Pontiff: The Vatican, the KGB, and the Year of the Three Popes by Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan-Witts

Author:Gordon Thomas & Max Morgan-Witts [Thomas, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781497658912
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

XXI

The opposition grew.

Within his city-state–with its thirty squares and streets, parish church, grocery store, post office, car pool, garage and bookstore–the voices of dissent became more vocal, more malicious and more bold in their rejection of what the pope said and did.

When he smiled and laughed, they smirked. When he quoted not only Dale Carnegie but also Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Napoleon and St. Bernard, they said he culled his philosophy from the Reader’s Digest. The more his audiences were attracted by his direct, commonsense approach, the fiercer grew the opposition; the more the crowds cheered, the more the Curia growled.

They picked over Gianpaolo’s words, looking not so much for hidden meaning–there was almost none–as for a chance to ridicule and repudiate with that special kind of subtle viciousness curialists can use when they feel most threatened; these were the gibes of single-minded men whose outlook had been shaped in part by grappling with such travails as birth control, premarital sex and the increasing threat of women being ordained as priests.

These were men who had come to believe in the closing years of Paul’s pontificate that, unless the slide was halted, by the end of the century there would no longer be a religious institution which they, in any event, recognized as the Roman Catholic Church. All around them they perceived opponents tearing at the very fabric they held sacred in order to achieve that change even sooner. There were priests in open rebellion against their bishops; bishops in revolt against the authority of the Vatican; black, yellow and all shades of brown, Catholics all, insisting that their will be done in the name of their brand of racism and under threat of separation from the parent Church; nuns who refused to wear habits or even work alongside priests because it offended their newfound religious women’s liberation. There were Catholic gay churches, Catholic yogis, Catholic Pentecostalists, Catholic Processions; they are to these men in the Curia what the dancing dervishes are to mainstream Islam.

For years–say the curialists–the deviates have had sympathizers in high places in the hierarchy; any number of cardinals who should know better continue to pay at least lip service to the demands of those determined to bring about change and the havoc their opponents fear.

They had almost welcomed the passing of Paul. For them, he had become simply too feeble to handle the crisis of communism, contraception and theological revolt. Not only had he finally failed to walk alone on the peaks of decision, he had lurked in the foothills, pleading and scolding, and trying to please all sides. Under him papal authority had reached a new nadir. The Church had been eviscerated by his weakness, his indecision, the lack of real authority that greatness demanded. Paul, in their eyes, became a pygmy pope leading the pygmy masses to the abyss.

They had expected, they said, so much from his successor: that he would refute moral support for terrorists in Latin America and elsewhere, that he would temper

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