In God's House (31 page)

An hour after arriving in Rome, Cardinal John Wolleski was walking toward Piazza Navona. He was offered a ride as he passed through the Porta di Sant’Anna at the Vatican, but the old man liked to walk. The night was dark and cold. The wind blew his shock of white hair in a direction different than his comb had set it.

Rome was a place he loved. He had arrived in the city in 1929, aged twenty-two and fresh from the US. He came with the bundle of money his father had handed him the previous Christmas Day, saying, “Go find your dream, Johnny.” Before the year ended, his father’s immigrant dreams had turned into a nightmare as America fell into a deep financial depression. But never once while John was in Rome did his father let on that the money John was spending was the last the Wolleski family had.

At the time he sailed to Europe, John Wolleski fancied that he would be a writer. He knew little about writers and less about writing. His notion was that it was preferable to be well traveled than well schooled. His travels began in Rome and ended there. He never got to Poland, the land of his father, or across the Mediterranean to Seville to see Juan Belmonte fight bulls; nor did he make it to Milan to see an opera at La Scala.

On that first trip to Rome long ago, he had visited an
ice-cream
stall on the edge of Piazza Navona. Isabella Rinaldi was seventeen when she handed the handsome American his first
gelato. She served him an ice cream every day until she was twenty. Over that time, John Wolleski learned to speak Italian well enough to converse with Isabella’s father. He read Italian books and taught Italians his own language, making enough money to live comfortably in a small pension. Each day he exchanged pleasantries with the girl’s father, but he and Isabella never spoke beyond what was necessary for him to purchase his daily serving of strawberry ice cream.

One day Signor Rinaldi gave John a free bowl of ice cream and sat across from him, wiping his hands on his apron. In his own language, Isabella’s father said, “I now work in this stall just like my father, and his father, and his father before him. We sell many things here. There is always a price. Everything has a price, no?”

John had nodded in agreement.

“But today I’ll give you this ice cream for free. Do you know why I’ve done this?”

“No.”

“It is so you can know we are friends. And so now you can ask me if you can go for a walk on a Sunday with my daughter, Isabella.”

Fifty-five years later, as he headed toward the place where the ice-cream stall once stood in Piazza Navona, John stood on Ponte Sant’Angelo, spanning the Tiber River, reflecting on the distant past. He could still remember how flushed he’d felt when Signor Rinaldi had given him permission to take his daughter for a Sunday walk.

“Isabella’s mother and her grandmother will walk with you, just far enough behind not to hear you two. But when Isabella returns home, they will ask her about everything you talked about.”

“We will do this on this Sunday, in three days?” John Wolleski asked excitedly.

“No. You have not properly asked me yet. You have not asked Isabella. Maybe she will say no.”

“May I…?”

The old man got up and slapped John on the back. “Of course. I was having fun.”

As her father walked away, Isabella looked at John in a way he had only dreamed she might.

The Sundays ran on for months until suddenly, one Sunday, the two old women did not follow them when they left the house. John had slowed their gait, brought them to a snail’s pace, waiting for the old women to catch up. When they reached the river, Isabella put her arm in his and whispered, “They are not coming.”

“And why?” John asked.

“Because I told them I am going to kiss you today whether they follow or stay home.”

And she did kiss him, right at the very same spot where he stopped on the Ponte Sant’Angelo fifty-five years later, the first spot he went to every time he arrived in Rome. He could never remember the kiss, hard as he tried, or whether it was one kiss or many kisses, but he never forgot the feelings that rushed through him.

It had been May 1931 when he and Isabella first embraced and kissed on the bridge. By June they had announced their plans to be married, and her grandmother had taken to her bed, swearing she would die if Isabella left Rome to go to America. John had vowed to the family that they would never leave. By then he had begun work as a clerk at the American Embassy. He had job security and a good salary by the standards of the city. He and Isabella would be able to have everything they needed, and be able to help the Rinaldi family as well. To show his good faith, he began to relieve her father on Saturday nights, working side by side with Isabella.

In the fall, Isabella fell sick with polio, and in less than a month she was dead. Her lungs stopped working properly, her legs became crippled, and her beautiful face aged. And then she was gone.

As the old man stood on the bridge, he wiped tears from his eyes.

