The Thirteenth Apostle

by Michel Benoît

  He rose, and left his cell.

  Before him stretched the dark, chill corridor of the second storey – the “corridor of the Reverend Fathers” – reminding him where he was: in the Abbey. And now he was alone. Never again would the librarian’s conspiratorial smile lighten up this corridor.

  10

  “Take a seat, Monsignor.”

  Calfo repressed a grimace, and allowed his plump body to settle back into the soft curves of the armchair, opposite the imposing desk. He didn’t like the way Emil Catzinger, the very powerful Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had summoned him to a formal meeting. As everybody knows, the serious business isn’t done around a desk, but over a shared pizza, or going for a stroll after a spaghettata in a shady garden, with a fine cigar wedged between your index and middle fingers.

  Alessandro Calfo had been born in the quartiere spagnolo, the working-class heart of Naples, from a lineage that had vegetated in the wretched promiscuity of a single-room flat overlooking the street. Immersed in a populace whose volcanic sensuality was nourished by a generous sun, he very soon perceived that he had an irrepressible need for pleasure. The flesh was there, soft, inviting, quivering, but inaccessible to a poor boy who learnt to dream of his desires and to desire his dreams.

  Alessandro was cut out to be a real Neapolitan, obsessed by the cult of the god Eros – the only possible way of forgetting about the poverty of the quartiere into which he had been born. But in a patriarchal society, acting out your desires is even more of a tricky business than proving that the annual miracles promised by San Gennaro have been performed.

  It was at this point that his father sent him to the unwelcoming North. There were too many children to feed in this one-room flat: this figlio would become a man of the Church, but not just anywhere. His father, a bashful admirer of Mussolini, had heard that lassù – up there – real patriots were rebuilding the seminaries in the spirit of Fascism. Since God was a good Italian, there was no question of going anywhere else to train for his service. At the age of ten, Alessandro, now ensconced in the plain of the Po, put on a cassock – he would wear it permanently from now.

  But this cassock covered – without being able to contain them – the permanent frustrations of this son of Vesuvius, always on the verge of erupting.

  In the seminary, he made his second discovery: comfort and affluence. Mysteriously, funds flowed here along the countless channels of the European extreme right. The poor boy from the quartiere learnt the importance of money – money which can do anything.

  At seventeen he was sent to learn his faith in the shadow of the Vatican, and in the language of God: Latin. Here he made his third discovery: power. And he saw that wielding power can, more than any obsession with pleasure, fill a life and give it meaning. To be sure, the cult of Eros is one approach to the mysteries of God – but power turns the person who possesses it into the equal of God himself.

  His natural inclination towards Fascism meant that, one day, he came across the Society of St Pius V. He realized that his three successive discoveries would find a table ready-laid for them. His appetite for power would grow and flourish in the ideological totalitarianism of the Society. His crimson-hemmed cassock would remind him of belated spiritual aspirations, while elegantly acting as a cover for the fulfilment of his carnal desires. And finally, money would come flowing into his hands, thanks to the hundreds of files the Society carefully kept up to date – files which spared no one.

  Money, power and pleasure: Alessandro was ready. At the age of forty he was promoted to the title of Monsignor, and became the rector of the highly mysterious and highly influential Society, a prelature which answered directly to the Pope and was subject to his authority alone. Then the unexpected happened: he conceived a real passion for the mission with which he had been entrusted, and became the fanatical defender of the founding dogmas of a Church to which he owed everything.

  He ceased to repress the itch of his senses. But in allowing it to find expression, he gave it a dimension compatible with his priestly office: now he saw it as the quickest way to reach mystical union, by means of carnal transfiguration.

  Two people – and two alone – knew that the all-powerful Rector of the Society of St Pius V was this little man with his honeyed tones: the Pope and Cardinal Emil Catzinger. For everyone else, urbi et orbi, he was merely one of the humble minutanti of the Congregation.

  In theory, at least.

  “Take a seat. Two questions – one external and one internal.”

  This distinction is a habitual one in the inner circles of the Vatican: here “internal questions” are those that crop up in the Church – a friendly, normal, controllable world. And “external questions” refer to what happens on the rest of the planet – a hostile, abnormal world that needs to be controlled as much as possible.

  “I’ve already spoken to you about this rather worrying problem – the French Benedictine Abbey…”

  “Yes, you asked me to do the necessary. But we didn’t need to take any action, as the unfortunate Father Andrei committed suicide, I think, and we can draw a line under it all.”

  His Eminence hated being interrupted: even if Calfo was trying to get him to forget the fact, he was in charge here. He would soon put him in his place.

  Catzinger was an Austrian. He had been chosen by the Pope, who found that his reputation as an enlightened theologian would be useful. But he rapidly revealed himself to be a formidable conservative, and since this was also, deep down, to the taste of St Peter’s new successor, the honeymoon between the two men turned into an enduring union.

  “Suicide is an abominable sin – God have mercy on his soul! But it seems there’s another black sheep in this monastery, where the flock of the faithful really needs to be above reproach. Look at this” – he passed a file over to Calfo – “a denunciation of this person from the Father Abbot. Perhaps it’s of no importance: you be the judge, and we’ll come back to it. There’s no urgency, at least not yet.”

