THE POPE was dead. The Camerlengo had announced it. The Master of Ceremonies, the notaries, the doctors had consigned him under signature into eternity. His ring was defaced and his seals were broken. The bells had been rung throughout the city. The pontifical body had been handed to the embalmers so that it might be a seemly object for the veneration of the faithful. Now it lay, between white candles, in the Sistine Chapel with the Noble Guard keeping a death watch under Michelangelo’s frescoes of the Last Judgement.
The Pope was dead. Tomorrow the clergy of the Basilica would claim him and expose him to the public in the Chapel of the Most Holy Sacrament. On the third day they would bury him, clothed in full pontificals, with a mitre on his head, a purple veil on his face, and a red ermine blanket to warm him in the crypt. The medals he had struck and coinage he had minted would be buried with him to identify him to any who might dig him up a thousand years later. They would seal him in three coffins – one of cypress; one of lead to keep him from the damp and to carry his coat of arms, and the certificate of his death; the last of elm so that he might seem, at least, like other men who go to the grave in a wooden box.
The Pope was dead. So they would pray for him as for any other: ‘Enter not into judgement with thy servant, O Lord…Deliver him from eternal death.’ Then they would lower him into the vault under the High Altar, where perhaps – but only perhaps – he would moulder into dust with the dust of Peter; and a mason would brick up the vault and fix on a marble tablet with his name, his title, and the date of his birth and his obit.
The Pope was dead. They would mourn with nine days of Masses and give nine Absolutions – of which, having been greater in his life than other men, he might have greater need after his death.
Then they would forget him, because the See of Peter was vacant, the life of the Church was in syncope and the Almighty was without a vicar on this troubled planet.
The See of Peter was vacant. So the Cardinals of the Sacred College assumed trusteeship over the authority of the Fisherman, though they lacked the power to exercise it. The power did not reside in them but in Christ and none could assume it but by lawful transmission and election.
The See of Peter was vacant. So they struck two medals, one for the Camerlengo, which bore a large umbrella over crossed keys. There was no one under the umbrella, and this was a sign to the most ignorant that there was no incumbent for the Chair of the Apostles, and that all that was done had only an interim character. The second medal was that of the Governor of the Conclave: he who must assemble the Cardinals of the Church, and lock them inside the chambers of the conclave and keep them there until they had issued with a new Pope.
Every coin new-minted in the Vatican City, every stamp now issued, bore the words sede vacante, which even those without Latinity might understand as ‘while the Chair is vacant’. The Vatican newspaper carried the same sign on its front page, and would wear a black band of mourning until the new Pontiff was named.
Every news service in the world had a representative camped on the doorstep of the Vatican press office; and from each point of the compass old men came, bent with years or infirmity, to put on the scarlet of princes and sit in conclave for the making of a new Pope.
There were Carlin the American, and Rahamani the Syrian, and Hsien the Chinese, and Hanna the Irishman from Australia. There were Councha from Brazil, and da Costa from Portugal. There were Morand from Paris, and Lavigne from Brussels, and Lambertini from Venice, and Brandon from London. There were a Pole and two Germans, and a Ukrainian whom nobody knew because his name had been reserved in the breast of the last Pope and had been proclaimed only a few days before his death. In all there were eighty-five men, of whom the eldest was ninety-two and the youngest, the Ukrainian, was fifty. As each of them arrived in the city, he presented himself and his credentials to the urbane and gentle Valerio Rinaldi, who was the Cardinal Camerlengo.
Rinaldi welcomed each with a slim, dry hand and a smile of mild irony. To each he administered the oath of the conclavist: that he understood and would rigorously observe all the rules of the election as laid down in the Apostolic Constitution of 1945, that he would under pain of a reserved excommunication preserve the secret of the election, that he would not serve by his votes the interest of any secular power, that, if he were elected Pope, he would not surrender any temporal right of the Holy See which might be deemed necessary to its independence.
No one refused the oath; but Rinaldi, who had a sense of humour, wondered many times why it was necessary to administer it at all – unless the Church had a healthy disrespect for the virtues of its princes. Old men were apt to be too easily wounded. So, when he outlined the terms of the oath, Valerio Rinaldi laid a mild emphasis on the counsel of the Apostolic Constitution, that all the proceedings of the election should be conducted with ‘prudence, charity, and a singular calm’.
His caution was not unjustified. The history of papal elections was a stormy one, at times downright turbulent. When Damasus the Spaniard was elected in the fourth century, there were massacres in the churches of the city. Leo V was imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by the Theophylacts, so that for nearly a century the Church was ruled by puppets directed by the Theophylact women, Theodora and Marozia. In the conclave of 1623 eight Cardinals and forty of their assistants died of malaria, and there were harsh scenes and tough words over the election of the Saint, Pius X.
All in all, Rinaldi concluded – though he was wise enough to keep the conclusion to himself – it was best not to trust too much to the crusty tempers and the frustrated vanities of old men. Which brought him by a round turn to the problem of housing and feeding eighty-five of them with their servants and assistants until the election should be finished. Some of them, it seemed, would have to take over quarters from the Swiss Guard. None of them could be lodged too far from bathroom or toilet, and all had to be provided with a minimum service by way of cooks, barbers, surgeons, physicians, valets, porters, secretaries, waiters, carpenters, plumbers, firemen (in case any weary prelate nodded off with a cigar in his hand!). If (God forbid!) any Cardinal were in prison or under indictment, he had to be brought to the conclave and made to perform his functions under military guard.
This time, however, no one was in prison – except Krizanic in Yugoslavia, and he was in prison for the faith, which was a different matter – and the late Pope had run an efficient administration, so that Valerio Cardinal Rinaldi even had time to spare to meet with his colleague, Leone of the Holy Office, who was also the Dean of the Sacred College. Leone lived up to his name. He had a grey lion’s mane and a growling temper. He was, moreover, a Roman, bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool. Rome was for him the centre of the world, and centralism was a doctrine almost as immutable as that of the Trinity and the Procession of the Holy Ghost. With his great eagle beak and his jowly jaw, he looked like a senator strayed out of Augustan times, and his pale eyes looked out on the world with wintry disapproval.
Innovation was for him the first step towards heresy, and he sat in the Holy Office like a grizzled watchdog, whose hackles would rise at the first unfamiliar sound in doctrine interpretation, or practice. One of his French colleagues had said, with more wit than charity, ‘Leone smells of the fire.’ But the general belief was that he would plunge his own hand into the flame rather than set his signature to the smallest deviation from orthodoxy.
Rinaldi respected him, though he had never been able to like him, and so their intercourse had been limited to the courtesies of their common trade. Tonight, however, the old lion seemed in gentler mood, and was disposed to be talkative. His pale, watchful eyes were lit with a momentary amusement.
