Three

It was ten o’clock when the night nurse came in to settle the Pontiff and give him a sedative. It was nearly one in the morning before he lapsed into an uneasy sleep, haunted by a serial dream.

… He was at his desk in the Vatican surrounded by expectant dignitaries, the highest in the Church: patriarchs, archbishops, of every rite and nationality – Byzantine, Melchite, Italo–Greek, Malakanese, Ruthenians, Copts, Bulgars and Chaldeans. He was writing a document which he intended to read aloud to them, seeking their approval and endorsement. Suddenly, he seemed to lose control of his fingers. The pen slipped from his grasp. His secretary picked it up and handed it back to him; but now it was a goose-quill, too light to handle, which dribbled ink and moved scratchily on the paper.

For some reason, he was writing in Greek instead of Latin, because he was anxious to impress on the Byzantines that he was open to their spirit and understanding of their needs. Suddenly he blocked on a word. All he could remember was the first letter – μ. The Patriarch of Antioch reproved him gently: ‘It is always safer to use a translator who has the language as a mother tongue.’ The Pontiff nodded a reluctant agreement, but continued to grope for the word among the cobwebs that seemed to have invaded his mind.

Next, still holding the paper, he found himself walking across St Peter’s Square to the Via del Sant’Ufficio. It seemed important that he confer with the Consultors to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for an explanation of the mysterious letter. They were vigilant guardians of the ancient truth, who would first rise to salute the Vicar of Christ and then enlighten him with their wisdom.

They did nothing of the kind. When he entered the aula where the Consultors were assembled, they sat like mutes, while the Prefect pointed to a stool where he must sit, isolated under their hostile scrutiny. The paper was taken from his hand and passed around the assembly. As each one read it, he clucked and shook his head and mouthed the sound ‘Mu’, so that soon the room was full of the bourdon as it were of swarming bees: Mu … Mu … Mu …

He tried to cry out, to protest that they were making a travesty of a most important encyclical, but the only sound he could utter was Mu … Mu … until, for very shame, he fell silent, closed his eyes and waited for their verdict. Out of the darkness a voice commanded him: ‘Open your eyes and read!’

When he obeyed, he found himself a boy again, in a dusty classroom, staring at a blackboard upon which was written the word which had eluded him for so long, A great sense of relief Hooded through him. He cried out: ‘You see, that’s what I was trying to say – Metanoia, repentance, a change of heart, a new direction.’ But no one answered. The room was empty. He was alone.

Then the door opened and he froze in terror at the vision that confronted him: an old, eagle-beaked man, with furrows of anger about his mouth and eyes black as volcanic glass. As the man moved towards him, silent and threatening, he screamed, but the sound would not come. It was as if a noose were knotted around his neck, cutting off air and life …

The night nurse and a young male orderly helped him to get up. While the orderly remade his tangled bed, the nurse walked him into the bathroom, peeled off his sodden pyjamas, sponged the sweat from his body, then brought him clean night clothes and a cool drink. When he thanked her and apologised for putting her to trouble, she laughed.

‘The first night in hospital is always a bad one. You’re full of fears that have to be dreamed out because you can’t put them into words. The sedatives get you to sleep, but they can disturb the normal rhythms of rest and dreaming … You’re better now. Your pulse rate’s steadying down. Why don’t you read for a little while? You’ll probably doze off again

‘What time is it, please?’

‘Three in the morning.’

‘Then it’s bad luck, isn’t it?’

‘Bad luck? I don’t understand.’

Leo the Pontiff gave a small, unsteady laugh.

‘Around Mirandola – that’s where I come from – the peasants say that the dreams we have after midnight are the ones that come true.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘Of course not. I was joking. It’s an old wives’ tale.’

But even as he said it, he knew it was an evasion. What he had dreamed was more than half the truth and what was not yet true might well be prophecy.

He could not read. He could not sleep. He felt too arid and empty to pray. So, wakeful in the dim light of the night lamp, he gave himself up to contemplation of his very uncertain future.

