Lazarus Read online

  After the harsh country life to which he had been bred, the disciplines of the urban seminary and of the scholastic life were no burden at all. He was accustomed to a rhythmic existence. He was well fed, warmly clothed. His mother was protected and content. She made no secret of the fact that she much preferred the security of a son in the cloth to a gaggle of grandchildren in another woman’s kitchen. Ambition made Ludovico a good scholar. He learned early that for a man who aspired to eminence in the Church the best qualifications were an orthodox theology, a solid grasp of canon law and an instant acceptance of every directive of authority – wise, foolish or merely expedient …

  All the reports on him said the same thing. He was good clerical material. He was not profoundly spiritual, but he had, as his rector put it, ‘an imam naturaliter rectam,’ a spirit of natural rectitude.

  What he had practised in his own youth he rewarded in others as he rose from curate to monsignor, to suffragan bishop, to Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, first under the redoubtable Leone and then under the iron-fisted German Josef Lorenz, who had pushed him slowly but steadily upward until he became a candidate for the Sub-prefecture.

  It was the Ukrainian pontiff, Kiril I, who had given him the appointment and the red hat that went with it. Kiril, who in the early years of his reign had been seen as an innovator and passionate reformer, had become latterly a compulsive traveller, totally immersed in his public role as Universal Pastor, rattling the Keys of Peter wherever he was permitted to make a landfall. But while he travelled, the cabals of the Curia took control of the administration of the Church, and its interior life, its involvement in the new dilemmas of human experience, languished for want of courageous interpreters.

  Whenever the question of his successor arose, Ludovico Gadda was counted among the papabili – a possible candidate for election. However, when Kiril died, on a flight from Rome to Buenos Aires, the man elected to succeed him was a Frenchman, Jean Marie Barette, who took the name of Gregory XVII.

  This Gregory was a liberaliser, who saw little merit in the rigorist policies of surveillance, censorship and enforced silence which Cardinal Gadda had reinstituted at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So he moved him sideways to be Prefect of the Congregation for the Bishops, knowing that the bishops were all grown-up fellows and perfectly able to take care of themselves.

  But Ludovico Gadda, always the obedient servant of the system, performed ably and discreetly and managed to make a large number of friends in the most senior ranks of the episcopate. So, in that strange portentous time when Gregory XVII claimed to have had a private revelation of the Second Coming and to have received a call to preach it as one of the most ancient and enduring doctrines of Christianity, Gadda was able to procure his abdication by threat of a collegial vote to depose him on the grounds of mental incompetence.

  He stage-managed the whole affair so adroitly that, in the hastily summoned conclave which followed, Cardinal Ludovico Gadda was elected Pope on the first ballot and took the name of Leo XIV. With so swift and massive a mandate, there was nothing now to restrain him. Within six weeks he had published his first encyclical, ‘Obedient unto death …’, a chill admonition to discipline, conformity, unquestioning submission to the dictates of papal authority within the Church.

  The Press and a large section of the clergy and laity were stunned by its reactionary tone, its echoes of ancient thunders, its smell of old bonfires. The general inclination was to ignore it; but that was much harder than it sounded. Leo XIV had spent a lifetime learning how the machinery of the Church worked and he manipulated every thread and cog like a thumbscrew to bring pressure on the recalcitrant, clergy and laity alike.

  Like every bold general, he had calculated his losses in advance and, though to many they seemed appalling, he was ready to justify them by the end result: fewer clergy, smaller congregations, but all of them fired with redemptive and reforming zeal.

  It was the post-Tridentine illusion. Rally the zealots, stiffen the waverers, purge out the objectors with bell, book and candle; in the end, the elect, aided by the Grace of God, would convert the backsliders by prayer and example. Instead, more and more decent folk carried on their decent lives in a silent schism of indifference to this hard-nosed pragmatist, who still believed that he could rule by fiat the consciences of a billion souls scattered across the spinning planet.

  But Ludovico Gadda, the peasant from Mirandola, ran true to form. He had always believed that if you did right you were right – and if you did wrong in good conscience, it was up to God to take care of the consequences.

  Now, at one stroke, he was robbed of these comforting certainties. He could die with the work unfinished. He could survive yet be in no condition to complete it.

  To the devil with such melancholy thoughts! God would dispose matters in His own time and fashion. His servant would not, could not, sit here brooding. There was work to be done. Work and prayer were a single act. He had always sought solace in action, rather than in contemplation. He pressed the buzzer to summon his secretary and have him assemble the members of the Curia at five sharp in the Borgia chamber.

  His allocution to the Curial Cardinals was almost good-humoured, but never less than precise.

  ‘The Sala Stampa will be responsible for the announcement to the world press. The statement will be accurate in all particulars. The Pontiff is suffering from heart disease, a bypass operation is indicated. It will be undertaken at the International Clinic of Professor Sergio Salviati. The operation has a high statistical success rate. The prognosis is positive. The Pontiff will be grateful for the prayers of the faithful – even the prayers of his brethren in this assembly.

