The Good Shepherd (51 page)

Who would have thought six months ago, Matthew, that you would have been accused of incompetence, cowardice, and disloyalty before your fellow American bishops? It was logical; it was part of the path for which you seem fated, the way of humiliation and defeat. Yet the gall did not taste any sweeter, for knowing this. It still seared your heart and ravaged your stomach like liquid fire. He told himself he was not the first, nor would he be the last, man to endure such a beating. Two years ago he had watched a dying Paul Hallinan take even more brutal punishment as he led the fight for more liturgical freedom. Sneers about his loyalty to Rome and prophecies of chaos had been used to pound him into silence.

Cardinal Dearden called for a vote. Did the bishops approve the substance of the document? Only two no votes were recorded on this question. Should the document be released? A two-thirds majority was required. To Matthew Mahan’s amazement, the vote on release was 145 in favor, and 68 opposed. If three bishops had voted the other way, he would have won the debate he thought he had so humiliatingly lost. In agony, he asked himself why he had not risen to reply to the final assault from New Jersey. As he stood up and felt his legs trembling under him, he knew the answer. He was simply too exhausted.

Up in his room, he flung himself on the bed and wept. There were so many reasons for tears. There was no need to explain them to himself or to God. He wept for the death of that old self, the smoothie whom he still loved, in spite of all his attempts to evade him. He wept for Dennis. He wept for the Church. In his humiliation, he ate dinner alone in his room, telling himself it was the best way to stay on his diet.

This sacrificial gesture did not seem to satisfy his ulcer. In the middle of the night, he awoke with Brother Pain clawing at him, followed by sudden nausea, which sent him rushing to the bathroom to vomit more blood. When it happened again at 5:00 a.m., he decided that even the mild tension of speaking before his fellow bishops was too much for him to handle in his exhausted state. He skipped the rest of the meeting and flew home.

Dennis met him at the airport. The celibacy statement had already been released. Dennis had heard a capsule version of it on the midnight news. “I tried to talk them out of it,” Matthew Mahan said, and told him how close the vote on releasing it had been.

Dennis shrugged. “If you’d won, I’d start believing in miracles.”

It had been sunny and warm in Washington. But the weather here was cloudy, and the wind was raw. A sliver of icy air struck him in the throat, and he asked Eddie Johnson to close his window. A second later, he was shaken by a terrible premonition of disaster. Whether it was personal or something to do with the Church or with the nation, he did not know. He tried to thrust the feeling away, telling himself it was easy enough to imagine doom was imminent, just from reading the newspapers. As he left Washington, the city had been preparing for a siege. They expected a quarter of a million antiwar demonstrators to rally around the Washington Monument tomorrow.

He mentioned this to Dennis, and he barely nodded. It was obvious that he was thinking about more personal problems.

Two weeks later, Dennis handed him a letter from the vice-secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops, a Monsignor Carlo Dotti. Cardinal Confalonieri, having been rejected on
Humanae Vitae,
was not risking his dignity with Cardinal Mahan again. The letter informed him that “confidential information” from the Netherlands had forced the Holy Father to reach the grievous conclusion that the Dutch Pastoral Council, which was to meet early this month, would urge the Dutch bishops to adopt optional celibacy for priests. The Holy Father planned to exhort the Dutch bishops to reject this demand. He hoped that bishops from other parts of the world would write their brothers in Holland and urge them to respond to the Pope’s plea.

Matthew Mahan did not reply to the vice-secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops. “At the very least,” he remarked to Dennis, “I think they ought to know that if they kick a fellow in the teeth, he doesn’t rush to do them favors.”