Ristorante Rinaldi was full when Cardinal Wolleski walked in. Giovanni Rinaldi, the younger brother of Isabella, was now seventy, but he quickly stood up from his table in the rear of the elegant room. Seeing John Wolleski in the door, Giovanni rushed over to him. “Zio Johnny, your smile warms a cold night. Come off with the big coat. I have a little drink that will take the night air off you.”

The closet where Giovanni hung the cardinal’s coat and muffler was the space where the ice-cream stall had stood years ago. Giovanni hustled the old man into the kitchen, where a cheer went up as the double doors swung open. There were hugs, kisses, shouted greetings. This was John Wolleski’s second family.

After Isabella’s funeral, John Wolleski had entered the seminary in Rome and completed studies for ordination to the priesthood. He had baptized every Rinaldi born since he was ordained and as his stature grew in the Church so did the venue of the baptisms. The last dozen years or so the Rinaldi children had been christened at the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the most important church in Rome.

Before Isabella’s father died, he had asked the newly promoted Cardinal Wolleski to take a ride with him, saying he had something he wanted to show him, and something they needed to talk about. They changed buses twice as they crossed the city. Then they climbed almost to the top of a steep hill. As they walked up the stone steps, old man Rinaldi paused a number of times to catch his breath. Cardinal Wolleski knew where they were going. He sometimes came here on Sunday afternoons when he was in Rome, to this hilltop cemetery where Isabella was laid to rest. Some Sundays he brought something with him, a small bouquet of flowers. Every Sunday, he took something away with him. When he walked away from her grave it was like she was with him on their Sunday walks long ago.

Both old man Rinaldi and the brand-new cardinal prayed at her gravesite, then John helped the old man off his knees. “I am going to die soon, I think. The doctors say a half year. Who knows?
I brought you here to ask you if will you do me the honor of saying my funeral Mass and putting me in the ground here?”

“I will do anything you wish, as I would do for my own father.”

“Good. Now we know I will have a cardinal bury me. That might impress some.”

Pointing to Isabella’s grave, John Wolleski said, “It will not impress her and I almost envy you that you will be with her again.”

“That’s good you say that because I think it is right that you are with her when this life ends. The family has talked about this and it is odd that all of us have had the same idea for many years, something no one would say aloud to the others. We want you to know that this plot, to the right of hers, is a place that will never be taken by a Rinaldi. This place is for you. She walked on your right arm, no?”

John smiled. “But who will bury me? Who will say the prayer over me?”

“If you cannot get a holy man to do this, then let an Italian cardinal do it. God will forgive you.”

By this cold January night in 1985, Isabella’s father had been dead many years and over a half-century had passed since John Wolleski had first come to the Piazza Navona for an ice cream. Nevertheless, the cardinal still felt some of the spirit of his youth. As Giovanni Rinaldi started bringing plates of food to Cardinal Wolleski’s table, he looked at the pictures on the wall, looking backward into the past. His favorite was a large picture of the girl he’d loved. In costume and make-up, she posed as Chaplin when he played the Little Tramp.

The three Polish priests – Monsignor Jozef Majeski, Cardinal John Wolleski and the Holy Father – had a feast spread before them. Every time Cardinal Wolleski came to Rome, he brought boxes of provisions from a Polish deli in DC, better than anything Majeski and the pontiff could get out of Warsaw or Krakow.

The Pope delighted in these small, informal dinners in the papal apartment.

Cardinal Wolleski sat still, with the papers compiled by Renon Chattelrault, Father Matt and Father Desmond on the table in front of him. He read aloud from the document. “Based upon information known to the authors, it is certain that there are hundreds of priests guilty of sexually abusing children, and there are undoubtedly thousands of child victims. The authors believe that the offending priests may number in the thousands, and that their victims may number in the hundreds of thousands.”

Monsignor Majeski was sampling three kinds of sausages and a potato salad, washing it down with swigs from a big brown bottle of Polish Warka beer. The Pope had not touched any of the food, though they were his favorite dishes, since Cardinal Wolleski had mentioned the estimated number of offending priests and child victims in the United States.

