Act II, Scene 3

Spring 1971. Stage is black. Light up. It is late at night. Rain is falling in a storm. Now and then, we hear thunder in the distance. Corso and Orsini are sharing a bottle of red wine. Corso’s jacket and shirt collar are off – but not Orsini’s. There are piles of papers on the table, ignored by them. They are silent for a moment, each lost in his own thought. Their discussion escalates into a fierce argument.

ORSINI

What are you thinking about?

CORSO

The word “beatification.” “To raise someone up for religious honor.” Do you think that means in the eyes of the dead as well as us?

ORSINI

(shaking his head) Life is for the living. Why?

CORSO

I see the faces of the dying kids on the Pacific islands during the war. Funny, I saw them even when I visited Auschwitz. I’ve seen so many pictures and films of the poor souls in the concentration camps, you’d think I’d have seen them in my mind.

ORSINI

It’s been a terrible century. Each of us relives it according to his own experience.

CORSO

Yeah, but that bastard, Eichmann, was right. The Holocaust was different. Our minds are overwhelmed by it; our brains short-circuit when we think about it. We can only handle one face at time. (Pause.) A commitment to abstractions, that was Pius’ error, I think. For all his lonely mysticism, religion was abstractions to him. Theological legalisms, political strategies, institutionalism ... Without moral courage, such a religion is sterile! Pius’ religion was all legalism, intellectualism and other-worldly piety. He ended up being tone-deaf to the flesh-and-blood horror surrounding him.

ORSINI

You yourself are engaging in abstractions now.

CORSO

Then let me try a metaphor instead. I think Pius made his pontificate into a medieval knight.

ORSINI

How so?

CORSO

He put the Church in thick armor against outside dangers, especially modernism and Communism. And he bolted the Church to the saddle. Catholicism could have been formidable, but in all that heavy armor, Pius’ Catholicism was unable to move, and blind too – blind to the unprecedented evil of Nazism.

ORSINI

You wax poetic! Pius didn’t have that luxury! He had to ensure the Church’s continued existence, its survival in the time of critical danger.

CORSO

(becoming angry) Did he have such little faith that Catholics would have kept the Church alive despite whatever Hitler might have done to it? Did he have so little faith that God would have preserved it?

ORSINI

(insistent) You don’t know what they would have done, and neither did Pius! It was his responsibility!

CORSO

(also insistent) He was the Oracle of Christ, for God’s sake – he himself insisted on that! What about that responsibility! Use your imagination – do you think Jesus would have sat here, silent, making intricate little diplomatic chess moves while millions were being murdered? Can you really conjure that up as a possibility?

ORSINI

(impatient) Pius was not Christ – he was only a man. There are always infinite possibilities – in retrospect. The fact is, Pius faced one, single, intractable imperative!

CORSO

Which was?

ORSINI

(with more impatience) To preserve the Church against the evils of his time, above all. (He adds as an afterthought.) And within that context, to help create peace and alleviate suffering, of course.

CORSO

The evils of our time require more than that. Much more! The Church should be a participant – a leader – in great moral issues. Nazism was not just another tyranny like a thousand others in history. It was carrying out genocide, unspeakable mass cruelties, and world conquest in an era when technology made these real possibilities! The fact that Pius’ silence was motivated at the beginning by the thought the Germans might have already won the war damns him all the more! He would have been silent in a world dominated by Hitler! And all that baloney about not being able to condemn Hitler without condemning Stalin won’t fly.

ORSINI

Why not? Isn’t your own United States now fighting a cruel war in Vietnam to defeat Communism?

CORSO

Lyndon Johnson was dead wrong to make that war, and Americans are correcting him. Thanks to democracy – something which Pius had contempt for, with his love for Teutonic authoritarianism. It won’t fly because, monster that he was, Stalin was not attempting genocide. And the free world did stand up to him. Late maybe, but with great determination. Pius’ excuses won’t fly because the twentieth century has produced unique evil, not just more of the same. Who was it that said at a certain point differences in degrees eventually become differences in quality…?

ORSINI

What does it matter!

CORSO

Millions of people in Pius’ time saw this clearly. Pius was smart enough to see it, too!

ORSINI

Of course he saw it, and he fought it as he should have! The proper way! Political neutrality. And upholding God’s natural law as the standard. It wasn’t Pius who ordered the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!

CORSO

He must be judged on the whole, as you said when we first started this investigation. On the whole moral quality of his pontificate. The good that he did in asking Catholics to help Jews in Italy is admirable. He took leadership there, and it worked. Which damns his silence about the rest of Europe all the more! Silence, when speaking out might have helped save millions. Moral courage! Without it, Christianity, or any other religion, is just another pie-in-the-sky scam!

ORSINI

(with disgust) You sound like a Marxist.

CORSO

Don’t pull that on me! If Pius’ view of religion is to prevail, then Marx might just as well have been right! Religion might just as well be ... marijuana!

ORSINI

So! Now at last we come to it. You would have the Church be just another voice promoting the morality of the day, like some sanctimonious American political party. The Church’s mission is infinitely more – and infinitely superior. The salvation of souls!

CORSO

By other-worldly piety? Keep your eyes on heaven while there’s an ocean of blood forming at your feet? Thank God Vatican II repudiated that!

ORSINI

And threw the baby out with the bath! Look at what’s happening in your “new Catholicism.” Priests are leaving their vocations! Laymen ignore Church teaching! Young people think Christianity requires nothing deeper than being a “nice guy” and “feeling good.” (Mockingly.) “God is within you! God is within you!” So every selfish thing you do for yourself is a religious act!

CORSO

Alright, then, the battle is on! A Christianity of Pius, the Lawyer-Pope, versus a religion of Christ’s white-hot love. Pius made the Church into an idol! It’s time to turn it ...

ORSINI

(interrupting) ... Into what? A religion which stands for any and all passing fashions and platitudes? Vatican II was an aberration – a dangerous aberration! Catholicism’s strength is its unchanging permanence, its transcending all factions and philosophies on earth!

CORSO

... No! Into a religion that finally honors the words of Catherine of Siena ... (Gesturing toward the window.) There’s a statue of her somewhere out there. “Love of God and love of neighbor are the same thing!” If Christianity doesn’t stand for that, it stands for nothing!

ORSINI

(contemptuously) Love? Without authority, love is Hollywood sentimentality! God forbid the Church fall into that abyss! (Long pause, while they glare at each other. Then Corso sighs. He pours another glass of wine for each of them. He hands one to Orsini.)

CORSO

It seems we’re going to be at this for a long time. A long, long time. (Corso raises his glass as if in a toast. Orsini doesn’t respond except by staring coldly at him. Light goes to black.)