‘I’m eighty-two, my friend, and I’ve buried three Popes. I’m beginning to feel lonely.’
‘If we don’t get a younger man this time,’ said Rinaldi mildly, ‘you may well bury a fourth.’
Leone shot a quick look from under his shaggy brows. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
Rinaldi shrugged, and spread his fine hands in a Roman gesture. ‘Just what it says. We’re all too old. There are not more than half a dozen of us who can give the Church what it needs at this moment: personality, a decisive policy, time and continuity to make the policy work.’
‘Do you think you’re one of the half-dozen?’
Rinaldi smiled with thin irony. ‘I know I’m not. When the new man is chosen – whoever he is – I propose to offer him my resignation, and ask his permission to rusticate at home. It’s taken me fifteen years to build a garden in that place of mine. I’d like a little while to enjoy it.’
‘Do you think I have a chance of election?’ asked Leone bluntly.
‘I hope not,’ said Rinaldi.
Leone threw back his great mane and laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I know I haven’t. They need someone quite different; someone’ – he hesitated, fumbling for the phrase – ‘someone who has compassion on the multitude, who sees them, as Christ saw them – sheep without a shepherd. I’m not that sort of man. I wish I were.’
Leone heaved his bulky body out of the chair, and walked to the big table where an antique globe stood among a litter of books. He spun the globe slowly on its axis so that now one country, now another, swam into the light. ‘Look at it, my friend! The world, our vineyard! Once we colonized it in the name of Christ. Not righteously always, not always justly or wisely, but the Cross was there, and the Sacraments were there, and however a man lived – in purple or in chains – there was a chance for him to die like a son of God. Now…? Now we are everywhere in retreat. China is lost to us, and Asia and all the Russias. Africa will soon be gone, and the South Americas will be next. You know it. I know it. It is the measure of our failure that we have sat all these years in Rome, and watched it happen.’ He checked the spinning globe with an unsteady hand, and then turned to face his visitor, with a new question. ‘If you had your life over, Rinaldi, what would you do with it?’
Rinaldi looked up with that deprecating smile which lent him so much charm. ‘I think I should probably do the same things again. Not that I’m very proud of them, but they happened to be the only things I could do well. I get along with people, because I’ve never been capable of very deep feelings about them. That makes me, I suppose, a natural diplomat. I don’t like to quarrel. I like even less to be emotionally involved. I like privacy and I enjoy study. So I’m a good canonist, a reasonable historian, and an adequate linguist. I’ve never had very strong passions. You might, if you felt malicious, call me a cold fish. So I’ve achieved a reputation for good conduct without having to work for it… All in all, I’ve had a very satisfactory life – satisfactory to myself, of course. How the recording angel sees it, is another matter.’
‘Don’t underrate yourself, man,’ said Leone sourly. ‘You’ve done a great deal better than you’ll admit.’
‘I need time and reflection to set my soul in order,’ said Rinaldi quietly. ‘May I count on you to help me resign?’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you. Now, suppose the inquisitor answers his own question. What would you do if you had to begin again?’
‘I’ve thought about it often,’ said Leone heavily. ‘If I didn’t marry – and I’m not sure but that’s what I needed to make me halfway human – I’d be a country priest with just enough theology to hear confession, and just enough Latin to get through Mass and the sacramental formulae. But with heart enough to know what griped in the guts of other men, and made them cry into their pillows at night. I’d sit in front of my church on a summer evening and read my office and talk about the weather and the crops, and learn to be gentle with the poor and humble with the unhappy ones… You know what I am now? A walking encyclopaedia of dogma and theological controversy. I can smell out an error faster than a Dominican. And what does it mean? Nothing. Who cares about theology except the theologians? We are necessary but less important than we think. The Church is Christ – Christ and the people. And all the people want to know is whether or no there is a God, and what is His relation with them, and how they can get back to Him when they stray.’
‘Large questions,’ said Rinaldi gently, ‘not to be answered by small minds or gross ones.
Leone shook his lion’s mane stubbornly. ‘For the people they come down to simplicities! Why shouldn’t I covet my neighbour’s wife? Who takes the revenge that is forbidden to me? And who cares when I am sick and tired, and dying in an upstairs room? I can give them a theologian’s answer. But whom do they believe but the man who feels the answers in his heart, and bears the scars of their consequences in his own flesh? Where are the men like that? Is there one among all of us who wear the red hat? Eh…!’ His grim mouth twitched into a grin of embarrassment, and he flung out his arms in mock despair. ‘We are what we are, and God has to take half the responsibility even for theologians!…Now tell me – where do we go for our Pope?’
‘This time,’ said Rinaldi crisply, ‘we should choose him for the people and not for ourselves.’
‘There will be eighty-five of us in the conclave. How many will agree on what is best for the people?’
Rinaldi looked down at the backs of his carefully manicured fingers. He said softly, ‘If we showed them the man first, perhaps we could get them to agree.’
Leone’s answer was swift and emphatic. ‘You would have to show him to me first.’
‘And if you agreed?’
‘Then there would be another question,’ said Leone flatly. ‘How many of our brethren will think as we do?’
The question was subtler than it looked, and they both knew it. Here, in fact, was the whole loaded issue of a papal election, the whole paradox of the Papacy. The man who wore the Fisherman’s ring was Vicar of Christ, Vicegerent of the Almighty. His dominion was spiritual and universal. He was the servant of all the servants of God, even of those who did not acknowledge him.
On the other hand, he was Bishop of Rome, Metropolitan of an Italian see. The Romans claimed by historic tradition a preemption on his presence and his services. They relied on him for employment, for the tourist trade and the bolstering of their economy by Vatican investment, for the preservation of their historic monuments and national privileges. His court was Italian in character; the greater number of his household and his administrators were Italian. If he could not deal with them familiarly in their own tongue, he stood naked to palace intrigue and every kind of partisan interest.
Once upon a time the Roman view had had a peculiarly universal aspect. The numen of the ancient empire still hung about it, and the memory of the Pax Romana had not yet vanished from the consciousness of Europe. But the numen was fading. Imperial Rome had never subdued Russia or Asia, and the Latins who conquered South America had brought no peace, but the sword. England had revolted long since, as she had revolted earlier from the legions of Roman occupation. So that there was sound argument for a new, non-Italian succession to the papal throne – just as there was sound reason for believing that a non-Italian might become either a puppet of his ministers or a victim of their talent for intrigue.
