction on his face. Didn’t you hear what I said? Matthew Mahan almost cried.

  “I wish - I wish I understood what you are trying to do,” Dennis said.

  Now was the moment for the grandiose spiritual remark. I’m trying to save my soul, Dennis. I’m trying to save the soul of this archdiocese. He could almost hear his father’s growl: No grandstanding in this family. “I’m doing the best I can, Dennis, the best I can.”

  The long parting kiss Helen Reed had given him last night was still on Dennis McLaughlin’s lips as he came downstairs to begin his day’s work. Not even the taste of the bread and wine, the words of the consecration at his morning mass, This is my body, this is my blood, had diminished (no, they had intensified) the sadness, the anguish, of that kiss. Even as he said good night, Dennis had felt the brief joy they had created with their bodies transmuting into muddled guilt.

  Another failure to spew into the ear of his confessor, Dennis McLaughlin thought wearily, as he sat down at his desk. He had quietly found a confessor for himself about a month ago. Monsignor Frank Falconer, one of Matthew Mahan’s classmates, pastor of St. Damian’s, the nearest parish to the cathedral. He had been amazingly gentle with Dennis for his falls from grace with Helen Reed. “You won’t be the first priest who had this problem, and you won’t be the last,” he said the first time he confessed it. It was his own inability to forgive himself that was depressing him, Dennis realized.

  His mood was compounded by his encounter with the Cardinal last night when he had returned to the residence at 3:00. He was sure that guilt was written in giant letters across his forehead when Matthew Mahan had invited him to join him in the kitchen for an “insomniac’s lunch.” In the harsh overhead light, the Cardinal looked ghastly. More weight had vanished from his cheeks. For the first time, flecks of gray were visible in his normally glistening black hair.

  He told Dennis he had just listened to the Vatican radio for a half hour. Pope Paul had made another comment on priestly celibacy - his fourth or fifth in the last month. They were all stridently against any change in the rule. Dennis heard deep sadness in Matthew Mahan’s voice, saw it on his face as he told him this bad news. For a moment, Dennis almost begged him to stop worrying about it. In a travesty of his prayer, he wanted to cry, I am not worthy.

  As Dennis often did when he brooded over the way things were going, he found himself fingering the moon shell on his desk - the souvenir of his walk along the Nettuno beach with Matthew Mahan. Each time he became aware of the shell in his hand, he was irritated by the memory of something larger - an idea, an insight, even a reality lurking in those delicate brown swirls.

  This morning the same thing happened. With a grunt of irritation, he flipped the shell back on his desk. A knock on the door. Rita McGuire, one of the tall sepulchral typists from the chancery office, delivered the mail with her usual simpering smile. Quickly, Dennis looked through it, spotting with an inner groan at least a half-dozen more complainers about dismissed saints. Then he seized a dull stainlesssteel letter opener and slit the obvious leading contender for attention. The papal seal and the Washington, D.C., return address signaled a communication from the apostolic delegate.

  Well before he reached the last paragraph, he began cursing softly to himself.

  Your Eminence:

  It pains me to be under the necessity to write this letter. Communications have been received by the Holy See from priests in your archdiocese informing the Sacred Roman Rota and other officials of a highly unusual program which you have initiated in regard to divorced persons who have entered second canonically invalid marriages.

  Similar programs in the diocese of Baton Rouge, Portland, Chicago, and one or two other dioceses have also been brought to the attention of the Holy See. Our Holy Father, His Holiness Pope Paul VI, has been extremely distressed to learn of these programs. He has directed me to order all the bishops and heads of diocesan marriage tribunals who are administering them to suspend them immediately. The value (or scandal - here I add a personal comment) of these programs will be weighed by the proper authorities in Rome and a decision issued on the practice, which will be binding for the universal Church. It seems inconceivable to me, personally, that these practices will ever be approved. They contradict 1,000 years of canon law and threaten the very essence of the Church’s teaching on marriage.

  Please communicate to me as soon as possible your compliance with the Holy Father’s order.

  Sincerely yours in Christ

  Dennis McLaughlin shoved the rest of the mail aside and walked into the Cardinal’s office. He was sitting at his desk, reading another draft of the study on priestly celibacy. “Excuse me,” Dennis said. “I thought you should see this immediately.”

  Matthew Mahan looked up with the blank startled expression of an old man who had difficulty concentrating on more than one thing at a time. It was hard to believe he was the same man who had volleyed seven different orders on seven different subjects per minute before they went to Rome. A little of the old self reappeared in his face as he read the apostolic delegate’s letter. For a moment, Dennis expected a roar of rage. He would have welcomed it, even if it had been directed at him. But Matthew Mahan only shoved the letter aside as if it were another helping of Mrs. Norton’s atrocious pasta. His face seemed to crumble. His head fell forward until his chin sagged on his chest.

