Prince of Peace (56 page)

"Nor mine, but the NLF is not run by Catholics. My government is. That puts me in a special position, you agree?"

Michael did not answer.

The Vietnamese priest continued to smile, inappropriately, Michael thought. Then he realized that his smile was his disguise. The priest said, "I attended seminary in Paris. My thesis was on Tocqueville. You know what he said about the Ancien Régime? 'Our government resembles the Mass for the Dead: there is no Gloria, since there is nothing to sing about; no Credo since there is nothing we believe in common; a long offertory where much money is collected, and in the end, no Benediction.'" The priest's smile was gone.

 

"What do you mean, 'run by Catholics'?" Michael asked. "The time of Diem is passed."

The priest made a gesture with his hand: Maybe yes, maybe no. "You remember the Ngos' Can Lao?"

"The secret organization?"

"Yes. Police, spies, provincial leaders, generals, a shadow government, all Catholics. It was the source of their power. Those men did not disappear when Diem and Nhu were killed. They simply withdrew somewhat, to wait. And now it seems the time of waiting is over."

"Why?"

"Nguyen Van Thieu," the priest said simply.

Thieu was the new chief of state. With Air Vice-Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky he had been running the government for less than a month.

"Thieu is a convert to Catholicism, a devoted, pious man, and many of the former Can Lao members see in him a new Diem. They have secretly begun a new organization, the Nhan Xa, called in English 'The Revolutionary Social Humanist Party.' Many of the old alliances have simply been struck again. Their purpose is the old one, to save Vietnam not just from Communism but from Buddhists.
They
are the ones who have convinced Lodge and Westmoreland that the Struggle for a Third Way is Viet Cong. Your government would love to have Catholics in power again. They will welcome Nhan Xa."

"What about Ky?"

"Ky is a comedian. Only Americans think of him."

"But Thieu only came to power this month. None of the others have lasted."

"He will last, I promise you, until the war is lost, or until he is dead."

"Or until the war is won."

"It won't be won."

"If Nhan Xa is secret, how do you know about it?"

"The leader is my own bishop, Nguyen Van Thuan. In our country a bishop has no secrets from his priests. Do you know him?"

"No."

The priest nodded. He was accustomed to such ignorance. "He replaced Thuc."

"Diem's brother."

"That is correct. You believe Diem's family was removed from power in nineteen sixty-three."

"It wasn't?"

"You know the myth of Hydra, the monster slain by Hercules? It had nine heads, and when one was cut off, it was replaced by two others. My bishop, Thuan, is the son of Diem's sister. The Ngos are the hydra family of Vietnam. They still control the Church. With Nhan Xa, they will control Thieu. They will control America."

And it all began, Michael thought, in the Maryknoll seminary where Ngo Dinh Diem had spent his years in exile as Cardinal Spellman's ward. Jesus Christ! he thought. Am I the only one who knows this? Michael looked at Inge again. This must sound to her like the resurgence of the Nazi party. Well, wasn't it like that? Michael remembered that, once, his horror at what the Ngos were doing had taken him, furiously and so imprudently, to Spellman's residence. And Spellman had coopted him completely.

Michael faced the Vietnamese priest. "Why have you brought me here?"

"Because I want to tell you what I and some brother priests are going to do."

"You trust me?"

"Of course. We are eleven Catholic priests. Who can we trust if not a fellow priest? On July twentieth in all of Vietnam, in Hanoi as well as Saigon, in Haiphong and Hue, we Vietnamese will mark the Day of National Shame. On that day it is ten years since the Geneva Agreement divided our country in two. And on that day we priests from parishes all over South Vietnam will go to Saigon in behalf of our people. There will be many Buddhists in the streets, many demonstrations. The government will say the demonstrators are Viet Cong. But no one can say that about Catholic priests. We will make a simple prayer, a procession, a Way of the Cross. We will go from the president's palace to the American embassy, and we will be saying what the Buddhists say. The National Shame is what we have allowed to happen in our country. We can relieve our shame only by protesting the source of it: 'No More America in Vietnam!' No more American soldiers in our cities. No more American bombs on our villages! No more American murder of our people!"