The perpetuity of the Church was an article of faith; but its diminutions and corruptions, and its jeopardy by the follies of its members, were part of the canon of history. There was plenty of ground for cynicism. But over and over again the cynics were confounded by the uncanny capacity for self-renewal in the Church and in the Papacy. The cynics had their own explanations. The faithful put it down to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Either way there was an uncomfortable mystery: how the chaos of history could issue in so consistent a hold on dogma or why an omniscient God chose such a messy method of preserving His foothold in the minds of His creatures.
So every conclave began with the invocation of the Paraclete. On the day of the walling-in, Rinaldi led his old men and their attendants into St Peter’s. Then Leone came, dressed in a scarlet chasuble and accompanied by his deacons and subdeacons, to begin the Mass of the Holy Spirit. As he watched the celebrant, weighed down by the elaborate vestments, moving painfully through the ritual of the sacrifice, Rinaldi felt a pang of pity for him and a sudden rush of understanding.
They were all in the same galley, these leaders of the Church-himself along with them. They were men without issue, who had ‘made themselves eunuchs for the love of God’. A long time since they had dedicated themselves with greater or less sincerity to the service of a hidden God, and to the propagation of an unprovable mystery. Through the temporality of the Church they had attained to honour, more honour perhaps than any of them might have attained in the secular state, but they all lay under the common burden of age – failing faculties, the loneliness of eminence, and the fear of a reckoning that might find them bankrupt debtors.
He thought, too, of the stratagem which he had planned with Leone, to introduce a candidate who was still a stranger to most of the voters, and to promote his cause without breaching the Apostolic Constitution which they had sworn to preserve. He wondered if this were not a. presumption and an attempt to circumvent Providence, whom they were invoking at this very moment. Yet, if God had chosen, as the faith taught, to use man as a free instrument for a divine plan, how else could one act? One could not let so momentous an occasion as a papal election play itself like a game of chance. Prudence was enjoined on all – prayerful preparation and then considered action, and afterwards resignation and submission. Yet however prudently one planned, one could not escape the uncanny feeling that one walked unwary and unpurged on sacred ground.
The heat, the flicker of the candles, the chant of the choir, and the mesmeric pace of the ritual made him drowsy, and he stole a surreptitious glance at his colleagues to see if any of them had noticed his nodding.
Like twin choirs of ancient archangels they sat on either side of the sanctuary, their breasts hung with golden crosses, the princely seals agleam on their folded hands, their faces scored by age and the experience of power.
There was Rahamani of Antioch, with his spade beard and his craggy brows and his bright, half-mystical eyes. There was Benedetti, round as a dumpling with pink cheeks and candyfloss hair, who ran the Vatican Bank. Next to him was Potocki from Poland, he of the high, bald dome and the suffering mouth and the wise, calculating eyes. Tatsue from Japan wanted only the saffron robe to make him a Buddhist image, and Hsien, the exiled Chinese, sat between Ragambwe, the black man from Kenya, and Pallenberg, the lean ascetic from Munich.
Rinaldi’s shrewd eyes ranged along the choir stalls, naming each one for his virtues or his shortcomings, trying on each the classic label papabile, he-who-has-the-makings-of-a-Pope. In theory every member of the conclave could wear it; in practice very few were eligible.
Age was a bar to some. Talent or temperament or reputation was an impediment to others. Nationality was a vital question. One could not elect an American without seeming to divide East and West even further. A Negro Pope might seem a spectacular symbol of the new revolutionary nations, just as a Japanese might be a useful link between Asia and Europe. But the princes of the Church were old men and as wary of spectacular gestures as they were of historic hangovers. A German Pope might alienate the sympathies of those who had suffered in World War II. A Frenchman would recall old memories of Avignon and tramontane rebellions. While there were still dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, an Iberian Pope could be a diplomatic indiscretion. Gonfalone, the Milanese, had the reputation of being a saint, but he was becoming more and more of a recluse, and there was question of his fitness for so public an office. Leone was an autocrat who might well mistake the fire of zealotry for the flame of compassion.
The lector was reading from the Acts of the Apostles. ‘In those days, Peter began and said, Men, Brethren, the Lord charged us to preach to the people and to testify that He is the one who has been appointed by God to be judge of the living and of the dead…’ The choir sang, ‘Veni, Sancte Spiritus…Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of your faithful ones…’ Then Leone began to read in his strong stubborn voice the Gospel for the day of the conclave: ‘He who enters not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbs up another way is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep’. Rinaldi bent his head in his hands and prayed that the man he was offering would be in truth a shepherd, and that the conclave might hand him the crook and the ring.
When the Mass was over, the celebrant retired to the sacristy to take off his vestments, and the Cardinals relaxed in the stalls. Some of them whispered to one another, a couple were still nodding drowsily, and one was seen to take a surreptitious pinch of snuff. The next part of the ceremony was a formality, but it promised to be a boring one. A prelate would read them a homily in Latin, pointing out once again the importance of the election and their moral obligation to carry it out in an orderly and honest fashion. By ancient custom, the prelate was chosen for the purity of his Latin, but this time the Camerlengo had made another arrangement.
A whisper of surprise stirred round the assembly as they saw Rinaldi leave his place and walk down to the far end of the stalls on the Gospel side of the Altar. He offered his hand to a tall, thin Cardinal and led him to the pulpit. When he stood elevated in the full glare of the lights, they saw that he was the youngest of them all. His hair was black, his square beard was black too, and down his left cheek was a long, livid scar. On his breast, in addition to the cross, was a pectoral ikon representing a Byzantine Madonna and Child. When he crossed himself, he made the sign from right to left in the Slavonic manner; yet, when he began to speak, it was not in Latin but in a pure and melodious Tuscan. Across the nave Leone smiled a grim approval at Rinaldi, and then they surrendered themselves like their colleagues to the simple eloquence of the stranger:
‘My name is Kiril Lakota, and I am come the latest and the least into this Sacred College. I speak to you today by the invitation of our brother the Cardinal Camerlengo. To most of you I am a stranger because my people are scattered, and I have spent the last seventeen years in prison. If I have any rights among you, any credit at all, let this be the foundation of them – that I speak for the lost ones, for those who walk in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death. It is for them and not for ourselves that we are entering into conclave. It is for them and not for ourselves that we must elect a Pontiff. The first man who held this office. was one who walked with Christ, and was crucified like the Master. Those who have best served the Church and the faithful are those who have been closest to Christ and to the people, who are the image of Christ. We have power in our hands, my brothers. We shall put even greater power into the hands of the man we elect; but we must use the power as servants and not as masters. We must consider that we are what we are – priests, bishops, pastors – by virtue of an act of dedication to the people who are the flock of Christ. What we possess, even to the clothes on our backs, comes to us out of their charity. The whole material fabric of the Church was raised stone on stone, gold on golden offering, by the sweat of the faithful, and they have given it into our hands for stewardship. It is they who have educated us so that we may teach them and their children. It is they who humble themselves before our priesthood, as before the divine Priesthood of Christ. It is for them that we exercise the sacramental and the sacrificial powers which are given to us in the anointing and the laying-on of hands. If in our deliberations we serve any other cause but this, then we are traitors. It is not asked of us that we shall agree on what is best for the Church, but only that we shall deliberate in charity and humility, and in the end give our obedience to the man who shall be chosen by the majority. We are asked to act swiftly so that the Church may not be left without a head. In all this we must be what, in the end, our Pontiff shall proclaim himself to be – servants of the servants of God. Let us in these final moments resign ourselves as willing instruments for His hands. Amen.’