  Spiritually, Matthew Mahan was no longer in the room. He was in Rome again, facing the anguished woman whose soul he had so confidently promised to save, confessing to her this final humiliation. What would Mary Shea do? What would she say when you turned your back on her now? What would you say to the others who were waiting for your episcopal permission? What? Trust in God but not in the Church. No, that was unthinkable, unsayable. If the Church was not God’s voice, if her arms remained folded across her supposedly loving breasts, if there was no hope of opening them, your whole life was a sham, a charade, Your Eminence.

  “Why, Dennis, why?” he murmured, looking up and seeing the concern on his secretary’s face. “I don’t know why.”

  “Do you want to - reply to this?” Dennis said, pointing to the apostolic delegate’s letter.

  Matthew Mahan nodded mournfully. “Write a brief acceptance. We’re suspending the program. Then send it to Monsignor Barker over at the Rota with a memorandum telling him to process all the cases now on the docket. But don’t accept any more. Tell him to see me about setting up some kind of a counseling program for those we turn away.”

  As if the last words inspired the movement, Matthew Mahan swiveled in his chair and stared out the window at the traffic moving meaninglessly up and down the Parkway. “There should be a story in the paper, too. Tell Cohane. Make it clear that I take full responsibility for the program. Say something about my being pleased that Rome has decided to give this matter serious attention. But make it clear, as I said, that it’s my fault - that I regret raising the hopes of so many couples prematurely.”

  “I won’t write that. I can’t,” Dennis said, almost in a shout.

  “Dennis, please don’t make it more difficult for me.”

  “Why don’t you fight them?”

  Matthew Mahan shook his head. “This may sound awfully maudlin to you, Dennis. But I love the Church more than I love your good opinion of me. And I love that and want it very much.
If I can’t have it -” A ghost of a smile strayed across his lips. “God seems determined to deprive me of everything I love.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes, it does. The kind of sense that Papa Giovanni made. He spent thirty years in the desert, do you realize that? Thirty years playing diplomat, making small talk to Bulgarians and Turks. Obedience and peace. That was his motto. I’m hoping - praying - that if I can live up to the first part, I may taste a little of the second -”

  Dennis strode back to his cubicle and sat down, fuming. It didn’t make - sense? Suddenly, with the force of a physical blow, he realized how utterly and totally he had lost contact with the spiritual life. A decade of Jesuit retreats suddenly engulfed him. Phrases from the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius thundered in his brain. To regulate his life so that he will not be influenced in his decisions by an inordinate attachment. . . . In the present meditation, I shall ask for shame and confusion. . . . Working against their own sensuality and carnal and worldly love will make offerings of greater value and importance. Numbly, as if someone else were directing his hand, he reached out for the moon shell. Abruptly he turned it over so that the narrow tip was pressing into his palm. He stared at the lines spiraling up wider and wider.

  Stupid, stupid, he denounced himself. What are you seeing, O ye of little faith? The dynamic spiral - it was the image of the Church’s growth. The idea that had tantalized him, that had lurked just beyond his mind’s reach since they had left Italy. The holy spiral, wholly unpredictable, moving upward in ever more widening circles toward infinity, each spiral both a new beginning and a continuation of the past, changing color, sometimes even shape, the living edge like a great expanding wave, not repudiating, simply growing beyond the dead past.

  He must write to Goggin, he must write to him immediately. Here was his needle in the historical haystack, the point of view that included a New Gospel and a new history of the Church, books that would proclaim and create a new beginning. The subject of the history would be nothing less than the struggle of the Christian community to achieve the freedom its founder had died to create - a struggle that was, in essence, a series of defeats, culminating in Pio Nono, the Pope who snarled, Tradition - that’s me. But from that total defeat, the proclamation of absolute spiritual despotism, had come the seeds of a deeper more profound growth of freedom. Why was that surprising? Wasn’t that the very essence of the Way, the Truth, the Life, the constant flowering of victory in defeat, joy from desolation, love from hatred and contempt?

  Where could he find a better place to observe this drama than his present job? This man, this suffering Cardinal next door, who was trying to impossibly combine obedience and peace, he was intimately connected with this new beginning. He must become its spokesman in the land where its possibility, its very heart, a new confidence in human freedom, was born. He must become John’s living voice, consecrated by John’s own hands.

  The phone was ringing. Dennis snatched it to his ear and heard Mike Furia’s familiar ebullient rasp. “Is the boss around?”

  The children of this world perpetually distract the children of light, Dennis thought as he asked the Cardinal if he would speak to his former fundraising chairman.

  Matthew Mahan picked up the phone with a sudden sense of dread. He was going to hear some bad news. “Hello, stranger, how’s the world treating you?”

  “Australia’s treating me pretty good. Japan lousy. Italy very, very good. The rest of Europe stinko.”

  “How long have you been gone, eight weeks?”

  “Closer to nine. I got in the day before yesterday. It’s the first chance I’ve had to call you. From the cables I got, I gather our collection plate isn’t doing much better than it was when I left.”

  “Unfortunately true. Maybe it’ll be good for us in the long run.”

  “Did you ever get a report from the chancellor on the projected cost of your schools?”

  “I got it last week. It indicates that we’ll be in the red for $10 million by 1976.”

