The Third Revelation (6 page)

“I understand.”

“I'll ask your question. I'll call you when I get the list.”

“Thanks, John.”

“How many pushy sisters do I have?”

Laura couldn't resist. She got up and went to hug her brother again, dropping a kiss on the top of his head.

He blushed like a six-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Laura . . .”

“It's just so good to see you.”

“You better get going.”

“Thanks, John.”

And so they parted.

Later, Laura would wonder what she would have done then if she had known the ripple effect such a simple question would have on the people she loved, and on the Church itself.

 

 

On her way back to the hotel, Laura went through the basilica, telling herself it was a shortcut. Once inside the enormous church she found herself wandering about like any other tourist. And then she noticed the confessionals. The priest sat behind a little Dutch door and penitents knelt on either side. His head was tipped toward the person confessing. Above his little box was a sign indicating the languages in which he heard confessions. It seemed odd to think of sins as Spanish or Italian or English.

Laura lingered in fascination, imagining what it would be like to wait her turn, to kneel there, and when the grill was opened, to pour out the sins of her life. The thought exercised a powerful attraction. Confession, absolution, pardon, and peace. But what was the point? She would have to have a firm purpose of amendment.

She would have to change her sinful ways.

She had no intention of doing so today.

She went slowly down the nave and out the great doors, across the piazza, to the Hotel Columbus and Ray Sinclair.

To pray is to put oneself in the presence of God.

Heather Adams had known Laura when they were students at Boston College. Not well, but better than she knew most of her fellow students.

“Nebraska?” Laura had sounded as if Heather had come from the farside of the moon.

“Red Cloud, Nebraska. It's where Willa Cather grew up.” Then she added, “The novelist.”

“So why did you come to Boston?”

“I wanted to come east. Willa Cather came to Pittsburgh. The city, not the university.”

“Heather, I haven't the faintest idea who Willa Cather is.”

Heather told her, even though it was clear that Laura had little interest in fiction. Heather herself was a math major and not a great reader, but she had read all of Willa Cather, first as a matter of local pride and then because
Death Comes for the Archbishop
had been the beginning of what she supposed was her secret life.
Shadows on the Rock
was even more important to her. Those novels had brought her eventually to Catholicism, and it was a puzzle to her that Willa Cather herself had not made the same journey. Mathematics is abstract, but life is concrete, and Heather wasn't the first mathematician who had found that the ethereal world of quantity opened her to something that changed her view of the concrete. Once she had thought that Pascal was simply a computer program; now she had a special devotion to the saintly mathematician.

She was not yet a Catholic when she left Boston College—her timid overtures to a Jesuit on the subject had not been encouraged—to pursue her MBA in New Haven. The Yale drinking song had spoken to her almost as directly as the novels of Willa Cather. “God have mercy on such as we, damned from here to eternity, bah, bah, bah.” The plangent lyrics had the impact of a hymn. When she made up her mind to take instruction in Catholicism and had gone off campus to a city parish in Manchester, she felt like an imposter among the working-class parishioners. Not that they paid any attention to her as she stood and knelt and sat and looked around her and realized that Catholicism was all about the Mass. Others in her pew had to push past her into the aisle at Communion time, and she longed to go forward with them but knew that wouldn't be right.

The pastor's name was Krucek. He was in his sixties and was very matter-of-fact when she showed up at the rectory and told him she wanted to become a Catholic.

“What are you now?”

“Protestant, I guess.”

“Don't you know?”

“I was raised a Lutheran.”

He was silent for a moment when she told him she was a graduate student at Yale. “What do you know about the Church?”

“That I want to receive Holy Communion.”

He gave her books to read, he met with her for half an hour every week for several months, and then said he would give her conditional baptism.

“Conditional?”

“Chances are you're already validly baptized.” He quoted the creed to her. One baptism, for the forgiveness of sins.