He and Dennis began listening to the Vatican on their multiband Italian radio almost every night. As predicted, the Dutch Pastoral Council, composed of both priests and laymen, voted overwhelmingly for optional celibacy. They called on their bishops to support them. The Pope in turn issued a statement exhorting the Dutch bishops to reject the council and defend celibacy with all the power and eloquence at their command. A month later, the Dutch bishops replied. They said that their country would be better off if there was optional celibacy, if married men could be ordained priests, and if priests who had married could return to the ministry. They affirmed that the Pastoral Council had “expressed the opinion of a substantial part of the Dutch community on celibacy and the priesthood.” They asked their fellow bishops around the world to consult with them and with the Pope in order to reach “an understanding of this complicated situation.” Meekly, they said they could do nothing “without consulting the Holy Father and the world Church.”

“It’s beautiful, too beautiful,” Dennis said as Matthew Mahan turned off the radio. “They have old Paul up against the wall.”

Matthew Mahan nodded mournfully. “If he meant what he said about cooperation with his brother bishops -”

“There should be a consultation.”

Matthew Mahan felt guilty for a moment. In the dim study, he suddenly saw Pope Paul’s face as he knelt before him last May. The man’s extraordinary sadness penetrated his heart once more. “I don’t envy him.”

“He deserves it,” Dennis said.

The heartlessness of the young. But Davey Cronin would have said the same thing if he were sitting there. Perhaps the young and the old only
seem
pitiless. They tell the truth. For them, reality is not fogged by the peculiar sympathy of middle age. We who have failed and cannot swallow our failure, who perpetually pray for an opportunity to regurgitate, we are the flinchers from the truth. But isn’t charity another word for it?

At 2:00 a.m., Matthew Mahan was still awake, wrestling with these painful thoughts. The telephone rang. The night watchman at the chancery office was very apologetic. “Your Eminence, this fellow says he’s a very close personal friend and he’s got some very important personal news for you. His name is Furia.”

“Put him through.”

“Hello, Padre.”

“Mike. Where are you?”

“San Francisco. Have you seen Mary?”

“No. Why should I? Isn’t she with you?”

“I thought she might stop - she left me, Matt. She went back to Rome.”

There was anguish in Mike’s voice. “We got into an argument about the Church. I started giving her the usual line - that it was crock. All of a sudden she burst into tears. I didn’t know what was happening. The next morning - she left. She wrote a note -
saying
she loved me - but she didn’t have the strength - to be worthy of me. Did you ever hear anything crazier than that? Her worthy of me? What the hell should I do, Matt?”

“The first thing you’d better do is cable Father Guilio Mirante. Tell him to find her and make sure she doesn’t do something serious.”

“Like what?”

“Like killing herself.”

“You think that’s possible?”

“From what Mirante told me, yes. The second thing -” He hesitated, unsure whether to say it. “This will make you sore, Mike.”

“Tell me, the hell with that.”

“Start taking the Church seriously. Whether
you
believe in it or not, take
it
seriously. Stop talking as if the Pope and the bishops were just another bunch of businessmen. Our business is caring for souls, Mike. Now maybe it’s yours. Caring - for one soul.”

“I get the message, Matt. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve let that Roman cynicism about the Church eat into my brain. Say a prayer for her - and me, will you, Matt? Because if I lose her - I think I’ll get drunk for life.”

“I’m praying right now, Mike.”

Matthew Mahan went down
to
his
private
chapel and knelt there for the rest of the night. His knowledge of what else
was
happening added to his torment. Mary in Rome now when Paul was about to commit another blunder. There was no doubt in his mind that the Pope was going to blunder on celibacy as he had blundered on every other sexual problem in his papacy.

Surely this was a kind of climax, a moment of truth the whole world would recognize. Or was it only his personal moment, created by the peculiar dimensions of his fate?

The following morning, Dennis handed him a letter from the apostolic delegate. Why had he failed to answer the letter from the vice-secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops? Surely Cardinal Mahan must know that the Holy Father had special reasons for depending upon him. Could he possibly fail to come to the support of the man who had raised him to the Sacred College of Cardinals and so forth and so forth? Matthew Mahan flipped the letter to the edge of his desk. He looked up and saw Dennis studying him. What was he searching for? A sign that there was something here beside an automaton, a greedy collector of clerical honors who had played the game all the way up to the red hat and now would pay his debt like a good little politician? What else will he see if you humbly capitulate?

