ABOUT twenty minutes to eleven on Sunday, the faithful of the quarter began to enter the church for the eleven o’clock High Mass. These faithful included Irish labourers and their families, Italian ice-cream merchants and their families, French mistresses from some of the more exclusive girls’ schools, a flock of Belgian nuns, a few university lecturers who had been converted to Catholicism by reading history or theology, a handful or so of Real Ladies and Gentlemen who saw no inconsistency in accepting both haggis and Papal Infallibility, and a horde of publicans whose piety would have shamed a Carthusian monk. They came, all of them, to comply with the universal precept of the Church and to gain comfort and strength from worshipping with their fellow Catholics in a land the majority of whose inhabitants imagined that the Apostolic and Roman Faith was a superstition specially minted for the delusion of Hibernian domestic servants. All around them, the MacWhirters and MacGregors were preaching that humorless brand of Christianity which is supposed, for some reason or other, to produce good surgeons and competent accountants, and the good surgeons and competent accountants, disdaining that which had made them what they were, were off to Barnton, Luffness, or Muirfield to worship the Trinity in Unity by going round in under eighty. But the faithful of the quarter held fast to tradition, and they had, those of them who thought very deeply about the matter, the satisfaction of knowing that, if they were out of fashion in Edinburgh, they were at one with the high nobs in Madrid and Venezuela and with that gang of toughs subsequently known to hagiology as the Apostles.
In the sacristy (that kitchen where the hieratic mysteries are so unmysteriously prepared), there was a froth of men and boys sliding into surplices and cottas, and Canon Geoghegan was pushing his baldish pate through an alb and looking very much like an irate farmer going to bed in a Christie comedy, and Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty, who were to be deacon and sub-deacon and who were already vested in their green tunicles, were having a sotto voce conversation about electric hares, and Father Malachy, who was to preach the sermon, was walking up and down with his hands folded beneath his scapular in the manner approved by his holy father Saint Benedict.
“Father,” said Canon Geoghegan as he began to fasten the girdle around his waist.
“Yes, Canon,” said Father Malachy, slipping si-lently to his side.
“About that sermon of yours.” The canon spoke in an earnest whisper. “Pitch it in strong. First of all, the dignity of plain chant, Gothic chasubles, and all that, and how all this polyphonic nonsense is in direct opposition to the wishes of His Holiness. And then the Garden of Eden. Details, you know. Sex music, silk stockings, and unbridled passion. Late hours and good young Catholic girls being led astray. And then contrast the tumi-tumness of the modern dance with the chaste harmonies of St. Gregory. Pile it on. And if you notice anyone sleeping, preach at them until they open their eyes.”
“But surely, my dear Canon, I can sufficiently justify the seemliness of performing the supreme act of worship in a decent and chaste manner without dragging in the establishment on the other side of the road. And it’s not as though I had had much experience of preaching on vice. You see, I live all the year round in a monastery and all the preaching I do is to priests in retreat and an occasional Sunday sermon to the Highland laity who, as you must have heard, are most virtuous and not at all attracted to the things which you have just mentioned. Why not leave the subject over until your annual mission? The Redemptorists do that sort of thing so very much more competently than I could ever hope to do.”
Father Malachy did not speak these words without reflection for, so quickly does the human mind flash across whole continents of logic, philosophy, and fact, he was able, in the second of time that cradled the interval between Canon Geoghegan’s question and his reply, to weigh Christ’s love for the sinner against Christ’s hatred for sin and to decide that, in this instance at least, all references to a pastime which was not per se evil would be out of place and might do more harm than good.
“But, my dear Father,” Canon Geoghegan droned in his most wheedling voice, “you must surely see the scandal that such an establishment causes in my parish? Most of our young men and, I regret to say, many of our young women frequent it and are thereby led into occasions of sin. And their temptation is made more grievous by the fact that, Saturday night after Saturday night, they see the brother of his lordship the bishop in a state of intoxication and indulging in wanton familiarities with indecently dressed dancing instructresses. I take a pride in the souls as well as in the sanctuary of my parish, my dear Father, and, for every sermon I have preached on the ornaments of the altar and the ministers, I have preached two on immoral novels and walking down dark lanes after ten o’clock at night. Please, Father, do not lose this opportunity of helping me to carry out the work which Almighty God has called me to do.”
Father Malachy thought again, quickly, deeply. Like an invisible machine, his mind loosed its own controls and went chasing down the channels which it had hewn for itself in the dark, uncharted lands of interior consciousness. Dancing halls, he knew, were not always run in accordance with what the hierarchy called in their pastorals truly Christian principles, and shaded lights and southern music and short frocks often fanned to a blaze those passions which the moral theologians said were more responsible for the peopling of hell than all the other sins put together. And yet was it by suppressing dance halls that one would usher in the reign of Christ? Was it not rather by preaching the old story of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ Our Saviour that one would kill those longings which made it so hard for men and women to remain pure? And, from a which-came-first-the-egg-or-the-chicken point of view, was it not the passions which caused the dance halls rather than the dance halls the passions? If people could only be got truly to love God, they would find such pleasure in kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament that they would require neither dance halls nor cinemas nor theatres. If… There was unbelief and there was hatred and there was apathy. But the way to kill them was to preach Christ and His love. Dance halls were but the least of all the stumbling-blocks. No, he understood the canon’s feelings all right, but he could not do this thing which was asked of him.