When Cardinal Wolleski’s reading was finished and the last page turned face down on the table, he took a long drink of water.
The Holy Father seemed unsteady as he stood and slowly walked out of the room.

Monsignor Majeski turned to Cardinal Wolleski. “It’s all right, John,” Majeski said. “Whenever the Holy Father receives this kind of news, he always retreats to his chapel alone. It is not that he does not want to talk with you about this. First, he will talk with God. When he has finished praying, he will return to us.”

The owner of the Polish Deli in DC always put extra things in the packages he made up for the Pope. Jozef liked the festive candles he found in the boxes, and he and Sister Margarita, the Polish nun who attended to the kitchen, had placed them in silver holders and set them on the long table. The candles had burned down to half their original height by the time the Pope returned to the room.

Jozef Majeski motioned for his friend to finish his meal. The pontiff waved his hand dismissively, indicating he did not intend to share in the feast. He walked over to Wolleski and put a hand on the cardinal’s shoulder. “John, you are one of my oldest friends. This is not a job that facilitates making many friends. Every human encounter I have is formal; every word I utter must be spoken with care and with thought.”

The Pope pointed to the hiking boots, khaki cargo pants and faded blue sweater he was wearing. “I rarely can even dress this way or be seen by anyone when I am dressed this way. Sometimes, at night, I wear these shoes I used to wear when I hiked in the mountains. These shoes are as close to the mountains as I get now, and these little dinners with you and a few other friends from the old days are the only real conversations I have.”

“You should eat something,” Jozef said. “You have that medicine to take and the doctor says always you should eat something first.”

“Maybe I will eat something in a while, Jozef.”

The Pope walked to one of the huge French windows and tried to open it. He struggled with the latch, looked at Jozef and shrugged. Jozef wiped his mouth, stood, walked over to the
window, and effortlessly flung it open, admitting a gust of cold air that extinguished the candles.

Jozef said, “God gave you the right job, my friend. An engineer you are not.”

Staring into the cold, dark night, the Pope spoke in a low voice. “There are things out there that we know about, and there are things out there we do not know about, and can never know about. There are good things, bad things too. But evil… tonight, we talk about evil. The evil we talk about is not out there. There is evil inside this Church.”

The Pope turned back to them. “Historically, we all know there have been these same kinds of problems in the Church since the beginning. This kind of sin in the Church has never been eradicated. Even now I know there are complaints against some priests in places other than America – one who is in a high place in Mexico, who I know well and has personally professed his innocence to me. These things are investigated and handled in a manner that avoids scandal to the Church. But to my knowledge all complaints have always been only against one single priest. These things have been isolated incidents.”

There was a long silence.

Cardinal Wolleski said, “Here we are not talking about complaints against one single priest. We’re talking about complaints against hundreds of priests in one country, maybe thousands of priests, and thousands of innocent lives damaged or destroyed.”

“Medieval,” the Pope said. “What this paper describes is medieval, like something from before the time of the Reformation – immorality on an unimaginable scale.”

“I believe the Church will suffer as it has let children suffer,” Cardinal Wolleski said.

Jozef anticipated the pontiff’s next request and walked over and latched the window against the cold.

“Was it this cold when we used to walk and sleep in the mountains, Jozef?”

“It was colder.”

“We were young and hardy then, weren’t we?” the Pope said.

“We were crazy then. Sane people do not leave a perfectly warm dormitory room to spend a weekend under the stars in freezing temperatures.”

“It was the happiest I ever was, I think. I had a sense of wonder about everything in those mountains. Death and sadness had come to my life already. But the personal spirit of my being then, my youth, the innocence God created within me – those things were intact. Innocence had not been taken from me. Those are things no one should ever be able to take from any child. Christ himself spoke of this, of the evil of taking the innocence of a child.”

The Pope sat down and nibbled on a piece of sausage. He drank two glasses of water. As he poured the second glass from the pitcher, his hand trembled and water spilled on the tablecloth.

“John, I know you would not bring this to me if you did not believe it was true. I do not want to believe it is true. We know the Church has had this kind of wickedness in its history… this same evil. But… but in the numbers you mention? It is as if this document you read for me is a report about a legion of sinners in North America – ordained priests.”

John Wolleski nodded. Jozef picked up the Pope’s plate and went to find Sister Margarita in the kitchen so that she could warm the meal.