It was so simply said that it might have been the customary formality, yet the man himself, with his scarred face and his strong voice and his crooked, eloquent hands, lent to the words an unexpected poignancy. There was a long silence while he left the pulpit and returned to his own place. Leone nodded his lion’s head in approval, and Rinaldi breathed a silent prayer of gratitude. Then the Master of Ceremonies took command and led the Cardinals and their attendants with their confessor and their physician and surgeon, and the Architect of the Conclave, and the conclave workmen out of the Basilica and into the confines of the Vatican itself.
In the Sistine Chapel they were sworn again. Then Leone gave the order for the bells to be rung, so that all who did not belong to the conclave should leave the sealed area at once. The servants led each of the Cardinals to his apartment. Then the prefect of the Master of Ceremonies, with the Architect of the Conclave, began the ritual search of the enclosed area. They went from room to room pulling aside draperies, throwing light into dark comers, opening closets, until every space was declared free from intruders.
At the entrance of the great stairway of Pius IX they halted and the Noble Guard marched out of the conclave area, followed by the Marshal of the Conclave and his aides. The great door was locked. The Marshal of the Conclave turned his key on the outside. On the inside the Masters of Ceremonies turned their own key. The Marshal ordered his flag hoisted over the Vatican, and from this moment no one might leave or enter, or pass a message, until the new Pope was elected and named.
Alone in his quarters, Kiril Cardinal Lakota was beginning a private purgatory. It was a recurrent state whose symptoms were now familiar to him: a cold sweat that broke out on face and palms, a trembling in the limbs, a twitching of the severed nerves in his face, a panic fear that the room was closing in to crush him. Twice in his life he had been walled up in the bunkers of an underground prison. Four months in all, he had endured the terrors of darkness and cold and solitude and near starvation, so that the pillars of his reason had rocked under the strain. Nothing in his years of Siberian exile had afflicted him so much, nor left so deep a scar on his memory. Nothing had brought him so close to abjuration and apostasy.
He had been beaten often, but the bruised tissue had healed itself in time. He had been interrogated till every nerve was screaming and his mind had lapsed into a merciful confusion. From this too he had emerged, stronger in faith and in reason, but the horror of solitary confinement would remain with him until he died. Kamenev had kept his promise. ‘You will never be able to forget me. Wherever you go, I shall be. Whatever you become, I shall be part of you.’ Even here, in the neutral confines of the Vatican City, in the princely room under Raphael’s frescoes, Kamenev, the insidious tormentor, was with him. There was only one escape from him, and that was the one he had learned in the bunker – the projection of the tormented spirit into the arms of the Almighty.
He threw himself on his knees, buried his face in his hands, and tried to concentrate every faculty of mind and body into the simple act of abandonment.
His lips commanded no words, but the will seized on the plaint of Christ in Gethsemane. ‘Father, if it be possible, let this Chalice pass.’
In the end he knew it would pass, but first the agony must be endured. The walls pressed in upon him relentlessly. The ceiling weighed down on him like a leaden vestment. The darkness pressed upon his eyeballs and packed itself inside his skull-case. Every muscle in his body knotted in pain and his teeth chattered as if from the rigors of fever. Then he became deathly cold, and deathly calm, and waited passively for the light that was the beginning of peace and of communion.
The light was like a dawn seen from a high hill, flooding swiftly into every fold of the landscape, so that the whole pattern of its history was revealed at one glance. The road of his own pilgrimage was there like a scarlet ribbon that stretched four thousand miles from Lvov, in the Ukraine, to Nokolayevsk on the sea of Okhotsk.
When the war with the Germans was over, he had been named, in spite of his youth, Metropolitan of Lvov, successor to the great and saintly Andrew Szepticky, leader of all the Ruthenian Catholics. Shortly afterwards he had been arested with six other bishops and deported to the eastern limits of Siberia. The six others had died, and he had been left alone, shepherd of a lost flock, to carry the cross on his own shoulders.
For seventeen years he had been in prison, or in the labour camps. Once only in all that time he had been able to say Mass, with a thimbleful of wine and a crust of white bread. All that he could cling to of doctrine and prayer and sacramental formulae was locked in his own brain. All that he had tried to spend of strength and compassion upon his fellow prisoners, he had had to dredge out of himself and out of the well of the Divine Mercy. Yet his body, weakened by torture, had grown miraculously strong again at slave labour in the mines and on the road gangs, so that even Kamenev could no longer mock him, but was struck with wonder at his survival.
For Kamenev, his tormentor in the first interrogations, would always come back; and each time he came, he had risen a little higher in the Marxist order. Each time he had seemed a little more friendly as if he were making a slow surrender to respect for his victim.
Even from the mountain-top of contemplation, he could still see Kamenev cold, sardonic, searching him for the slightest sign of weakness, the slightest hint of surrender. In the beginning he had had to force himself to pray for the jailer. After a while they had come to a bleak kind of brotherhood, even as the one rose higher and the other seemed to sink deeper into a fellowship with the Siberian slaves. In the end, it was Kamenev who had organized his escape – inflicting on him a final irony by giving him the identity of a dead man.
‘You will go free,’ Kamenev had said, ‘because I need you free. But you will always owe me a debt because I have killed a man to give you a name. One day, I shall come to you to ask for payment, and you will pay, whatever it may cost.’
It was as though the jailer had assumed the mantle of prophecy, because Kiril Lakota had escaped and made his way to Rome to find that a dying Pope had made him a Cardinal ‘in the breast’ – a man of destiny, a hinge-man of Mother Church.
To this point the road in retrospect was clear. He could trace in its tragedies the promise of future mercies. For every one of the bishops who had died for his belief, a man had died in his arms in the camp, blessing the Almighty for a final absolution. The scattered flock would not all lose the faith for which they had suffered. Some of them would remain to hand on the creed, and to keep a small light burning that one day might light a thousand torches. In the degradation of the road gangs, he had seen how the strangest men upheld the human dignities. He had baptized children with a handful of dirty water and seen them die unmarked by the miseries of the world.