“Please do not think me obstinate or unsym-pathetic, Canon,” he said, “but I really must ask you to excuse me from a task for which I am not fitted by nature.”
The canon pulled the cope round his shoulders with more of a rustle than was necessary.
“As you will,” he said crisply. “I suppose that I shall have to crack the whip myself at Benediction this evening.”
“I think, perhaps, that that would be the best way out of the difficulty,” said Father Malachy, and could not, for all that Saint Paul had said about charity, resist adding: “After all, it’s your circus, isn’t it?”
2
They poured away; the scratch beginnings of the new choir, the acolytes, the sacred ministers poured away out of the sacristy onto the sanctuary where, with many posturings and posings, they began to reenact the drama of Christ’s Blood shed for the redemption of men.
Father Malachy, who, as has already been indicated, was a very holy old man and a very simple old man, was not of that multitude of priests who say their own Mass and never put in two minutes’ prayer at any other priest’s Mass; yet he did not follow the procession into the church because he wanted to be alone and to gather together his ideas for his sermon. And in any case, as the sacristy door had been left open, he was morally present at the Holy Sacrifice and could have mumbled, “et vobis, fratres” of Canon Geoghegan as, with a twist to right and to left, he confessed to Almighty God, Saints Peter and Paul, Fathers Neary and O’Flaherty and Mrs. McGinty in the back pew that he had sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through his fault, through his fault, through his most grievous fault.
So, gathering the ample folds of his Benedic-tine cloak about him, he began slowly and silently to walk up and down the sacristy and to ask the Holy Ghost to put words into his mouth. For that was his method, and he had never, in forty years of priesthood, known it to fail. He asked for inspiration, and he handed on the inspiration which he received. He did not spend hours in the preparation and the committing to memory of long jeremiads or exhortations. And when he preached, he spoke rather than orated, so that everyone in the church thought that they were alone with him. Hearing Father Malachy preach was rather like going to confession, so much a spiritual causerie à deux did it seem; and it left on the soul a great peace, as mountains do when the moon is on them and lakes when they catch and refract the starlight.
And as he walked up and down, up and down, he knew that the world was a very wicked place and that in Buenos Aires young girls were seduced in their ’teens and that in Paris most men had mistresses and that here in Edinburgh things weren’t very much better. He knew, too, that in New York men cared more about money than salvation and that in Hollywood cinema actresses were not as simple as they seemed. He knew these things in virtue of his being a man among men, and he knew them again as he paced the sacristy. But he knew also that there was much unseen virtue in the world and that it didn’t get talked about as vice did because it had less gossip value. He knew, in his quality of priest, that there were many unknown saints of God on the earth whose fame would not be noised among men until time should have passed into eternity. He knew, too, that there were many queer people, following queer avocations, who loved God just as much as Saint Teresa or Saint Francis or the Little Flower had done; tight-rope walkers, tram drivers, surgeons, sailors, cardinals even. And, as he knew these things, the good and the bad, and knew them over again, he gave great thanks to God Who had ordered all things wisely.
If only men would believe in God and love Him and keep His commandments…. If only they would do these things, then, Father Malachy was old-fashioned enough to think, there would be no more wars and no more rising up of nation against nation, no more envy, no more vain ambition. If only the countries of the world would learn to think in terms of grace instead of in terms of coal. If only… Ah, there was the trouble. In the nineteenth century, someone had started the rumour that God wasn’t God and that Christ wasn’t Christ and that sin wasn’t sin, and ever since then there had been no way of doing with people at all, at all. Dancing halls and local Babylons and girls with naughty little twinkles in their eyes there had always been. Indeed, they had been to practical Christianity very much what bunkers were to golf courses, the hazards that made the game worth playing. But nowadays when people sinned, they said they were doing right and that young men must be young men and that everyone was entitled to be as immoral as everyone else. And it was no use handing the sacramental niblick to people who didn’t believe in unsacramental bunkers. The proprietors of brothels, he reflected dryly, ought to pay a royalty to the professors of exegetics. Unbelief. That was the root of all evil.
Ah, but these dear people weren’t unbelievers, these dear O’Raffertys and D’Agostinos and O’Shaughnessys; they believed all right, were Catholics in a city and in an epoch which regarded their holy religion as sanctified flummery and an insult to the intelligence and all the rest of it. Poor dear O’Raffertys and D’Agostinos and O’Shaughnessys, how Our Blessed Lord must love them.
And so it was that, when Father Neary had brogued out the notices and announced that on Tuesday evening there would be a mission for Eyetalians which every Eyetalian in the parish must attend, he went up into the pulpit and, spreading out his arms so that his cloak fell as a cloud about him, preached on the Love of God which, he said, was as strong as steel beneath blows and as gentle as oars being dipped in still waters.
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Four
Father Malachy's Miracle, Chapter Two
Notes
et vobis, fratres: and to you, brothers.
causerie à deux: chat with two
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