The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “Your message was alarming,” he said softly, looking from Rodriguez to Traeger. Rodriguez slumped in his chair.

  “You didn’t know?” he asked.

  “I didn’t know.” The smile had been replaced by an expression of sadness. “Sometimes I wonder if the Blessed Virgin knew what trouble she would cause by telling those things to Sister Lucia.”

  Traeger said, “But wasn’t the third secret made public?”

  “It was. The hope was that that would stop all the wild speculating about its contents. Of course, withholding it for so long had inflamed curiosity. The strangest ideas became current as to what the secret said. Finally, the Holy Father—Cardinal Ratzinger as he then was—decided the time had come to put an end to all that. So the secret was published and he wrote a magnificent commentary.” The wistful smile was briefly back. “And immediately we were accused of deception. It was said that there must be more that was being withheld.”

  Traeger looked at him. “And there wasn’t?”

  “Everything was made public.”

  “Who would have stolen it?” Traeger asked.

  Piacere’s hands opened as if he were saying Mass. “It would be rash of me to speculate.”

  “We have to speculate, Your Eminence,” Rodriguez said. That was when Traeger first realized that this mild little priest with the aura of holiness about him was a prince of the Church.

  “I will leave speculation to you,” Piacere said sweetly. “What disappointment the thief must be feeling.”

  He went on then, developing the thoughts Cardinal Ratzinger had put into the document accompanying the revelation of the third secret in 2000. The essence of Christian doctrine had been revealed in its completeness at the time of the apostles. Since then of course there had been what Cardinal Newman called the development of doctrine, drawing out the implications of that original deposit of faith. But no development could be authentic that did not conform with the original revelation.

  “We learn more and more of what we cannot understand, not in this life.” Piacere twisted the ring on his right hand, as if he feared it would slip off.

  Of course there were private revelations, some of which received official Church approval, but in their case, too, the test of authenticity was their agreement with the faith that had been entrusted to the Church.

  “Private revelations have good and bad effects,” Piacere murmured. “Many useful devotions are the results of such apparitions. The bad effect is a passion to know what lies ahead, to have prophecies. There are those who seem almost to long for the end of the world. Of course, the apparitions at Fatima are a great blessing to the Church. Paul VI went there, as did John Paul II. But the heart of the Fatima message is as old as the Church itself. Prayer, repentance, fasting. The secret is that there is no secret.”

  “But the assassination attempt?” Traeger said.

  “Yes, yes. There is that.”

  By the time they left Piacere, Traeger had thought that, if he ever got religion, he would want Piacere there at his deathbed.

  And so, that afternoon, talking with Crowe on the rooftop of the Vatican Library, Traeger had known of the missing third secret. And he could not rid himself of the thought that Crowe, too, knew of it. What he did not know, despite Rodriguez’s remark the night before, was whether those murders in the Vatican were connected with the missing third secret.

  “Be careful,” he said to Crowe, when they had gone downstairs and were standing outside the monsignor’s office.

  “I’m always careful.”

  “Good.”

  He would reserve for their next meeting what he had learned of Crowe’s connection with the Confraternity of Pius IX.

  III

  The engine room of the bark of Peter

  Brendan Crowe waited half an hour after Traeger had left him, the door of his office open. Anyone passing by would have seen him busy at his desk, this day a day like any other. Finally, he rose, shut the door and locked it, and stood very still, taking deep breaths. He had been shaken on that dreadful day when an assassin had roamed the Vatican; he had been deeply moved when he discovered the body of his chief on the roof above. But now, for the first time, he sensed the truth of Traeger’s warning. He had seen the assassin. If the man were apprehended alive, it would be Brendan Crowe’s task to say, “That is the man.” But far more than his personal safety concerned him. The double life he had been living for years now threatened to become one life.

  “Now.”

  That had been the single word in the message from Catena. He had received it the day before, in a cybercafé on the Via Boezio, using the AOL address he held in the name of John Burke. Burke was only the latest of several names he had used to provide a buffer between himself and the e-mail address that connected him with the Confraternity of Pius IX. It had all seemed a game.