  The Cardinal’s relation to his own past was fraught. His father had been an officer in the Austrian Wehrmacht, the Anschluss division. While he had distanced himself from Nazism to the utmost, he had preserved one of its instincts: his conviction of being the sole possessor of a truth that alone was capable of uniting the world, around a Catholic faith that was non-negotiable.

  “The internal question concerns you directly, Monsignor…”

  Calfo crossed his legs and waited to hear the rest.

  “You know the Roman proverb: una piccola avventura non fa male – a little adventure does no harm… so long as the prelate remembers his position and is, above all, properly discreet. Well, I’ve learnt that a… common whore is threatening to sell her story to the paparazzi in the anti-clerical press, who are promising to pay her a fortune in exchange for her revelations concerning certain… how shall I put it?… certain private conversations you are alleged to have had with her.”

  “Spiritual conversations, Your Eminence: we are together making progress along the path of mystical experience.”

  “I’m sure you are. But anyway, the sums mentioned are considerable – what do you intend to do?”

  “Silence is the first of Christian virtues: Our Lord himself refused to reply to the slanders of the High Priest Caiaphas. So silence has no price – I think that a few hundred dollars…”

  “You must be joking! This time you need to add a zero. I’m inclined to help you out, but make this the last time: the Holy Father will not fail to see the paragraph published in Il Paese. This is a warning to us. It really is deplorable!”

  Emil Catzinger slipped his hand into his crimson cassock and pulled out of the inside pocket a little silver-gilt key. He leant forwards, inserted the key into the bottom drawer of his desk and opened it.

  The drawer contained a score of bulging envelopes. From even the smallest parish of the Catholic empire, a tax is gathered for the Apostolic seat. Catzinger directed one of
the three congregations which ensured the collection of this manna, as regular and innocent as the fine drizzle of Brittany.

  He delicately took hold of the first envelope, opened it and rapidly counted the notes with his fingertips. Then he proffered the envelope to Calfo, who half-opened it. He didn’t need to stick his hand in to find out exactly how much it contained: a Neapolitan can count a bundle of banknotes with a glance.

  “Your Eminence, I can’t say how touched I am. You can rest assured of my gratitude and devotion!”

  “I’m sure I can. The Pope and I appreciate your zeal for the most sacred cause there is – touching as it does the person of Our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Va bene, Monsignore – calm down this young woman’s hankerings for publicity and, from now on, please lead her along the paths of spirituality in a… less demanding way.”

  A few hours later, Catzinger found himself in the office overlooking Bernini’s colonnade, on the right-hand side, with its window directly onto St Peter’s Square. Ever since his election, the Pope had chosen to travel extensively, leaving the management of everyday affairs to the men who live in the shadow of the Vatican. Nobody ever mentions them, but they steer St Peter’s vessel in the right direction: that of the restoration of the old order.

  His Eminence Emil Catzinger was the man who in secret ruled the Catholic Church – and he ruled it with a rod of iron.

  A trembling hand held out to the Cardinal, who was standing respectfully in front of the old man’s armchair, a copy of Il Paese. He found it difficult to enunciate his words.

  “And this story in which the name Calfo appears… ah, er… is it our Monsignor Calfo?”

  “Yes, Holy Father, it is. I saw him today: he’ll do what is necessary to prevent these hateful slanders from spattering the Holy See with mud.”

  “And… how can we prevent?…”

  “He’ll take care of it in person. And you know that, thanks to our Vatican Bank, we control the press group on which Il Paese depends.”

  “No, I wasn’t aware of that. All right, make sure that peace returns, Eminenza. Peace – that is what I yearn for, at every moment!”

  The Cardinal bowed with a smile. He had learnt to love the old Pontiff, even though his past life meant that he felt different from him in every fibre of his being. Every day, he was moved by the older man’s struggle against illness, his courage in suffering.

  And he admired the strength of his faith.

  11

  The Father Abbot was the last to enter the huge refectory, where the monks were waiting respectfully in front of their stools, lined up in impeccable order. In his melodious voice, he began the ritual. After the chant Edent pauperes, forty hands laid hold of their stools and slipped them with an identical movement under their habits. Their hands lay folded on the edge of the tables of deal wood, and forty heads bowed to listen in silence to the beginning of the reading.

  The midday meal had just begun.

  Opposite the prelate, at the far end of the refectory, a whole table was filled by the students of the theological college. Impeccable clerical garb, a few cassocks designating the most traditionalist of them; tense faces with shadows under their eyes: the elite of the future French clergy making ready to pick up the metal soup tureens overflowing with the lettuce that had been picked that very morning by Brother Antoine. The academic year had begun, and would not end until June.

  Father Nil liked the start of autumn, when the fruits of the orchard reminded him that he was living in the garden of France. But for the past few days he had lost his appetite. His theology classes here were taking place in an atmosphere that left him feeling uneasy.