He himself had learned humility and gratitude and the courage to believe in an Omnipotence working by a mighty evolution towards an ultimate good. He had learned compassion and tenderness and the meaning of the cry in the night. He had learned to hope that for Kamenev himself he might be an instrument, if not of ultimate enlightenment, then at least of ultimate absolution. But all this was in the past, and the pattern had still to work itself out beyond Rome into a fathomless future. Even the light of contemplation was not thrown beyond Rome. There was a veil drawn, and the veil was the limit imposed on prescience by a merciful God…
The light was changing now; the landscape of the steppes had become an undulant sea, across which a figure in antique robes was walking towards him, his face shining, his pierced hands outstretched, as if in greeting. Kiril Cardinal Lakota shrank away, and tried to bury himself in the lighted sea; but there was no escape. When the hands touched him and the luminous face bent to embrace him, he felt himself pierced by an intolerable joy, and an intolerable pain. Then he entered into the moment of peace.
The servant who was assigned to care for him came into the room and saw him kneeling rigid as a cataleptic with his arms outstretched in the attitude of crucifixion. Rinaldi, making the rounds of the conclavists, came upon him and tried vainly to wake him. Then Rinaldi too went away, shaken and humbled, to consult with Leone and with his colleagues.
In his cluttered and unelegant office, George Faber, the grey-haired dean of the Roman press corps, fifteen years Italian correspondent for the New York Monitor, was writing his background story on the papal election:
‘…Outside the small medieval enclave of the Vatican, the world is in a climate of crisis. Winds of change are blowing and storm warnings are being raised, now in one place, now in another. The arms race between America and Russia goes on unabated. Every month there are new and hostile probes into the high orbits of space. There is famine in India, and guerrilla fighting along the southern peninsulas of Asia. There is thunder over Africa, and the tattered flags of revolution are being hoisted over the capitals of South America. There is blood on the sands in North Mrica, and in Europe the battle for economic survival is waged behind the closed doors of banks and board rooms. In the high airs above the Pacific, war planes fly to sample the pollution of the air by lethal atomic particles. In China the new dynasts struggle to fill the bellies of hungry millions, while they hold their minds chained to the rigid orthodoxy of Marxist philosophy. In the misty valleys of the Himalayas, where the prayer-flags flutter and the tea-pickers plod along the terraces, there are forays and incursions from Tibet and Sinkiang. On the frontiers of Outer Mongolia, the uneasy amity of Russia and China is strained to the point of rupture. Patrol boats probe the mangrove swamps and inlets of New Guinea, while the upland tribes try to project themselves into the twentieth century by a single leap from the Stone Age.
‘Everywhere man has become aware of himself as a transient animal and is battling desperately to assert his right to the best of the world for the short time that he sojourns in it. The Nepalese haunted by his mountain demons, the coolie hauling his heart muscle into exhaustion between the shafts of a rickshaw, the Israeli beleaguered at every frontier, everyone all at once is asserting his claim to an identity; everyone has an ear for any prophet who can promise him one.’
He stopped typing, lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair, considering the thought which he had just written – ‘a claim to identity’. Strange how everyone had to make it sooner or later. Strange for how long one accepted with apparent equanimity the kind of person one seemed to be, the state to which one had apparently been nominated in life. Then all of a sudden, the identity was called in question…His own for instance. George Faber, long-time bachelor, acknowledged expert on Italian affairs and Vatican politics. Why so late in life was he being forced to question what he was, what he had so far been content to be? Why this restless dissatisfaction with the public image of himself? Why this doubt that he could survive any longer without a permanent supplement to himself?…A woman, of course. There always had been women in his life, but Chiara was something new and special…The thought often troubled him. He tried to put it away and bent again to his typewriter:
‘Everywhere the cry is for survival, but since the supreme irony of creation was that man must inevitably die, those who strived for the mastery of his mind or his muscle have to promise him an extension of his span into some semblance of immortality. The Marxist promises him a oneness with the workers of the world. The Nationalist gives him a flag and a frontier, and a local enlargement of himself. The Democrat offers him liberty through a ballot box, but warns that he might have to die to preserve it.
‘But for man, and all the prophets he raises up for himself, the last enemy is time; and time is a relative dimension, limited directly by man’s capacity to make use of it. Modern communication, swift as light, has diminished to nothing the time between a human act and its consequences. A shot fired in Berlin can detonate the world within minutes. A plague in the Philippines can infect Australia within a day. A man toppling from a high wire in a Moscow circus can be watched in his death agony from London and New York.
‘So, at every moment, every man is besieged by the consequences of his own sins and those of all his fellows. So, too, every prophet and every pundit is haunted by the swift lapse of time and the knowledge that the accounting for false predictions and broken promises is swifter than it has ever been in history. Here precisely is the cause of the crisis. Here the winds and the waves are born and the thunderbolts are forged that may, any week, any month, go roaring round the world under a sky black with mushroom clouds.
‘The men in the Vatican are aware of time, though many of them have ceased to be as aware as they need to be…’
Time…! He had become so vividly conscious of this diminishing dimension of existence. He was in his mid-forties. For more than a year he had been trying to steer Chiara’s petition of nullity through the Holy Roman Rota so that she might be free from Corrado Calitri to marry him. But the case was moving with desperate slowness, and Faber, although a Catholic by birth, had come to resent bitterly the impersonal system of the Roman Congregations and the attitude of the old men who ran them.
He typed on vividly, precisely, professionally:
‘Like most old men they are accustomed to seeing time as a flash between two eternities instead of a quantum of extension given to each individual man to mature towards the vision of his God.
‘They are concerned also with man’s identity, which they are obliged to affirm as the identity of a son of God. Yet here they are in danger of another pitfall: that they sometimes affirm his identity without understanding his individuality, and how he has to grow in whatever garden he is planted, whether the ground is sweet or sour, whether the air is friendly or tempestuous, Men grow, like trees, in different shapes, crooked or straight, according to the climate of their nurture. But so long as the sap flows and the leaves burgeon, there should be no quarrel with the shape of the man or the tree.