  ‘Medical bulletins will be prepared at the clinic and sent by fax to the Sala Stampa for distribution. Our attitude to the press will be cordial and informative. Questions about negative possibilities will be answered frankly, with the assistance of the clinic.

  ‘One question which will inevitably be raised – and which I am sure is in all your minds even as I speak – is whether or not I shall be competent, physically or mentally, to serve out the term of my pontificate. It is too early to judge that; but three months from now we should all know the truth. I wish only to affirm to you, as I have already done in writing to the Dean of the Sacred College, that, since we are now an embattled Church, I am the last man in the world who would wish her to be led by an incompetent general. My abdication is already written. I suggest only that it may be untimely and embarrassing to publish it at the moment.’

  They laughed at that and gave him a round of applause. The tension that had been building all day was suddenly released. It seemed their country brother was not so stubborn after all. His next words cautioned them not to expect too easy a surrender of the Papal Seal.

  ‘The surgeon recommends strongly that I absent myself from affairs of state and public ceremonial for about three months. Common sense dictates that I follow his advice and rusticate for a while away from either the Vatican or Castel Gandolfo … I have not yet decided where to go, or even whether to take so long a leave, but for however long or short a time I am absent, I am still the Pontiff, and I charge you all to pursue diligently the policies I have already determined with you. There will be ample opportunity – no, daily necessity – for the exercise of your collegial discretion and authority, but the Chair of Peter is not vacant until I am dead or I have consented with you, my brethren, to step down from it … I reserve to myself the right to reverse any decisions made in my absence which do not conform to the policies we have laboured so hard to devise.’

  There was an uneasy silence, broken at last by Cardinal Drexel, Dean of the Sacred College, eighty years old but still bright of eye and vigorous in argument.

  ‘A point must be made here, Holiness. I make it because the rules disqualify a man of my age from voting in any future Papal election. Your Holiness reserves his right to reverse any decisions made by any member of the Curia, or by t
he Curia acting in concert, during his absence. None of us, I believe, has any problem with that. But the members of the Electoral College must equally reserve their right to decide upon Your Holiness’s competence to continue in office. It would seem that the criteria applied to the abdication of His Holiness Gregory XVII might be mutually agreed, here and now, as guidelines. It was, after all, Your Holiness who drafted them as head of the Congregation for Bishops.’

  There was a longer silence this time. Leo XIV sat hunched in his chair, staring at some point of focus in the centre of the floor.

  Drexel was the last man in the world on whom he could vent his anger. He was too old, too wise, too versed in the subtleties of the canons. It was Drexel who had persuaded Jean Marie Barette to abdicate without a struggle or a scandal, and who still maintained contact with him in his secret existence abroad. It was Drexel who had censured so bluntly his own bid for election and yet, when it succeeded, had kissed hands and served as he had always done, asking no favours, condoning none of the mistakes of his new master. Drexel made no secret of his grief and anger at the new rigorism of Church government. Like Paul of old, he withstood the Pontiff to his face, claiming that he had already lapsed into gnostic error by trying to make a Kingdom of the Pure out of the tatterdemalion assembly of the errant children of God.

  He stiffened the courage of other Papal Counsellors and was quite open in his intention to create a body of opposition opinion within the Curia – ‘because,’ as he put it bluntly to the Pontiff, ‘Your Holiness acts sometimes like a country mule and we cannot truly tolerate that in this day and age.’

  But, however bitterly he fought, he kept the battle private, as he had done in the case of Jean Marie Barette. More than most in Rome, he understood how ominous were the statistics of defection and he would not by word or gesture widen the gap between Pontiff and people. So finally, Leo the Bishop answered his brother bishop.

  ‘As I remember, I produced a draft of the norms, which were then amended and agreed by the Sacred College before being submitted to the reigning Pontiff, who consented to their application even in his own case … So, there is no question, I too will submit myself to the same norms, if and when it is necessary to invoke them. Now, may we deal with other essential details …’

  The details were legion: communications, security, protocols with the Republic of Italy while the Pope was resident outside Vatican territory, a schedule of those permitted access to the clinic while he was in intensive care and at each successive stage of convalescence …

  Finally it was done. Then, to the surprise of the whole assembly, the Pontiff made the first apology they had ever heard from his lips.

  ‘I had hoped to say Mass with you tonight. I cannot. I find that I am at the end of my strength. However, I cannot go without asking you all to hear my confession and to offer me your common absolution. I do not repent of what I have done in this office. I must repent of what I am – stubborn, blind, arrogant, swift to anger, slow to forgive. Touched by the corruption of power? Yes. A coward? That too, because I am very much afraid of what awaits me once I leave here. I lack compassion, because ever since I was a child I have been driven to thrust myself as far away as possible from the miseries of the human condition. And yet I cannot abjure what I believe, that a simple childlike obedience to the lessons of Our Lord and Saviour, as interpreted by the Holy See, is the only true road to salvation. If I err in this, believe me it is not for lack of goodwill, but from lack of light and understanding. So, in the presence of you all, I confess and repent and I ask our brother Drexel to absolve me in the name of God and of you all.’