Something had to be done, something had to be done,
a voice drummed in his head. Pain began to gnaw in his stomach. A pulse throbbed in his forehead.

“Let’s let him stew a little longer,” Matthew Mahan said.

Dennis trudged back to his office. The slump of his shoulders, the droop of his head, wrenched Matthew Mahan’s heart. He got up, fought off the by now familiar wave of weakness that assailed him almost every time he rose from a chair and went downstairs to the chapel. Kneeling on his familiar prie-dieu, he contemplated the cheap crucifix above the tabernacle. When the choice is between love and obedience, what is the answer, Lord? he asked. Does the time come when the Shepherd’s words are not enough, when he must risk himself to prove his love? Answer me, Lord, answer me.

Of course, there was no answer. Why should He look upon this caricature of a shepherd, this utterly worthless bishop, this pseudo-suffering servant whose service was so consistently lousy?

As he came out of the chapel, he almost collided with Dennis.

“A cable from Rome. Just arrived,” he said, handing him the yellow envelope.

He opened it. It was from Cardinal Confalonieri, head of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops.

“My God,” Dennis said, who was reading the words over his shoulder.

Something had to be done. Something had to be done.
Anguish throbbed in Matthew Mahan’s mind and body. Dennis’s sad face dropped before him. In Rome, he saw Mary’s suffering mouth and leaden eyes beside that greasy river, in the ominous shadow of that huge inhuman dome. She and Dennis had to
know
,
they had to
see
, that love existed for them, love unto the limits of risk. “Dennis,” he said. “Make arrangements for us to go to Rome as soon as possible.”

Give me strength, give me strength,
Matthew Mahan prayed as the jet thundered skyward. Whom was he talking to? Obscurely, he sensed it was Pope John. But would he approve of this trip? The man who chose as his episcopal motto “Obedience and Peace.”

It was insane, this sudden assumption of the role of a latter-day Cardinal Gibbons. Wasn’t it a kind of diseased reaction to Davey Cronin’s bizarre lectures and months of patent brain-washing by Davey’s spiritual heir, Dennis McLaughlin? Gibbons had been the leader of the American Church. He had behind him the solid support of almost every bishop and the vast majority of the laity when he had rushed to Rome to prevent Leo XIII from denouncing trade unionism as a pact with the devil. Who is supporting you, Cardinal Mahan? Only the voiceless generation, Your Holiness, the younger priests and the voiceless legions of the divorced and the voiceless multitude of unwanted, unloved children and their mothers and fathers broken in health and spirit.

Wouldn’t that be a lovely answer. He took out of his briefcase the letter he had written to the Pope and reread it for the twentieth or twenty-fifth time.

He had rewritten it a half-dozen times. It said too much, too much. He should have waited a day, until he was calmer. But it told the truth, the spiritual and the emotional truth. That was what he wanted to do, that was what he had to do from now on.

Beside Matthew Mahan, Dennis McLaughlin tried to make up his mind whether he was frightened or exultant. He exulted to see the vision of his challenge to the papal monarchy suddenly assuming such staggering reality. Events and the courage of the man beside him were catapulting him light-years beyond the world of books. There was no need to take notes, to cite authorities, to elaborate arguments. This was a living challenge.

Then, his fright or his fear would take charge. It was not concerned with possible punishment, some unforeseen public humiliation. It revolved around Matthew Mahan as a human being, as a man he loved. From the moment he said those words about going to Rome, Dennis could literally see the torment that began tearing the man apart. It was not simply one conflict; it was several. The smoothie, the man who hated to rock the boat or have his boat rocked, was appalled by the utter unorthodoxy of the act. It was so easy for him to put himself in Paul’s place, and ask himself:
What would I do, what would I think?

