metallic. ‘No, Dean, I cannot. And to be truthful, I am shocked that you should expect me to disclose a private conversation – a very precious and private conversation, given that those were the last words I ever exchanged with the Holy Father.’
Lomeli pressed his hand to his heart and bowed his head slightly in apology. ‘I quite understand. Forgive me.’
The Canadian was lying, of course. They both knew it. Lomeli stood aside. Tremblay opened the door. In silence they walked back together along the corridor and at the staircase went their separate ways, the Canadian down to the lobby to resume his conversations, the dean wearily up another flight to his room and his doubts.
5
Pro eligendo Romano pontifice
THAT NIGHT HE lay in bed in the darkness with the rosary of the Blessed Virgin around his neck and his arms folded crosswise on his chest. It was a posture he had first adopted in puberty to avoid the temptations of the body. The objective was to maintain it until morning. Now, nearly sixty years later, when such temptations were no longer a danger, he continued out of habit to sleep like this – like an effigy on a tomb.
Celibacy had not made him feel neutered or frustrated, as the secular word generally imagined a priest must be, but rather powerful and fulfilled. He had imagined himself a warrior within a knightly caste: a lonely and untouchable hero, above the common run.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
He was not entirely naïve. He had known what it was to desire, and to be desired, both by women and by men. And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness. It was only when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that he had begun to brood on what he hadmissed. Because what was he nowadays? No longer a shining knight: just another impotent old fellow, no more heroic than the average patient in a nursing home. Sometimes he wondered what had been the point of it all. The night-time pang was no longer of lust; it was of regret.
In the next-door room, he could hear the African cardinal snoring. The thin partition wall seemed to vibrate like a membrane with each stertorous breath. He was sure it was Adeyemi. No one else could be so loud, even in his sleep. He tried counting the snores in the hope that the repetition would lull him to sleep. When he reached five hundred, he gave up.
He wished he could have opened the shutters for some fresh air. He felt claustrophobic. The great bell of St Peter’s had ceased tolling at midnight. In the sealed chamber, the dark early-morning hours were long and trackless.
He turned on his bedside lamp and read a few pages from Guardini’s
Meditations Before Mass.
If someone were to ask me what the liturgical life begins with, I should answer: with learning stillness . . . That attentive stillness in which God’s word can take root. This must be established before the service begins, if possible in the silence on the way to church, still better in a brief period of composure the evening before.
But how was such stillness to be achieved? That was the question to which Guardini offered no answer, and in place of stillness, as the night wore on, the noise in Lomeli’s mind became even shriller than usual.
He saved others; himself he cannot save –
the jeer of the scribes and elders at the foot of the cross. The paradox at the heart of theGospel. The priest who celebrates Mass and yet is unable to achieve Communion himself.
He pictured a great shaft of cacophonous darkness, filled with taunting voices thundering down upon him from heaven. A divine revelation of doubt.
At one point in his despair he picked up the
Meditations
and flung it at the wall. It bounced off it with a thump. The snoring ceased for a minute, and then resumed.
*
At 6.30 a.m., the alarm sounded throughout the Casa Santa
Lomeli pressed his hand to his heart and bowed his head slightly in apology. ‘I quite understand. Forgive me.’
The Canadian was lying, of course. They both knew it. Lomeli stood aside. Tremblay opened the door. In silence they walked back together along the corridor and at the staircase went their separate ways, the Canadian down to the lobby to resume his conversations, the dean wearily up another flight to his room and his doubts.
5
Pro eligendo Romano pontifice
THAT NIGHT HE lay in bed in the darkness with the rosary of the Blessed Virgin around his neck and his arms folded crosswise on his chest. It was a posture he had first adopted in puberty to avoid the temptations of the body. The objective was to maintain it until morning. Now, nearly sixty years later, when such temptations were no longer a danger, he continued out of habit to sleep like this – like an effigy on a tomb.
Celibacy had not made him feel neutered or frustrated, as the secular word generally imagined a priest must be, but rather powerful and fulfilled. He had imagined himself a warrior within a knightly caste: a lonely and untouchable hero, above the common run.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
He was not entirely naïve. He had known what it was to desire, and to be desired, both by women and by men. And yet he had never succumbed to physical attraction. He had gloried in his solitariness. It was only when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that he had begun to brood on what he hadmissed. Because what was he nowadays? No longer a shining knight: just another impotent old fellow, no more heroic than the average patient in a nursing home. Sometimes he wondered what had been the point of it all. The night-time pang was no longer of lust; it was of regret.
In the next-door room, he could hear the African cardinal snoring. The thin partition wall seemed to vibrate like a membrane with each stertorous breath. He was sure it was Adeyemi. No one else could be so loud, even in his sleep. He tried counting the snores in the hope that the repetition would lull him to sleep. When he reached five hundred, he gave up.
He wished he could have opened the shutters for some fresh air. He felt claustrophobic. The great bell of St Peter’s had ceased tolling at midnight. In the sealed chamber, the dark early-morning hours were long and trackless.
He turned on his bedside lamp and read a few pages from Guardini’s
Meditations Before Mass.
If someone were to ask me what the liturgical life begins with, I should answer: with learning stillness . . . That attentive stillness in which God’s word can take root. This must be established before the service begins, if possible in the silence on the way to church, still better in a brief period of composure the evening before.
But how was such stillness to be achieved? That was the question to which Guardini offered no answer, and in place of stillness, as the night wore on, the noise in Lomeli’s mind became even shriller than usual.
He saved others; himself he cannot save –
the jeer of the scribes and elders at the foot of the cross. The paradox at the heart of theGospel. The priest who celebrates Mass and yet is unable to achieve Communion himself.
He pictured a great shaft of cacophonous darkness, filled with taunting voices thundering down upon him from heaven. A divine revelation of doubt.
At one point in his despair he picked up the
Meditations
and flung it at the wall. It bounced off it with a thump. The snoring ceased for a minute, and then resumed.
*
At 6.30 a.m., the alarm sounded throughout the Casa Santa
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