Keys of This Blood (118 page)

He started walking back to his chair at the center of the dais, his voice picking up more firmness and volume. “Saint Luke goes on with the rest of the Lord's words to Simon Peter. ‘When you, Simon, return once more to the faith, you will restore the strength of faith to your brothers.'” He paused and turned his head, craning around to look up at the cardinals. “Please sit down!” He waited while the standing cardinals took their seats; but he could not see the stony looks of disapproval, anger and threat that some of those cardinals threw at those who had remained seated. Everyone concentrated now on Valeska.

He had stopped walking by then, and turned to face his audience. “No matter what the personal sins and failings of Peter's successors, they remain Peter's successors, sole possessors on earth of the Keys of the Kingdom, who are solely ensured against any misuse of those keys by the blood of Our Lord Jesus.

“The Keys of this Blood.” Valeska repeated the phrase, letting his voice
linger over each syllable. “The Keys of this Blood.” He was regaining his composure and a greater control over his thoughts and delivery.

“My own conscience, and the intelligence available to me as universal pastor, has driven me, willy-nilly, to adopt a plan—I know it will be called the Papal Plan in the popular media—for at least facing the dire situation in which the institutional organization finds itself today.”

He walked the short distance to his chair and sat down, turning several pages of his notes until he reached the place he was seeking. “That dire situation throws one grave question in my face: How much longer must I wait? How low can I allow our condition to sink? How low is too low?”

Valeska stood up and closed his folder. “Unless I wish to betray my papal oath, I have to take action. I have to say: This is far enough, low enough. At this point, we fight. Hence”—he looked for a long few moments at the folder, then began again—“hence, the Papal Plan.

“Here in Rome, there will be six new Congregations, all of them granted an interim existence, each one possessing absolute powers, all of them reporting directly to me. Each one will supervise one area of Church structure that needs drastic and immediate reform: Bishops, Religious Orders, Priests, Ecumenism, Diocesan Organizations, the Mass. Besides being endowed with absolute powers of excommunication, suspension and interdict, these interim Congregations will have at their disposal three organizations, two already familiar—the Legionnaires of Christ and the Personal Prelature commonly called the Opus Dei—and a third, which has already been established and exists on a worldwide basis but hitherto has remained in total secret.

“These Congregations will supersede any existing Roman Congregation—for instance, the present Congregations for Religious and for Bishops will cease to function until further notice.

“Now, exhaustive lists have been compiled. Let me just read you the main ones. There are, first of all, five important ones: cardinals, bishops, priests, seminary professors and theologians. Those whose names appear on those lists have a common fate: They will be automatically retired, stripped of any canonical authorization to function, and left free to pursue life as they see fit.

“There is, then, a second series of lists, covering such changes as the transfer of certain cardinals, the abolition of certain religious orders and congregations, both of men and of women, parishes and dioceses placed under interdict until priests, bishops, and layfolk return to Catholic practice.

“It has required a Herculean labor on the part of my collaborators to assemble the names of thousands of retired priests, retired bishops and
retired theologians who will immediately replace those who are forcibly retired by papal decree.

“You will discover, in time, that there is a series of particular papal decrees. The principal ones should be mentioned here. There has been in the past and there will be in the future one official Roman Rite of the Mass. For the foreseeable future, there will be two officially sanctioned variations of that sacred Roman Rite: the traditional one that flourished for over a thousand years before the Council of Trent gave it a special cachet; and the Novus Ordo of Pope Paul VI, which, in a reformed state, is also authorized. Both will be said in Latin, as the Second Vatican Council decreed, except for vernacular prayers said by the people. The Pauline Novus Ordo will be purified of its suspect parts, the validating words of Consecration restored to it and, completely purged from it, Luther's additions. Performance of either Mass is decided not by a popular vote but by direct orders from the Holy See. All ecclesiastical sanctions launched against the so-called Traditionalist movements and leaders are hereby revoked. Anyway, most of them were null and void from the beginning.

