Robert Blair Kaiser's summary of the story so far: Cardinal Mahony has been taken off on his own helicopter to Mexico and put on trial for his crimes before a worldwide television audience. A jury of his peers finds him guilty and sentences him to become a Christian. Then a troop of Mexican commandos invade the jungle compound and kill everyone except the cardinal. He wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, with no memory of his ordeal, but with a nagging feeling that he is being called to a new kind of leadership in the American Church. He meets Nick Pike, a Southern California lawyer, and, Sean Sunnyhill, an Australian Jesuit, who start him thinking about some new ways of creating a people’s Church in the U.S. — even if he has to ignore canon law, which Pike suggests has become something of an idol. Now here's Chapter Nine...

Chapter 9: Resurrection

THE NEXT MORNING AFTER HIS PRIVATE MASS in the sacristy, Cardinal Mahony knelt to pray for no more than five minutes, then straightened up and strode into the nave to visit with some of the 137 saints and non- saints that marched—on tapestries—around both sides of his cathedral. He stopped for some moments to visit with seven of his favorite saints, in turn, then finally stood in front of St. Catherine of Siena, the woman who had once traveled all the way to Avignon in 1376 to tell the French Pope Gregory XI he had to return the papacy to Rome.

Mahony addressed Catherine of Siena, "For the good of the whole Church, Kate, you stood up to the pope. Do you suppose you could stand by me while I see if it is possible for this poor servant to stand up to a pope as you did? Maybe even find me a little help?"

He expected no miraculous answer, but got one only minutes later when he was racing toward the rectory, in a hurry because of the cold January drizzle. On his way, he encountered a handsome woman wearing a trenchcoat—Hispanic, vaguely familiar. She stopped in his path and smiled. He said, "you'll have to excuse me. In my twenty-three years here, I have met so many—"

She said, "Juana Margarita Obregón."

That staggered him. "Dr. Obregón! Are you real? Or am I having a vision?"

"Quite real," she said. She took his hand, so he could feel her warmth.

"But you died on November the ninth—in Chiapas! Along with everyone else, with Iván Díaz and the five bishops and the video crew and—" his voice softened—"María."

She laughed, but there was no mirth in her laughter, only wonder. "It was not a miracle, I assure you."

"Wha, what happened? Tell me."

"All right." She took a deep breath, then another, then plunged in. "Back on that fateful day, as soon as Bishop Azevedo announced the trial verdict, I dashed out of the room. There is no need now for any false modesty. I had a terrible case of diarrhea that day. I had to find relief. I hurried over to the latrine ravine. I was pulling my pants down just as I heard the helicopters overhead. By the time I finished my business, I was able to look up through the foliage and see they were military. When I heard the first explosions, I realized they had come to rescue the cardinal, with lethal force."

Despite the wind and the rain, Mahony's face was flushed. He took her arm, "Come with me. let's get out of the wet." She nodded and followed him through the plaza, back to the rectory. He let himself in with a key and led her to one of the visitors' parlors, shaking his head. "I cannot believe this," he said. "Then what happened?"

"I can hardly believe it either," she said, eyes alight with excitement. "Providence, for me, was a pool of—well—shit."

Mahony blinked. "you mean—you just dived in?"

"Well, not head first, I assure you. I just slid in, feet first, closing my eyes and holding my nose. I went under for a few seconds, then realized I could swim my way to the other side, kicking and using a very vigorous breast stroke, until I landed on a kind of shelf under a large banana leaf, with machine gun fire popping all around me. I floated there for almost four hours, up to my ears in excrement. Finally, I heard the helicopters take off."

"American helicopters or Mexican helicopters?"

She gave him a quizzical look. "Helicopters," she said. She paused, letting the implications of her response sink in, then plunged ahead with her story. "I waited another hour or so, until I heard nothing except the sound of the cockatoos. Then I climbed out of there, covered with—" She grimaced.

"How did you get out of there?"

"I walked out."

"Walked out? Just like that?"

"Well, no. First, I wanted to find out what had happened to all the others. I made my way farther down the ravine, then climbed back up again to the compound. Parts of it were still smoldering. Bullet holes everywhere. At first, I found no one. Then I discovered a large funeral pyre off to the south. I was assailed by a strange combination of smells—kerosene and burned human flesh. There is nothing like it. They had piled up the bodies and incinerated them, probably with their special helicopter fuel.