‘The men of the Vatican are concerned as well with immortality and eternity. They too understand man’s need for an extension of himself beyond the limit of the fleeting years. They affirm, as of faith, the persistence of soul into an eternity of union with the Creator, or of exile from His face. They go further. They promise man a preservation of his identity and an ultimate victory even over the terror of physical death. What they fail too often to understand is that immortality must be begun in time, and that a man must be given the physical resources to survive before his spirit can grow to desire more than physical survival…
Chiara had become as necessary to him as breath. Without her youth and her passion, it seemed that he must slide all too quickly into age and disillusion. She had been his mistress for nearly six months now, but he was plagued by the fear that he could lose her at any moment to a younger man, and that the promise of children and continuity might never be fulfilled in him…He had friends in the Vatican. He had easy access to men with great names in the Church, but they were committed to the law and to the system, and they could not help him at all. He wrote feelingly:
‘They are caught, these old and deliberate men, in the dilemma of all principality: that the higher one rises, the more one sees of the world, but the less one apprehends of the small determining factors of human existence. How a man without shoes may starve because he cannot walk to a place of employment. How a liverish tax collector may start a local revolution. How high blood-pressure may plunge a noble man into melancholy and despair. How a woman may sell herself for money because she cannot give herself to one man for love. The danger of all rulers is that they begin to believe that history is the result of great generalities, instead of the sum of millions of small particulars, like bad drainage and sexual obsession and the anopheles mosquito…’
It was not the story he had intended to write, but it was a true record of his personal feelings about the coming event…Let it stand then! Let the editors in New York like it or lump it…The door opened and Chiara came in. He took her in his arms and kissed her. He damned the Church and her husband and his paper to a special kind of hell, and then took her out to lunch on the Via Veneto.
The first day of the conclave was left private to the electing Cardinals, so that they might meet and talk discreetly, and probe for one another’s prejudices and blind spots and motives of private interest. It was for this reason that Rinaldi and Leone moved among them to prepare them carefully for the final proposal. Once the voting began, once they had taken sides with this candidate or that, it would be much more difficult to bring them to an agreement.
Not all the talk was on the level of eternal verities. Much of it was simple and blunt, like Rinaldi’s conversation with the American over a cup of American coffee (brewed by His Eminence’s own servant because Italian coffee gave him indigestion).
His Eminence, Charles Corbet Carlin, Cardinal Archbishop of New York, was a tall, ruddy man with an expansive manner and a shrewd, pragmatic eye. He stated his problem as baldly as a banker challenging an overdraft:
‘We don’t want a diplomat, and we don’t want a Curia official who will look at the world through a Roman eyeglass. A man who has travelled, yes, but someone who has been a pastor and understands what our problems are at this moment.’
‘I should be interested to hear Your Eminence define them.’ Rinaldi was at his most urbane.
‘We’re losing our grip on the people,’ said Carlin flatly. ‘They are losing their loyalty to us. I think we are more than half to blame.’
Rinaldi was startled. Carlin had the reputation of being a brilliant banker for Mother Church and of entertaining a conviction that all the ills of the world could be solved by a well-endowed school system and a rousing sermon every Sunday. To hear him talk so bluntly of the shortcomings of his own province was both refreshing and disquieting. Rinaldi asked:
‘Why are we losing our grip?’
‘In America? Two reasons: prosperity and respectability. We’re not persecuted any more. We pay our way. We can wear the faith like a Rotary badge – and with as little social consequence. We collect our dues like a club, shout down the Communists, and make the biggest contribution in the whole world to Peter’s Pence. But it isn’t enough. There’s no – no heart in it for many Catholics. The young ones are drifting outside our influence. They don’t need us as they should. They don’t trust us as they used. For that,’ he added gravely, ‘I think I’m partly to blame.’
‘None of us has much right to be proud of himself,’ said Rinaldi quietly. ‘Look at France – look at the bloody things that have been done in Algeria. Yet this is a country half-Catholic, and with a Catholic leadership. Where is our authority in this monstrous situation? A third of the Catholic population of the world is in the South Americas, yet what is our influence there? What impression do we make among the indifferent rich, and the oppressed poor, who see no hope in God and less in those who represent Him? Where do we begin to change?’
‘I’ve made mistakes,’ said Carlin moodily. ‘Big ones. I can’t even begin to repair them all. My father was a gardener, a good one. He used to say that the best you could do for a tree was mulch it and prune it once a year, and leave the, rest to God. I always prided myself that I was a practical fellow like he was – you know? Build the Church, then the school. Get the nuns in, then the brothers. Build the seminary and train the priests, and keep the money coming in. After that it was up to the Almighty.’ For the first time he smiled, and Rinaldi, who had disliked him for many years, began to warm to him. He went on whimsically, ‘The Romans and the Irish! We’re great plotters, and great builders, but we lose the inwardness of things quicker than anybody else. Stick to the book! No meat on Fridays, no sleeping with your neighbour’s wife, and leave the mysteries to the theologians! It isn’t enough. God help us, but it isn’t!’
‘You’re asking for a saint. I doubt we have many on the books just now.’
‘Not a saint.’ Carlin was emphatic again. ‘A man for the people, and of the people, like Sarto was. A man who could bleed for them, and scold them, and have them know all the time that he loved them. A man who could break out of this gilded garden patch and make himself another Peter.’
‘He would be crucified too, of course,’ said Rinaldi tartly.
‘Perhaps that is just what we need,’ said His Eminence from New York.
Whereupon Rinaldi, the diplomat, judged it opportune to talk of the bearded Ukrainian, Kiril Lakota, as a man-with-the-makings-of-a-Pope.
In a somewhat smaller suite of the conclave, Leone was discussing the same candidate with Hugh Cardinal Brandon from Westminster. Brandon, being English, was a man with no illusions and few enthusiasms. He pursed his thin, grey lips and toyed with his pectoral cross, and delivered his policy in precise, if stilted Italian:
‘From our point of view, an Italian is still the best choice. It leaves us room to move, if you understand what I mean. There is no question of a new attitude or a fresh political alignment. There is no disturbance of the relations between the Vatican and the Republic of Italy. The Papacy would still be an effective barrier to any growth of Italian communism.’ He permitted himself a dry joke. ‘We could still count on the sympathy of English Romantics for Romantic Italy.’
Leone, veteran of many a subtle argument, nodded his agreement and added almost casually, ‘You would not then consider our newcomer, the one who spoke to us this morning?’
‘I doubt it. I found him, as everyone did, most impressive in the pulpit. But then eloquence is hardly a full qualification, is it? Besides, there is the question of rites. I understand this man is a Ukrainian and belongs to the Ruthenian rite.’
‘If he were elected, he would automatically practise the Roman one.’
His Eminence of Westminster smiled thinly. ‘The beard might worry some people. A too Byzantine look, don’t you think? We haven’t had a bearded Pope in a very long time.’
‘No doubt he would shave it.’
‘Would he still wear the ikon?’
‘He might be persuaded to dispense with that, too.’
‘Then we should be left with a model Roman. So why not choose an Italian in the first place? I can’t believe you would want anything different.’
‘Believe me, I do. I am prepared to tell you now that my vote will go to the Ukrainian.’
‘I am afraid I can’t promise you mine. The English and the Russians, you know…Historically we’ve never done very well together…Never at all.’