“Another decree suspends all activities of the Justice and Peace Commission and all offices for ecumenism throughout the Church; and still another decree forbids any further use of both the infamous RENEW program and the RCIA program. These have to be suppressed as un-Catholic.

“There is already established a papal commission for a reexamination of the documents of the Second Vatican Council; its decrees will give the authentic interpretation of those documents, once and for all. I myself will be issuing a series of papal decrees about religious liberty, about the one, true Church as the only means of salvation, and about papal infallibility.

“A special
Motu Proprio
of mine will suspend all meetings and activities of all Bishops' Conferences, local and regional. This whole initiative of Bishops' Conferences has proved to be a seedbed of heresy, schism and theological error; and it has been one of the chief instruments in the hands of the anti-Church partisans in their quest to depapalize the Roman Catholic institutional organization.

“Lastly, there is the question of correcting and reformulating the attitude of the Roman Catholic worldwide organization and institution to the modern world. Unfortunately, what the Second Vatican Council stated in this regard was modeled on what Pope Paul VI formulated. Unfortunately, that Pontiff's formulation was fashioned for him by men of the Vatican and men and women outside the Vatican who had one
aim and one aim only: to liquidate the essence of Catholicism and make our human organization of this Church the handmaiden of total secularization of Roman Catholicism. This attitude—already widespread and accepted by bishops, priests, religious and layfolk—must be purged from the Church.

“Your Eminences will be the first to receive all the relevant documents of my Papal Plan. But for the moment, the preceding explanations will suffice.

“Venerable Brothers, all I have outlined may sound like strong medicine. If you think that, you think accurately. It is strong medicine for the virulent disease slowly eating the vitals of the Church Universal.”

Valeska was now gathering his papers into the folder. The cardinals were very quiet, most of them still under the impact of the Pontiff's words, some of them trying to answer the all-important question: What changes does this new attitude of this Pope augur in this Pope's foreign policy? One or two felt like asking the question in the silence that followed Valeska's abrupt ending, but they thought better of it.

“Leave them hanging in that wind, Holy Father,” Frankevic said under his breath up in the study. “Let them swing a little in the winds of doubt and uncertainty.”

The same thought was on Valeska's mind, but he thought better of it. About to turn on his heel and depart, he stopped. “I should perhaps add two further points, very briefly,” he said. He put down his folder and folded his arms.

“I would remind Your Eminences that, as Pope, I hold the Keys of this Sacred Blood, and that the Holy See can wait and wait and wait and wait. For as long as is necessary. If I depart this life, when I depart this life, my successor here will wait and wait and wait. What power on earth can wait like that? Which of Your Eminences or of my bishops can wait as long as that? The strength of those Keys will never weaken. The perfection of that Blood will never be diluted.

“I am now proceeding to the Basilica. I expect all of you to join me there in silent prayer.” Before his audience had realized what was happening, he had traversed the distance between his place on the dais and the exit, and was disappearing between four security men.

Some twenty minutes later, the last of Their Eminences straggled into the Basilica by the main doors and were motioned reverentially but firmly by security guards to travel up all 630 feet of the nave toward the central place of the Basilica, where the 449-foot-long transept crosses the nave. There the High Altar stands facing east beneath Bernini's all-bronze
canopy. In front of the altar is the circular marble balustrade and staircase leading down to an ancient chapel that holds the bronze sarcophagus of Simon Peter. This whole section of the Basilica is called the Confession of St. Peter, because the band of Greek and Latin inscriptions running around the upper walls there records Simon Peter's confession: “You are Christ, the Son of the Living God….”

Even from the main doors and up that enormous nave, the entering cardinals could see the white-robed figure: Frozen by the distance, it seemed dimly to be draped on the balustrade because of the whiteness of that beautiful marble. Actually, Papa Valeska was kneeling there, his cupped hands, fingers intertwined with a Rosary, resting on the balustrade, his eyes fixed on Canova's kneeling statue of Pope Pius VI, who, the most recent pope to be kidnapped, was taken into exile, held prisoner for four years by the dictators of the French Republic, and died in a miserable barracks room of the citadel of Valence, France, in 1802, far from the Tomb of the Apostles.