The word which he had been chasing through his dreams had become very important in his latter-day thinking. It expressed accurately what he desired to convey to the Church – a penitence for the mistakes of the past, a change for the better, a future openness to the needs of the faithful and to the designs of the Almighty. But the change had to be wrought in himself first of all and he could find no sure ground on which to stand while he made it.

The whole bent of his mind, the whole thrust of his education, all the transactions of his career, had been to conserve and not to change. No matter that so many historical claims made by the Church were based on forgery and fabrication; no matter that so much canonical legislation was unjust, intrusive and hopelessly loaded against the individual and in favour of the institution; no matter that so much dubious teaching was presented from the pulpit as official doctrine on the flimsiest foundation of scripture or tradition; no matter that the reforms envisaged in the decisions of a great Council were still unrealised four decades later … no matter, no matter! Just so the history remained obscure, the canons unchallenged, the dubious teaching unquestioned, then each generation would make, as it always had, its own accommodation with the paradox. It was better that the unbelievers should be cast out, the sceptics silenced and the disobedient censured, than that any rent should appear in the seamless robe of Roman unity.

In this frame of reference, theologians and philosophers were a dangerous luxury, biblical scholars a tendentious nuisance, still seeking to establish an historic Jesus instead of offering Jesus Christ yesterday, today and the same for ever. As for the faithful, they were at the best of times a wayward family, easily seduced by passion or by novelty.

This attitude of magisterial expediency dated far back through the centuries to an epoch when the faithful were illiterate and uncritical and the dispensation of faith, along with the exercise of power, were the prerogatives only of the literate, the clerics who were the natural custodians of knowledge and authority. As for the aberrant ones, the speculators, the too-bold theorists, they were easily dealt with. Error had no right to exist. The errant would repent or be burned.

In the twentieth century, however, in post-revolutionary, postconciliar societies, these attitudes had no place. They were at worst an unacceptable tyranny, at best a class snobbery that clerics, high or low, could ill-afford to practise. The faithful, up to their necks in the problems of modern living, had the need and the right and the duty to reason with their pastors, and no less a right and a duty to hold them accountable for their exercise of the magisterium, because if magistracy were an autarchic exercise beyond appeal, then at one stride they were back to secret denunciations, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé and automatic excommunications. The faithful would not take that any more. They were Children of God, free agents co-operating with His divine plan. If this liberty were abridged, they would refuse the abridgement and absent themselves from the assembly to await a more propitious time or a more charitable shepherd.

In the small half-light of the hospital room, whose silence was broken only by the distant sound of a patient’s call-buzzer, Leo the Pontiff saw it all clearly. No matter how bitterly he regretted his own defaults, he saw no easy way to mend them. He lacked the one essential talent which the good Pope John and Jean Marie Barette had both possessed: a sense of humour, a readiness to laugh at themselves and the egregious follies of mankind. There was not one photograph in existence of Leo XIV laughing. Even his rare smile was more like a grimace than an expression of pleasure.

Yet, in all truth, only part of the blame attached to him. The sheer size and mass of the institution created an inertia like that of a black hole in the galaxies. Enormous energy was sucked into it. The energy that emerged was constantly diminishing. The old Curial cliché. We think in centuries and plan for eternity’ had turned into a doom-saying.

The great tree of the Gospel parable, in which all the birds of the air could nest, was dying back from the tips of its spreading branches. The trunk was still solid, the great mass of foliage seemed intact; but at the outer edges there were dead twigs and sere leaves, and the nourishment from the taproot flowed more and more sluggishly.

The slow curse of centralism was working in the Church, as it had worked in every empire since Alexander’s. The British had succumbed to it, the Russians and the Americans were the latest to be forced into divestment of their territories and spheres of influence. The symptoms of malaise were always the same; disaffection in the outer marches, disenchantment with bureaucracy, alienation and indifference on the part of the people and, on the part of government, a growing impulse towards reaction and repression.

