Prince of Peace (39 page)

"If you issued a statement guaranteeing the religious rights of the Buddhist population, your priests would be less likely to make such mistakes."

Thuc made a dismissive gesture. "The religion of the pagans is a
pot au feu.
Confucians one day, Taoists the next."

"They are Buddhists," Michael insisted. The archbishop's evident contempt made him angry, but it also stunned him to realize how ignorant he himself was. What were these distinctions? What was Buddhism based on?

"They are Confucians in good times and Buddhists in time of trouble. It is not serious religion."

"Leave that aside for a moment, Your Excellency. Clearly the ability of the government to control the country requires the loyalty of the Buddhist population but the Buddhist leaders feel—"

"Ah, the leaders, Father! They are Communists. The followers can be won over. But the leaders are Communists. That is well known." Thuc glared at Michael, satisfied with his statement of the decisive fact.

Michael saw there was no point in arguing about the rights of Buddhists. Error has no rights,
n'est-ce pas?
The point was to let him know that the baptism shit had to stop. It was sacrilege and it was bad politics.

"Cardinal Spellman's expectation, Your Excellency, is that the relief program will be kept apart from politics and also from religion. He wants me to emphasize that with you." Michael wanted Thuc to think he'd already heard back from Spellman. It didn't matter that he hadn't. He knew that Spellman would agree with him. Spellman would be furious at Thuc when he got Michael's report. "We are responding to simple human needs; we are not proselytizing."

Thuc nodded. "Of course not."

"Cardinal Spellman has asked me to be watching, Your Excellency. Just so you know."

Thuc did not respond. Michael knew that, in addition to the influence he could bring to bear on American policy, Spellman held the key to the realization of Thuc's great personal ambition, being elevated to the status of cardinal. Even as Spellman's mere agent, Michael felt the thrill of his power over the man and frankly relished it. Thuc tied the ends of his amice, and began reciting the prayers for vesting. Michael took the alb from its hook and handed it to him.

During the Mass, Michael knelt at the overstuffed prie-dieu in the sanctuary. He received his ashes from the archbishop—"Remember, man, you are dust, and unto dust you shall return"—then watched while the Ngos knelt at the communion rail: Diem, Nhu, Madame Nhu, and Ngo Dinh Can, the other brother, the shrewd governor of Hue. The archbishop smudged each of them, then each devoutly crossed himself. All at once their piety disgusted Michael. Whatever their political ambitions had been at the beginning, now they considered themselves the anointed of God with a sacred mission. Their arrogance was obscene.

After the Mass Michael hired a pedicab to take him to the Vinh Hoa Dao pagoda. Already the heat, the dirt and the noise of the overcrowded city made it unpleasant to be outside, and the jostling pedicab, with its crude wheels rattling over the cracked pavement, not to mention its association with class oppression, increased Michael's discomfort.

At the pagoda, one of the great temples of Vietnam, famous for its own beauty and for the exquisite ancient carvings and statues it was furnished with, Michael had to step gingerly up the broad sweeping staircase that led up from the avenue because refugees were all over it. Hundreds had made the steps of the pagoda home.

Michael entered the temple, and the tranquillity, the sweet incense, the soft light instantly soothed him, and the transcendent beauty of the large carved Buddha, which sat where in a church the altar would have been, made him want to kneel.

A young monk approached him and bowed. His head was shaven and his left shoulder was exposed. His feet were bare. Michael spoke the name of the monk who'd taken Howe and him to My Tho, Thic Nhat Than. The young monk bowed again and indicated that Michael should follow him.

They crossed the large, shadowy space and went through a series of smaller darker rooms until finally they came out into a garden, an exquisite, otherworldly enclosure with pools, plants of many kinds, glorious flowers and a maze of paths, brilliantly paved with round, smooth pebbles of white and black like stones of the Japanese
go.
It was impossible to think that the teeming desperate city was all around them. Even the sky above seemed bluer, less indifferent.

The young monk led Michael to the veranda at the far end of the garden and there he found Nhat Than, on his mat, robed in saffron, a calligraphy pen in hand.

Michael bowed. The monk looked at him stoically. He was at least seventy years old. Every pain, loss, every happiness, of each of his years had been transformed into that great, silent dignity.