The moment Valeska had entered the Basilica, all security walkie-talkies rattled with the red-alert code: “The dove is loose! The dove is loose!” A cordon of security guards appeared as if by magic and ringed around the Confession, surrounding Valeska. All exit and entry points of the Basilica were barred and heavily guarded.

Three jeeploads of armed carabinieri tore at breakneck speed across St. Peter's Square and screeched to a halt outside the main doors of the Basilica. The command helicopter appeared, slowly circling above the Basilica, the sharpshooters balancing at its doors and watching with readied weapons. Plainclothes police, male and female, circulated among the people caught in the Basilica by the security emergency. Behind the cordon, the chance pilgrims and visitors, speaking a babel of languages, gathered quickly, eyeing this unannounced event and wondering what was happening.

For some of the cardinals, the walk up that nave was the longest walk of their lives. They knew that place quite well, knew all the hoary memories clinging to its walls. The also knew this Pope. They had learned to expect two things from him: a deluge of well-chosen words and a panoply of gestures heavily laden with symbolism. They had just had one half hour's deluge of those words. Now surely must come the symbolism in gesture.

One by one, or in small groups, some with muttered complaints, some wearing a quiet but obvious air of resentment, one or two with barely suppressed small supercilious smiles, the cardinals arrived at the Confession; and eventually all but a dozen sank gingerly and awkwardly to their knees on the marble intarsia around the balustrade. That holdout dozen
bunched together to one side, carrying on a staccato conversation in whispers. They had gone along, noblesse oblige, with the farce of the so-called Consistory. Stone-faced security officers informed them they could not leave the Basilica or exit from the security cordon. They were prisoners; but they had no obligation and certainly no intention of following the lead of this Polish Bishop, as if they were nothing more than a bunch of junior seminarians flocking docilely on the heels of their spiritual director.

But they especially, as well as some others, were severely shaken by old and cranky Luis Cardinal Suva. They could not take their eyes off him. He was ludicrous, and he was a reproach to them. Suva was last in. He made his way slowly, laboriously, agonizingly, pausing every two or three steps, glaring at the cardinals in his way, breathing heavily and talking to himself, eventually reaching the balustrade. He could not kneel down. So he leaned his aching frame on the balustrade to Valeska's right and buried his face in his hands. Suva was crying quietly, unashamedly, as if he were totally alone, as only an old man can do with an inviolable sense of privacy.

Frankevic arrived at the tail end of all of them. He stood at the very back, inside the cordon, keeping his eyes on that motionless white-robed kneeling figure surrounded by a ragged hemicircle sea of purple. After a while, as the minutes passed, the secretary relaxed, staring pointedly at the standing cardinals as if each one of them was an unhealthy excrescence, and praying. Surely some of these Eminences will get the Holy Father's message and meaning—this was his prayer. But his attention was mainly held by the kneeling cardinals.

He noted any and all of their movements, and where their heads turned, and who signaled to whom and what they were signaling. Yes, Frankevic concluded, at least some of them were slowly putting it all together, letting their surroundings and what they had just been told by Valeska sink into their spirits.

There was no escape from the significance of their surroundings: The kneeling statue of that worthy but worldly Pope whose physical beauty was ruined by hardship and whose pride was humbled by imprisonment and death in the contemptuous hands of his mortal enemies. The flickering lights of the ninety-five lamps that burn night and day around the entrance to the Tomb of the Apostles. The four massive ninety-five-footlong bronze pillars, containing the bones of 31,000 ancient Roman martyrs and sustaining the 700-ton weight of Bernini's canopy, brooding over the majesty of the High Altar. Above it all, the band of black lettering in Greek and Latin running around the upper walls and announcing Christ's momentous supreme choice in answer to Peter's confession of
faith: “You are Peter. Upon this rock, I will build my Church. And the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it….”