Prince of Peace (42 page)

"You're one of my best men, Father," the cardinal said quietly. "I need you to do this for me. I'd consider it a personal favor."

It was in China, in the camp commandant's office. They'd refused to let him sleep for days. They'd wanted him to identify those of his fellow prisoners who were officers. He never did. It had seemed to him he'd learned to sleep even while standing up, even while they kept questioning him.

Michael snapped himself alert. This was not China. And he was not being asked to betray anyone. He was being asked to save the children of Vietnam. Yes. He was being asked to tell Americans what was happening there. Yes. He felt that peace coming over him. The peace of assent. Yes, he would do it. For the children. For the cardinal. For God whose Will it was, he thought, which then embraced him.

T
WO
months later Michael was in charge of arrangements for the press conference at which Cardinal Spellman was to announce the beginning drive of the Children's Relief Fund. The press conference was to be held at Idlewild Airport because the cardinal was leaving for Rome for the third session of the Vatican Council. His departure would give reporters a news angle that what they would surely take as just another Catholic appeal for money lacked.

Public interest in the council was growing, and not only among Catholics. Americans were beginning to sense what forces it was even then unleashing. Cardinal Spellman himself, however, did not yet understand its meaning. He was leaving for Rome as the senior prelate of the most fabulously successful national Church in the world. In the previous ten years the Catholic population in America had grown by 44 percent, and the number of children in Catholic schools by 65 percent. There were twelve thousand more priests in America than there had been in 1950, and in the same period the number of seminarians had doubled. And the prodigiously generous Catholic people of America contributed millions of dollars not only to their own parishes and schools, but to the offices of the Vatican and to the Church's worldwide works of mercy. To Spellman, those were the things that counted. He had expected in the first session the year before that the Council Fathers in Rome would want to know how American Catholics were doing it. But he was surprised. The Council Fathers, inspired by Pope John, if not the Holy Ghost, had so far shown no interest in wealth, in buildings, in numbers, or even in the kind of power represented by a Catholic in the White House. Their concern was simpler: had the Church become so obsessed with its own survival that it had forgotten its true mission—to proclaim the Gospel, to serve the poor, to work for peace and justice in the world?

But frankly that wasn't the question on anyone's mind at Idlewild that day. In the popular press the council was still treated as a kind of ecclesiastical Super Bowl, and the religious press was preoccupied with Church gossip. Several dozen reporters had shown up, including camera crews from two New York stations. When they had assembled in the makeshift auditorium, a rarely used waiting area off the main concourse, Michael went to the VIP lounge where the cardinal was waiting.

The room was lit like a cocktail lounge, and its walls were covered with a cheap version of the dark paneling salesmen might associate with rich men's clubs. The clergy dominated the place. Two auxiliary bishops, several monsignors and half a dozen priests were accompanying the cardinal to Rome. They and their clerical chums who'd come to see them off were standing in groups of three or four, talking softly. The cardinal was sitting in a corner. As he approached, Michael realized that one of the priests with His Eminence was Monsignor Ellis, the former golf champion and the pastor of Holy Cross. Michael had not seen him since his deacon summer.

Monsignor Ellis turned slightly in his upholstered swivel chair and fixed Michael with a stare. Spellman continued to talk to the priest on his other side. The monsignor sat rigidly upright, as if he wore a corset or a backbrace. Though he had to crane up at Michael, who towered over him, his expression achieved the familiar condescension. He looked more distinguished in his black suit with the tab of red at his throat than he had that summer in his cassock. A black fedora dangled from one hand, and he held a freshly lit cigar in the other. "Well, well, Mister Maguire. How are you?"

"Hello, Monsignor. Quite well, thanks. And you?" Michael put his hand out.

Monsignor Ellis transferred his cigar, and without rising, shook Michael's hand. "I guess it's 'Father' now, isn't it?"

Michael smiled. "For a couple of years, Monsignor."

When Spellman saw him, he stood up. Monsignor Ellis stood then too and took the cardinal's elbow. "I guess I was wrong about this one, eh?"