She made her First Communion at a weekday Mass, seven thirty in the morning at Saint Cyril's, but only she and Father Krucek knew that it was her first. From then on, she went to Mass every day, sometimes on campus, usually at Saint Cyril's. After she got her degree, she wrote to Laura and asked if there were any openings at Empedocles. There had been a write-up about Laura in the Boston College alumni magazine. Heather was asked down for an interview, she and Laura had a pleasant reunion, and she was offered a job in purchasing.

That had been three years ago. However good it was to see Laura again, and however much Heather knew she owed her friend for her job, they just didn't click the way they had in college. For one thing, Laura's life was lived in a blur these days, always at the beck and call of Mr. Hannan, off on trips with no forewarning, busy, busy, busy. How could she call her soul her own?

“When do you have time to think, Laura?”

“I'm not paid to think.”

“Ha.”

She had thought that now that she was a Catholic, they would have that in common, too, but Laura did not find it an exciting subject. Except to brighten up and say, “My brother is a priest, you know. In Rome.”

Heather decided that what now chiefly interested her was not easy to talk about, nor was that necessary. What do you say about prayer?

How odd it was that such a simple word, one she had known all her life, turned out to hide things of which she had never dreamt before. One Christmas vacation, she had read through all the volumes of Churchill's account of World War II and had been particularly struck by a surprising locution in his instructions. “Pray do this, or pray do that.” The French would have said
je vous en prie
, the Italians,
prego
. The English equivalent had all but dropped from usage, which is what made Churchill so different; praying now meant asking for something, the way she had prayed she would get the job with Empedocles. Had she thought of it as an answer to a prayer?

Now she began to read Teresa of Avila, first the autobiography. And second, too. When she finished it, she immediately read it again. The saint seemed to speak directly to her across the intervening centuries. From that point on, she was more happy than sorry that she and Laura had not again become close. Oh, it wasn't the gossip that flew around about Laura and Ray Sinclair. There was no protection against what people might say. God knows what they thought of her. She had become reconciled to the fact that her enthusiasms were not shared by others.

 

 

The house she had bought was isolated, on a country road, surrounded by woods that seemed to offer protection as well as seclusion. When she came home from work and turned into her driveway, she could feel her spirits lift. It was the first house she had ever owned, and it was furnished like every other house, more or less. The difference was in the lower level, which the previous owner had used as a home office. Carpeted, freshly painted, it had become her oratory. Reading about hermits and consecrated virgins as well as the Carthusians, Heather had in effect founded her own religious order. There was a prie-dieu, an altar with a portrait of Teresa of Avila flanking the crucifix. After a swift supper, she descended to her oratory and her real life.

To pray is to put oneself in the presence of God. Since we are all already there, in His presence, that sounds easy, but the realization of it took quiet, an inner silence, waiting. She had no expectation of mystical experiences—reading Teresa had informed her of the danger of such expectations. All she wanted was to realize that simple statement. To be in the presence of God. Saying the rosary helped put her there. She had come to love the rosary, its repetitious prayer, each decade devoted to some great event in the story of salvation. It had surprised her when she came upon Mr. Hannan on his knees in the grotto behind the main building, saying the rosary.

It seemed that some things connected all the faithful.

Chapter TWO

The third secret of Fatima

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Confraternity of Pius IX was formed in the late 1960s by half a dozen disenchanted priests, a sede vacantist or two, men certain the present occupant of the Chair of Peter was an imposter and the post legally empty; a variation on this, several were men convinced that Vatican II had been a heretical council, contradicting what had been Catholic teaching for centuries. They occupied a villa overlooking the Grande Raccordo Anulare where it intersects with the road to Leonardo da Vinci airport and Fiumicino, and they formed a religious community of sorts, bound together by their several discontents, dreaming of the restoration of orthodoxy and vindication of their accusations. They were under the leadership of Bishop Frederick Catena, Federigo, in the familiar democracy of the confraternity.

