The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “What do you mean missing?” John had asked.

  “He’s not here. We don’t know where he is. His wife doesn’t know where he is.”

  “The Vatican experts did admire the calligraphy of the faked passage.”

  “John, are you safe there? The news is absolutely horrible. How is Heather?”

  “I’ve put her into a convent of Carmelites.”

  “Do they make candy?”

  John ignored this. “A convent within the walls of the Vatican. She’s as safe as I am.”

  Laura would have liked to find that more reassuring than she did. Laurel and Hardy had returned with the plane in which Heather and Traeger had been flown to Rome, deadheading it back to Logan, as they put it.

  “She should come back, John.”

  “I think she likes it here.”

  “Heather has the capacity to like wherever she happens to be.”

  “Oh it’s more than that, I think. Traeger came with her,” he added.

  “I know.”

  “I got him into a clerical residence. Cardinal Piacere seems to know him.”

  Ray was right. She would never write a novel. Things should hang together more than they seemed to do.

  “It’s not the money,” Nate said.

  “I know.”

  Nate had plainly been shocked by the thought of buying and selling something like the secret of Fatima. Hence his immediate decision to send the document to Rome. If only Trepanier hadn’t broadcast the fake passage, the whole thing would have been settled. They had bought a fake and lost some money, but that would have been that.

  “So where is the real document?” Nate asked.

  Good question.

  “Father Trepanier still won’t take my calls.”

  II

  “I make it myself.”

  Jean-Jacques Trepanier listened with a skeptical smile when Laura Burke and Ray Sinclair told him the judgment of the Vatican experts on the passage he had made public with consequences beyond the scope of imagination. The two minions of Ignatius Hannan had waylaid him as he came from the television studio where he had been informing his viewers that they were now witnessing the heavenly scourge Our Lady had warned of. He was on his way to lunch and he asked them along. At the table, over clam chowder, they had told him what they had come to say.

  “Of course they would say that,” Trepanier said.

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “My dear woman, what else could they say? Don’t you see that half a century of deceit has been exposed? Their duplicity has brought bloody chaos to the world.”

  “I think you can take credit for that, Father,” Ray said.

  “I?”

  “You broadcast it.”

  “The truth can never be suppressed forever,” Trepanier said.

  “Where did you get hold of that passage?” Laura asked.

  He should have been prepared for this attempt to blame him for the rioting and outrages being perpetrated throughout so much of the world. Nonetheless, he was surprised. And Laura’s question put him in a tight spot. How could he, as the voice accusing the Vatican bureaucracy of mendacity, take refuge in what could have been plausibly described as a mental reservation?

  “I bought it.”

  “Bought it!”

  “From Gabriel Faust?” Ray asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But he had already sold it to Ignatius Hannan,” Laura said.

  “I was content to have a photocopy of the relevant passage.”

  “Which is fake,” Ray said.

  “Then why is what it predicted taking place? It is the single topic of the news.”

  “What would it take to convince you that you bought something fraudulent?”

  Again he resented that they had the audacity to blame him. “And what is Gabriel Faust’s reaction to this Vatican judgment?”

  “He didn’t stay around long enough to hear it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He vamoosed.” The two of them looked at him expectantly. Surely they wouldn’t lie about such a thing. If anything, it weakened their case.

  “That is neither here nor there,” he told them.

  They looked at him as liberal seminary professors had looked at him years ago.

  “At any rate, now you know,” Ray Sinclair said.

  “This is very good chowder,” Laura said.

  “I make it myself.”

  When they had gone, he admitted to himself that what they had said made him uneasy. He tried to retain his original reaction that of course Vatican bureaucrats would seek to deny their culpability for keeping such a message to themselves. Hadn’t they once pretended to make the third secret public? They had been hoist by their own petard. Convincing as that interpretation was, it no longer satisfied him completely.

  The implication of their visit was that Gabriel Faust had been responsible for the passage Trepanier had paid a huge sum for. He got out the photocopy and studied it. He compared it with the pages that had been provided in 2000 when the third secret had supposedly been made public. No expert could deny that the hands were identical. But then the experts would not have been dealing with a photocopy.

  It bothered him that the Confraternity of Pius IX was not joining him in condemning the Vatican anew, now that the missing passage was known. How could they fail to see that this development corroborated the charges they had been making for years? If only he could discuss the matter with Bishop Catena. Perhaps they were angry with him for not sharing the explosive news of that missing fragment of the third secret. He considered sending an e-mail. He considered telephoning. He decided that the definitive thing to do would be to go to Rome himself.

  This was a thought that filled him with dread. The morose delectation he took in seeing on television those scenes of rioting raging mobs had been possible because of the saving distance between himself and all those crazed demonstrators. The pope himself had been spirited out of Rome. To go there would be like flying into a war zone.

  He pondered the possibility of the trip. He prayed about it. In the end, he decided that he would go. Let the Vatican experts try to convince Jean-Jacques Trepanier that he had paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the photocopy of a fake.