"You've been wrong about a lot of things, Arthur," Spellman said good-naturedly. Then to Michael, "Are you ready for me, Father?"

Michael said he was and led the cardinal back to the waiting reporters. But Ellis's comment preoccupied him. It was the first indication he'd had that the pastor had recommended against his ordination, and the realization stunned him. It wasn't simply that someone in authority had considered him unfit—though for a man who'd long been accustomed to the approval, even admiration, of his superiors that would have been blow enough. The shock he felt was more acute than that. Throughout the Holy Cross School controversy he had kept his head in the trench, and it still shamed him that Carolyn had taken the heat alone. Robert Moses and Cardinal Spellman may finally have yielded on the school, but they had blown Carolyn to Shanghai. The Church had made itself her enemy. And Michael had chosen the Church.

To discover now that Monsignor Ellis had disapproved of him anyway added to Michael's shame, multiplied it. He could imagine the old fart banging his table and saying, "Hell, if you'd had any guts you'd have stood up with that girl when she needed you! Then I'd have voted for you!" But of course he knew that Ellis's negative vote had been a simple effort to obliterate everything associated with what surely was the great embarrassment of his priesthood. He'd have voted against Jesus if he'd been the deacon that summer.

"Gentlemen, thank you for coming." Michael stood behind the microphones, but ignored them. They had been set at the cardinal's height, not his, and he'd have had to kneel to use them. "The cardinal will make a short announcement, then will entertain your questions for about fifteen minutes." Michael paused, looking over the audience. The Catholic press—the diocesan newspapers from New York, Rockville Centre, Brooklyn, Newark, Bridgeport and Hartford, the stringer from the Catholic News Service and writers from the Catholic magazines—was fully represented. Religion reporters from secular newspapers and wire services were there, and the TV crews from the pair of local stations. Michael didn't know them personally, but it was easy to imagine who they were. Uniformly middle-aged, gregarious men, smokers, drinkers, somewhat shabby in their old suits and frayed shirts. They'd begun their careers in journalism with the usual enthusiasm and perhaps more than the usual promise. They tended to be literate, liberally educated and, for journalists, reflective. But for one reason or another they'd slid from paper to paper—big-city daily to suburban weekly to diocesan—or from desk to desk—Metro to Obit to Religion. They were men who'd been shunted aside, and the news they covered was unimportant not only to their editors but to them. If the rare major story did break in their area—like the Vatican Council—these poor bastards were bumped by the first-stringers or the foreign guys. Except for a couple of them, they had not even been to Rome and weren't going now. Michael resolutely refused to make anything of it, but he knew full well that only failed reporters regularly covered the events that formed the core of his life.

But it wasn't the sight of the regulars that gave Michael pause. A young man in the third row had caught his eye. He wore heavy black-rimmed glasses, and his thick red hair was disheveled enough to suggest he rarely combed it. He looked nothing like the others. He was staring intently at Michael, and his air of expectation alone would have set him apart from his blasé colleagues. But there was something else. Suddenly Michael realized what had snagged his attention. The young man was not wearing a suitcoat; he sported an ill-knotted, gray knit tie on a faded brown workshirt. But it wasn't a workshirt. It was an old woolen army blouse like he had worn himself once.

Michael cleared his throat. "It is my honor to present the archbishop of New York, the Military Vicar for the United States Armed Forces, His Eminence, Francis Cardinal Spellman."

Spellman, so short and stout, so bald, so ruddy-faced, was in no way a figure of imposing physical presence. When garbed in the elaborate episcopal vestments he seemed slightly ludicrous. But when he wanted to, he could transcend his cherubic manner utterly, conveying more than a hint of his immense authority. He took his power for granted and so had no need to flaunt it. But when it was time to make a serious point, he knew how to do it. And nothing in his entire ministry was more serious than this. Oh, he wanted the funds to be raised and the orphans to be cared for, of course. The Children's Relief Fund was a fine idea, but not only for its own sake. He wanted Americans to remember that in the war against Communism their commitment had long since been made. Nothing reminded them so well, he knew from years of doing this, as the forlorn face of an orphaned child. He had that face in mind as he finished reading what Father Maguire had written for him. "In the last year alone more than a hundred thousand Vietnamese civilians have been killed and perhaps three times that many wounded. It is impossible to say with precision how many children have been left homeless and parentless by this violence, but surely the figure is many tens of thousands. The country and the cities are full of boys and girls, hungry, ill clothed and terribly afraid. In the chaos of the fighting no one will care for them if we do not. That is why the Catholic Relief Service of which I am episcopal director has launched this emergency effort, and why I call upon all Catholics and all Americans of goodwill to join us in it."