‘Always,’ said Rahamani the Syrian in his pliant, courteous fashion, ‘always you search a man for the one necessary gift – the gift of co-operation with God. Even among good men this gift is rare. Most of us, you see, spend our lives trying to bend ourselves to the will of God, and even then we have often to be bent by a violent grace. The others, the rare ones, commit themselves, as if by an instinctive act, to be tools in the hands of the Maker. If this new man is such a one, then it is he whom we need.’
‘And how do we know?’ asked Leone dryly.
‘We submit him to God,’ said the Syrian. ‘We ask God to judge him, and we rest secure in the outcome.’
‘We can only vote on him. There is no other way.’
There is another way, prescribed in the Apostolic Constitution. It is the way of inspiration. Any member of the conclave may make a public proclamation of the man he believes should be chosen, trusting that if this be a candidate acceptable to God, God will inspire the other conclavists to approve publicly. It is a valid method of election.’
‘It also takes courage – and a great deal of faith.’
‘If we elders of the Church lack faith, what hope is there for the people?’
‘I am reproved,’ said the Cardinal Secretary of the Holy Office. ‘It’s time I stopped canvassing and began to pray.’
Early the next morning, all the Cardinals assembled in the Sistine Chapel for the first ballot. For each there was a throne and over the throne a silken canopy. The thrones were arranged along the walls of the Chapel, and before each was set a small table, which bore the Cardinal’s coat of arms and his name inscribed in Latin. The Chapel altar was covered with a tapestry upon which was embroidered a figuration of the Holy Ghost descending upon the first Apostles. Before the altar was set a large table on which there stood a gold Chalice and a small golden platter. Near the table was a simple potbellied stove whose flue projected through a small window that looked out on the Square of St Peter.
When the voting took place, each Cardinal would write the name of his candidate upon a ballot paper, lay it first on the golden platter, and then put it into the Chalice, to signify that he had completed a sacred act. After the votes were counted, they would be burned in the stove, and smoke would issue through the flue into the Square of St Peter. To elect a Pope, there must be a majority of two-thirds.
If the majority were not conclusive, the ballot papers would be burned with wet straw, and the smoke would issue dark and cloudy. Only when the ballot was successful would the papers be burned without straw, so that a white smoke might inform the waiting crowds that they had a new Pope. It was an archaic and cumbersome ceremony for the age of radio and television, but it served to underline the drama of the moment and the continuity of two thousand years of papal history.
When all the Cardinals were seated, the Master of Ceremonies made the circuit of the thrones, handing to each voter a single ballot paper. Then he left the Chapel, and the door was locked, leaving only the Princes of the Church to elect the successor to Peter.
It was the moment for which Leone and Rinaldi had waited. Leone rose in his place, tossed his white mane, and addressed the conclave:
‘My brothers, I stand to claim a right under the Apostolic Constitution. I proclaim to you my belief that there is among us a man already chosen by God to sit in the Chair of Peter. Like the first of the Apostles, he has suffered prison and stripes for the faith, and the hand of God has led him out of bondage to join us in this conclave. I announce him as my candidate, and dedicate to him my vote and my obedience…Kiril Cardinal Lakota.’
There was a moment of dead silence, broken by a stifled gasp from Lakota. Then Rahamani the Syrian rose in his place and pronounced firmly:
‘I too proclaim him.’
‘I too,’ said Carlin the America.
‘And I,’ said Valerio Rinaldi.
Then in two and threes, old men heaved themselves to their feet with a like proclamation until all but nine were standing under the canopies, while Kiril Cardinal Lakota sat, blank-faced and rigid, on his throne.
Then Rinaldi stepped forward and challenged the electors. ‘Does any here dispute that this is a valid election, and that a majority of more than two-thirds has elected our brother Kiril?’
No one answered the challenge.
‘Please be seated,’ said Valerio Rinaldi.
As each Cardinal sat down, he pulled the cord attached to his canopy so that it collapsed above his head, and the only canopy left open was that above the chair of Kiril Cardinal Lakota.
The Camerlengo rang a small hand bell and walked across to unlock the Chapel door. Immediately there entered the Secretary of the Conclave, the Master of Ceremonies, and the Sacristan of the Vatican. These three prelates, with Leone and Rinaldi, moved ceremoniously to the throne of the Ukrainian. In a loud voice Leone challenged him:
‘Acceptasne electionem? Do you accept election?’
All eyes were turned on the tall, lean stranger with his scarred face and his dark beard and his distant, haunted eyes. Seconds ticked away slowly, and then in a dead flat voice, they heard him answer:
‘Accepto…Miserere mei Deus! I accept. God have mercy on me!’
No ruler can escape the verdict of history; but a ruler who keeps a diary makes himself liable to a rough handling by the judges…I should hate to be like old Pius II, who had his memoirs attributed to his secretary, had them expurgated by his kinsmen and then, five hundred years later, had all his indiscretions restored by a pair of American blue-stockings. Yet I sympathize with his dilemma, which must be the dilemma of every man who sits in the Chair of Peter. A Pope can never talk freely unless he talks to God or to himself – and a Pontiff who talks to himself is apt to become eccentric, as the histories of some of my predecessors have shown.
It is my infirmity to be afraid of solitude and isolation. So I shall need some safety valves – the diary for one, which is a compromise between lying to oneself on paper and telling posterity the facts that have to be concealed from one’s own generation. There is a rub, of course. What does one do with a papal diary? Leave it to the Vatican library? Order it buried with oneself in the triple coffin? Or auction it beforehand for the Propagation of the Faith? Better, perhaps, not to begin at all; but how else guarantee a vestige of privacy, humour, perhaps even sanity in this noble prison-house to which I am condemned?
Twenty-four hours ago my election would have seemed a fantasy. Even now I cannot understand why I accepted it. I could have refused. I did not. Why?…
Consider what I am: Kiril I, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State …Gloriously reigning, of course…!
But this is only the beginning of it. The Pontifical Annual will print a list two pages long of what I have reserved by way of Abbacies and Prefectures, and what I shall ‘protect’ by way of Orders, Congregations, Confraternities and Holy Sisterhoods. The rest of its two thousand pages will be a veritable Doomsday Book of my ministers and subjects, my instruments of government, education and correction.
I must be, by the very nature of my office, multilingual, though the Holy Ghost has been less generous in the gift of tongues to me than he was to the first man who stood in my shoes. My mother tongue is Russian; my official language is the Latin of the schoolmen, a kind of Mandarin which is supposed to preserve magically the subtlest definition of truth like a bee in amber. I must speak Italian to my associates and converse with all in that high-flown ‘we’ which hints at a secret converse between God and myself, even in such mundane matters as the coffee ‘we’ shall drink for breakfast and the brand of petrol ‘we’ shall use for Vatican City automobiles.
