A Traveller in Rome by H.v. Morton

Author:H.v. Morton [H. V. MORTON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

§ 2

Back at Castel Gandolfo, a papal chamberlain led me through a number of rooms whose windows looked down to the blue oval of the lake. We came to a corridor where five people were waiting and there he left me. One glance was enough to show that, like myself, they had been summoned to a special audience. There was a door at the end of the corridor, and we whispered together uneasily, rather like boys outside the headmaster’s study.

There was a dark young man in evening dress, a Christian Arab, whose pockets bulged with rosaries and other objects which he had brought for the Holy Father to bless; there was a slim, blonde American wife with her husband, and I thought she would never look more charming than she did that afternoon in her black lace mantilla and her long black dress; and two elderly Frenchmen.

The door of the Pope’s study at the end of the corridor opened, and we all turned expectantly. There came out, however, not the Pope but a prelate in purple, who arranged us a few paces apart on either side of the corridor, and told us that the Pope would say a few words to each of us as he passed. It was correct, he told us, to go down on one knee and kiss the papal ring. Having worked us into a condition of pleasant anxiety, he departed, and there followed twenty minutes during which we were occupied with our thoughts.

My own were of a day many years ago in Istanbul when a friend took me to meet the Œcumenical Patriarch of New Rome in the Phanar. We dived down some mean streets and came to what looked like the usual Greek monastery. Some bearded Greek priests took us to a room in which there was a wall safe full of books and manuscripts, which we examined, and, while we were doing so, various sable and bearded dignitaries entered and we were introduced to the last ghosts of the Byzantine world, the Great Logothete, the Didaskalos, the Protekdikos. Finally the Patriarch himself entered, a fierce old man wearing a violet kalemaukion above the square beard of an Assyrian king. He was referred to in a fulsome and almost blasphemous Byzantine manner as ‘your most divine All-Holiness’. He made a gesture with a ringed hand, and the priests carried round little cups of Turkish coffee and green figs in syrup. As usual on these occasions, no one had anything to say, but it was enough for me to have seen the Patriarch of New Rome seated upon his throne, with his serpent-headed crozier at hand.

Now I was waiting to be received by the Patriarch of the West, which is one of the Pope’s many titles. How differently, I thought, history has dealt with the Vatican and the Phanar, and how regrettable, though how inevitable, was the separation of the Latin West from the Greek East. Who could have imagined, in the fifth century, when

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