In religious terms, the numen of the papacy was fading, as its aura of mystery was dissipated by constant exposure on television and in the Press. Government by fiat brought small joy to folk in crisis, who yearned for compassion and for understanding of the God abiding among them. They did not reject the pastoral office. They paid ritual homage to the man who held it, but they asked how he mediated for them in the double mystery of the creative Godhead and confused humanity. For Leo the Pontiff the question was personal and immediate; but it was still unanswered when sleep claimed him again. This time, mercifully, he did not dream at all. He woke at first light to find Salviati standing beside the bed, with the night nurse a pace behind him. Salviati was counting his pulse rate.

‘Nurse tells me you had a rough night.’

‘I was having nightmares. However, I’ve just had a couple of hours’ good rest. How is your patient?’

‘Which patient are you talking about?’

‘The cardiac arrest. You and Mr Morrison went off in a great hurry last night.’

‘Oh, that one …’ Salviati shook his head. ‘We lost her. She’d already had two heart attacks before they brought her to see me. Her case was always a long shot. Sad though; she leaves a husband and two young children … If I’ve got the story right, the husband’s one of your people.’

‘Mine?’

‘A priest, one of the Roman clergy. Apparently he fell in love, got the girl pregnant and walked out of the ministry to marry her. He’s spent the last five years trying to have his position regularised by the Vatican – which, they tell me, isn’t as easy as it used to be.’

‘That’s true,’ said Leo the Pontiff. ‘It isn’t easy. Disciplines have been tightened.’

‘Well, it’s beyond mending now. The girl’s dead. He’s got two kids to care for. If he’s wise, he’ll try to find ’em a stepmother. So the situation repeats itself; yes?’

‘If you’d give me his name, I could perhaps …’

‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’ Salviati was studiously offhand. ‘I’m a Jew, so I don’t understand how you Christians reason about these things; but the boy’s very bitter and your intervention may be unwelcome.’

‘I’d still like to have his name.’

‘Your life is complicated enough. As from tomorrow, you begin a minimalist existence. So start now to be grateful – and let the Almighty run His own world. Open your pyjamas, please. I want to listen to your chest. Give me deep breaths now.’ After a few minutes of auscultation, he seemed to be satisfied. ‘You’ll do! It’s going to be a beautiful day. You should take a little stroll in the garden, get some clean air into your lungs. Don’t forget to tell the nurse when you’re going. You can’t get lost, but we like to know where all our patients are.’

I’ll take your advice. Thank you … I’d still like to have that young man’s name.’

‘You’re feeling guilty about him.’ It was more an accusation than a question.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘You gave the reason yourself. He’s one of mine. He broke the law. I set the penalties he incurred. When he wanted to come back, the way was barred to him by rules I made … I’d like to be reconciled with him, help him, too, if he’ll permit me.’

‘Tove Lundberg will give you his name and address. But not today, not until I say you’re ready to occupy yourself with affairs other than your own survival. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Abundantly,’ said Leo the Pontiff. ‘I wish my mind were half as clear as yours.’

To which Sergio Salviati answered with a proverb, ‘Every wolf must die in his own skin.’

‘If you want to swap proverbs,’ said Leo the Pontiff, ‘I’ll give you one from my home place: “It’s a hard winter when one wolf eats another.”’

For a moment Salviati seemed to withdraw into some dark recess of himself; then he laughed, a deep happy rumbling that went on for a long time. Finally, he dabbed at his streaming eyes and turned to the night nurse.

‘You’re witnessing history, my girl! Write it down and tell it to your grandchildren. Here’s a Jew from Venice disputing with the Pope of Rome in his own city.’

‘Write this down also …’ The Pontiff laughed as he said it. ‘The Pope is listening very carefully, because this time the Jew is the one with the knife in his hands! He can kill me or cure me!’