Michael was not breathing. The priest's indictment filled
him
with shame. "And you are telling me this because..."

"We want you to join us."

"Making twelve."

The priest smiled. "Unintentional."

But Michael's thought was, One of the twelve was Judas. He remembered Nicholas Wiley. Judas and Peter; what made them different was how they handled their shame.

Inge Holz spoke finally, saying to Michael, "I told Pham that you are ready. If this offends you, then is my fault."

What Michael noticed was her use of the priest's name. She did not call him 'Father.' He looked from one to the other. "But I am an American. That seems wrong, given what you're saying."

The priest nodded. "In a way, that's true. But there are good reasons. You are a priest like us, and that emphasizes that we are speaking as Catholics. As priests we all object to government, you to yours, we to ours. And as priests we all proclaim the Gospel's independence from narrow, political causes of whatever kind." He paused. "And there are other reasons too. If you are with us, then the police will hesitate to move against us. We do not want our procession to be interrupted before the people see us."

Inge Holz said, "If you are not with them, the police will put them off the street at once and we may never see them again."

The Vietnamese priest ignored her, as if that was not his concern. "And your participation will attract the attention of news reporters from Europe and America. We do not burn ourselves, like the bonzes. They might therefore ignore us."

Tim O'Shea's one request to Michael: "Don't let Spelly read about you in the
Times."

Michael could think of a dozen reasons to say no, good ones. But his impulse—and it was to say no, to be sure—sprang from none of them. He was afraid.

"We are asking you to join us on the Day of National Shame, and on each day after that when we will repeat the procession until the war ends or until they stop us."

Michael stared at him. The gaunt, shadow-ridden priest seemed all at once an upright cadaver. Shall these bones live? But it wasn't Suu Van Pham who'd been reduced to bones. Michael saw that his own belief in his own mission, his own identity, his own position was completely collapsed. He looked out on an infinite stretch of ruins, a vast plain littered with dried, lifeless bones, the remains of all he'd once sworn by and lived for. The futility of his effort to alleviate suffering by working, timidly, within the structures of Church and government was undeniable now. The absurdity of his own life slammed him, and he felt for the first time ever disgust at what he'd become. A clerical camp follower, yes. The army's holy whore. The cardinal's. His self-loathing was surpassed only by his despair.

Dear reader, such a moment would have undone you and me, would have finished us. We'd have gone off, regarding the Vietnamese priests as foolhardy, self-aggrandizing martyrs. We'd have claimed to prefer organizing quietly among Catholic clergy and developing what we would call "authentic" opposition, "practical" dissent. We'd have refused, citing if not our vow of obedience to America's Sunshine Prelate or our obligation to the poor refugees served by the CRS, our debt of loyalty to Tim O'Shea. They couldn't undo his consecration because of us—he was a bishop forever—but they could keep him an auxiliary forever too.

And we'd have been nearly right; there were honorable reasons for men like us to say no to Suu Van Pham. Honorable reasons to pretend that nothing had changed, to insist that the invitation from this ghost of a priest was not, at last, an annunciation, a conscription, an act of God. You and I, dear reader, would have slipped away, wishing the Vietnamese dissenters well, promising to pray for them. And only we'd have known what cowards we were and how we'd just destroyed ourselves.

But Michael Maguire was not like the rest of us, any more then than he had been in Korea or would be later. His capacity for fear, and for retreat, matched ours, but when forced by events to face the truth, at last, he did so willingly. I would have deflected the truth. Perhaps you would have. Michael embraced it. Confronted with that vast plain of dry bones, the bones of the slain, the bones of his own savaged dreams, he stood with upraised arms and cried, "Live!" In him despair became hope, collapse became conversion, and fear was changed into the source of action. Such transforming will is the hero's gift, and he had it. And we remember him through these pages because, oh, we need it.