Michael spoke to him in his halting French. "It will not happen again. If you hear any reports of it, tell me at once. I will stop it." He vowed to himself, this, if nothing else, would be his work here, however long he remained.

Still the old monk made no reply.

Michael said, "And if I may be so bold, Honored Teacher, I would like to ask your help. I would like to learn about your people. I would like to learn about your faith."

Thic Nhat Than eyed Michael carefully. Then, even while sitting, he bowed.

S
OMEWHAT
more than a year later, two men died a week apart from each other, one in a Renaissance palace in Italy and one at a crowded intersection in the center of Saigon. And after their deaths, everything was different.

Pope John XXIII died on June 3, 1963. No one knew it at the time, but his magnificent vision for the renewal of the Church, the humanizing of it, would be thwarted, not maliciously but nevertheless effectively, by his successors, the Self-doubting Pope who was obsessed by his own suffering, and the Commissar-Pope who is obsessed by his own power. John's instinctive embrace of the world and his belief in its goodness were replaced by the traditional suspicion. Though his Vatican Council continued without him—many Churchmen, like Spellman, had expected it would last weeks; it lasted years—and though certain superficial aspects of Catholicism did change, the Church's essential post-Reformation note—world-wariness—reasserted itself. Suddenly the Ecumenical Movement stalled, pluralism as a manifestation of vitality was rejected in favor of the former rigid orthodoxy; the introduction of democratic procedure into the structure of the Church was undone and the ancient disdain for women and for nonChristians and even for Protestants was quickened. Some Catholics remember John fondly, as a kind of miracle, but if you push them they will say he was the Pope of False Promises, and it would have been better if he hadn't started what he wouldn't be around to finish. You detect a hint of disillusionment in my tone,
n'est-ce pas?
And you think to yourself, How unlike him.

And then, the second death. On June u, 1963, an old man climbed from an automobile and squatted on the pavement at a main Saigon streetcorner. He was a Buddhist monk named Quang Due. He was surrounded by a thousand monks and nuns, and then by thousands of other people, including journalists, because everyone had heard what he intended to do. Quang Due waited patiently, running an acorn rosary through his fingers, while two disciples doused his saffron robe with gasoline. The eerie sounds of chanting, but of nothing else, filled the square as the monks and nuns offered their prayer for him. Then Quang Due said, "I return to the eternal Buddha." He struck the match himself. Instantly he was aflame. The plume of smoke, unlike the smoke over Auschwitz, was black with the lard of human flesh. And quickly the stench of the burning bonze, even more than the heat, drove the inner ring of monks back, though the farthest away pressed forward. Police tried to break through, but the holies prevented them. Witnesses shrieked in horror and bystanders wept. Quang Due's devoted followers continued to chant, and all the while photographers and film cameramen took their pictures. After ten minutes the charred body of the old monk fell over. Nothing he had done in his long life had the effect his death would have. Within twenty-four hours the photograph of his body in flames would appall the world, stun the leaders of America and give the American public its first, though by no means last, shock of pure horror from Vietnam. Within weeks the leading Vietnamese poet and novelist Nguyen Tuong Tam would kill himself, perhaps a dozen other monks and nuns would publicly burn themselves to death, one nun would ritually hack her hand off before an altar, hundreds of Buddhists would begin a hunger strike, and tens of thousands would take to the streets, all to protest against the vicious despotism of Ngo Dinh Diem. Quang Due had exposed it to the world for what it was.

Pope John had dreamed of eliminating from the Church once and for all the implicit intolerance, self-righteousness and triumphalism that periodically in its history had become explicit in tragically violent forms. But in the very season of John's death, a fanatical Catholic army whose generals mourned his passing was unleashed against a populace because of its religion, and it happened in Cardinal Spellman's protege's Vietnam.

 

"They've lost their fucking minds, obviously." Howe threw the dispatch on his desk and looked across at Michael. "The esteemed governor of Hué, brother of our esteemed president, brother of our esteemed archbishop, brother of our esteemed chief of torture, brother-in-law of the Dragon Lady, has now issued a decree forbidding anyone from wearing Buddhist robes in a public place."

"Oh, God," Michael said. The police and Buddhist mobs had been skirmishing for days. "What will happen?"