‘There’s a proverb for that, too,’ said Sergio Salviati. ‘“You’ve got a wolf by the ears. You can’t hang on and you can’t let go …

On that fine spring morning there were other folk, too, who found themselves hanging on to a wolf’s ears. The Secretariat of State was swamped with enquiries from all quarters of the globe, from legates and nuncios and metropolitan bishops, from cardinals and patriarchs, from diplomats and intelligence agencies of one colour or another. The burden of their questions was always the same: how serious was the Pontiff’s illness; what were the odds on his recovery; what would happen if … ?

The Secretariat, under Matteo Cardinal Agostini, normally conducted its business with an air of Olympian detachment. Its officials were a select tribe of polyglots who maintained diplomatic – and undiplomatic – relations with every region under the sun, from Zaire to Tananarive, from Seoul to St Andrews, from Ecuador to Alexandria of the Copts. Their communications were the most modern and the most ancient: satellites, safe-hand couriers, whispers at fashionable gatherings. They had a passion for secrecy and a talent for casuistry and discretion.

How could they be otherwise, since their competence, defined by Apostolic Constitution, was the widest of any organisation in the Church: ‘to help from close at hand (da vicino) the Supreme Pontiff, both in the care of the Universal Church and in his relations with the dicasteries of the Roman Curia.’ The which, as cynics pointed out, put the job of managing the Curia on a par with the care of a billion human souls!

The word dicastery had its own Byzantine coloration. It signified a tribunal, a court and, by extension, a ministry or department. It suggested a complicated protocol, an intricate web of interests, an ancient subtlety in the conduct of affairs. So when the diplomats of the Secretariat of State dealt with their secular peers or with the Dicasts of the Sacred Congregations, they were required to be quick on their feet, nimble of tongue and very, very wide awake.

Their replies to the questions that poured into their offices were bland, but not too bland. They were, after all, dealers in the marts of power. They were, for the moment, the spokesmen for the Holy See. They must make it clear that Rome was never taken by surprise. What the Holy Ghost did not reveal they supplied from their own refined intelligence services.

Yes, the medical bulletins on His Holiness could and should be taken at face value. The Holy Father had decreed an open information policy. No, the Electoral College had not been summoned, nor would it be until the Camerlengo declared that the throne of Peter was vacant. In fact, the Secretariat was actively discouraging visits to Rome by cardinals and archbishops from abroad. The Holy Father understood and commended their desire to offer support and loyalty but, frankly, he would prefer them to be about God’s business in their own vineyards.

Questions about the future competence of the Pontiff were dealt with curtly. They were inopportune and unfruitful. Common decency demanded that public speculation on this delicate matter be discouraged.

Time elements? The doctors advised a period of three months’ convalescence before the Pontiff resumed his normal schedules. In fact, this pointed to his return after the usual summer vacation, perhaps a month or so later than Ferragosto … Most certainly, Excellency! His Holiness will be informed of your call. He will no doubt wish to acknowledge it in person after his recovery. Meanwhile, our compliments to Your Excellency and his family …

All of which was sound enough, but hardly sufficient for the hinge-men of the Church, the Papal Princes who would have to decide upon the competence of the living pope or the successor to a dead one. In the context of the third millennium, total secrecy was an impossibility and the leisure for informed decision was an antique luxury. They had to be prepared at every moment. Their groupings had to be stable, their alliances tested, the terms of their bargainings and the price-tags on their votes had to be agreed in advance. So, there was a great mass of traffic – by telephone, by fax, by safe-hand courier – which bypassed Rome altogether. Chicago talked to Buenos Aires, Seoul talked to Westminster, Bangkok talked to Sydney. Some of the talk was blunt and pragmatic: ‘Are we agreed …?’; ‘Can we afford … ?’ Some of it was in sfumature, hints and nuances and careful allusions which could be disclaimed or reinterpreted with any shift of events.

The question which required the greatest delicacy in discussion was the one whose answer was the least evident: How far could an ailing pontiff be trusted to direct the affairs of a global community in crisis?