  Not all priests who were assigned to Rome became disenchanted with the all-too-human aspects of Church governance. When John Henry Newman had been named cardinal, he asked and received permission not to come to the Eternal City to receive the red hat. It was better, the Englishman had confided to friends, not to get too close to the engine room of the bark of Peter. Brendan Crowe was one of the disenchanted.

  It had begun while he was still a student, shocked by the heterodoxy of professors teaching in the very shadow of the Vatican. The time came when he wondered if it was he rather than they who were out of line. Surely the wild theories were known by the Curia, by the Holy Father. Vatican II was interpreted in ways that called into question the hierarchical nature of the Church. Now, it was alleged, we are the People of God, not a monarchical bureaucracy deriving from the age of Constantine. The gap between clergy and laity must be closed, as well as that between men and women in the Church. Celibacy, they were assured, would soon be a thing of the past, a reminder of the Church’s failure to understand fully the incarnational character of the faith. Crowe had appealed to old Father Donohue, a fellow Irishman, who taught Church history and was clearly out of sympathy with his more radical colleagues.

  “Of course it’s madness,” Donohue said. He had produced a bottle of Irish whiskey and poured half an ounce for Brendan.

  “You’re not having any, Father?”

  “I have to keep my wits about me. Such as they are.”

  Donohue developed a theme he had already discussed in his lectures. In the long history of the Church, the period after an ecumenical council was often a time of turmoil. This was particularly true in recent times. Take Vatican I. He went on about Dollinger and Lord Acton and the scourge of modernism, the Old Catholics who broke from Rome. The long view of history seemed to provide all the consolation Father Donohue needed: this too will pass. It had not been enough for Brendan Crowe.

  The teaching going on in the pontifical universities in Rome after the Council suggested that a coup had taken place. It was as if the Reformers of the sixteenth century had been offered professorial chairs in Rome to spread their doctrine. From there it had been a small step to think that a palace coup had taken place in the Vatican itself and that hostile forces were in charge, bringing about the demise of the Church.

  Brendan Crowe had resisted this upsetting interpretation of what was going on in the Church. Who was he to stand in judgment of men far wiser than he, more educated, in positions of responsibility? Perhaps the differences were not as deep as he thought. For years after the Council, as he worked in one of the more obscure dicasteries of the Vatican, disputes about such matters had seemed to him just an exchange of personal opinions, both sides of any issue occupying positions suggestive of authority. And then in 1985, twenty years after the Council closed, at the second extraordinary synod held in Rome, the synod following on the famous Ratzinger Report, the assembled bishops had acknowledged that there was a false spirit of the Council abroad in the Church. This was contrasted with the true spirit, and the marks of each were enumerated and stated. Crowe had known the great relief that what hitherto had seemed merely his
opinions were now identified as the true spirit of the Council. Now at last would come clarity and unity, a dying away of the surly undertone of dissent.

  But nothing changed. The report of the synod was filed away with all the previous post-conciliar clarifications to be ignored by all those Crowe now saw as his adversaries. The time seemed to have come to follow the example of Donohue, get out of Rome and back to Ireland and comparative sanity. Oh, for a little rural parish in County Clare where he could be sustained by the solid faith and piety of his people. Two things intervened.

  The first was the then Bishop Maguire’s stay at the Irish College where Brendan roomed. The prelate had just been created cardinal and had come to Rome for the ceremony. One afternoon, when Brendan was pacing the graveled walks of the college ground, while most of the residents were taking their postprandial nap, a voice called. It was Maguire, sitting on a bench.

  “You are pensive, Father.”

  “My thoughts are not Pascalian, I’m afraid.”

  Maguire had liked that, and he had recognized the west country accent. He patted the bench beside him and Brendan sat.

