Pandora's Curse

THE VATICAN ROME, ITALY

It seemed to outsiders that the white smoke signifying the election of the first pope of the new millennium was barely out of the chimney of the Apostolic Palace when Leo XIV, the 263rd man to take the seat of St. Peter, began changing the Holy See. Those who worked within the Vatican knew this wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough. And many were stunned by what the former Cardinal Giuseppi Salvi was planning to do.

Salvi had been was seen as a temporary compromise between factions within the Curia. Politicking during the electoral conclave had been rampant, and the election dragged on for ballot after ballot with no end in sight. After five days, it became apparent that neither of the two principal contenders would ever receive the two-thirds needed, so each side began to play a waiting game, hoping that the final ballot on the twelfth day, when a simple majority would take the election, would see their man victorious.

The reasons for this loggerhead were varied, but the church was at a crossroads, changes in the world had to be addressed, issues that the Curia had put off for decades could no longer be ignored, and a leader for the twenty-first century was needed. Some cardinals felt it was time for Catholicism and the papacy to modernize while others believed a more conservative, and in some instances reactionary, hand was needed.

On the eighth day, several of the more diplomatic cardinals realized that the bitterness infecting the conclave would likely spill over and infect the new pope’s reign. The church must show a united front, they felt. A compromise was needed. A third candidate was put forth, a man who could act as a temporary solution while the church decided its future. Cardinal Salvi was seventy-four years old and in poor heath. His reign as pope, they knew, would be a short one, giving each side time to further debate points of doctrine.

A week after Giuseppi Salvi became Leo XIV, he was in the hospital and the cardinals feared their solution had been too temporary, much like the first John Paul, who’d been pope for just over a month in 1978. However, tests confirmed that his ill health was not a grave concern. Instead, doctors found he suffered from gastric reflux, a condition he’d never discussed. Surgery for his malformed stomach valve was performed, and within a few weeks, he had made a near-miraculous recovery.

It was at this point that Leo XIV began to change the church, reshaping it into his vision of what it should be with a vigor that stunned the hard-liners who’d elected him. He appointed his closest friend, the liberal Cardinal Peretti, to the secretariat of state, the Vatican’s number two position. Leo had always been considered a moderate but this crucial appointment loudly stated that the status quo was about to end. He made it clear that the topic closest to him, and thus all of the church, was raising religious tolerance around the world and stamping out fanaticism. Rather than issue papal decrees on the subject, he decided to go directly to the bishops who oversaw the dioceses.

He called for a special synod of bishops, and such was the importance he placed on this meeting, he made Peretti its president. In another unusual step, Leo XIV invited other religious leaders to attend. Though they would have no voting rights, he wanted them all to understand the Vatican’s position on the subject of tolerance. Eastern Orthodox patriarchs and bishops were common at synods, but Leo also wanted Jewish leaders from Israel and the United States, prominent Buddhist monks including the Dalai Lama, influential Mullahs and Imams from both the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam, Shinto priests from Japan, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who headed the Anglican church, and hundreds of others.

Gathering this great body fell on Cardinal Peretti, and the sheer logistics were staggering. An ordinary synod took a year to organize and the pope had given him only six months, not only to bring together one hundred and seventy bishops from the Catholic Church, but all the others as well.

Dominic Peretti was a native Roman, sixty-five years old and something of a Curia outsider because of his modernist views on artificial birth control. Like Leo, he believed that some form of population control was going to be crucial for the sustainability of civilization. As pope, Leo couldn’t openly declare such a belief, but by giving Peretti power within the Vatican, his intentions were clear.

The Synod on Tolerance was a planned first step to bring the church closer to other religions so that, at some point, this other topic may be discussed. The Vatican was a two-thousand-year-old institution that moved at the ponderous pace of the world’s largest bureaucracy. Incremental change was the only way to get the church to reform and even the synod was seen as a radical departure.

Peretti was sitting at his desk on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace when a priest knocked at his door. “Forgive me, Cardinal Peretti. His Holiness has finished with his lunch and will see you now.”

“Grazie.” Peretti removed his reading glasses and slipped on his all-purpose pair. He’d tried bifocals but they gave him a pounding headache.

He stood and stretched. At six foot five inches, he was the tallest person in the Vatican, excluding a few of the corpo di vigilanza, the Holy See’s police force, and a couple of the ornamental Swiss Guards. As a boy, he’d been something of a basketball star and on rare occasions he would still shoot a few baskets with some of the Vatican’s lay workers. His face was remarkably unlined except for a deep crease on each side of his large, hooked nose. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses, his eyes were dark and possessed captivating intelligence. He grabbed up two bundles of papers and left his spacious office.

Although the Palace was a place of opulence and quiet dignity, Peretti moved through it with a looselimbed gait that was only now beginning to slow. He climbed the marble steps to the papal apartments and found the pontiff in the gilded library. With him already was Bishop Albani, relator for the Synod on Tolerance. He would act as a facilitator for the discussions and make sure that a consensus was reached at the event’s close.

“You look tired,” the pope greeted his secretary of state.

“I am,” Peretti agreed and took a chair across the desk from Leo. “This has been a trial.”

“Another week and we’ll convene the synod, Dominic,” the pontiff said with genuine sympathy. “Our relator here will take over and you can get some sleep. While I’ve limited the time allowed for opening remarks to quicken the pace, you’ll have a few quiet days before anything of significance takes place.”

Before Albani could mutter a protest that the opening discussions would be important, Leo XIV raised his hand, the sunlight streaming through the windows glinting off his fisherman’s ring, one of the many symbols of his office. “I’m joking, of course. We’ve given ourselves only two weeks for the synod, half the normal time, and not a moment will be wasted. Have there been any last-minute delays?”