Tradition, established by long-dead papal dynasts, determined that a pontiff served until he dropped. History, on the other hand, proved beyond all doubt that one who outlived his usefulness became a liability to the community of the faithful – an instant liability, because in the modern world time telescoped itself, because act and consequence were immediately conjoined. There was sound argument for a term of service fixed by canonical statute, as it was in the case of cardinals and other prelates; but the man who raised the argument might well find his own career suddenly ended.

However, the subject was touched in an early morning telephone conversation between Anton Drexel and his old friend Manfred Cardinal Kaltenborn, Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro. Each was German-born, the one in Brasilia, the other in the Rhineland. They spoke in their mother tongue and their conversation was cryptic and good-humoured. They were old friends and sturdy campaigners who knew how to spell all the words in the book.

‘Can we talk freely, Anton?’

‘Never quite as freely as we’d like.’ Drexel had a healthy respect for satellite technology and the possibilities of espionage. ‘But let me give you some background. Our friend is already in care. I have it on the best authority that the odds are all in favour of recovery.’

‘To full competence?’

‘Yes; but in my view that will not be the issue.’

‘What then?’

‘It seems to have escaped most of our colleagues that our friend is undergoing a Gewissenskrise, a crisis of conscience. He has tried to reform the Church. Instead, he has created a wasteland. He sees no way to make it fruitful again. He has few confidants, no emotional supports, and a spiritual life based wholly on orthopraxis … right conduct, according to his limited lights. He will not risk beyond that, or reason beyond it either. So he is desperately lonely and afraid.’

‘How have the others missed this? They’re all intelligent observers.’

‘Most are afraid of him. They spend their lives either avoiding or managing him. I’m too old to care. He knows that. He doesn’t try to intimidate me.’

‘So what will he do?’

‘He will break or he will change. If he breaks, my guess is that he will simply surrender his hold on the office and possibly on life itself. If he is to change, he will need the experience of a charity he has never known in his life.’

‘We can’t endow him with that. It’s something we have to pray for.’

‘I’m proposing to work on it as well. I’m inviting him to spend part of his convalescence at my villa. It’s only a stone’s throw from Castel Gandolfo and an hour’s drive from the Vatican … He’s a farmer’s son, he might appreciate a change to country manners. He can also meet my little tribe and see how they handle their lives.’

There was a brief silence and then His Eminence from Rio de Janeiro murmured a warning.

‘Some of our colleagues might not understand your intentions, Anton. They mistrust kingmakers and grey eminences.’

‘Then they will say so.’ Anton Drexel’s tone was testy. ‘And His Holiness will decide for himself. Charity may bend that stubborn will of his. Opposition will only stiffen it.’

‘So, let’s go one step further, Anton. Our master has his second Pentecost – tongues of fire, an infusion of the Spirit, a rush of charity like the flush of spring. What next? What does he do about it? How does he retreat from the trenches he’s dug for himself – for us all? You know the way it works in Rome. Never explain, never make excuses. Never appear to hurry a decision.’

‘I’ve talked about this at length with his physician, who is as concerned as I, though for other reasons. He’s a Jew. He lost relatives in the Holocaust and the Black Sabbath in Rome … For him, this is a moment of extraordinary irony. He holds the life of the Roman Pontiff in his hands. You see the implications?’

‘Some at least I see very clearly. But how does he answer my question? What does the Holy Father do – afterwards?’

‘Salviati is emphatic that the Pontiff can do nothing unless we help him. I agree. I know his family history. Subsistence farming. A father dead too early. A mother determined to lift her son and herself off the dung heap. The best, if not the only, solution was the Church. It’s a sad, sterile story. The one thing he has never experienced is the human family, the quarrels, the kisses, the fairytales around the fire.’

‘You and I, my dear Anton, are hardly experts in that area.’

‘You underrate me, my friend,’ Anton Drexel laughed. ‘I have a very large adoptive progeny, sixteen boys and girls. And they all live under my roof.’

‘Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Anton! I’ve got a million homeless kids in the favelas here! If you’re ever short, I can always send you some replacements.’

‘Send me your prayers instead. I’m not half as confident as I sound in this affair.’

