Prince of Peace (61 page)

Michael ignored the question. When a reporter grabbed his arm Michael pushed him roughly aside.

"The cardinal said if he was a Catholic, he's excommunicated."

"What?" Michael stopped and faced the man who'd said that.

"Because it's suicide," the reporter added.

"Suicide?" Michael glared at him.

"He burned himself to death, right?"

"When did the cardinal say that?"

"Shortly after the hospital pronounced the kid dead." The man referred to his notes. "He said, '...the Church condemns suicide. Anyone who commits it forfeits the right to a Church burial.'"

"He said that?"

"Well, that's the statement they issued at the chancery. His name was on it."

It was as if a pair of mailed hands reached into Michael's chest and tore his lungs out. He said, "I haven't spoken to the cardinal. I don't expect to. I will speak to Nicholas Wiley's parents, and, if they agree, he will have a Roman Catholic burial at Saint Joseph of Arimathea Church in Aina, New York. We will pray for the repose of his soul."

"You don't condemn suicide?"

A flashbulb went off in Michael's face. He was blind for a moment.

He said, "Nicholas Wiley is a martyr. He is at peace with God. What I condemn is the war in Vietnam, and that is what the cardinal should be condemning too."

 

The next day Cardinal Spellman summoned Michael to his office.

He had not been in his office since the time nearly three years before when Michael had gone to him upon his first return from Vietnam. Since then, it seemed to Michael, the pin had been removed from the center of the world itself. Everything was out of kilter now. He had only one certainty as he entered the cardinal's residence, that Nicholas Wiley was going to be buried in Church.

The woman at the typewriter in the room off the entrance hall knew who he was this time. His photograph had been in all the New York papers that morning. A tourist's photograph of Nicholas Wiley in flames had been on the front page of every major newspaper in America.

"Father Maguire is here," she said into her phone.

Monsignor Dugan was waiting for him when the elevator doors opened on the second floor. He followed Michael down the hallway to the cardinal's office.

As before, Spellman was sitting at his desk, back to the window, waiting for him when he entered. Spellman did not stand. He needed the desk this time, against this man.

Dugan ushered Michael to the wing chair. Michael took it. Dugan took his place at the large Catalonian table, opened a folder and uncapped his pen.

The cardinal spoke then and his voice was steely. "You have contradicted me publicly on a grave matter of faith and morals. You have disobeyed my explicit order regarding use of the public forum. You are hereby suspended of all priestly faculties. You are not to preach, administer the sacraments, or celebrate the Holy Eucharist."

Michael did not blink. "Your Eminence, I am going to preside at the funeral of Nicholas Wiley at Saint Joseph's. After that I will obey you."

Spellman's face reddened. "You are no longer assigned to Saint Joseph's. You are now assigned to the North American College in Rome where for two years you are to pursue the Licentiate in Sacred Theology. Obviously you did not learn your lessons well enough the first time."

Michael stood. "I respectfully submit, Your Eminence, that there is little point in continuing this. I will leave Saint Joseph's when Nicholas Wiley has been buried there. I will stop preaching and go to Rome when the war in Vietnam is over."

"Consider carefully what you are saying, Father."

"I've considered it for three years, Your Eminence." Michael towered over him. The cardinal seemed small and weary. He had been defeated by the very thing—American Catholic triumph—to which he'd given the best energy of his life. It seemed no surprise at all to discover that this frightened old man could do nothing to punish Michael and nothing to stop him. Nor could Michael want to punish Spellman by denouncing that war as a monument to the man's vanity. He clung to what mattered. "I feel bound in conscience to complete my ministry to Nicholas Wiley. I cannot abandon him, not even to keep my vow to you. I wasn't with him when he needed me most, but I'm with him now."

"But you cannot have a Mass at Saint Joseph's. I will not permit it."

