Three Cheers For The Paraclete (23 page)

O
N A NIGHT
in early July, Maitland came – to sit before an inquiry – to the door marked
Sapientia
at the cathedral presbytery; and was taken without delay to the council room where he had dealt so unprofitably with His Grace and Des Boyle some months before. There the fire went well, the table glinted like port wine. Recognized now by Maitland as an old acquaintance, St Sebastian still exercised his terrible heroism in the window behind His Grace.

On the archbishop’s right sat Costello, within a day or two to enter retreat and reduce his life to order for consecration as a bishop. Already he looked quaint in his black, caped priest’s cassock; his presence was a prelatial one, and that he should still be wearing simple black looked like a deliberate and poorly staged act of public humility.

Monsignor Nolan sat on the left of the head of the table, and occasionally fuelled the fire. Before him lay a thin sheaf of typewritten notes, but the copious notepaper in front of Costello and His Grace had not been touched.

For Maitland, a chair had been placed to Nolan’s side of the room. The table seemed even more suited to dramatizing the gulf between judges and judged than did the one at Sister Martin’s inquiry, and His Grace had
wanted to avoid overtones of trial: he sensed that Maitland’s case was too important to be dressed up in formal ways. So Maitland, treated again to that upside-down consideration which was his right as a wrong’un, would sit at least as close to the fire as would his judges, and on the edge of a chair made for fireside dozing. He wondered whether, if he had murdered Nolan, they’d have given him a chaise-longue.

Nevertheless, he would be throughout badly exposed to the tribunal behind their oak ramparts.

‘You still don’t have an overcoat, James?’ asked His Grace, mostly in accusation, partly in something that was indulgent.

‘He earns enough,’ Nolan asserted.

As Maitland looked shamefaced and moved along the table to kneel before His Grace, the archbishop sat and warded him off with both hands.

‘Is this your idea of satire, James? I know you probably squirm and think it medieval, so I’d rather you didn’t.’

Maitland said softly, ‘It’s a polite gesture, Your Grace. If I can’t be polite to my own bishop …’

‘Isn’t that by way of being the point?’ Costello asked.

‘Sit down, James.’

But then the sight of this thin and ascetic troublemaker stooping to sit piqued His Grace.

‘You must know that I would be quite justified in suspending you without so much as speaking to you.’

Maitland nodded.

‘You’ll notice, Dr Maitland,’ said Costello, ‘there is no clerk-of-court here. Conscience is, we hope, clerk-of-court and sanctioner. There is no notary. Conscience keeps the book. All right?’

His Grace took up the thread. ‘Why I have chosen to consult you, James, is that I want explanations. And it’s
not only a matter of this book. There are other failures –
failures
, note! – of yours which will work against you all your life unless you answer for them here. It will be necessary to impose a penalty on you. I want – I’d even say I plead with you – to accept it and remain my priest.’

Maitland said indefinitely and with some embarrassment, ‘Yes, yes. Certainly.’

His Grace nodded at Nolan, who scanned the details of the first complaint. ‘It seems, Dr Maitland, that within a month of your being appointed to the staff of the House of Studies, you gave a sermon at a most peculiar Mass, in which you applied to priests the dictum, “Because they love nobody they imagine that they love God.”’

‘Well, James?’

‘Of course I didn’t apply it to priests as such, Your Grace. It was used to outline a danger, nothing more. What I said that evening was a plea for tolerance for priests.’

Costello smiled. ‘It’s kind of you to be concerned for us, Dr Maitland, but people seem to tolerate us to a quite satisfactory degree.’

‘It’s a nasty quotation, James,’ the prelate murmured. ‘You say you were outlining a danger. A danger for priests, I suppose you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t you think lay people have sufficient problems of their own without being let into ours.’

Maitland took a risk. He said, ‘I don’t want to seem flippant, Your Grace. Least of all tonight. But the Mass in question was said for a society of graduates. To many of them,
we
are one of the major problems.’

‘My nephew, Mrs Lamotte’s son, who attended the Mass, found the dictum in bad taste,’ Nolan claimed.

‘If His Grace questioned priests about every sermon that individual Catholics found distasteful …’

‘I would find such a statement in bad taste whether in or out of context. I would find it so, not by the standards of some individual quirk, but by absolute standards.’

