Prince of Peace

by James Carroll

  But my failure is another subject. I was talking about Catholic University's. Even the Methodists, whose equivalent nineteenth-century movement resulted in Boston University, Northwestern, SMU, Emory, Southern Cal and my own NYU, outshone the Catholic bishops. Still, CU became and remains the center of the effort to educate American priests and nuns. Perhaps it was handicapped impossibly by its clerical orientation, though some of its priest-facuity, Fulton Sheen for example, or John Tracy Ellis, had left enduring marks. Of course CU has had its achieving laymen too. Among the alumni of its famous drama department are Jon Voight, the midnight cowboy, and Ed McMahon, the midnight card.

  The site chosen for the university in the 1880s was on a hill just northeast of Washington, and over the next seventy-five years, around a first modest hall of lecture rooms and a primitive observatory where presumably the priest-astronomers asked forgiveness of Galileo, there clustered the monasteries, convents, postulates, juniorates, theologates and colleges of Paulists, Benedictines, Redemptorists, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Claretians, Capuchins, Christian Brothers, Xaverians, Salesians, Oblates of Francis de Sales, Carmelites, Carthusians and half a dozen competing factions of Franciscans. Each of these places housed students who attended the university or faculty who taught at it. By Michael Maguire's time there, Catholic University and its religious satellites so dominated the growing new section of Washington known as Brookland that it was referred to as "Little Rome." It was the perfect setting, that genteel but modest neighborhood with its quiet tidy streets and small tract houses on quarter-acres of grass, each with its garage; the little tudor shopping centers with ample parking; the sprawling parks where Little League and Pop Warner flourished. Brookland was an early suburb and as such a type of the world into which the entire postwar generation of American Catholics was moving. The fifties boom was for the Church too a suburban phenomenon. Newly ordained clergy weren't going to serve in the gloomy parishes—"Saint Paul's," "Saint Mary's"—of the decaying cities, but in the bright new all-purpose parishes—"Our Lady of Hope," "Holy Innocents"—of the sparkling child-dominated suburbs. The knotty-pine cheer of such places already paneled their lives.

  Thousands of young religious were at large in Brookland. On its streets monks, friars and cassocked seminarians could stroll in their medieval robes without the least self-consciousness. The officials deferred to them and the merchants gave them discounts. On the class-free mornings of Holy Days they could attend en masse in a local moviehouse special gratis screenings of features in which Bing Crosby was forever paying off the mortgage of the new church and Ingrid Bergman was perpetually taking her final vows. Brookland was an enclave like Vatican City itself, complete and entire, and across its boundaries the junior clergy were forbidden to go, except in the afternoons of those same Holy Days when they might hike across the city to Arlington for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or down to the Smithsonian, wondrously cluttered with the wax figures of Indian chiefs and the original Spirit of St. Louis. Not that larger Washington was regarded as wilderness or that the institutions of government weren't prized by those highly patriotic Catholics, but that, for all their success, the last vestige of that old alien feeling had yet to be removed. In truth it wasn't the world they were in but not quite of, but their beloved America.

  In the fall of 1958 Michael Maguire began his second year at Catholic University's Theological College. Washington was continually abuzz with news; events that would shape the future followed each other in quick sequence that year. The president, acting on his own authority and with no particular regard for the precedent set, sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon to restore order and bolster a friendly government. The Supreme Court, applying its own four-year-old principle, affirmed the right of embattled black children to attend a segregated school in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Here come the niggers!" the rednecks cried, and they were right. The first American satellite was successfully shot into space. Nikita Khrushchev became the premier of the USSR. A grand jury found that quiz-show winner Charles Van Doren, the son of my own literary idol, was a fake. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was sponsoring tests on an oral contraceptive that would free women from the fear of pregnancy. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro routed the last of Batista's troops to complete the liberation of Cuba. Stereophonic recording was developed and among young people outside the seminary the hits of the year were Buddy Holly's "Maybe Baby" and the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley." 1958 finished Elvis as a musical innovator—he went into the army—but it launched a trio of Liverpool teenagers who called themselves "The Silver Beatles." Any one of these events would have justified Eldridge Cleaver's comment made about Rosa Park's refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus: "Somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted." Taken together they support the view that the era of tumultuous change we call "the Sixties" actually began in 1958.