"Then I will do it in Central Park. Is that what you prefer? I have no intention of turning Nicholas Wiley's death into a protest rally." Michael leaned over Spellman's desk, put his hands upon it. He stared at the prelate with cold, threatening eyes and he said, "But if you refuse me access to the small church to which he devoted the last efforts of his life, that's exactly what it will become. And you will have to answer for it, to newspapers, to television, to Rome and to God." Michael straightened abruptly, and his arm shot out, his finger stabbed toward Spellman. "Believe me, Cardinal, you will have to answer."

Spellman could hardly bring himself to speak. He opened his mouth and closed it. He shook his head. Finally he said, "But we are talking about Church law! This is not a matter of my will, Father, or of yours. This is not a matter of individual conscience. You are a priest!" He gestured with both his fists at Michael. "You must condemn the sacrilege of suicide!"

"I will not!" Michael shot back. Now anger choked him too. But he reined it. "Church law on the matter of the burial of the dead—any dead—leaves room for pastoral discretion, Your Eminence. If you don't know that you should. Ask Monsignor Dugan." Michael looked back at the other prelate, who refused to raise his eyes from his notepad. He was a canon lawyer and knew that Michael was right. Michael faced Spellman again. "By your statements you have made the issue that young man's rejection of the war. You have made the issue his standing as a Catholic. You have made the issue your authority. And I am telling you—as I will tell anyone who asks—that in the matter of Nicholas Wiley I refuse to be bound by your authority. The issue is his right to a loving gesture from the Church, and he will have it. Beyond that, I refuse to yield to you in anything related to this evil war."

Cardinal Spellman's lips moved soundlessly around the only words he could think to say: "Get out!"

Michael nodded, a vestige of respect, and left.

Early the next day he prayed the Mass for the Dead, quietly, without music, in the Church of Saint Joseph of Arimathea. In front of him was the pine box containing Nicholas Wiley's remains. Michael had not made the time of the service public, but he'd notified those whom he hoped would come. Very few did. Not Nicholas's parents, not his therapist. No one from the Newman Club at NYU; the chaplain was on retreat. A seminarian and two women from the
Catholic Worker
were there, although not Dorothy Day, who would later bristle when Thomas Merton himself wrote that something was wrong with a movement that led people to kill themselves. Two Quakers with whom Nicholas had worked for a short time were there, and so was the rectory housekeeper.

Michael reminded them, as he threw the first handful of dirt onto Wiley's coffin in the parish cemetery, that Saint Joseph of Arimathea was the stranger who'd taken the body of Jesus from the cross when none of His friends would claim it. He had placed it in his own tomb.

The stone now with which to seal such a hole was in Michael's heart.

C
ARDINAL
Spellman died in the last month of 1967. In his final Christmas sermon to thousands of American soldiers at Cam Ranh Bay the year before he had christened their efforts as "a war for civilization." He had said that the peace America sought could be had only through "total victory." The troops cheered him, but their applause was far from enough by then. He would return home to a people he had embarrassed, and the Holy Father himself would make clear his displeasure at what was less "faith and morals" than rank jingoism. Even Cardinal Spellman knew that he had outlived values and modes that once he had thought were absolute. His physical death was only the last of many deaths he suffered toward the end, but even so, to others it was a shock. The cardinal? Dead? As if the structures of his Church, his country and his war could not stand without his support, they immediately began to rock like runaway scaffolding in the winds of that typhoon of years, 1968.

First, in January, Tet, that decisive defeat of the Communists in Vietnam that, in the mad logic of that war, assured their victory. Then, little more than a month later, the political defeat of an upstart senator by the president in the New Hampshire primary (the president won 48 percent to Eugene McCarthy's 42. percent) that, in the same logic, sealed the defeat of LBJ and led to his withdrawal from the race. A few weeks later, in the same month, Lieutenant Calley presided over the slaughter of several hundred civilians at My Lai. Some Americans, when they learned of it a year later, would not understand the fuss, and they would be right. Calley was a victim of the army's pretense that what he did was different.