"First reports are that now everyone in Hué, from taxi drivers to Catholic students, have declared themselves Buddhists and donned the robes."

"Good for them."

"Yeah." Howe turned in his chair to look out his window. His office occupied a corner in the rear of the embassy and its single window opened on the parking lot where the marines kept their jeeps. Beyond the lot was an iron picket fence and a side street, along which pedestrian and auto traffic moved as usual. The chaos in Hué had yet to break out in Saigon. "And all that shit is hitting the fan because of flags."

Howe didn't need to make his reference explicit. Archbishop Thuc had banned the display of the Buddhist flag, and the Buddhists had gone crazy.

"So what about the bombing? I heard there was a bombing up there." Michael had come to the embassy not to fence with Howe about the absurd denouement of Catholic-Buddhist conflict, but to learn if the rumors he'd been hearing about the violence were true. He had workers in Hué, and two American Maryknoll priests whom he'd befriended were there.

"A car blew up inside the old city," Howe said. "There were many casualties. We don't yet know how many dead, how many wounded. Governor Can issued a statement already saying it was the Viet Cong. He says the Viet Cong have taken over the Buddhist movement." Howe smirked. "As if they needed to. I think the V.C. are probably on vacation. Let the Buddhists and the Ngos finish each other off."

"When can I get a casualty list, John? I have friends up there."

Howe jotted something on a notepad. "I'll keep an eye on the wire for you. I'll call you."

"Thanks."

"So, can I ask you something?" He paused. Michael didn't bat an eye. He and Howe had had frequent if somewhat formal contact in the last year. They respected each other and kept each other posted but they had not become friends. Michael no longer felt that as a disappointment, and he no longer allowed himself to take Howe's aloofness as a personal or social rejection. Michael didn't know it, but he had drawn on his innate Irish knack for turning aside the snub. "What is Spellman saying now? What's he going to do?"

Michael had to look away. If they had become friends he might have admitted that Spellman never responded to his communiqués. At a certain point he'd begun describing in detail the mad behavior of Thuc and the other Ngos. At about that point the replies had begun to come, not even from O'Shea, but from O'Shea's assistant. The replies had a theme; keep the relief going. Separate it however you can from politics. And that's what he had done. Michael forced himself to smile at Howe. "You think the cardinal and I are on the phone each week? Come on, John. What do I know? Anyway, what does it matter at this point, what Spellman thinks?"

"When we've got the Asian version of the Inquisition going on here? We've got Frankenstein's monster; but you know who Doctor Frankenstein is, as well as I do."

Michael nodded. "But he's irrelevant to it now, John. These people wouldn't listen to the
pope.
I mean, Madame Nhu, Christ! She calls the monks who burn themselves the 'barbecued bonzes.' Nhu is hooked on opium. The archbishop thinks he's Torquemada. And Diem considers himself an Oriental El Cid taking on the Moors. The whole family thinks of itself as sent from God. This is their moment to come down from Olympus with thunderbolts. So who's going to listen to Spellman?"

"Kennedy," Howe said abruptly. "Kennedy has people telling him that when Diem wins this battle, everything else will fall into place. They're saying swallow your misgivings, look the other way while the monks burn themselves, and while the soldiers shoot the people in the streets. They're telling him that those are Communists in the streets and that the Buddhists are Russian agents. If Spellman broke with Diem, it would help Kennedy to."

Now Michael saw for the first time why Howe had cultivated him, even to the extent that he had. All along Michael had thought Howe wanted to influence events in Vietnam—to see that the aid was distributed equitably—but now he saw that Howe wanted to influence Washington. He said nothing.

Howe leaned forward across his desk. "The question, Father, has become, At what point does the Church proclaim its opposition to the regime it created? When every Buddhist in Vietnam is dead?"

"Wait a minute, John. Don't talk to me about the Church. This is the American embassy, where Diem's money comes from. You talk to me about distributing aid. Ninety-five percent of the aid coming into this country goes to Diem's army. That's
your
people doing that, not mine. Tell
them
about Hue, John. Not me. And not Spellman either. Just because the president's a Catholic doesn't mean he's waiting to be told by the hierarchy what to think. He's waiting to be told by you people, Goddamnit! Hawkins and Nolting are the ones he depends on. So get to them, John!"