  He thrust himself awkwardly out of the great carved chair and knelt before them. Drexel approached and gave him the ritual absolution: ‘Deinde ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti …’

  ‘And for penance?’ asked Leo the Pontiff.

  ‘From us, none. You will have pain enough. We wish you the courage to endure it.’ Drexel held out a hand to raise him to his feet and, in the midst of a winter silence, led him from the room.

  As the Curial Cardinals dispersed in the glow of a Roman evening, MacAndrew, the Scotsman from Propaganda Fide, strolled out with Agostini, from the Secretariat of State. Together they provided an almost perfect metaphor for the nature of the Church. MacAndrew’s Congregation was charged with the evangelisation of the nations, the propagation of the ancient faith among the unbelievers and the maintenance of missionary foundations. Agostini’s job was to create and maintain the political relations that made such efforts possible.

  MacAndrew said, in his dry, humorous fashion, ‘Well now, that’s something we haven’t seen since seminary days! Public confession, with the Rector on his knees to the community. What did you make of it?’

  Agostini, always the diplomat, shrugged eloquently and quoted from the Dies Irae: ‘Timor mortis conturbat me! He’s scared. It’s natural. He knows he can die under the knife. He knows he will die if he doesn’t risk the operation.’

  ‘I got the impression,’said MacAndrew deliberately, ‘that he was casting up his accounts and finding a shortfall.’

  ‘We all know there’s a shortfall.’ Agostini’s tone was sombre. ‘You at Propaganda Fide are in a position to know how catastrophic it is. Congregations are getting smaller, we’re getting fewer candidates for the priesthood, the missions and religious life: the places where the faith is strongest seem to be those furthest from our jurisdiction or our influence! Maybe our lord and master is beginning to see that he is responsible for at least part of the mess.’

  ‘We’re all responsible.’ MacAndrew was emphatic about it. ‘You, me, the whole gilded gang of us. We’re the Cardinals, the hinge men of the organisation. We’re also bishops, vested in our own right with Apostolic authority. Yet look at us there today. Look at us any day! We’re like feudal barons with their liege lord. Worse still, sometimes I think we’re like a bunch of court eunuchs. We accept the pallium and the red hat and thereafter we take everything he hands out as if it were the voice of God from the holy of holies. We watch him trying to order back the waves of millennial events, silence by fiat the murmurs of troubled mankind. We listen to him preaching about sex as if he’s spent his youth with the Manichees, like Augustine, and can’t get the dirty notions out of his head. We know how he’s silenced theologians and philosophers who are trying to make Christian redemption intelligible in our tooth and claw universe. But how many of us are prepared to tell him he just might be wrong, or needs new spectacles, or is looking at God’s truth in a distorting mirror?’

  ‘Would he listen if we did?’

  ‘Probably not – but he’d have to treat with us as a body. All he has to do now is divide and conquer. He trades on that. So each of us has to find a separate way to deal with him. I can count ’em off for you – manipulation, evasion, flattery, the diplomacies of a kitchen cabinet … Drexel seems to be the only one ready to stand toe to toe with him and face him down.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Agostini mildly, ‘perhaps Drexel has less to lose than the rest of us. He’d like nothing more than to retire completely and rusticate among his vines. Besides, so long as we are in office and in favour with the Pontiff, we can do some good. Out of it, we are impotent.’

  ‘It’s a fine piece of casuistry,’ said MacAndrew gloomily, ‘but it doesn’t absolve us from our own delinquencies, does it? I wonder how I’d feel tonight if I were the one looking across the razor’s edge to Judgement Day?’

  ‘I’m a diplomat.’ Agostini at his best had a small, vinegary humour. ‘I am permitted – no, obliged – to heresies which in others are most damnable. I deal not with the perfect but with the possible, the relatively good or the acceptably evil. I’m not asked to provide doctrinal definitions, just pragmatic solutions: what is the best deal we can make between the Uniats and the Orthodox in Russia? How long can we hold our precarious position in Syria? How can I unpick the tangle with the Blue Christians in China? Our master und
erstands that. He keeps the moralists away from my cabbage patch … But when you come down to it, he himself is an inquisitor born and bred. You know how close we’ve come several times to getting another Syllabus of Errors. You ask how you’d feel, or I. I can answer for myself. A mistaken servant perhaps. A time-server perhaps. But at least I’d be myself, without surprises. But Leo XIV is a man split clean down the middle. That confession we just heard. What did it say? My policies are dead right, even though I am as full of faults as a colander is full of holes. He’ll be an absolutist to the end. He has to be, else he’s nothing.’

  ‘So what do we pray for?’ MacAndrew was still in gallows humour. ‘His speedy recovery or his happy death?’

  ‘Whatever we pray for, we have to be prepared for what we get: Lazarus returning from the dead, confirmed in the beatific vision, or a corpse that we have to bury and a new candidate we have to find.’

  ‘Who recommended Salviati?’

  ‘Drexel. He gave him the highest praise.’

  ‘Then whether our Lazarus lives or dies, Drexel will have a lot to answer for, won’t he?’

  Sergio Salviati’s International Clinic was a splendid domain of parkland and pinewoods, perched high on the crater lip of Lake Nemi.