“A man who would do this to a child is truly evil, John. But hundreds or maybe thousands of priests in one country? What is wrong in the American Church if this is true?”

“A lot is wrong,” Wolleski said. “It may not be only the American Church.”

“The priests in my country – your father’s land – were men who had to have discipline against the occupation of the German army, and then the Russian army. It was rare that I ever heard reports or even rumors of things like this in our homeland. And as I have said, here, since I have been in Rome, I have heard a word here and there about accusations of this kind. Priests have been
removed from ministries where they worked with children, I think. I know there are accusations investigated here. But since the 1960s, in accord with the dictates of John XXIII, we’ve handled these things to avoid scandal to the Church. These charges are investigated at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. No one has ever told me of any charges being proven true. I too have always wanted such things handled in a manner that no scandal would be created. Never has anyone suggested the magnitude of a problem like that of which you speak of tonight. It describes a hell we created for children God entrusted to our care.”

The Pope thanked the nun who set his warmed plate before him and said, “When I was made a bishop an old friend gave me counsel. He said, ‘Two things happen when a man is made a bishop. First, he never again hears the truth. Secondly, he never again has to speak the truth.’ I speak truth. In some things I don’t know that I’ve always heard the truth.”

“These things are true,” Wolleski said. “That I failed the Church in these matters is of little consequence because I always believed I was protecting the Church. I, like you and all bishops, was following the dictum of Pope John XXIII’s directive about secrecy.”

The Pope nodded wearily.

Cardinal Wolleski continued, “I don’t think there is enough time for me to do the penance my sins mandate. In failing the children, I failed God.”

The Pope took the papers on the table into his shaking hands.

The cardinal looked away and then back to the Pope, taking a big breath. “I avoided scandal to the Church. I placed the reputation of the Church, of myself, of the priests, above caring for the children. All bishops have always acted this way. We’ve been mandated to act this way.”

The Pope stood again and began to pace slowly. “Yes, yes. John, I will pray every morning for the children.”

“We must pray for the children, Your Holiness. And I pray you will act.”

“Yes. I will pray for the children. Children always fill my heart. Those who have had their innocence taken from them through these evil acts of our priests will be on my mind every breath I take. And, yes, my friend, we will act. I will have something done before the pigeons are in the piazza in the morning. We will appoint someone to investigate and report to us.”

John reached into his pocket. “I almost forgot this. I have the names of the three children of the lawyer who helped write this document. When you pray for all the children whose names we do not know, would you pray for his children as well?”

The pontiff nodded and Cardinal Wolleski handed the slip to Jozef.

“Now, Jozef, would you please get a message tonight over to Cardinal Marcello. I want to see him alone in my library at six in the morning and he is to tell no one of this appointment.”

Jozef turned to Cardinal Wolleski. “You know the definition of a Vatican secret? It’s something a cardinal only tells to one other cardinal at a time.”

“You know who I mean,” said the Pope.

“The German? Kruger?” asked Majewski.

“Yes,” the Pope said. “Neither the German, nor his men, Paginini and Bertolini, must know. This is something the Holy See must do my way and not the German’s way.”

John Wolleski knew they were talking about the Rhinelander, Cardinal Hans Kruger, a strong man within the walls of the Vatican who had amassed the kind of power not seen in the Church for centuries.

The previous pope, John Paul I, had served only thirty-three days before being found dead in his bed. When he was Patriarch of Venice, Pope John Paul I had shown a keen interest in financial corruption in the Vatican Bank, a scandal that led to murders. Many believed the Pope was also murdered.

Some Vatican observers believed the election of the present pope was manipulated by powerful forces in the Curia who knew the Pope had no interest in financial matters, no involvement in
ecclesiastical politics, and had never exhibited any interest or skill in administration. He was a spiritual man and his vision was outward toward the world, not inward into Vatican politics and finance.

A power vacuum was created when the Pope opted not to micromanage Vatican affairs and showed little interest in administrative matters. After several years of quiet, sophisticated political maneuvering, the German cardinal Hans Kruger forged a partnership with two Italian cardinals, Paginini and Bertolini. The power the Pope did not exercise, they took themselves.