  Two Irishmen in a foreign land, two clerics from County Clare with a fund of common memories and all of Holy Ireland sustaining them—there was immediate rapport. Brendan had described the work he did in the Vatican but mentioned his intention of returning home. Maguire sighed.

  “I won’t be going back.”

  He told Brendan of his appointment as head of the Vatican Library and Archives. Before they rose, he had asked Brendan to come there as his assistant.

  “I’ll want someone whose Italian I can easily understand.”

  Brendan had asked for and received a day to think on it. And then he had gone to Catena.

  He had made the appointment before Maguire had made his offer, with the intention of telling Catena he was returning to Ireland. But things were more complicated when he kept the appointment. If he accepted Maguire’s offer, he must sever all connections, however informal and clandestine, with the Confraternity of Pius IX.

  “It is the answer to a prayer, Father,” Catena had said.

  Neither man had said it in so many words, but the implication was clear. Brendan Crowe would become the confraternity’s man in the archives. No need to mention that the third secret was stored there.

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Couldn’t work for the good of the Church? Surely you don’t imagine that I am asking you to be subversive. The subversives are already there.”

  Catena was a persuasive man and, Crowe had to admit, it was flattering to be recruited by both Maguire and Catena. Even so, Crowe’s agreement had been tacit. Over the intervening years, he had kept in touch with Catena, but had never been asked to do anything that could have been construed as disloyal to Cardinal Maguire. Sometimes he almost persuaded himself that he was keeping a watch on Catena and the confraternity. And then had come the awful day when an assassin had roamed the halls, had found the villa on the rooftop of the library, and had plunged a knife into the breast of Cardinal Maguire.

  He had found the third secret of Fatima on the bedside table in Maguire’s villa, just lying there where the cardinal must have placed it after reading it, perhaps while in bed. If the assassin had had time, he could have found the folder and been off with it. Crowe knew why Maguire had been perusing the secret. After the publication of it in 2000, a steady stream of letters came that claimed that parts of the secret had been suppressed. Maguire had said he would put an end to that once and for all. In the greatest of secrecy, Crowe had removed the secret and brought it to his chief. And now, here it was.

  Of course he should return it to the archives. He himself felt no impulse to open the folder to see if the complainers had a case. His motives when he put the secret into his briefcase were obscure to himself, then and later. It was as if he were removing the documents from harm’s way when he took them back to his room in the Domus Sanctae Marthae. He remembered Chekovsky’s enigmatic question—Is it you, or must we wait for another?—and Traeger’s suggestion that there was a mole in the Vatican. He had feared that Traeger meant him. It was the thought of little Remi Pouvoir, flitting among the rows and rows of archived materials, that decided him. And he had another idea, a wild idea, prompted by Burke’s account of the eccentric billionaire for whom his sister worked.

  IV

  “He is a self-made Croesus.”

  John Burke’s rooms were on the same floor in the Domus as Brendan Crowe’s, and the two priests had formed a friendship, the younger looking to the older for counsel, Crowe fascinated by the eager zeal of the younger man. Burke had taken Crowe to the building that housed the Pontifical Academies and showed him around, and Crowe in turn had acquainted Burke with the inner sanctum of the Vatican Library and the publicly accessible parts of the archives. In their conversations, the range of Crowe’s knowledge impressed the younger priest—patristics, philosophy, the manuscripts in the Vatican Library, even an effortless authority about the art works in the museum. It was this last that prompted Father Burke to seek the older priest’s help in compiling the list Laura had asked for.

  But before he could broach the subject, Crowe had made the dreadful revelation that four recent deaths in the Vatican had been murders. After that, it was difficult to get back to the wishes of Ignatius Hannan.

  “The mysteries of the rosary?” Crowe said.

  “The best artistic depictions of them.”

  “There is scarcely unanimity on that.”

  “Well, the best in your opinion, then.”

  “I could mention two or three for each mystery.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” John said, as if Crowe had agreed.

  “What is the purpose of the list?”

  In answer, Burke told his friend more about the eccentric billionaire for whom his sister worked in New Hampshire.