  But no event of that year was more fraught with significance for the young men studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood than the death of the man who had come to embody everything triumphant, timeless and secure about their Church, but also everything static, rigid, morose and moralistic. He was an Italian, born Eugenio Pacelli, but revered by two generations as Pope Pius XII. When he died that fall many Catholics reacted as if some law of nature had been transgressed. His Holiness dead? That was no gear shifting, but the machinery shutting down. A kind of tensing—that glandular "Achtung!"—swept the Church, and with it the unexpected visceral knowledge that the last of the ancient command societies, dating back one and a half millennia, was, like an old Roman, about to fall on its sword. Catholics sensed implicitly that the ecclesial structure that had enabled their achievement in postwar America could continue serene and unshaken, immutable as well as infallible, only if Pius, as some thought he might, lived forever.

  Seminarians were ordinarily restricted in their ability to follow the news. It wouldn't do to have them distracted by the man-chasing sensations of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe. Let me say, aside, that the wholesome movie stars like Doris Day and Grace Kelly were vastly more seductive as fantasy figures to such repressed young males. After all they, like the "innocent" actresses, were being taught the manipulative values of chastity. The most insightful actress of the day, by the way, was Jane Wyman, being the first American to see through Ronald Reagan. But actresses are not my subject, alas. If they were I'd pay homage to Brigitte Bardot, who rescued cinematic eros from the weirdos on Forty-second Street. It was a great day for us Puritans when we learned that sex was art. But seminarians, I was speaking of seminarians.

  Reports of goings-on in "the world," whether sex-related or not, could only make it more difficult for the boys to keep their eyes on the ball, in Michael's phrase, which was not God but the thirteenth century. And so by and large newspapers, magazines, radio and television were forbidden unless there was a Catholic angle to the event reported, Edward R. Murrow interviewing Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, for example, or any Notre Dame football game. This restriction, of course, played its part in the larger strategy of seminary discipline, which was to reduce those young men, even those best ones, to the status of dependent children. Seminarians were being trained in subservience, and no one had embodied the totalitarian system in which obedience was synonymous with humiliation better than Pius XII. He had run the entire Church the way every rector ran his seminary. When the cardinals of the Church sequestered themselves in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope, their Consistory became the top news story of the day and seminarians across America were not only permitted to follow it but expected to.

  The places of honor in the students' common room at Theological College belonged to two pool tables and a Ping-Pong table. The television was a small-screen floor model with a battered wood cabinet, the hand-me-down gift of some faculty member, and it was impossible, even after the head student and two others lifted it onto one of the pool tables, for more than a couple of dozen fellows to watch it at one time. There were a hundred and twenty
-two soutaned theologians in the room, the entire student body not counting the eight who were in the kitchen washing dishes, a chore everyone took turns doing except the deacons. Deacons could smoke too, though not in front of the others. Theirs were the petty privileges of a petty elite; the last lesson in how to be a priest.