Then on a bright April day a new archbishop of New York and Vicar of the American Military was installed at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, an unoffensive Irishman named Terence Cooke whose first words from the episcopal throne were addressed to Lyndon Johnson, sitting in the front row. He thanked the president for coming and commended him warmly for his valiant search for peace in Vietnam, a search which by then was being conducted by 549,000 U.S. soldiers, none of whom could find it and many of whom, even if they lived, would never have it again. Johnson liked Catholics a lot better now than he had as a boy in Texas, for they were his diehard backers. Demonstrations of the sort paralyzing hundreds of other colleges that spring weren't tolerated on Catholic campuses, and the students weren't inclined to have them anyway. Furthermore, the Catholic bishops issued a rare formal statement about the war. Applying the principles of Vatican II and the classic moral theory of the Scholastic tradition, though not the urgent pronouncements of Pope Paul VI, they said, "It is reasonable to argue that our presence in Vietnam is justified."

No one noticed how cozy Archbishop Cooke and President Johnson were that day, however, because a few hours after the ceremony at Saint Patrick's, James Earl Ray shot and killed the clergyman who had most resolutely condemned the war. In the days and weeks following Dr. King's death, black Americans in a dozen cities set fire to their own neighborhoods. Hardly anyone noticed. But at the end of the month when students took over Columbia before going on vacation, the nation was stunned.

In France, too, the young revolted—one resists saying they were revolting—while in Germany a punk named Andreas Baader committed his first act of arson, and in Northern Ireland Catholics took to the streets for the first time in years, not dreaming how much worse their lives could get. In June, Vietnam became the longest war in U.S. history, and a lunatic Arab saw to it that the war would be as long again still when he murdered the leader of those who opposed it. Robert Kennedy was buried from Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and with him was buried any hope not only for a prompt end to the killing, but for a return to our simple faith in the goodness of our government. Carolyn and I kept the vigil on Fifth Avenue with a million others. On our radios we heard Andy Williams begin the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A news bulletin reported that the three-month-old siege of Khe Sanh was lifted that day. The marines had held. "Mine eyes have seen the glory..." What should have felt like victory in that war was always more like defeat. All we could do was hold each other and sing.

In July Catholics who'd thought their Church had changed were jolted by the papal encyclical,
Humanae Vitae,
forbidding all forms of birth control except abstinence and rhythm. Well, it
had
changed because immediately thousands of Catholic priests in Europe and America publicly rejected the pope's authority in the matter. Bishops on the other hand, who had found it possible the year before to ignore Paul's radical criticisms of capitalism, private property and the profit motive in
Progressio Populorum,
now fell in behind His Holiness with a vengeance. When the large majority of seminarians signed a dissenting letter in Boston, Cardinal Cushing fired them without discussion. In Los Angeles Cardinal MacIntyre forced his clergy to take a solemn oath of fealty, and in Washington Cardinal O'Boyle imposed an oath of his own and suspended more than forty of his priests for refusing to take it. Many priests didn't wait to be suspended. In large numbers—tens of thousands eventually—they began to resign their ministry altogether. Meanwhile millions of Catholic lay men and women who had long since decided for themselves in the matter of contraception regarded the squabbling of celibates over other people's sex lives with distaste and a kind of embarrassed pity. So much for the triumph of American Catholicism.

In August the police—Catholics again—rioted in Chicago and the Russians sent tanks into Prague. The first event guaranteed the defeat of the Democratic candidate and the second meant that the Republican candidate—or so he said—could not reveal his secret plan for ending the war. In China the Red Guard had begun their rampage, but we didn't care about China yet.

In October Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, a divorced man. The Vatican newspaper called her "a public sinner." But now even cardinals began to dissent—authority was in shambles everywhere—when Cushing of Boston countered, "Leave the poor woman alone."

November gave us Nixon.

On December 10 Thomas Merton, with whom we began, having left his Kentucky monastery for the first time in over twenty years, was in Bangkok for a meeting of Zen and Christian monks and masters, an effort toward East-West reconciliation. He was electrocuted while trying to plug in a fan. By now even the most benign American contact with Southeast Asia seemed dangerous, tragic, violent and absurd.

And on Christmas Eve, the last week of the year, the American military elite, our astronauts, preached the homily from the moon. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," one of them read, looking back at us, a blue ball hanging in nothing. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."