“Hundreds,” Peretti sighed. “But I’m dealing with them. If I may speak frankly, many of the other religious leaders are acting like prima donnas on opening night. Some want more time to address the bishops. Others want better control over their meals. Still others resent the cabin assignments. For men and women who dedicate themselves to the spiritual salvation of others, they seem inordinately preoccupied with their own corporeal needs.”

“There are many dietary and cultural customs we must be sensitive to,” the pope reminded.

“Those I can understand. However my office has been deluged with other requests. Why an American minister needs to bring his wife with him, I’ll never know, but he telephones me every day repeating his displeasure that she won’t be allowed to join him. I finally relented and told him she could come.”

“Who is it?”

“Tommy Joe Farquar. He’s a former car salesman turned evangelist with a substantial television ministry.”

“How America puts up with some of those charlatans I’ll never understand,” Albani said

“How about the ship?”

Because of the international scope of the Synod on Tolerance, the pope had wanted it in Rome, as was tradition. However several of the key invitees refused to come to Vatican City. Jerusalem would have been his second choice, but that turned out to be even more contentious than Rome. It was Peretti’s suggestion to avoid the question of territory altogether. Rather than deal with political squabbling, he recommended that the synod be held at sea, on a cruise ship large enough to accommodate the two thousand people attending. The vessel they had leased, the Sea Empress, was one of the newest cruise liners in the world.

Having so many important people on one ship had created other sets of problems, not the least of which was security. The Swiss Guards were responsible for checking every member of the ship’s crew and the attendees. They would work with the individual security specialists from dozens of countries. Getting the group safely on board was the biggest single concern. Once the ship was in international waters, she was well beyond the reach of all but the most sophisticated terrorists. Still, the pope procured the services of the Italian Navy to provide an escort for the modern ocean liner — a destroyer that would follow behind the Sea Empress on her voyage.

“The ship is ready. With one week to go before we depart, the crew has been sequestered aboard her. No one not already checked by Interpol and the Swiss Guards is allowed anywhere near her.”

“She’s provisioned, then?” asked Albani.

“With everything from champagne to dog food for the bomb-sniffing dogs that sail with us.”

“Dominic, you’ve done a remarkable job. This meeting is as much a testament to your organizational skills as to the need for world understanding.”

Peretti demurred. “I will gladly fade into the background if we can get just one person to stop killing in the name of religion.”

“We will, my friend,” the pope said with unwavering faith. “How about the items we are returning to the other faiths? Are they at the ship yet?”

“Everything has been put aboard the Sea Empress already. The response we’ve gotten has been tremendous, I might add.”

“I thought it would. John Paul’s Mea Culpa in March of 2000 was a first step. The church should have made such a formal apology to the world decades ago. Some of the atrocities carried out under our banner were unspeakable. The Inquisition, crusades, pogroms, and our failure to counter fascism are just the most notable. Saying we are sorry was not enough. I thought it necessary to give back something tangible and what better than the thousands of religious texts and artifacts belonging to other faiths that the Vatican has accumulated over the centuries? These items should have been returned long ago.”

“Has there been a final count of items we are returning?” Albani asked Peretti. “I need to know for my speech to the assembly.”

Cardinal Peretti rifled through one of the batches of papers he’d brought to the meeting. “Seven thousand eight hundred books, mostly Jewish texts and torahs that we hid during the war, Islamic writings that were captured during the Crusades, and Eastern Orthodox material that we’ve held on to since the Council of Chalcedon in 451.”

“That’s it?” The pope’s eyes widened at such a low figure.

“You gave us only six months to prepare.” It was fact, not complaint. “There are two million books in the Vatican library as well as 150,000 manuscripts. This doesn’t include the seventy-five kilometers of documents in the archives. We’ve only begun to comb through to find material that belongs to others.”

“I’m sorry.” Leo smiled. “Forgive me. What else is being given back to the proper owners?”

“Five hundred icons that belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church. They will decide what particular group gets what. There are also forty statues, about two hundred paintings and a great many religious pieces such as candlesticks, menorahs, ornamental crosses, and reliquaries. In all, we’ve shipped eleven containers to the docks in Belgium. I’ve already drawn up a manifest of what goes to whom, and we’ve kept some of the more symbolic pieces separate so you can give them out directly.”

“And you say that the world’s interest in this step is high?”

“Despite the best efforts of our press office, many journalists are focusing on the restoration more than the synod, which by the way we can’t seem to dissuade them from calling the Universal Convocation.”

“It is our synod, but it is also a universal gathering,” the pope countered. “I actually prefer the title they’ve bestowed on the gathering. A synod smacks of secrecy. What we want is an openness that has never been seen before. This meeting is not about religion. It is about people and how to get them to improve relations with each other.”

Albani, who would be leading the synod, picked up the thread. “Modernism is dividing the world into fanatics or secularists. Evangelism has become such a bitter battle that many religious leaders have lost sight of why we spread our various beliefs. Souls have become a commodity, no different from oil futures or stock shares.”

Suddenly the pope laughed aloud, and it took him a moment to recover. “I’m sorry, Albani. In my head I heard a radio announcer quoting religions like a stock ticker.” He deepened his voice. “In today’s trading, Catholicism is up two points, Judaism up a quarter, and Buddhism down an eighth.” He laughed again before the reality of his joke hit him. He became subdued once more. “We have to put an end to this way of thinking. I hate to think what will happen if we don’t. Politics and race breed fanaticism on their own. The world does not need its religious leaders adding fuel to such an incendiary mixture.”