‘It seems to me you’re juggling with a man’s soul – and quite possibly with his sanity. You’re also playing very dangerous politics. You could be accused of making a puppet out of a sick man. Why are you doing it, old friend?’

It was the question Drexel had dreaded, but he had to answer it.

‘You know I correspond with Jean Marie Barette?’ ‘I do. Where is he now?’

‘Still in Germany, in that little mountain commune I told you about; but he manages to be very well informed about what’s going on in the big world. It was he who encouraged me in this work with the children … You know Jean Marie; he can make jokes like a Parisian music-hall comedian and the next moment he is discoursing deep mysteries. About a month ago he wrote me a very strange letter. Part of it was pure prophecy. He told me that the Holy Father would soon be forced to make a dangerous voyage and that I was the one marked to support him on the journey. Soon afterwards the Pontiff’s disease was diagnosed; the papal physician named Salviati as the best heart surgeon in Italy – and the mother of my favourite Enkelin is a counsellor at his clinic. So a whole pattern of related events began to form itself around me. Does that answer your question?’

‘You’ve left out something, Anton.’

‘What?’

‘Why do you care so much about a man you’ve disliked for so long?’

‘You’re being rough with me, Manfred.’

‘Answer my question. Why do you care so much?’

‘Because I’m past eighty. I am perhaps closer to judgement even than our Pontiff. I have been given many of the sweets of life. If I don’t share them now, they will be like Dead Sea fruit – dust and ashes in my mouth!’

Nicol Peters sat under a pergola of vines on his terrace, sipped coffee, ate fresh pastry and watched the roof-dwellers of old Rome wake to the warm spring morning.

There was the fat fellow with striped pyjamas gaping open at the crotch, whose first care was to take the cover off his canary cage and coax the birds into a morning chorus, with trills and cadenzas of his own. There was the housewife in curlers and carpet slippers, watering her azaleas. On the next terrace, a heavy-hipped girl in a black leotard laboured through fifteen minutes of aerobic exercises to the tinny tunes of a tape machine. Over by the Torre Argentina a pair of lovers thrust open their shutters and then, as if seeing each other for the first time, embraced passionately and tumbled back into bed for a public mating.

Their nearest audience was a skinny bachelor with a towel for a loincloth, who did his own laundry and hung out every morning the shirt, the jockey shorts, the cotton vest and socks which he had just washed under the shower. This done, he lit a cigarette, watched the love-making of his neighbours and went inside to reappear a few minutes later with coffee and a morning paper … Above them, the first swifts dipped and wheeled around the campaniles and through the forest of antennae and satellite discs, while shadowy figures passed and repassed by open doors and casements to a growing cacophony of music, radio announcements and a rumour of traffic from the alleys below.

These folk were the theme upon which Nicol Peters was building the text for his weekly column, ‘A View From My Terrace’. He stacked the scattered pages, picked up a pencil and began his editing.

‘ … The Romans have a proprietary interest in the Pope. They own him. He is their elected Bishop. His domains are all on Roman soil. They cannot be exported, but they may in some future crisis be expropriated. There is not a single Roman citizen who will not freely admit that most of his personal income depends directly or indirectly upon the Pontiff. Who else brings the tourists and the pilgrims and the art lovers and the romantics, young and old, to clog the airport and pack the hotels and pump tourist and export currency into the city?

‘The fact that they need him, however, does not compel the Romans to love him. Some do. Some don’t. Most accept him with a shrug and an expressive “Boh!”, a monosyllable which defies translation but conveys a wholly Roman sentiment: “Popes come, Popes go. We acclaim them. We bury them. You must not expect us to tremble at every proclamation and every anathema they utter.

“‘That’s our way, you see. Foreigners never understand it. We make horrendous laws, load them with terrible penalties – and then water them all down with tolleranza and casuistry! …

“‘It has nothing to do with faith and only a little to do with morals. It has to do with arrangiarsi, the art of getting along, of managing oneself in a contradictory world. If the cogs of creation slip, that has to be due to defects in the original workmanship. So, God can’t be too hard on his creatures who live on a defective planet.