‘Oh, monsignor,’ James protested, ‘we’ve never been friends, let alone admirers. Isn’t it natural we’d find each other distasteful by absolute standards. That’s what resentment’s all about.’

There was a silence. Then His Grace said, ‘Maitland, you’re not here to make proverbs.’

Maitland admitted this. There was a further silence, broken, without a trace of gall, by Nolan.

‘Your Grace, the quotation came from a French poet called Charles Péguy.’

His Grace, who harmlessly fancied his own French, went sorting names in his mind. ‘Péguy … Péguy …’

‘He was a nominal Catholic, a violent anti-clerical, and he didn’t attend Mass.’

‘Monsignor, that has no bearing on wisdom or its lack.’ Maitland longed to say something specious but ironic about Abraham and David, robust non-Massgoers. But His Grace intervened loudly.

‘
James!
It seems you have to be told you’re not here either to make proverbs
or
to argue as the equal of any other person in the room.’

Apologies had to be made a second time, and the proper silences again to be observed. The archbishop was frowning.

‘James, you say, “because they love nobody …” But don’t you believe that Costello and Nolan and myself love our brothers for the love of the good God?’

‘Yes,’ said Maitland. ‘Yes, I know you do.’ For their God was a kinsman, not an absolute, not a void in the heart.

‘Then can you name any priest who fits the statement made by this Péguy?’

He knew that he would be badgered with it in future conflicts, yet it had to be admitted now. ‘Yes,’ he stated. ‘Myself.’

Fairly covertly, the judges eyed each other.

‘Come now, James,’ His Grace said, ‘you desire to behold God, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that desire is love.’

‘I don’t know if that sort of love suffices. Half the evil things done on the earth are love-offerings, from someone to someone. I don’t know if I …’

‘My God!’ Costello made his classic sinus noise. ‘He’s gone all Dostoevski on us now.’

Questions proliferated, and when they were finished, the three were satisfied that, within the limits of the theological definitions, Maitland loved God. Throughout, Maitland wanted to announce, ‘But we’re not talking about the same entity!’ But that would merely have initiated a parallel line of questioning.

Then Brendan and Grete were raised by Nolan, apologized for by Maitland, commentated on by His Grace, and forgotten.

Third in the president’s notes, but bracketed by two red question-marks, was a digest of the strange theological opinions avowed by Dr Maitland during discussions among the members of staff in the downstairs parlour. But His Grace did not want a doctrinal showdown, not until
The Meanings of God
was brought up.

No question-marks flanked the names of Hurst and Egan, two unstable men, the secret of whose instability had been too well kept by Maitland.

Nolan at length neared the end of a long annotation on Hurst’s case.

‘… went so far as to arrange interviews with a psychiatrist for Hurst. Entirely without reference to me or to the young man’s spiritual director. If I stood on ceremony, I could manage to resent profoundly the bad manners. But what I most resent is the danger to the priesthood involved in such bad manners.’

‘Of course you do. James, I have to tell you yet another thing. You’ve got no sense of belonging to an institution. You’d better hurry up and acquire some, that’s all. No explanations?’

‘I couldn’t explain without seeming to accuse, Your Grace. I plead guilty to beginning something I shouldn’t have begun, and then treating Hurst negligently. Just the same, the person who has been harmed at my hands is Hurst, not Dr Nolan.’

Nolan appealed to His Grace. ‘You see?’

‘In any case,’ Costello said urbanely, ‘I’d like to see you attempt to accuse.’

‘I’d prefer merely to let my apologies stand.’

‘Ah, the beginning of wisdom!’

‘Then there’s Maurice Egan,’ murmured His Grace; and, more loudly, ‘Maurice Egan. Once more the problem of institutional sense. Or its lack.’

Maitland affirmed, ‘Maurice’s case would have confused the wise …’

Nolan made an axiom. ‘With a priest, wisdom is obligatory.’

‘James, you realized that his letter to the Supreme Pontiff was a mistake. Why wasn’t I warned of it? Do you think I’m beneath trust?’

The young priest gave a negative shrug. ‘You’re absolutely right. You should have been warned in Egan’s case. But Maurice had a career in the Church and … well, I feared a disintegration. Which has happened in any case.’

