The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “We’ll talk about it in better circumstances,” he said.

  “Wait.”

  His expression changed. Now she could read him as he had read her. He dreaded that she would say yes, let’s, why not? But it was enough to have restored the balance. She put a hand on his arm.

  “You’re right. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Did she just imagine that Ray kept out of her way throughout the rest of John’s visit? She and her brother had time together while Brendan Crowe gave Nate a crash course in sacred art. They drove to the nursing home to see their mother. Mrs. Burke sat slumped in a wheelchair, her hair just washed and fluffy, and looked at these two strangers who hugged her and called her Mom. John gave her his blessing before they left, and she traced the sign of the cross on her breast. How much did she remember? How much did she know?

  “It’s so sad,” Laura said, tears in her eyes, when they were crossing the parking lot to her car.

  “Dante would have had to devise an anteroom for those in Mom’s condition, neither living nor dead.”

  “At least she’s spared the fear of dying.”

  “I suppose,” her little brother said.

  But what did anyone really know about what went on in the mind of a victim of Alzheimer’s?

  “It’s a pretty posh place,” John said.

  “Thanks to Ignatius Hannan.”

  “He’s quite a fellow.”

  “Faint praise.” Laura laughed. “John, he’s generous as well as acquisitive. He gets what he wants. Father Crowe didn’t put up much resistance.”

  “He did say no.”

  “I think Nate expected that.”

  “But you proposed the chief consultant alternative.”

  “John, I’m his alter ego.”

  “What’s Ray Sinclair’s job?”

  “Oh, he’s money mainly. And general watchdog.”

  “They were classmates at Boston College?”

  “More or less. Nate never graduated of course. They’ve offered him an honorary degree, but he had heard tales of the theology taught there and took a pass.”

  They drove in silence. Without having to decide, they went past the house where they had been raised. Laura made a U-turn at the corner and went back, parking in front of the house, and they looked at the scene of their childhood. It seemed as remote as their mother had.

  John said, “Coming back makes me realize what an expatriate I am.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “That depends on Brendan. A few more days at most. He seems to have an apt pupil in Hannan.”

  “How do you like your digs?”

  “It reminds me of the Domus.”

  The two priests said their Mass in the guest residence, on an improvised altar. Nate apologized for not having thought of asking the architect to include a chapel. This posed a difficulty for Laura. She couldn’t receive Communion, of course, being a scarlet woman and all. It didn’t help to think of it that way. John made no comment. Perhaps he thought she had received from Father Crowe. Her own mind was so full of her relationship with Ray that she found it hard to believe that John suspected nothing. He was so wonderfully innocent it made her want to cry. It did help that Ray had mentioned marriage. It helped even more when John asked about her and Ray.

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  “And?”

  “What do you think, John?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She looked at him. “Don’t you like him?”

  When they got back to Empedocles, Zelda Lewis was there. Laura was delighted. It was Ray’s fantasy that Zelda would make a good match for Nate.

  “Just what he needs, a predatory widow.”

  “Ray, she is a very nice woman.”

  Maybe if she kept saying that, she would believe it.

  Zelda said, “I’ve been away for a few days.” But she was looking at John when she said it.

  “This is my brother John.”

  “Father,” Zelda said grandly, putting out her hand. John took it and turned it over, as if he were going to read her palm.

  “And where have you been?” Laura asked.

  “Corfu!”

  “Corfu?”

  “An island off the Italian coast. Heavenly. Do you know it?” she asked John.

  “I spent a few hours there once on the way to Greece. Why Corfu?”

  “Oh, it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing.” But she smiled a great, secretive smile. “And Rome.” She lifted her chin. “We were married in Rome.”

  “Married!” Laura felt an impulse to hug the older woman, so she did. Oh, this was delightful, as all Ray’s speculations went up in smoke. Laura hooked one arm into Zelda’s and the other through John’s and took them off for coffee, where Zelda told them about Gabriel Faust.

  “So you married in Rome and honeymooned on Corfu.”

  Zelda nodded. “We were married in Santa Susanna.”

  “Ah,” John said. “The American church.”

  “Is it? They made it all so easy.”

  “But tell us about Gabriel Faust,” Laura urged.

  “I’ve known him for years. This was all quite sudden, in a way. But I can see it started long ago. He’s an art historian. He catalogued my collection.”

  “An art historian.”

  “He made his name in Renaissance art. Italian Renaissance.”

  Laura’s mind was whirling. “What exactly do art historians do? Is he a professor?”

  “He was. But he has been an independent consultant for years.”

  “Not tied down anyplace?”

  “He is now,” Zelda said.

  “Of course.”

  There were voices in the hallway, and then Nate and Father Crowe and Ray entered the room. Nate suppressed an expression of annoyance at the sight of Zelda.

  “Look who’s here,” Laura trilled. “Mrs. Faust.”

  “Mrs. Faust.” Nate’s expression changed, but he came forward warily.

  “I assume you missed seeing me at Mass and wondered about it,” Zelda said to him. “I thought I owed you an explanation. I ran away and got married.”

  Nate might have concealed his relieved delight better.

