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EIGHTEEN

In Rome I usually found the Jesuits not only congenial but often wise. Not long after Karol Wojtyla, Archbishop of Kraców, was raised by the Holy Spirit to the See of Peter as John Paul II, the Jesuits were ready with a joke. The new Pope addresses God: “Almighty, will there be a married clergy in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be women priests in my time?” “No, my son, not in your time.” “Almighty, will there be another Polish Pope?” And God bellows: “Not in my time!” The Jesuits had done their homework. All the potential reforms that had come out of Vatican II were sternly undone by a fourteenth-century Prince-Bishop from Poland primarily interested, like Pius IX before him, in papal authority based on the most literal illiberal readings of Scripture. The result has been a serious shortage of priests in the United States with ever fewer would-be priests on the horizon while the parishioners pick and choose which of the Pope’s commands to obey and which to ignore; meanwhile, Brazil’s huge Catholic majority is splintering off into strange protestant evangelical groupings.

But watching the crowds in Saint Peter’s Square night after night was for me a nostalgic trip in time. I first set foot in the piazza in the summer of 1939. The heat was Washingtonian. The Pope then was Pius XII, now generally thought to have been too accepting of the Hitler regime. Years later when Howard and I were living in Rome’s Via Giulia, Pius XII (real name Pacelli) finally died. Apparently, he was something of a faddist when it came to medicine. The ultimate fad proved to be his embalmment by what seems to have been an amateur taxidermist. As a result, while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned, according to one viewer, “emerald green.” Then, in response to the summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for a long time until someone (a Jesuit?) passed on the information. It is also reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during this holy combustion.

Although an absolute nonbeliever I saw the church as a fascinating shadow of imperial Rome with its curia so like the Roman Senate whose building is still pretty much intact in the Forum.