  It was the free period after the evening meal. Ordinarily, during those thirty or forty minutes, they all donned sweaters over their cassocks and went out in raucous groups of three, always three because more was impossible on the neighborhood sidewalks and fewer was forbidden. For a seminarian to stroll alone was antisocial, and for a pair to go could indicate an incipient "particular friendship." For obvious reasons homophobia thrived in the seminary culture, and not only among the faculty. Seminarians were alert for any sign of intense feeling in themselves or others. Affection reaching to any depth at all set off alarms, and you can imagine what that did to their capacity for friendship. And so as trios they strolled along Michigan Avenue or down Fourth Street or onto the CU campus to check the progress of "the shrine," the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the massive Romanesque basilica that after intermittent construction over thirty years was nearly finished: With its pencil-sharp K. of C. bell tower and its brilliant blue mosaic beach ball of a dome, it already dominated the northeast hill of Washington as completely—and wasn't this the point?—as the Episcopal National Cathedral dominated the northwest hill. Unfortunately the Protestant Church was a classic Gothic masterpiece while the National Shrine seemed garish even to the unaesthetic Catholic donors whose names were being chiseled on pillars in the vast crypt. There was a story, in fact, that on the morning of the day that the great dome was dedicated at last the Blessed Virgin Mary herself appeared on the massive shrine plaza and said to two humble seminarians, "Tell the bishops that I want them to honor me by building on this very spot a beautiful church."

  But that evening, despite the mild late October weather, they weren't outside. They were attending as well as they could to the tiny television. A hush fell over the room when Walter Cronkite reported the amazing news that the Consistory had still not chosen the new pope. The smoke had risen black twice that day, indicating two more futile ballots. Speculation now, he said, was that the cardinals, divided between progressive and traditionalist factions, were deadlocked. Cronkite went on to other news, but the seminarians ignored him, bursting into heated conversation of their own. Many took offense at the newsman's implication that liberal versus conservative politics, not the guidance of the Holy Ghost, would determine the outcome of the papal election. Others, the more worldly ones, thought it naive in the extreme to expect a secular commentator not to impose some human analysis on the sacred process.

  Gene O'Mally didn't care, frankly. He was worried about the game. The next day Theological College was playing the Paulists, and on the Paulists' court. O'Mally was the captain. He was a type and I know all about him. They came through Fordham by the gross. Even as I remember what Michael told me of him I can read his mind. He'd played basketball for Notre Dame, and he knew better than anyone that his team didn't have it. Hell, it was embarrassing. They'd lost six in a row now. Even the Capuchins in their fruity beards beat them, and the Paulists had won the league the year before.

  Some people thought the seminary basketball league was frivolous, the litniks and the eggheads, but O'Mally's opinion was that God was as glorified by a nice lay-up as He was by the Tantum Ergo. But he also thought it was a disgrace to have all these effete religious orders trouncing the diocesan guys of TC, and he was going to do something about it. If he didn't, the Paulists, who could be vicious bastards, were going to run off a hundred points against them.

  As the seminarians began to drift out of the common room—they had to be in their rooms in ten minutes for the night study period—he slid into line behind Mike Maguire. Oh, if he could just get the son of a bitch to play tomorrow, that would do it! Not that they'd win, but O'Mally just wanted to keep it from being a rout. Maguire, at six-three, was taller than anybody on the team, and the guys from Dunwoodie said he was good. In fact O'Mally had seen him shooting baskets by himself the previous spring, and he had the touch. The ball just floated off his fingers, like it had helium in it. He'd knocked off ten in a row from all over the court. But Maguire wouldn't play, and he didn't even shoot baskets by himself this fall. For sports all he did was swim laps in the CU pool. When O'Mally'd approached him in September he'd declined pleasantly enough, but firmly. He'd said he wanted to concentrate on studies and that b-ball wasn't his sport anyway. Maguire'd made a joke about being older and said his jock days were over. But O'Mally's theory was that Maguire was used to being the big shot. He never referred to the war-hero stuff himself, but everybody else was always aware of it. Hell, a lot of guys looked at him with a kind of awe. Maguire seemed oblivious to that, but probably he secretly lapped it up. He probably wouldn't play ball unless he was the captain. Well, O'Mally had decided during that miserable game against the Capuchins that if that was what it would take to get Maguire on the team, it was okay with him. He'd resign the damn captaincy and offer it to Mister Wonderful.

  "Hey, Mike, how goes it?"