  “I told you it would knock your head off. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m sending out a memorandum to all pastors, telling them to face up to the necessity of phasing out the parochial school system on the grammar school level.”

  “Really? Congratulations, Matt. That took guts. It must have been tough to write.”

  “The advice you gave me - helped me face up to it.”

  Only partially true, but it might help to restore their friendship, Matthew Mahan told himself.

  “I’m glad. Listen, I’ve got something personal I want to talk to you about. Are you free for lunch or dinner?”

  “Either one.”

  “Lunch would be better. I’ll see you in the Men’s Grill at the Athletic Club at twelve, okay?”

  Riding downtown at eleven forty-five Matthew Mahan tried to divert himself by cheering up Eddie Johnson. Eddie was not the same man since the Cardinal had traded in his limousine for a Ford. The spring had vanished from Eddie’s step, the spontaneity from his smile. Jim McAvoy, who had given Matthew Mahan a new limousine every year free of charge, was equally unhappy. But his wife, Madeline, who was much more in touch with contemporary spiritual problems, had calmed Jim down, and they were still friends.

  “Come on, Eddie, admit it, this car handles just as well as the Cadillac,” the Cardinal said.

  “Ain’t going to ever get me to admit that, Your Eminence. Fact is, I think you take a serious risk drivin’ around in this hunk a junk.”

  “But Eddie, if God isn’t watching over me, who is he watching? I think we’ve got a built-in guarantee that’s better than any dealer can give us.”

  “Yeah, but they was so polite when I took the car into McAvoy’s garage. This new place, they don’t even look at me. They just say stick it in the corner. As if I was drivin’ some tinhorn lawyer or somethin’.”

  Matthew Mahan almost smiled. Eddie, too, was learning humility and not liking it.

  In the lobby of the Athletic Club, Mike Furia crushed his hand and then refused to let it go. “Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you? You look awful.”

  “Oh, the usual, Mike, working too hard. And not sleeping very well. You’re looking great.”

  It was the truth. Mike had lost ten or fifteen pounds on his world tour. His face was tanned. He exuded energy and vitality. Or was he just extraordinarily nervous? At the table, he fiddled with knives, spoons, forks. He gulped a scotch on the rocks and was into a second one before Matthew Mahan had taken more than two sips from his glass of milk. He had expected an interrogation over the milk and had decided, in advance, to stop trying to conceal his ulcer. But Mike was too self-absorbed to notice it. Finally, Matthew Mahan decided to relieve the suspense.

  “What’s this personal matter? I thought of picking up some boxing gloves in the exercise room before I tried to give you any more advice.”

  Mike grinned. “Okay, here it comes. I finished my trip around the world in six weeks. For the last three weeks, I’ve been persuading someone to marry me.”

  “That’s great, Mike. Who’s the lucky woman?”

  Mike hesitated, his second scotch in midair. He took a sip and slowly put the glass down on the table, his eyes on Matthew Mahan’s face. “Mary Shea,” he said.

  For a moment, Matthew Mahan could not see Mike Furia across the table. Blackness engulfed him. He thought he was fainting. Then Mike’s worried face reappeared. A blurred version, like a picture taken with an unsteady camera.

  “That’s - that’s the most wonderful news I’ve heard in a year, Mike.”

  “Really?”

  Mike was very serious. That tough, square-jawed swarthy face was plainly worried that the Cardinal was lying to him.

  “Really. Why don’t you believe me?”

  “She’s told me everything, Matt. I know what she’s been to you. I’m not sure you want to see her married to a lug like me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” With a
n enormous effort, Matthew Mahan stifled an urge to weep. “Tell me, tell me how it happened.”

  Mike smiled. “It started last May, during the week of your elevation. I remember looking at her at that small dinner party, asking myself why the hell I never had the brains or luck to find someone like her. We had dinner together one of our last nights in Rome that week. When I got home, I started telephoning her every other day.”

  “Where is she, where’s Mary now?”

  “Right here in the city.”

  “Why didn’t you bring her along?”

  “She’s as nervous about what you’d think as I was.”

  “No,” Matthew Mahan said, “no, Mike. I’m the one who’s nervous. I’m the one who has something - shameful to tell you.”

  “What?” Mike was utterly baffled.

  “You want me to receive you and Mary into the Church, don’t you?”

  “She wants you to do more than that. She wants you to marry us.”

  “I can’t do either one, Mike.”

  He told him about the letter he had received from the apostolic delegate that morning. Mike’s face twisted with an emotion that was hard to identify, a mixture of contempt and anger. “Matt, what I told you in Rome still goes. I’ve got my own arrangement with God, or whoever the hell is running this crazy world. But I don’t know what this is going to do to Mary.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “There’s nothing you can do? You can’t pretend you didn’t get this letter for a month or so? Once you give us permission, it can’t be revoked, can it?”

  “Another letter went to the head of our marriage tribunal, I’m sure. The apostolic delegate’ll be on the phone to me if I don’t answer him by return mail.”