  After he had made his travel arrangements—there seemed to be no problem in catching a flight to Rome; he was even offered business class gratis—he telephoned Zelda. She answered with an excited yelp.

  “Gabriel?”

  “This is Father Trepanier, Zelda.” The question he had called to ask, not that he thought Laura Burke and Ray Sinclair would lie, seemed answered.

  “Is he with you, Father?”

  In the circumstances, it was an odd thought that Gabriel Faust should have taken refuge with him. Jay remembered how the just appointed director of Refuge of Sinners had suggested that there should be close cooperation between Fatima Now! and the new foundation. Had Faust been laying the groundwork for a future sale? He brushed the thought away. He told Zelda that her husband was not with him.

  The price he paid for his curiosity was to have to listen to her sobbing, incoherent tale of her missing husband. Had she any idea what her husband was being accused of? Apparently not. It was difficult to picture the recent radiant bride as he listened to her, offering it up. He managed to end the conversation by promising to say a Mass for the safe return of Gabriel Faust.

  And then he was on his way.

  A cleric travels light—the suit he is wearing and in his bag an extra Selma shirt and collar, socks, underwear, toilet articles, his breviary. He left his car in long-term parking and then went on to the terminal and the ordeal of the security check. The only bright spot, though it gave him pause, was the paucity of passengers, once one had moved in a long snaking line toward the band of Keystone Cops who had turned travel into a penitential exercise. Today he was at the barrier in moments. His ticket was examined as well as his passport. Rome? The squat little woman, bulging from her mannish
uniform, seemed about to say something, but she waved him on through the metal detector. As usual, his miraculous medal caught the attention of the apparatus. He loosened his collar and brought out the medal. A feral creature gazed at it with suspicion.

  “What is it?”

  “A miraculous medal.”

  A blank look. Were there no Catholics left in Boston?

  “What does it do?”

  Dear God. A sarcastic response was on his lips: It gets me stopped at airport security. But no. He explained that it was a religious medal.

  This was followed by hesitation, and then, as if in a concession to tolerance, he was waved through. The man called after him. “I’m Protestant myself.”

  The episode seemed symbolic of the present state of world affairs. Long ago, in Paris on the Rue de Bac, Our Lady had miraculously produced the medals of which the one he wore was a copy. A heavenly gesture of protection for a fallen world. Now it had become, if not a sign of contradiction, at least an impediment to movement in this vale of tears.

  There were two other passengers in business class. The seats behind stretched away, row after row, with here and there the top of a head visible. Was there anyone in first class? He was treated with consummate attention. Perhaps the fey young attendant was Catholic? Apparently not. He addressed Jay as Sir. He was offered a drink before takeoff. Surprising himself, he asked for scotch and water. When it came he sipped it as if it were medicine.

  Thoughts at thirty-eight thousand feet are kaleidoscopic, between sleep and waking. In the first hour, he read his breviary, and when he put it away, he was offered another drink. Why not? Another scotch and water. There was a television set that could be lifted from the arm of his chair. He tried it out of curiosity. A newscast, a montage of rioting, burning, rampaging in the streets. He turned it off and put it away. To think that he had been accused of being the cause of that. He said his rosary. He slept.

  He awoke to a darkened cabin. The couple across the aisle seemed to be sharing a seat. He turned away, looking out the window. A light winked at the end of the wing, beyond which were stars reduced by distance to tiny points of light. Once, they had provided the means of navigation across such oceans as that which lay below. He thought of Zelda’s hysterical tale. The man who had sold him a photocopy of the missing fragment of the third secret had, in Sinclair’s words, vamoosed. Had he been duped?

  He drove the thought away as if it were a temptation against faith itself. He accepted a blanket from the attendant, declined another drink, wrapped himself in the blanket, hugging himself under its warming comfort, and slowly felt his sense of righteousness return.

  Leonardo da Vinci was an armed camp, with carabinieri everywhere, but few passengers. He came out into the Italian sunlight and hailed a cab. After only a moment’s hesitation, as if he had decided this on his restless flight, he gave the address of the Confraternity of Pius IX.

  III

  We are all Semites.

  Eugenio Cardinal Piacere had, in his youth, considered a vocation to the Cistercians, but he had entered the diocesan seminary in Bologna, his studies aimed at the secular priesthood. Every Italian schoolboy and schoolgirl read Manzoni, of course, but often that came down to only portions of I Promessi Sposi. Piacere’s interest had gone deeper. He had read several times the great Milanese author’s La morale cattolica, most recently in the three-volume critical edition of Romano Amerio. He read Rosmini’s The Five Wounds of the Church; Rosmini had been with Pius IX before he fled to Gaeta. And of course Dante. The magnificent closing canto of the Paradiso had sent him to the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, and his old dream of a contemplative vocation was reawakened. He made several retreats at a Trappist abbey. He was torn between continuing on the path his feet were on and definitively leaving the world for the monastery. His spiritual director had listened with patience, nodding his head. After a long silence, he said, “It is a temptation.”