The humble bishop, the disciple of Pope John that he had been struggling to become for the past eight months, was equally appalled. Wasn’t this arrogance of the worst sort? Who was he, ex-infantry chaplain, ex-hotshot fundraiser, the non-scholar who barely graduated from the seminary, who was he to come hurtling into Rome to lecture the Prince of the Apostles, surrounded by the world’s best theologians? Then there was the loyalist, the man who shuddered at this implied threat to betray the man who had made him a Prince of the Church. Dennis’s eyes strayed to the right, and he saw Matthew Mahan fiddling with his Cardinal’s ring. The familiar symptom of inner disturbance. It had become acute in the last three days. He was tempted to say:
Why don’t you take it off and put it in your pocket?
But it was better, much better, not to let on how much he knew. Perhaps it made his guilt easier to bear.

If Matthew Mahan had slept an hour in the last three nights, it would be remarkable, Dennis thought, eyeing him covertly. His face was ashen. Undoubtedly, his stomach throbbed with pain. He watched the big hand with the mass of black hair sprouting from its back move slowly across his belt line. Now they were piling on top of this exhaustion the ultimate barbarity, a night flight to Europe.

“Why don’t you take a pill and try to sleep?” Dennis said.

“I never sleep on planes, I’m afraid.”

Five minutes later, he was dozing. Dennis signaled the stewardess, and she took a blanket from the overhead rack and spread it across the Cardinal’s chest. Watching the big head as it nodded to one side, Dennis found himself praying.
Dear God, watch over him, please. Give him the strength, give him the strength.
He stared moodily out the window at the stars. What were their chances, really? Weren’t you more interested in the attempt than in the possibility of success? He had poured out a lot of his guilt to Helen Reed last night. Calmly, she had told him to endure it. He
was
guilty. It was marvelous, the way women accepted reality.

Dennis squirmed in his seat. He had been unable to tell her the next thought that had coruscated through his brain. If they failed, and he left the Church to marry her, would his book be worth writing? Wouldn’t the author be dismissed instantly as one of those failed priests who was trying to justify his weakness? A gust of desire had shaken him as he kissed Helen last night. Now you are going back to Rome, back to where love and sunshine mingled above the Tiber for the first time. Would it also be where love died?

He fell asleep. He, too, had spent much of the previous three nights staring into the darkness. When he awoke, harsh slices of daylight were cutting through the drawn curtains. The overhead lights came aglow. The stewardesses began passing out orange juice and coffee. The pilot told them they would be landing in a half hour.

“Do you think the baggage handlers are still on strike?”

“I don’t know. At least we won’t have to worry about 400 pieces of luggage,” Matthew Mahan said.

He shook out some pills and swallowed them with his orange juice. “Hey, that isn’t on your diet,” Dennis said.

“I know. But I’m thirsty.”

His smile was almost boyish. There was a reckless glint in his eyes. “Did you wire Father Mirante to meet us at the pensione?”

“Yes. I’m not sure that was a good idea. If they find out you’re talking to him -”

“I know. But we have to talk to him. He knows where Mary Shea - Mary Furia - is.”

They made an uneventful landing, passed swiftly through customs, and taxied to the Pensione Christina. Dennis had selected it because it was inexpensive - and the Cardinal could be anonymous there. Father Mirante was waiting for them in the lobby, an especially doleful expression on his sallow face. He went upstairs with them to the single room they had reserved and Matthew Mahan ordered a second breakfast, a glass of milk for him and coffee and rolls for Mirante and Dennis. While they waited, he showed Mirante his letter. He read it swiftly and said something in Italian. Matthew Mahan laughed. “He says I’ve been seized by a heroic inspiration. That’s a polite way of saying I’m out of my mind.”

Mirante smiled nervously. “No, no, Your Eminence,” he said in English. “It makes me all the more certain that I will return to your archdiocese with you, with your permission.”