Still, this is the traditional mode and I must not resent it too much. Old Valerio Rinaldi gave me fair warning when an hour after this morning’s election he offered me both his retirement and his loyalty. ‘Don’t try to change the Romans, Holiness. Don’t try to fight them or convert them. They’ve been managing Popes for the last nineteen hundred years and they’ll break your neck before you bend theirs. But walk softly, speak gently, keep your own counsel, and in the end you twist them like grass round your fingers.’
It is too early, Heaven knows, to see what success Rome and I shall have with one another, but Rome is no longer the world, and I am not too much concerned – just so I can borrow experience from those who have pledged me their oaths as Cardinal Princes of the Church. There are some in whom I have great confidence. There are others…But I must not judge too swiftly. They cannot all be like Rinaldi, who is a wise and gentle man with a sense of humour and a knowledge of his own limitations. Meantime, I must try to smile and keep a good temper while I find my way round this Vatican maze…And I must commit my thoughts to a diary before I expose them to Curia or Consistory.
I have an advantage, of course, in that no one quite knows which way I shall jump – I don’t even know myself. I am the first Slav ever to sit on the Chair of Peter, the first non-Italian for four-and-a-half centuries. The Curia will be wary of me. They may have been inspired to elect me but already they must be wondering what kind of Tartar they have caught. Already they will be asking themselves how I shall reshuffle their appointments and spheres of influence. How can they know how much I am afraid and doubtful of myself? I hope some of them will remember to pray for me.
The Papacy is the most paradoxical office in the world; the most absolute and yet the most limited; the richest in revenues but the poorest in personal return. It was founded by a Nazarene carpenter who owned no place to rest His head, yet it is surrounded by more pomp and panoply than is seemly in this hungry world. It owns no frontiers, yet is subject always to national intrigue and partisan pressure. The man who accepts it claims Divine guarantee against error, yet is less assured of salvation than the meanest of his subjects. The keys of the kingdom dangle at his belt, yet he can find himself locked out for ever from the Peace of Election and the Communion of Saints. If he says he is not tempted by autocracy and ambition, he is a liar. If he does not walk sometimes in terror, and pray often in darkness, then he is a fool.
I know – or at least I am beginning to know. I was elected this morning, and tonight I am alone on the Mountain of Desolation. He whose Vicar I am, hides His face from me. Those whose shepherd I must be do not know me. The world is spread beneath me like a campaign map – and I see balefires on every frontier. There are blind eyes upturned, and a babel of voices invoking an unknown…
O God, give me light to see, and strength to know, and courage to endure the servitude of the Servants of God…!
My valet has just been in to prepare my sleeping-quarters. He is a melancholy fellow who looks very like a guard in Siberia who used to curse me at night for a Ukrainian dog and each morning for an adulterous priest. This one, however, asks humbly if my Holiness has need of anything. Then he kneels and begs my blessing on himself and his family. Embarassed, he ventures to suggest that, if I am not too tired, I may deign to show myself again to the people who still wait in St Peter’s Square.
They acclaimed me this morning when I was led out to give my first blessing to the city and to the world. Yet, so long as my light burns, it seems there will always be some waiting for God knows what sign of power of benignity from the papal bedroom. How can I tell them that they must never expect too much from a middle-aged fellow in striped cotton pyjamas? But tonight is different. There is a whole concourse of Romans and of tourists in the Piazza, and it would be a courtesy – excuse me, Holiness, a great condescension! – to appear with one small blessing…
I condescend, and I am exalted once again on wave after wave of cheering and hom-blowing. I am their Pope, their Father, and they urge me to live a long time. I bless them and hold out my arms to them, and they clamour again, and I am caught in a strange heart-stopping moment when it seems that my arms encompass the world, and that it is much too heavy for me to hold. Then my valet – or is it my jailer? – draws me back, closes the window and draws the drapes, so that, officially at least, His Holiness Kiril I is in bed and asleep.
The valet’s name is Celasio, which is also the name of a Pope. He is a good fellow, and I am glad of a minute of his company. We talk a few moments and then he asks me, blushing and stammering, about my name. He is the first who has dared to raise the question except old Rinaldi, who, when I announced that I desired to keep my baptismal name, nodded and smiled ironically and said, ‘A noble style, Holiness – provocative, too. But for God’s sake don’t let them turn it into Italian.’
I took his advice, and I explained to the Cardinals as I now explained to my valet that I kept the name because it belonged to the Apostle of the Slavs, who was said to have invented the modern Cyrillic alphabet and who was a stubborn defender of the right of people to keep the faith in their own idiom. I explained to them also that I should prefer to have my name used in its Slavic form, for a testimony to the universality of the Church. Not all of them approved since they are quick to see how a man’s first act sets the pattern of his later ones.
No one objected, however, except Leone, he who runs the Holy Office and has the reputation of a modem St Jerome, whether for his love of tradition, a spartan life, or a notoriously crusty temper I have yet to find out. Leone asked pointedly whether a Slavic name might not look out of place in the pure Latin of Papal Encyclicals. Although he is the one who first proclaimed me in the conclave, I had to tell him gently that I was more interested in having my encyclicals read by the people than in coddling the Latinists, and that since Russian had become a canonical language for the Marxist world, it would not hurt us to have the tip of one shoe in the other camp.
He took the reproof well, but I do not think he will easily forget it. Men who serve God professionally are apt to regard Him as a private preserve. Some of them would like to make His Vicar a private preserve as well. I do not say that Leone is one of these, but I have to be careful. I shall have to work differently from any of my predecessors, and I cannot submit myself to the dictate of any man, however high he stands, or however good he may be.
None of this, of course, is for my valet, who will take home only a simple tale of missionary saints and make himself a great man on the strength of a Pontiff’s confidence. Osservatore Romano will tell exactly the same tale tomorrow, but for them it will be ‘a symbol of the Paternal care of His Holiness for those who cleave, albeit in good faith, to schismatic communions…’ I must, as soon as I can, do something about the Osservatore…If my voice is to be heard in the world it must be heard in its authentic tones.
Already I know there are questions about my beard. I have heard murmurs of a ‘too Byzantine look’. The Latins are more sensitive about such customs than we are; so perhaps it might have been a courtesy to explain that my jaw was broken under questioning and that without a beard I am somewhat disfigured…It is so small a matter, and yet schisms have begun over smaller ones.
I wonder what Kamenev said when he heard the news of my election. I wonder whether he had humour enough to send me a greeting.
I am tired – tired to my bones and afraid. My charge is so simple: to keep the faith pure and bring the scattered sheep safely into the fold. Yet into what strange country it may lead me I can only guess…Lead us not into temptation, O Lord, but deliver us from evil. Amen.