‘You say, in
Egan’s
case,’ Costello observed.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You emphasized, in
Egan’s
case. As if it wouldn’t have been better in any case to bring the problem straight to His Grace.’

‘There was no special malice in my saying
in Egan’s case
. But even a priest surely has the right to give or keep secrets. The archdiocese is not a police state.’

‘Enough rhetoric, thank you, James.’

‘In Egan’s case in particular I should have appealed immediately to you, Your Grace. Maurice lived by the book, and the book said that there is no appeal to Rome except through your bishop. I don’t want to sound portentous, especially since I’ve already been warned against such things. But those who live by the book – and it’s an enviable way to live – have to be saved in terms of the book. It was an unbalanced thing for him to have written that letter. I should have used the fact of the letter to gauge his condition.’

‘I see,’ said Costello, ‘no mention of any vow of celibacy the fellow might have had.’

‘What I said was only another way of putting it.’

Now it was well after nine, and His Grace, fuddled by the exchange of shots between Costello and Maitland, looked to the central question of
The Meanings of God
affair to show quickly and finally the precise quality of Maitland’s revolt. To conclude all minor matters, he asked Maitland whether by daring to mistrust authority he had saved Egan or Hurst from anything.

Maitland said, ‘I saved them from nothing.’

There were reasons, though he didn’t broach them. It was in general as impossible to help two people who are impacted in a given structure as it was to dig the eyes out of a whale and demand that they still focus. He had saved them from nothing. At that moment they both still
slept, stubble growing on both unlikely faces. Egan nearly had a beard, his face made vagabond by it, a child’s face, gratified with wonder drugs, fallen asleep with its pirate’s mask still on.

His Grace had said something to Nolan, who dissentiently pursed his lips and put aside the typewritten notes.

The archbishop began. ‘Are you aware yet, James, of the provisions of Canon 1386, the law governing publication of books by priests?’

‘I know that I’ve broken the law by publishing
The Meanings of God
without permission from yourself or one of the other bishops the law nominates.’

‘It was a book,’ testified Costello, ‘that required censorship as well as permission.’

‘I don’t believe that it required censorship because I don’t believe that it put forward theological opinion.’

‘The pseudonym seems to indicate that you suspected it did.’

His Grace mediated, saying firmly, ‘Now it’s Maitland’s mind on the matter that alarms me and that I must be certain about.’

‘I knew there must have been some provision of law by which I had to seek permission to publish. I am absolutely guilty of not making sure what the provision was.’

‘Oh come, Dr Maitland,’ Costello said, ‘I taught you when you were a student. I have regularly spent eight lectures every two years on this very topic, permission and censorship. Now I’d put my money on you to remember the details of the Dried Fruit Trading Act till your dying day if you’d listened to one or two, let alone
eight
lectures on the subject. How is it you don’t remember the details of Canon 1386?’

‘I wouldn’t dare say …’

‘Please do.’

‘Well, I suppose it all arises out of the human capacity to forget odious laws.’

‘So you think this is an odious law?’

‘I can’t pretend I don’t. All I can do is give my word to keep it in future. Until it’s revoked, of course.’

‘And if it’s never revoked, James?’ His Grace wanted to know.

‘I
will
keep it, Your Grace. Ironically, all that’s essential is that I should remain within the Church.’

Costello whistled, casting question on the word ‘ironically’.

Maitland went on, ‘You say you wanted to know my mind. There are many priests in Europe who ignore that Canon 13 …’

‘1386,’ Costello supplied.

‘Many of them use the expedient I used, and publish under a different name. They speak about the right to free expression being more basic than the rights of bishops, and all the rest of it. However, I didn’t do what I did on philosophic grounds. Far from it. I suppose I have to say my behaviour arose from a … native laxity.’

‘But this has no bearing on your breaking the law,’ said Costello.

‘That’s quite right. I know it’s not the thing a judge can take notice of. But a bishop may be more pleased to hear of it than of outright rebellion.’

‘Not this bishop,’ said His Grace, ‘not particularly pleased. I remember a charade of some weeks back, Des Boyle, yourself, myself. You discussing this same book as if it were somebody else’s. No, I’m not particularly pleased.’