  “Gabriel Faust is an art historian,” Laura said, planting the seed.

  After a time, she slipped away to her office and found Gabriel Faust’s web page. His credentials were impressive. Kind of a brooding photograph, but why not? An art historian. And now he lived in the neighborhood.

  Laura ran into Heather Adams in the ladies room. “You’re back,” Heather said.

  “Heather, there are some people I want you to meet. Two priests.” She put her arm through Heather’s. “One of them is my brother John.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I

  “We’re all priests now.”

  Jean-Jacques Trepanier had wanted to be a priest from as long ago as he could remember, but he was thirty-five when he finally got ordained. Anyone else would have been discouraged, but adversity had only strengthened Jay’s determination. And sometimes it seemed that adversity was all there had been. Of course, his mother had always been there to support his dream.

  He had an altar in his room, and his mother made vestments for him, the old-fashioned kind, the only kind she knew. An alb, a cincture, an amice, a stole and maniple, and a bass fiddle chasuble with a magnificent embroidered cross. She let him use the oil and vinegar cruets from the dining room, the ones that were never used anyway, and he had a gold cup for a chalice, and for a paten, a brass disk designed to go under a flowerpot. His first altar missal had been his late father’s Saint Andrew’s Missal, which had the equivalent of a card deck of memorial cards in its pages, souls of the departed for whom his father always prayed at Mass. His father’s card had been added to them by the time his mother handed over the book to Jay with all the solemnity of a liturgical rite.

  “I feel I’ve already fulfilled my obligation,” his mother would say proudly after she had acted as his
congregation. She even liked the sermons he preached. His favorite theme was Mary, but then his mother told him she had dedicated her son to the Blessed Mother even before he was born. But if he was encouraged at home, he got no encouragement at the parish school.

  Only half the teachers were nuns by that time, and you already needed a scorecard to tell who they were. If anything, they dressed better than the laywomen, but then most of the nuns would themselves be laywomen before many years had passed. It was in third grade that he had first mentioned his vocation to the priesthood. Sister Madeline frowned. “We’re all priests now.”

  He didn’t understand, of course. Not then. Later, he would hear all about the priesthood of the laity, which allegedly made the ministerial priesthood redundant. In any case, Jay had learned to keep his counsel with Sister Madeline, though she must have passed the word along, because all the other nuns he had as teachers seemed to single him out for attention. Big, plush Sister Gloria had a way of crushing him against her breasts and running her hands through his hair.

  “You have to leave the girls alone,” she giggled.

  Jay never looked at girls. It was part of his vocation. When he explained this to Sister Gloria, she laughed. “But Jay, by the time you grow up, priests will be allowed to marry.”

  So he already got a full dose of what Vatican II meant to most nuns before he entered the minor seminary. Later, it seemed a miracle that the place was still open then. Of course, its days were numbered. Jay felt that he had signed on to the crew of the Titanic. Father Shipley, the rector—everyone called him Father Fred or sometimes just Fred, and to his face, and he loved it—explained to them that the system they had entered was doomed, thanks to the Council. Ireland Hall had six grades, the four of high school and the first two years of college. Its graduates then went on to the six-year course of the major seminary, two years of philosophy and then four of theology, followed by ordination. All that would be changed. Father Fred told them that the Council had decided that it was unnatural to take boys away from their families at such an early age. Besides, how could any kid know in his early teens what he wanted to do with his life? Father Fred didn’t quite say it, but the point was puberty. Until the sexual urge manifested itself, it was nonsense to speak of a life of celibacy, and when it did manifest itself you had to give the alternatives a chance.

  “Assuming we stick with celibacy,” he added, grinning as Sister Gloria had. Fred had long since left the priesthood and married and became the CEO of a dog food company.

  Ireland Hall did shut down, after Jay’s junior year, and he had finished at the Jesuit high school where they didn’t even teach Latin. His disappointment had impressed Hugh Dormer, S.J., as long as he thought Jay was interested in becoming a classicist. When Jay explained that he wanted to become a priest, Father Dormer said, “Have you been to Mass lately?”

  “I go every day, Father.”

  “You must have noticed it’s in English now.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be, does it?”

  “Son, we have to acquire the spirit of the Council. The vernacular was voted all but unanimously by the Council fathers.”

  In those days, anyone who thought the Mass should still be said in Latin, or at least that it was okay for it to be in Latin, was regarded as a schismatic, and not without reason. Lefebvre and his community walked right out of the Church, saying the Church had abandoned them, they hadn’t abandoned the Church. There were times in later years when Jay was tempted to join them, but then he got to know about Catena and his crowd and that cured him.

  After high school, he wrote to various religious orders, but the common suggestion was that he finish college first and then get in touch. So he enrolled at Saint Thomas Campion.

  “Philosophy,” he said when his advisor asked him what he wanted to major in.

  “You still have to take four courses in philosophy here, whether or not you’re a major. Why not choose something else?”

  “I still want to major in philosophy.”

  “How about a double major, philosophy and English?”