"I stumbled away from there as fast I could. I found the room I had been staying in, grabbed a shirt and some jeans and a pair of shoes and a towel and went to look for a place where I could bathe. I found a communal shower. It was not working. But nearby, I came upon a kind of wading, or maybe, bathing pool. The water was cold, but it was clean enough. I stripped and immersed myself in that water. Sat there, soaked for a good fifteen minutes and washed my hair as well as I could, then got out and dried myself and put on my clean clothes. Then I moved out. I spent one fearful night in the jungle, then another half day, and I found an Indian village, people who had heard what happened when the choppers had come. They asked me no questions. They took me to the nearest town in a donkey cart and—"

Mahony had sat there in the parlor, silent and astonished through most of her tale. But his impatience broke through. Interrupting, he said, "Why are you here?"

"Where? LA? I once had a house in Westwood. I am told I cannot go back there. The FBI seized that house. But LA is my home now. Where else would I go?"

"Why are you here in my cathedral, my rectory?"

"I have heard you might need some help. I want to help you."

He frowned. "Haven't you already done enough?"

She cringed.

He stood and took her hand and lifted her to her feet, then held her in his arms and hugged her to correct her misunderstanding. "Juana, Juana, Juana, don't you see? You've been an instrument of God's inscrutable ways. They sentenced me to become a Christian. Maybe you are here to help me do it. Will you help?"

"Yes," she said, eyes glistening. "Yes."

 AFTER SEVEN GOOD HOURS OF SLEEP that night, Mahony rose refreshed, too excited to do nothing, as his doctors had ordered. He began to make some radical moves. Two days ago, members of the U.S. Army Special Forces had delivered Mahony's helicopter—in excellent condition—to its hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. Today, he got on the phone, dialed an airplane broker and sold his flying machine for $1 million—and had the check sent to Jeff Dietrich and his wife, Catherine, at the Catholic Worker. He sold his Mercedes, too, and an SUV, then took a walk downtown and bought a bus-and-subway pass from the Los Angeles Rapid Transit District. On his way home, he stopped at the exclusive Jonathan Club on Figueroa and put in his official resignation. He had a small exercise room in the rectory. He could use that, and forego the steam room at the club, and its Swedish showers, and its masseurs.

And then he stunned his bookkeeper at the archdiocesan headquarters by phoning and asking her to get a bank draft for $100,000 and mail it to the pope. He dictated a note: "I will not be able to attend the January meeting of the Vatican's finance committee in Rome, and I will not be attending any more meetings at the Vatican—until, of course, it is time to go and help elect a new pope, which I pray, your Holiness, does not happen soon. I will be busy attending to the pressing needs of the people of God in the counties of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara."

What were those needs? First on his list: the people's need for the Eucharist, which came down to one thing: more priests. There were darn few in his own pipeline. young men weren't flocking to the seminary like they used to in the good old days. giving up a wife and kids—that was apparently too much to ask of men today. Whatever the reason, his seminary was empty. Almost. One or two young men each year would receive the Holy Oils. And three or four of the old timers would die, so that, each year, he had a net loss.

He'd already tried importing priests from Nigeria. They spoke English, after a fashion, but he'd gotten complaints about them. They were a lordly lot, convinced that the priesthood itself earned them all the perks and the deference due a corporate executive. And their homilies were abstract and moralistic. So imports were not the answer. Not unless he could get young priests from Ireland, as his predecessors in Los Angeles had done for almost a century. Trouble was, there were no more young priests coming out of Ireland. Last year at All Hallows, the major seminary near Dublin that had sent thousands of priests to America, they had had no ordinations at all.

He phoned Terry Dosh, a former Benedictine, the Southern California vice-president of CORPUS, and said he'd like to set up a pool of good men, married priests who could start saying Sunday Masses all over the LA Basin. "But then," he told Dosh, "before they actually go out and do it, I want to have some listening sessions in every vicariate, to find out how this will go down with the people. How do the people feel about priests who left the active ministry to get married? I want to ask them whether they would like to see these men back at the altar. And if they want that, I intend giving it to them, no matter what canon law says." In a recent flashback, Mahony had recalled the last words of his court-appointed lawyer, Paul Kelly: "Try listening to all your people. Don't tell them what you think they need. Find out what they think they need. And give it to them."

BEFORE SUPPER THAT EVENING, Mahony encountered his chancellor, martini in hand while he watched Channel 2's evening news. He told him he wanted to embark upon a program of creative listening "to the people of God."

Jeremiah Hawkslaw put down his drink and pursed his lips. "We've already done that," he said in the patient tone of a first grade teacher. "Remember our archdiocesan synod in 2000 and 2001? We had a grassroots campaign."

Mahony said he did remember. He had called on every parish in the archdiocese to conduct Town Hall-type meetings where people were encouraged to listen to one another, and to speak up about their Church. Pastors and parish leaders spent hours distilling all the comments down to ten proposals, and then they took those lists to regional meetings. Each of those meetings ended up producing a dozen concrete suggestions—most of them revolving around ministry—for the future of the Church of Los Angeles in the twenty-first century.