  “So it is obvious that the Gospel according to St John is a composite work, and the final result of a long process of literary development. Who was its author? Or rather, who were its authors? The comparisons we have just drawn between different passages of this venerable text display a vocabulary and even a content that are extremely different. The same man cannot have written the vivid scenes, sketched from the life, that he obviously saw with his own eyes, and the long discourses in elegant Greek through which we can glimpse the ideology of the Gnostics, those philosophers of the Orient.”

  He had given his students permission to intervene during his lectures, so long as their questions were brief. But ever since he had come to the heart of the matter, he had been confronted by a score of frozen statues.

  “I know we’re straying away from the beaten track, that this isn’t what they taught you in catechism classes. But the text gives us no choice… You’re in for quite a few more surprises!” Such had been his line.

  His classes were the result of years of solitary study and reflection. Time and again he had sought in vain, in the library of the Abbey to which he had access, for certain books which, as he knew from a specialized review to which Father Andrei as librarian subscribed, had only just been published.

  “Well, Father Nil, the fact is: they’ve finally brought to light a new batch of Dead Sea scrolls! I’d never have believed it… The jars were discovered fifty years ago in the caves at Qumran, and nothing’s been published since Yigael Yadin died: more than half these texts are still unknown to the public. It’s an incredible scandal!”

  Nil smiled. In the intimacy of this office, he had discovered in Father Andrei a man of passion, who was aware of all the latest developments. He loved their long conversations behind closed doors. Andrei listened as he told him about his research, his head bent slightly forwards. Then with a word or two, or sometimes a silence, he would give his disciple his approval, or point him the way forward as he came out with his most daring hypotheses.

  The man he could now see in front of him was so different from the starchy librarian, the strict guardian of the three keys, who had always been such a familiar figure in the Abbey on the river Loire!

  The building had been rebuilt after the war, and the cloister had been left unfinished: it formed a U shape open to the plain. The libraries occupied the top storey of the three wings – central, north and south – just under the roofs.

  Four years earlier, Father Andrei had seen considerable sums of money coming in, with instructions to purchase particular titles in the fields of dogma and history. He had been thrilled at this opportunity to place his knowledge at the service of these miraculous gifts of cash. The shelves filled up with rare books, editions that were difficult to find or out of print, in all languages both ancient and modern. The opening of the special theological school, closely followed by the Vatican, was obviously responsible for the creation of this marvellous research tool.

  There was, however, an unusual restriction. Each of the eight teaching monks appointed to the theological college possessed just one key, the key corresponding to the subject he taught. Nil, who taught the New Testament, had been given the key to the central wing, over whose entrance was a wooden notice engraved with the words: Biblical Studies. The libraries of the northern wing (Historical Studies) and the southern wing (Theological Studies) remained obstinately closed to him.

  Only Andrei and the Father Abbot possessed the keys to all three libraries, held together on a special keyring, which they never let out of their sight.

  Right at the start of his research, Nil had asked his friend for permission to gain access to the historical library.

  “There are certain books I really need and I can’t find them in the central wing. You told me one day they’d been catalogued and placed in the north wing – why on earth can’t I get in? It’s ridiculous!”

  For the first time, Nil saw his friend’s face grow distant. Looking strained and edgy, Andrei eventually told him, with tears in his eyes:

  “Father Nil… If I told you that, I was wrong to do so. Forget what I said. Please, never ask me for the key to one of the two libraries to which you no longer have access. You must understand, my friend, I can’t do just what I want. Father Abbot’s orders are strict, and they come… from a higher authority. Nobody can have access to all th
ree wings of our library. It keeps me awake at night: it’s not ridiculous, it’s tragic. I have access to all three libraries, and I’ve often passed my time there ferreting around and reading. For the peace of your soul, in the name of our friendship, I beg you: just stick to what you find in the central wing.”

  Whereupon he had relapsed into a heavy silence, which was unusual when he found himself alone with Nil.

  Feeling out of his depth, the teacher of exegesis had had to satisfy himself with the treasures that his one key opened up for him.

  * * *

  “His narrative shows that the principal author of the Gospel according to St John knows Jerusalem well, and has friends and acquaintances there: he’s a wealthy, cultivated Judaean, whereas the Apostle John lives in Galilee, and is poor and illiterate… how could he be the author of the text that bears his name?”

  As he spoke, the faces before him darkened into frowns. Some shook their heads disapprovingly – but nobody spoke up. This silence on the part of his audience disquieted Nil more than anything else. His pupils had come from the most traditionalist families in the country. They had been handpicked to form the spearhead of tomorrow’s Church. Why had he been appointed to this post? He was so happy when he could work in peace and quiet, all by himself!

  Nil knew that he would not be able to present them with all his conclusions. He would never have dreamt that teaching exegesis would one day be a perilous acrobatic exercise. When he’d been a student in Rome, together with his friend, the warm and brotherly Rembert Leeland, it had all seemed so easy…

  The first bell for mass started slowly to chime.

  “Thank you. See you next week.”

  The students rose and started to tidy away their notes. At the back of the room, a seminarist in a cassock, his skull clean-shaven, lingered for a moment as he wrote a few lines on a small piece of paper – of the sort used by monks in order to communicate with one another without breaking the silence.