  "Hi, Gene-o, how you doing?" Maguire was a year behind O'Mally, but at twenty-six, he was two years older. He'd gained weight since entering the seminary in New York four years before, and had lost the ascetic leanness and gray pallor he'd brought home from China. He was stoop-shouldered now, but no more than many tall men, and when he tired, his face took on a bony, haggard look. Still he was an imposing, robust man, devoid of boyishness, a handsome black Irishman in his prime. In the opinion of his superiors and most of his colleagues his physical stature was more than matched by other less tangible qualities of character. Once, on a bet, he skated out onto the freshly frozen lake at Dunwoodie. When the ice, which was too thin, began to crack he went faster and soon he was furiously skating across the lake, ahead of the crack. A gully of black water opened up behind him, but he never hesitated. He made it all the way across the lake, and the seminarians who saw what he'd done said to themselves, though not to each other, "Here is a man I want to be with."

  Some of the fellows, however, could never master their ambivalent feelings about him. It was less a problem at TC than it had been at Dunwoodie, but even among the theology students in Washington there were men for whom Michael's background was an insufferable rebuke, as if he'd risked his life in combat and endured years as a POW precisely to make them feel inferior. What his fellows were not aware of, for Michael kept his feelings to himself, was the fact that he felt deprived of the very sense of manhood, of power, his years in Korea and China had given him. This man who'd survived war and withstood brainwashing had been cut down to size too by the chickenshit of seminary life. It had been like a return to the suffocating, child-pinching world of Inwood.

  Once, the previous winter, he'd asked permission, as he was required to, of Father Farley, the gruff rector, to go ice skating on the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Monument. Father Farley said no, which so surprised Michael he involuntarily, for it was practically insubordinate to do so, asked why. The rector replied that it was dangerous. Dangerous! The water in that landscaped artificial pool was only three feet deep! At Dunwoodie Michael had skated across that cracking ice above twenty feet of water. "Go, Michael, go!" Michael Maguire had been a war hero! Had killed people! Had saved many lives! Stop, Michael, stop!

  "Dangerous, Father?" he asked, his face reddening.

  Father Farley stared at him.

  After a long time, a critical time in Michael's life, he turned and left the rector's room, but not before saying, as he was required to even though he'd been refused, "Thank you, Father."

  Michael worried, in other words, as much as any of them did about appeasing the great authority figures of rector and faculty, and he spent all of his energy, like the others, trying to dazzle not two parents but two dozen of them. If there was a difference between Michael and most of the others it was thi
s: he was man enough to suspect what was happening to him. He was becoming what Saint Paul called a "eunuch for the Kingdom of God." And there's the key. He would never have tolerated it, but he had inherited a belief and had yet to question it that the emasculating shit of life in the Church was the absolute will of God.

  Seminarians are inveterate nicknamers—they call each other "Fuzz" and "Spade" and "Champ" and "Wolfjaw" and "Bishop" and "Sleepy," always with a needle—and in Dunwoodie Michael had been tagged as "Mister Wonderful." Few had the nerve to call him that to his face, and it had evolved, as such handles do, first into "Won-ton," as if he was being ribbed for an interest in China, and then simply into "Won," pronounced "Juan." Michael knew better than to show how it insulted him, and he'd grown used to the complicated feelings his fellows had about him. But their bitterness, when it surfaced in a cold look or a snide crack, could depress him, and Michael had learned in Dunwoodie that nothing was served by outshining the others unnecessarily. That was, in point of fact, why he'd stopped playing basketball, a game at which since Good Shepherd no one he'd played with could touch him.

  "What do you think, Won?" O'Mally asked. "Who's going to get it?"

  There were Vatican-watchers among the seminarians who had all the leading candidates—the papabili —doped out. That crowd lived for Church gossip and it was them Michael kidded when he said, "Walter Cronkite, Gene-o. I think Walter Cronkite."

  One of the wags would have come back with a Cronkitish, "Et vos ibi!" —"And you are there!"—but O'Mally wasn't famous for his wit and his Latin was far too workmanlike for cracks. He said, as they rounded a corner into one of the long dark corridors off which each man had his room, "But it's got to be an Italian."