  He agreed. It was a good thing. At least he learned some English, read a lot, began to write, and started publishing in student magazines. Logic was all right, even if it was all symbolic logic. When he asked about Aristotle he was told that syllogistic is a subset, a minor subset, of formal logic. After that, there was epistemology, in which he learned that the mind is a cookie cutter that creates its own objects; ethics, where every moral problem called for a pro and con treatment that gave you a choice of solutions; and metaphysics, taught by a layman named Boswell who thought Wittgenstein and Heidegger had pretty well put metaphysics out of business. He did find an old Jesuit who agreed to give him directed readings in Scholasticism, but he was a Suarezian who hated Thomas Aquinas. Even so, he let Jay read the enemy.

  Jay was on the dean’s honor roll every semester, and from junior year he had a column in the student paper, and one of his stories won a national prize, but he had become a pariah. The Jesuits called him Torquemada and Savonarola. Jay had discovered the Ratio Studiorum and argued in column after column that the Jesuits were betraying their own tradition. The four courses of theology were about what you would expect. His only protection was to read and practically memorize the sixteen documents of Vatican II and cite them against the positions urged in class.

  “You are the biggest pain in the ass on campus,” the dean told him. “Is there anything you like about Campion?”

  “Yes, Father. That it only lasts four years.”

  When he submitted his valedictorian speech, the dean laughed. “No way in the world you’re going to give that at commencement.”

  The runner-up, a girl, gave the valedictory address, a feminist screed the students and faculty and even some of the parents liked. Jay had been in contact with the religious orders that had advised him to finish college first. Now he was told to spend some time in the real world to be sure of what he was doing. But it was because his mother lost her job that Jay spent time in the alleged real world. He might have gone on to graduate work, but they needed the money, so he got a job on a local paper that had a television station. At the station, he wrote scripts for commercials, he wrote the news, he did the weather reports, and then he became a backup news reader. Viewers liked him. There was lots of mail. His television career lasted six years, until his mother fell ill and died within months. She had thought they were poor, but it turned out that there was stock his father had bought, which in the meantime had split and split and amounted to a real pile by the time Jay came into possession of it.

  Throughout college, during all the years since, he had gone to Mass every day. The Latin he had learned on his own enabled him to read the office. He found a parish where the Tridentine Mass was said once a month and got to know the pastor, who had overcome the reluctance of the chancery office to have that Mass in Latin. Father Schwartz. He told him he wanted to become a priest. Schwartz groaned.

  “The seminary has become a zoo.”

  “I was at Ireland Hall until it closed down.”

  “Alienation of Church property, that’s what that was. They had no right to sell that property.”

  Father Schwartz read the Wanderer and Culture Wars and First Things and took morose delectation in the crumbling of the Church and the society he had grown up in.

  “We were warned, Jay. The Blessed Mother predicted it all.”

  He meant Our Lady of Fatima. Schwartz had everything ever written on Fatima, and he lent the books and pamphlets and papers to Jay, who devoured them. Schwartz was right. Unless we prayed the rosary and did penance, terrible afflictions would befall. And they had, as she had said they would. And there was more to come. Jay made the five first Saturdays; he added to the end of every decade of the rosary the prayer Mary had recommended. “Oh Jesus, forgive us. Deliver us from the fires of hell; draw all souls to heaven, especially those in special need.” Schwartz might seem an oddity in the diocese, but the Holy Father,
John Paul II, agreed with him.

  “Lip service,” Schwartz said.

  “What do you mean?”

  He meant that the Holy Father had not, as he had been instructed by Mary to do, dedicated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Why not? Politics! Had Jay read the documents of Vatican II? He had. Was there one mention of atheistic communism in any of them? There wasn’t. Imagine a Council meeting in the early 1960s that had ignored the most visible threat to the Church and to Christian civilization.

  “An opening to the East,” Schwartz said contemptuously.

  Jay hadn’t realized it at the time, but he had just received his mission in life.

  “How old are you?” Schwartz asked.

  “Twenty-eight.”

  The pastor frowned. “That’s young for a retarded vocation.”

  He was thinking of Saint John’s in Boston and of Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut, where older men were trained for the priesthood, widowers, some of them grandfathers. Jay was thirty-one, going on thirty-two, when he was admitted to Holy Apostles. It was wonderful, everything a seminary ought to be. He took remedial courses in philosophy and within a year was asked to teach a course in Thomistic metaphysics while he was pursuing his theological studies. Jay was the star of the place, but the next step was to find a bishop who would ordain him.

  For some dioceses, low on priests, Holy Apostles was a god-send. All these men anxious to live the life of the priest. Bishops came and interviewed the seminarians, and many were adopted by bishops before they were ordained subdeacon. The interviews Jay had all began well but led to nothing.

  “Don’t say everything you think,” the rector advised.

  But Jay found it impossible not to tell the bishops he spoke with how he regarded the current mess the Church was in or that the only solution was to take Fatima seriously. Nobody disagreed with him. It was his enthusiasm that seemed to bother them. Jay was in his final year and without a bishop when Angelo Orvieto, bishop of a little diocese outside Palermo, visited. Orvieto was a devotee of Fatima; he and Jay got along like a house afire.