Hawkslaw said, "I can give you those concrete suggestions from memory. The first one—"

Mahony wasn't exactly listening. His attention had been momentarily distracted at the sight of Vice President Cheney being interviewed on the CBS Evening News about a rumored U.S. raid on a nuclear facility in North Korea. Cheney would soon be an ex-vice president. He wondered to himself whether he would ever stop trying to make war. Then he turned back to Hawkslaw. "We didn't follow through on those suggestions," he said. "And, anyway, those meetings never got to the heart of the matter."

"Yes," said Hawkslaw, "from the beginning, we had to tell everyone there were certain things the local Church could do, and certain things the local Church couldn't do."

"That was a mistake," said Mahony, "In effect, we crippled that project before it ever got off the ground."

"Well, yes?" Hawkslaw wondered what point the cardinal was trying to make. To him, the universal Church's worldwide governance was a given— many centuries in the making. "Far as I know, the pope still makes all the rules."

Mahony ignored the implied rebuke. "I'd like everyone to revisit the questions. But this time with no cap on their creativity."

Hawkslaw stared at the cardinal. Further evidence, he thought, that Mahony had lost his mind. "We can't do that."

"Who says we can't?"

"Canon law says we can't. It's given us a whole set of rules and regulations regarding diocesan and provincial synods."

That gave Mahony pause. There was something about Hawkslaw's self- righteous tone, something, even, about the set of his jaw that told him to back off. What was he, stupid? Confiding his reservations about canon law to Hawkslaw, his eminent canon lawyer? "Of course," he said, clapping his palm to his forehead. "Canon law. Forgive me. I don't know what I was thinking." He was thinking, in fact, that canon law was a sacred cow.

"Okay. Okay." Jeremiah Hawkslaw relaxed and forced a grin. But now he started wondering what he'd do about his boss. He suspected the cardinal had been demented by his days in Chiapas—much more than anyone thought.

THE NEXT NIGHT, Hawkslaw had obvious proof. He was standing at the entrance to the cathedral's parking garage next to an LAPD paddy wagon, signing a complaint against the six bums he had found sleeping in the plaza. The cops had come right away, rousted the vagrants and were pushing them into their van when the cardinal appeared, his face illumined by the vehicle's flashing red lights.

"What are you doing?" he demanded of the sergeant in charge.

"Just complying with a request by the chancellor here. Monsignor—" He looked at his clip board. "Monsignor Hawkslaw."

Mahony stared at Hawkslaw.

Hawkslaw shrugged. "They were bedded down under some cardboard, just outside the bronze doors. Two of 'em were drinking cheap wine."

Mahony nodded. "Uh huh. Well, we have ten empty rooms in the rectory. There's no need for them to sleep under cardboard. On a concrete slab." He told the sergeant to tear up the complaint. He peered into the back door of the police van. "These men—how many are there, six?—will be our guests tonight."

Soon, the cardinal was leading six grimy bums up to the rectory's guest rooms on the second floor. "you'll probably want to shower before you climb under the sheets," he told them. "It looks like you guys haven't experienced hot water recently."

One of them said, "Recently? Would you believe six months?"

Mahony sniffed and grinned and said he could believe it.

Hawkslaw was agape. He wondered what message he would fax to Cardinal Re.. But no. It was almost midnight. He decided he'd better wait 'til morning, after he had a phone chat with Cardinal Grandeur in Philadelphia.

MONSIGNOR HAWKSLAW REALIZED the Church in Los Angeles was in even deeper trouble than he imagined when the cardinal ordered his press spokesman Harry Gray (in Hawkslaw's presence) to tell the media he'd be making his first public appearance a week from Friday night. "It will be in the cathedral," he said. "And I want to celebrate a Mass of the Resurrection— for my captors. President Bush may have called them terrorists. I call them martyrs. Martyrs for the truth."

If the cardinal's memory was beginning to kick in, it seemed to Hawkslaw like a very selective memory indeed. These kidnappers? These terrorists? He was calling them martyrs for the truth?

"You want to see any of the press before then?" asked Gray. "give 'em a heads-up?"

Mahony said, "Maybe some of my friends at the LA Times? No, I think not. From now on, Harry, I'm not going to play favorites with the press, or try to con them, or manipulate them. They have a legitimate job to do—to tell the truth insofar as they are able. My job is to help them do it—insofar as I am able."

Gray lifted an eyebrow.

"I am not kidding, Harry."

"I didn't say anything."

"You looked skeptical."

Gray hesitated, trying to figure out whether Mahony meant what he was saying—that he not only wanted to tell the truth, but be told the truth, too, even by his press spokesman. He took a chance. "Can you blame me?"

"I guess not," said Mahony. "For most of my time here, I only heard what I wanted to hear."