“‘The Pope will tell you Christian marriages are made in heaven. They are made to last a lifetime. We’re good Catholics, we have no quarrel with that. But Beppi and Lucia next door come close to murder every night, and keep us all awake. Is that Christian? Is that a marriage? Does it have the seal of heaven stamped on it? We beg leave to doubt the proposition. The sooner they break up, the sooner we’ll all get some sleep; but, for pity’s sake, don’t stop ’em finding new mates; otherwise our lives will be disrupted again by a randy bull and a heifer in heat …”

‘Clearly, there is no way your average Roman wants to argue this with the Pope. After all, a Pope sleeps alone and loves everybody in the Lord, so he is ill-equipped to deal with such matters. So your Roman listens politely to what he has to say, makes his own arrangements and turns up faithfully in church for marriages, christenings, funerals and first communions.

‘So far, so good – for the Romans! They have no need or desire to change their capital interest in the Pope. But what about the rest of Christendom – not to mention the millions outside the pale? Their attitude is exactly the reverse. They are happy to accept the Pope – or anyone else for that matter – as a champion of good conduct, just dealing, stable family relationships, social responsibility. It’s his theology which now becomes the root problem. Who, they ask, determines that the Pope sees all creation plain as day, the moment after he is elected? Who gives him the prescriptive right to create, by simple proclamation, a doctrine like the Assumption of the Virgin or to declare that it is a crime most damnable for a husband and wife to control their own breeding cycle with a pill or a condom?

‘The questions, it seems to this writer, are legitimate and they deserve open discussion and answers more frank than those which have yet been given. They need something else, too – a compassion in the respondent, an openness to history and to argument, a respect for the honest doubts and reservations of his questioners. I have been unable to find the source of the following quotation, but I have no hesitation in adopting it as my own sentiment: “There will be no hope of reform in the Roman Catholic Church, there will be no restoration of confidence between the faithful and the hierarchy, unless and until a reigning pontiff is prepared to admit and abjure the errors of his predecessors …

They were strong words, the strongest Nicol Peters had written in a long time. Given the subject and the circumstances, an ailing pontiff under threat of death, they might even be considered a gross breach of etiquette. The longer he practised his craft, the more conscious he became of the dynamic of language, of speech and writing as events in themselves. The simplest and most obvious proposition, stated in the most elementary language, could so mutate itself in the mind of the reader that it could express the opposite of what the writer had intended. What he wrote as evidence for the defence could hang the man he was defending.

Nicol Peters’s credit and credibility as a commentator on the Vatican depended upon his ability to render the most complex argument into clear prose for the hurried reader. The clarity of the prose depended upon a precise understanding of the matter at issue. In this case, it was a highly delicate one. It had to do with the Roman view of orthodoxy (right doctrine) and orthopraxis (right practice), the nature of the pontiff’s right to prescribe either – and his duty to recant any error that might creep into the prescription.

This was the problem which still split Christendom like an apple, and which the old-fashioned absolutism of Leo XIV had only exacerbated. It would not be solved as the Romans solved it, by cynical indifference. It would not go away like a wart or heal itself like a razor nick. It would grow and fester like a cancer, sapping the inner life of the Church, reducing it to invalidism and indifference.

Which raised quite other questions for Nicol Peters, doyen of the press corps, confidant of cardinals, comfortable in his elegant Roman domain: ‘Why should I care so much? I’m not even a Catholic, for God’s sake! Why should I sweat blood over every shade of clerical opinion, while the hierarchs themselves sit content inside the ramparts of Vatican City and watch the decline and fall of the Roman Church?’

To which his wife Katrina, arrived with fresh coffee and her good morning smile, delivered the perfect answer: ‘Glum today, are we? Morning sex doesn’t agree with you? Brighten up, lover boy. Spring is here. The shop’s making money. And I’ve just had a fascinating phone call about Salviati and his girlfriend and, of all people, your friend Drexel.’