Catena had been ordained for the diocese of Peoria forty-two years ago and had come to Rome for the Council as the secretary of his bishop. He had never been home since. Other members of the confraternity focused their discontent on what they considered doctrinal aberrations in the Church. At the center of Federigo's own discontent were the apparitions at Fatima, Portugal. Some years before his attendance at sessions of the Council, as a seminarian, he had made a pilgrimage to the shrine, traveling by train to Lyon and then through Spain to Portugal. On his knees, he had traversed the great square to the spot where the Blessed Virgin had appeared to three peasant children. It had been his devotion to Mary that had carried Federigo safely through temptations against his vocation, periods of dryness and moments of gladness, too. From the time of his visit to Fatima he had said the rosary, all fifteen decades, every day. He read everything he could lay his hands on that concerned the apparitions and their significance. And he had become obsessed with the so-called secret of Fatima.

This secret had been written out for the Holy Father by Sister Lucia, one of the seers who had survived and become a nun, and it was sent to Rome, with the understanding that it would be read and made public in 1960. But the year 1960 came and went, and no statement on the secret emanated from the Vatican. Federigo was appalled. This was direct defiance of the wishes of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

His bishop had been trained in canon law and was rightly famous for the building program he fostered in his diocese. New parishes were created, churches built, parish schools opened. The bishop went off to Rome with the conviction that America had a thing or two to teach the universal church about renewal, the aggiornamento called for by good Pope John XXIII. They crossed the Atlantic on the
Statendam
, and on the journey Federigo spoke to the bishop about Fatima.

“You must press for the revelation of the third secret, Your Excellency.”

“What were the first two?” Bishop Spelling seemed amused.

Father Catena told him. The bishop nodded. Prayer, the need for punishment, the threat of hell for the unrepentant. “Sound doctrine,” he observed. “Not what I would think of as a secret, Father.”

If the journey had been longer, Father Catena would have begun a novena for the enlightenment of his bishop. That night he did not go to bed but knelt on the floor of his cabin and prayed that the Blessed Virgin would stir the heart of Bishop Spelling and cause him to rise up in the Council and demand that the third secret of Fatima be revealed. He fell asleep on his knees, and it seemed a special grace, but his prayer was not answered. Bishop Spelling became impatient whenever his secretary got on the subject of Fatima. In Rome, Catena began one novena after another, certain his prayers would be answered. Then even his silence seemed to annoy the bishop. After the second session, before the bishop went back to Peoria, he had a long talk with Father Catena.

“I want you to stay in Rome and study.”

Catena bowed submissively.

“Canon law would not be your cup of tea, I think. Theology?”

“Philosophy.”

“Good, good. I was thinking of the Dominicans. The Angelicum.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

It was difficult to think of an assignment to study in Rome as exile, but he knew his bishop wanted to get rid of him.

 

 

With the advent of the Internet, he came into contact with even more kindred souls who were appalled and astonished by the Vatican's refusal to dedicate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, one of the requests that had been made at Fatima. For Catena, it was the refusal to divulge the third secret that held center stage. Speculation as to what it contained was rife. A missionary in Taiwan whom Catena had met at the Council, where Father Leone had been in the entourage of the lone cardinal from China, advanced the theory that the reason the secret was kept secret was that it contained the Blessed Virgin's negative estimate of the Council. There was also Jean-Jacques Trepanier, a firebrand in New Hampshire whose Fatima magazine enjoyed wide circulation but whose intemperate attacks on the Curia had brought him under a cloud. Catena became acquainted with various
episcopi vagantes
, men who had been ordained bishops illicitly but validly by other wandering bishops. When Catena decided against returning home to Peoria, he severed relations with his bishop and was himself ordained a bishop by a Melchite who had fallen out of favor with other members of his rite. The elevation made him the clear choice for superior when the community was formed and took possession of the villa overlooking the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the gift of a disenchanted Argentine who spent half her year in Fatima.