“You have that already.”

Mirante murmured something about personal matters delaying him. “Never mind, never mind,” Matthew Mahan said. “What do you think our next move should be?”

“I would call Confalonieri or his deputy. I presume you sent him a copy of this letter?”

“Of course. It’s his business, too.”

“He’s not a bad fellow. But he won’t even begin to decide what to do about you.”

“Is there a chance of getting to see His Holiness?”

“There’s always a chance,” Mirante said. “What will happen if you see him and he tells you to go home and keep your mouth shut?”

“I’ll go home and keep my mouth shut.”

“Are you sure? Or is it possible that your young friend here will persuade you to do something more daring?”

Suddenly Dennis did not trust Father Mirante.

Matthew Mahan asked him if he had located Mary Shea. Mirante nodded. “She is staying at a little convent to which she has contributed a great deal of money. It is on the outskirts of Rome.”

“Take me there, now.”

It was a long cab ride - almost a half hour down the Via Ostia, the road that Peter and Paul had taken when they first came to Rome. Mary met him in a small bare sitting room, a crucifix on the wall the only decoration. She looked ill. “I’m not sleeping,” she said, with a wan smile. “I’m trying to make it this time on prayer. No pills.”

He told her why he was here - the clerical reason, first, the letter to the Pope, the imminent declaration on celibacy. “But you’re the real reason, Mary. I’m here to tell you something. Something I never thought I would have to tell you.”

“What?”

“You’ve committed a sin. A serious sin.”

She shook her head, wide-eyed. “How?”

“A sin against the Christian ideal - the Church’s ideal - of love, Mary. You can’t do this to Mike. You can’t let a man start to love you the way he loves you - and then turn your back on him.”

“I thought it was better to do it now, Matt, than later.”

“That’s another sin, Mary. A sin against faith.”

Her lovely face crumpled. Tears began to flow. He braced himself to endure them. “Matt - if you could have married us. If I felt I had your - your real blessing.”

He seized her arms and gave her one fierce shake. “Mary! You have it.” Behind those words, he was saying:
Receive ye the Holy Spirit
. “As a bishop of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, I absolve you of all stain of sin in the love of this man. I affirm before God that it is a true, good, holy marriage.
Receive ye the Holy Spirit.
”

“Oh, Matt.”

She crumpled against him. He held her in his arms and prayed once more,
Receive ye the Holy Spirit.
He let go -totally, absolutely, forever - the wish to hold her, to love her in any other way. Suddenly, in his soul, there was a soaring joy, like light-filled water leaping from a fountain in a deserted square.

He felt guilty. He searched Mary’s face for similar joy. It was not there. “Mary, I cabled Mike. He wants to come here. Come to you.”

“Yes.”

Her voice was calm. But there was no joy in it.

“Are you - all right, Mary?”

Those old familiar words. She smiled. “Yes, Matt, I’m all right. Are you?”

“Only if you are.”

The convent bell tolled, summoning the nuns to chapel. They were surrounded by prayer. Matthew Mahan could only add his favorite plea:
Lord,
say
but the word and her soul shall be healed.

Dennis McLaughlin spent the afternoon trudging and riding around Rome in search of his friend Goggin. He wandered through the Biblical Institute in the Piazza della Pilotta, near the Fountain of Trevi. No sign of Goggin there. He taxied to the Villa Stritch on the Via della Nocetta just off the Ancient Aurelian Way, west of the Tiber and the Vatican. He hurried across the villa’s beautifully trimmed green lawn to learn from a fat, smiling, young Irishman from Chicago that “the Fifth Evangelist” was not at home. The Irishman, who said that he worked for Cardinal Wright in the Congregation for the Clergy, and who looked as if they were eating the same desserts, cheerfully hunted Goggin by telephone, and found him at work in the office of the Jesuit general in the Borgo Santa Spirito near the Vatican.