His lips barely moved as he spoke. The breeze under the cool columns stirred their cassocks and made them flutter; pigeons above the square wheeled in the air suddenly, all rustling wings and feathers, making circles against the flat Italian sky.
The second man was nearly twenty years younger, a little taller and a bit heavier than Ludovico. Father Martin Foley was dark Irish — his hair was thick and black with just a hint of gray at the sideburns, and his face bore a gravity of manner and the deep lines of experience. He was born in the Republic of Ireland but when he was six, his parents moved to Liverpool to find work. He was educated there and by dint of competitive examinations that were just beginning to open good schools to the lower classes, he got into Cambridge. His parents, his priest, his relatives, were amazed by his progress in this alien and hated society of the English, but they were even more astonished when he decided to become a priest. Though Liverpool was the most Catholic and most Irish city in England, it was still in England; his father thought Martin had “thrown up his chance” to make his mark there by becoming a priest, though he did not speak against it. The two men — father and son — eventually reconciled because the old man saw that his son would “make his mark” just as boldly in the Church as he would have done in Britain, for he was sent to Rome very early — and he remained there. He had been in the ancient city for ten years and was a Roman in taste and temperament, finding the ways of the capital city as familiar as those of the English society his family had adopted. Most of his success had been due to Cardinal Ludovico.
Ludovico had taken Martin Foley under his protection early and advanced him through the intricate Vatican bureaucracy with advice, with generous aid, with access to Ludovico’s own formidable alliances and networks. He had been a second father to Martin Foley at a time when Martin felt estranged from his natural father. Now their relationship was on a more businesslike footing but still the old affection lingered. Ludovico, an instinctive man able to make startling deductions on the basis of scanty evidence, had seen in this somewhat serious, somewhat plodding young man qualities of intelligence that might have taken a lesser mentor years to discover.
“You see, Martin, you are brilliant,” Ludovico had once said in his elegant, purring English. “But you hide this spark so well under the layers of your pedestrian nature that it requires a person equally brilliant to see the kinship with your intellect.”
“But I don’t have your Excellency’s brilliance.”
“Oh, you do, Martin. You are like a thousand little lamps darting flames at the darkness. If you would only concentrate all these flames into one light, the world would see it, too, as I do.”
But Foley remained something of a plodder and Ludovico had finally, reluctantly, concluded some time ago that Martin would always be a key operative in the network but never succeed him to head the operation.
The two men were speaking of the operation now, in the open square that Ludovico preferred. Too many walls in the Vatican listen, he had once said. “Our Church is full of mysteries, Martin, but it has no secrets.”
And secrets were most important to both men.
Franco Cardinal Ludovico was Director-General of the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith.
It was a dull name for an extraordinary organization with a budget in the millions of lire and a century-old mission to serve as the eyes and ears of the Pope in matters temporal, as opposed to matters spiritual.
The Congregation for the Protection of the Faith had been established by Pope Leo XIII, who saw the restless upheavals of the industrial age — and the no-longer-docile working classes — as both an opportunity and a threat to the Church. Openly, the Pope wrote of his concerns in the classic encyclical Rerum Novarum. Privately, he founded the Congregation and charged its first director: “I do not wish to know the words of ambassadors or kings; they cannot speak the truth. I wish to know the simple truth, the hard truth, the truth that is naked in the world.” So the network of “holy spies” began.
In the era of the young Mussolini, strutting for the first time across the stage of the world, the Congregation brilliantly gathered a ring of evidence and information that forced the Fascist dictator into a compromise that led to the Lateran Treaty of 1929, granting Vatican City the status of an independent state. The power of the Congregation was great then and it grew, especially after World War II. Now the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith was rarely spoken of — in the Church or out of it — which suited Cardinal Ludovico very well.
Only once had a pope seriously threatened the existence of the Congregation. In 1961, John XXIII met in secret with the man who was then Director-General. The peasant Pope with the wide, beaming face and the shrewd eyes had gone over the budget requests for the coming year and concluded, in his gentle voice, that “secrecy is very costly, isn’t it? Would this money be better spent on the poor?”
The Director-General made the mistake of offering the wrong reply. He had not yet taken the measure of the man: “The poor have no secrets.”
For a moment, the Pope was silent and then he said, still gently but with an implied warning in the turn of the words, “That is too cynical, Cardinal. Even for you.”
The Director-General had realized his mistake at once. “I beg your pardon, Holiness. I did not wish to offend you.”
“You have offended yourself.”
“Our Lord said to us we would have the poor with us always. Let us hope that the Church will be able always to serve them well, even in these times.”
“Do you doubt then, Cardinal, that the Church of Christ will last until the end of the world?”
The Director-General bowed his head in defeat. “No, Holiness. But the Church might again have to hide for half a millennium as the world plunges down into ignorance and darkness. Even in a new Dark Age — and I fear it is very close — we would have the poor with us. But how can we serve them best when we must ensure our own survival? Our Lord said to us the Church would last until the consummation of the world. But He did not say that it would be triumphant in every age of the world.”
So, shrewd and insistent in his arguments, the Director-General saved the life of the Congregation, though he could not forestall cuts in the budget. Fortunately, the reign of John was brief and the next Pope — Paul VI — had been a diplomat in the Vatican and was a thorough bureaucrat in his time and understood well the needs of the Congregation — and its uses. The budgets grew fat under the reign of Montini (who was Paul VI) and Montini was pleased with the clear, wise, direct intelligence reports from the new Director-General, Ludovico. Ludovico received his red hat within three years of taking over the Congregation.
Some in the Vatican said he was the second most powerful man in the Church; it was a mark of Ludovico’s power that he knew those who said such things.
“Do you understand the delicacy of this, Martin?” Ludovico now said as they walked at the edge of the square.
“Yes, even I understand that,” Martin Foley said. His voice was low, with still a slight lilt in the accent reminding Ludovico of his Irish birth. There was a trace of bitterness in the reply; the bantering of their first years had been hardened somewhat by a feeling in Martin that Ludovico had already made a final judgment about him.
“Now, Martin,” Ludovico said gently, in his light, amused tone. “You must understand the delicacy of it or I would not have told you about it at all; but I was speaking of the delicacy of what must be done.”