Michael nodded at Suu Van Pham. "I am honored that you should ask me to join you.
Adsum, Pater,"
he said firmly. It was the ancient declaration that each of them had made at ordination. "Send me," it means. "I am ready."

 

Father Suu Van Pham led Michael and Inge Holz to the rectory. In the kitchen he drew the blinds, then lit a fat, short candle on the table. He took a crucifix from around his neck and placed it next to the candle. He poured a glass of wine and set out a third of a thin loaf of bread. Then they each took seats and joined hands. For a few moments they prayed in silence. Then Father Pham raised his eyes to Michael. "You have a favorite passage of Scripture, Father?"

In Michael's mind, the pages fell open of the small New Testament Tim O'Shea had given him in Korea, and he recited from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. "'But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For He is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace; and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the Cross, thereby bringing hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.'"

When Michael fell silent, Pham opened his eyes and looked at him. He completed the passage. "'So then you are no longer a stranger or a foreign visitor. We are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.'"

The two men leaned toward one another and embraced.
"Pax tecum, "
they said.

Then each one kissed Inge Holz, whose eyes were bright. When Pham touched his cheek to hers she whispered something. Michael knew what—"I love you"—and he understood.

 

"Shall we say the Canon in Latin, Father? Or English?" Pham had the wine and bread arranged in front of him on the plain unfinished table.

Michael had never done the Mass so informally before. Though the mode would become trivialized in the post-Council era as "home liturgy"—that impoverished rite shorn of vestments, stripped of gesture and rubric, devoid of eloquence—one's first experience of the transcendent event so simplified, so freed from the sterile medieval accretions, called up its own special awe. The unadorned Mass could evoke magnificently that Last Meal in the Upper Room, but for Michael that night the breaking of the bread at the deal table in the blacked-out rectory was like something done in the catacombs, an act of the underground Church exactly. Wasn't the world outside raging? Wasn't it full of enemies? Weren't soldiers raising crosses on every hill? And in this shocking dispensation weren't the old loyalties replaced by a new one, modest and absolute at once? Underground, freed from trappings, the Eucharist becomes itself again, a simple meal, an act of life against death, a sacrifice. And likewise the Church. Michael felt that he was at Mass for the first time, that finally he had come home.

Latin was the vernacular of martyrs.

English was the argot of men who dropped canisters full of napalm on children.

But this was an act of communion—First Communion—with a people whose forgiveness Michael Maguire longed for.

"In your language, Father, please," he said. "In Vietnamese, let us pray."

M
ICHAEL MAGUIRE
was the tallest of the twelve, and he walked in front.

His first problem had been where to get a cassock. The Vietnamese priests were too short. Even Pham's soutane would have barely reached Michael's ankles and he'd have looked like an oafish altar boy. Ludicrous as it seems, the project of finding a cassock that would fit him preoccupied him in the days before the demonstration. If Michael Maguire was going to do this, appear in a public protest against his own government in a foreign capital, then he was going to look like what he was—a responsible, some would say important, American priest. He finally found an air force chaplain his height at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, a friendly Chicagoan who greeted Michael as if they'd been classmates. Michael told him he needed the cassock for a prayer service at the embassy.

 

The day itself was humid, and even in the early morning, rain threatened. July is the heart of the wet season in Saigon, and it was certain that the skies would open at some point.

Nevertheless by midmorning the streets and boulevards of the city were jammed with citizens. Few of them were demonstrators, and almost none of them had come in from the countryside. The government had coopted the move to turn the anniversary of the Geneva Accords into a protest and had declared it a national holiday. Also, soldiers were posted outside the city to prevent residents of refugee camps, displaced villagers and Buddhists from the countryside from coming into Saigon. Traditional Vietnamese had disdained Saigon when it was the French capital. Now that it had become the center of the American occupation with the degradation and corruption that brought, they hated it. And so on that day the government simply kept them out.