Spellman raised his eyes from the statement. "It should be emphasized in addition..." he began.

Michael studied his hands. He had been hoping the cardinal wouldn't ad-lib. It was impossible to predict what he would say.

"...that these children are on the frontline of our war against Communism. It isn't a flood or an earthquake that rendered them homeless, motherless, fatherless. The Reds did that. They are doing it to the Vietnamese, but who they'd really like to do it to is us. Which is why we must stop them there. Otherwise, tomorrow it will be Australia and day after tomorrow it will be Hawaii. It is impossible to exaggerate what an evil force we are dealing with." Spellman stopped. Like an expert preacher he let the silence gather and build before going on. "Many of the children we want to help were forced to witness the beheading of their own parents." He paused again to let the men see how this moved him. "And we know for a certainty that the Reds would have murdered the children too, but they let them live because, alive, they are a drain on the resources of the struggling democratic government. But we are determined that not even such heinous tactics as these shall succeed! That is why we call upon Americans to do their part to see that democracy and freedom and Christian values survive in Vietnam. Only in that way will they survive here."

Spellman nodded at the reporters to indicate that he was finished.

Their hands went up. He pointed at an overweight gray-haired writer in the front row and said, "Hal?"

"Your Eminence..." The reporter struggled to his feet and had reference to his pad as he asked his question. "What do you think the chances are that the Vatican Council will allow some use of the vernacular in the Mass?"

Spellman flashed his famous twinkle. "If I have anything to do with it, none."

The reporters laughed.

"How much longer," another asked, "do you think the council will last?"

"I'd say we should wind it up this month. The bishops of the Church are busy men and have to get back to their dioceses." He smiled again. "I know I do."

"Will you be making your usual tour of army bases this Christmas?"

"Of course I will. This will be my twentieth year. I have to go; Bob Hope needs me. Besides, what would I do with all those Camels?"

The men laughed again. Spellman had been distributing packs of cigarettes to the GIs since the war. The tobacco company not only gave them to him to do so, but embossed each pack with his name and seal.

The cardinal swatted out answers to half a dozen like questions as if he was a coach drilling grounders to his infield. He was amusing and engaging, especially for an archbishop.

Then Spellman recognized the young man in the brown shirt. "Your Eminence," he began. His nervousness, apparent as he stood, set him apart from the regulars. "I'd like to ask about Vietnam." He paused. Cardinal Spellman stared at him, and the room grew utterly quiet, but for the whir of the TV cameras. The young man glanced over at one of the cameras, then went on. "We're supposed to be defending democracy there, right?"

"Yes," the prelate said carefully. "That's right."

"Why are you against elections then?"

One of the cameras stopped filming.

"I'm not against elections, son. Who said I was against elections?"

"You did, Your Eminence." He fumbled with a sheaf of papers. A notepad fell to the floor, but he found what he was looking for. "You said that the elections called for by the Geneva Convention would be, and I quote, 'taps for the buried hopes of freedom in Southeast Asia.'"

"Oh, you're talking about Geneva. That wasn't binding on anybody." Spellman glanced over at Michael, his irritation flared.

Michael raised his finger at the newsman from the second TV station, and in turn he whispered in the cameraman's ear. The cameraman straightened and snapped his camera off too.

"I respectfully disagree, Your Eminence," the young man continued. "The Geneva Convention called for elections in nineteen fifty-six. The government of South Vietnam has flagrantly violated—"