  It was difficult to regard the austere life of a Trappist as a temptation, but Piacere had resolved to be guided by his director, not by what could very well be simply his whims. He continued on the path his feet were on.

  Now years later he was a prince of the Church and acting secretary of state and facing the greatest crisis of modern times. From his retreat—the Holy Father was at the Villa Stritch outside the city, but only Piacere and one or two others knew this—he offered his prayers and advice of a rather transcendental kind, not much help in dealing with the string of visitors who besieged his office.

  The Holy Father mused about his predecessors who had preached crusades. He remembered Lepanto and the battle of Vienna. Small comfort there. Each man must understand the moment of history he occupies.

  “And all because of a fraudulent document,” Piacere said sadly.

  “The donation of Constantine,” murmured the pontiff.

  A secure telephone had been installed between Piacere’s office and the Villa Stritch. No important decision could be made without the consent of the Holy Father. He did not bother the pope with the importunate demands of Chekovsky.

  “Now I see why you have withheld the reports,” the Russian ambassador purred.

  “And why is that?”

  “Obviously they show that the assassination attempt was an initiative of the Turks. If you had made this public, what we are now seeing would have happened earlier.”

  Piacere had not read the reports in question.

  “Releasing them now is your only hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “If you show that these mad Muslims have been attacking you all along, public opinion will be swayed in your favor.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And my country will at last be publicly exonerated. It is a matter of justice.”

  “I cannot authorize their release.”

  “The city is going up in flames, you are under siege, and you cannot authorize their release?”

  “Only the Holy Father can do that.”

  “Then ask him. Beg him. I will beg him. Get me an appointment with him.”

  “You know he has left the Vatican.”

  “And you know where he has gone.”

  Piacere remembered the late Cardinal Maguire talking about the visits of this tenacious ambassador. Diplomacy is a duplicitous art and provided the means of ending, if on a sour note, the interview. Piacere had not quite promised Chekovsky an answer from the Holy Father.

  Carlos Rodriguez expressed hope of obtaining the missing authentic document. Only then could it be made clear that it was a forged message that had ignited the seething animosity of Muslims for the world that Christianity had built.

  There was no such enmity between Christians and Jews. The first Christians had all been Jews. If there was a dispute then it was between Jews, those of the old and those of the new dispensation. Pius XI had said it in Mit brennender Sorge. We are all Semites. It was otherwise with Islam.

  Christian persecution of Jews had been condemned even while it was going on, not efficaciously perhaps, but depriving it of any theological grounds.

  The Prophet had proclaimed hegemony over all men, bringing them to heel by the sword if necessary. Jihad. What compromise could there be with such a religion? At Regensburg, the Holy Father had spoken of that ancient quarrel, had like his predecessor invoked the autonomy of reason as well as faith, but reason in the sense he had in mind had no place in Islam.

  In the past, the Iberian Peninsula had been a Muslim province, a dark period for the Jews and Christians in that area. Is that what awaited the whole of Europe now? Of more than Europe?

  However fraudulent the document that had set off the present conflagration, it had touched on a historic truth. That was why comparing the forgery with the authentic third secret of Fatima held out only a wan hope. But it was the only hope they had. He urged Rodriguez to get it as soon as possible.

  “Who has it?” Piacere asked.

  “An ex-KGB agent.”

  “KGB!”

 
; Was Chekovsky playing a game with him? But surely if the ambassador could produce the missing document, he would. What more effective way of securing the release of the reports on the attempted assassination of John Paul II.

  When they had publicized the secret in 2000, in the expectation that thereby, once and for all, the wild speculations of people like Jean-Jacques Trepanier and Bishop Catena could be silenced, they had of course been astonished by the reaction.

  To be accused of deliberately misleading the faithful in such a matter!

  Trepanier refused to accept that the Holy Father had fulfilled the requests of Fatima, and this even in the face of Sister Lucia’s own assurances. He wanted the Holy Father to declare from the Chair of Peter that he was dedicating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. His quarrel seemed to be not with the fact of the dedication—it had been made—but with its mode.

  Bishop Catena was what the Americans called another kettle of fish. Vatican II, an ecumenical council, had departed from the traditional teaching of the Church! But such voices had some semblance of a claim.

  Piacere had read Romano Amerio’s Iota Unum. More than once. It was a sober book, written more in sorrow than in anger, the book of a loyal son of the Church. Amerio’s analyses were often penetrating and convincing, especially those that bore on what von Balthazar had called the para-council, the interpretations of the spirit of the Council made by some theologians and members of the press. One would not of course go as far as Lefebvre, but even Lefebvre was now getting, posthumously, many of the concessions that he had demanded.

  Paul VI, speaking of the post-council, had said that the smoke of Satan had entered into the Catholic Church. Not a remark that the successor of Saint Peter would lightly make. But the tradition of dissent from the magisterium had continued to flourish in the Church, in Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, and derivatively in the United States.