  “I suppose he wants reproductions of them?”

  “He could scarcely obtain the originals, Brendan.”

  Burke himself had been devoting months to gathering archival materials for the use of the commission looking into the canonization of Pope Pius IX, who had begun his papacy as a liberal and then, appalled by political upheaval and revolution, reversed his field. He had fled the Vatican for Gaeta, joining the list of popes who had suffered from secular forces. Burke possessed an Irish eloquence that made dramatic his account of Napoleon’s kidnapping the pope of the day and bringing him to Notre Dame to crown him emperor.

  “In the event, Napoleon put the crown on his own head. Poor Pius.”

  “Pius?”

  “Paul V. After the fiasco in Russia, he offered protection and asylum to members of Napoleon’s family. A truly Christian gesture. There are those who think that Napoleon’s defeat in Russia was punishment for his treatment of the pope.”

  Full of his subject, Burke had then gone on about Paul Claudel’s trilogy of plays.

  From time to time, the two priests went out for dinner to Ambrogio’s in the Borgo Pio, absenting themselves from felicity awhile, in Brendan’s phrase—or not his phrase: his conversation was a florilegium of quotations—taking an outside table in clement weather. And that is what they did this evening.

  “Tell me more about your sister’s employer, John.”

  “I think I’ve already told you all I know. He is a billionaire.”

  Brendan’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that hyperbole?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “He inherited the money?”

  “Far from it. He is a self-made Croesus. Electronics.”

  “Hanson?”

  “Hannan. Ignatius Hannan.”

  “Irish?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Ah, an apparent Irishman.” Brendan was filling his pipe. “And a pious man though rich?”

  “That is quite recent. He was too busy to practice his faith for years but suddenly it all returned. Pietistic might be a better term.” He told Brendan of the replica of the
grotto at Lourdes that Hannan had put up on the grounds of his company.

  “Ah.”

  “I suppose it would be difficult to have something built that would resemble Fatima.”

  Crowe said nothing, puffing on his pipe, looking at passersby. “La Salette might interest him.”

  Burke looked blank.

  “Celle qui pleure?”

  He shook his head. Crowe sat forward and began to talk of the apparitions at La Salette, also in the nineteenth century. Did Burke know Leon Bloy? A shame that he did not; he must read him. The writer was a great champion of La Salette because the messages were such an indictment of abuses in the Church. “Now don’t tell me that the name Jacques Maritain means nothing to you.”

  “Of course I know Maritain.”

  “Bloy’s godchild, as was his wife, Raissa. Maritain wrote a book on La Salette but was advised not to publish it.”

  “Why?”

  “He consulted the pope.” Crowe’s eyebrows rose as if in explanation.

  On the day before she was to return to America, Laura invited John to tea at her hotel, and he brought Brendan along. To his delight, his sister and the learned Irishman got along, each immediately at ease with the other.

  “I didn’t think Americans drank tea.”

  “Haven’t you heard of the Boston Tea Party?” Laura taunted.

  “I was thinking of that. You dumped the tea overboard.”

  They talked of her employer’s interest in paintings depicting the joyful mysteries of the rosary. Brendan drew a folded sheet of paper from the sleeve of his cassock.

  “This is what I came up with.”

  Laura was delighted.

  “Nate will find a way of thanking you,” she promised.

  John Burke took Bloy’s The Woman Who Was Poor on vacation to Maiori on the Amalfi Coast and tried unsuccessfully to enjoy it. When he checked his e-mail there was a long message from Laura. Could he come to the States and see Ignatius Hannan in order to discuss an exciting new project? He replied asking why they couldn’t consult by e-mail or telephone. “He wants to make you an offer you can’t resist.” That was nonsense, of course, but the prospect of a visit to the States was attractive. He put it to his superior, saying a bit about Hannan. Bishop Sanchez Sorrondo stirred in his chair. That the academies could use the financial support of the American billionaire seemed to be his thought.