Hawkslaw wondered where Roger had gotten that. The words were certainly not vintage Mahony. But where did they come from? Had his captors brainwashed the cardinal-archbishop of Los Angeles?

THE CATHEDRAL WAS JAMMED. Those who hadn't come early didn't get a seat, and fire marshals asked some of those who were standing to leave and watch the proceedings on two large television screens set up in the plaza.

Before the Mass began, Cardinal Mahony, wearing a simple black cassock, marched out on the altar alone. He surveyed the crowd, then took several steps down to put himself on the same level with the congregation.

He began, "In the prophecies of Malachy, the man to succeed Pastor Angelicus, Pius XII, would be Pastor et Nauta. Those Latin words meant that Pius XII's successor would be a shepherd and a sailor. I think that was a poetic way of saying that that man, John XXIII, would be the kind of pope that Jesus wanted the Apostles to be: a fisher of men.

"Well, I haven't been a very good shepherd, and I haven't been much of a sailor, but I want you all to know that I have undergone a conversion experience, and I have resolved to demonstrate my conversion not with fine words but with daring deeds." He paused, then took two steps closer to the people in the first pews. "I want you all to know that I fired my lawyers this morning. Then I met with my five-member finance council and gave them a mandate to settle immediately with all the remaining victims of sexual abuse, the men and women whose cases are still unresolved. Those souls, mostly men, a few women, are still haunted by the abuse they suffered at the hands of men they trusted as they would trust Jesus himself.

"At one time, reluctant to lay myself open to my enemies, I played the games my lawyers taught me, played games with the victims, as my lawyers played games—are still playing games—with the victims' lawyers, and with the district attorney himself.

"Now I realize the victims were not my enemies, but simply victims of the clericalism that has shamed the hierarchical Church and, in the process, shamed all of you, the people of God. I also realize that the victims' lawyers—with only a few exceptions—are not the greedy opportunists I thought they were. They had a right—no, a duty—to seek help from our legal system for their clients. They still do.

"And once I realized my own lawyers' strategy, to keep the victims hanging out to dry for more than four years, I should have stopped them in their tracks and worked out an immediate settlement with those victims. You know I finally agreed to a settlement of six hundred sixty million dollars in July of 2007, but the archdiocese got off easy. It only paid out two hundred fifty million. Insurance companies and some religious orders paid the rest. In retrospect, I realized I could have done the right thing years ago, but didn't because I was thinking more about the institution and less about the ongoing suffering of the victims."

Mahony paused and looked out over the audience, and his voice broke a little. "I regret that. Now I want to cut through the legal niceties and help the rest of the victims put an end to this horrible chapter in their lives—insofar as that is possible. My heart goes out to them here tonight, even to those who are insisting on a trial. I'd rather not go on trial, of course, but I will, if that's what it takes to put this all behind us and face into the future as brothers and sisters in Christ—together.

"That said, I want to go back now and vest for Mass. It will be a Mass of the Resurrection for my captors, and for all those who lost their lives at Chiapas trying to hold me accountable to you—and to many others around the world—for my sins. They found a creative way to do that. I admire their imagination, and their follow-through, and their courageous foolhardiness, too." He paused, to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand. "They lost their lives in the process." He paused again, then proceeded, his speech now much more deliberate.

"Please . . . do not blame . . . the entire chain of military command . . . for their deaths. This was just one of those bureaucratic mistakes—poor information, men following orders that were never given, bad communications at the point of engagement. Pray for them. And, please . . . do praise . . . the martyrs, and give thanks to God . . . for sharing them with us before he brought them home in glory. And, if anyone cares, I plead . . . guilty as charged in Chiapas. I confess my sins to all of you, and promise I will try to be . . . a Christian—as I also seek new ways of being . . . a shepherd and a sailor." He bowed his head, then raised it, and raised his arms, too, and blinked back his tears and tried to smile.

For a few moments, no one stirred, or even breathed. Then, far in back of the cathedral, someone began a rhythmic clap. A few others joined in, and then everyone followed their lead, accelerating to a crescendo of acclaim that ended with a throaty cheer. A male voice rang out, "Do we have a bishop?"

Steve Lopez of the LA Times, who was there, wrote a few lines in his reporter's notebook to remind himself that the man in the pew didn't say, "We have a bishop," but posed it as a question, and that someone else shouted, "Maybe!" To Lopez that good-humored "maybe" told him Mahony still had to prove himself to a community that loved him, but didn't trust him.

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Other books by Robert Blair Kaiser:
A Church in Search of Itself
Clerical Error
The Politics of Sex and Religion
“R.F.K. Must Die!”
Pope, Council and World
Co-author (with Tim Smith): Jubilee 2000, A Musical Comedy

[Index of this serialisation of Cardinal Mahony — A Novel]