Precious Blood(17)

“If you’re going to worry about fasts,” he told Tibor, “worry about George. He’s over at my place with those two women, and they’re making gingerbread houses.”

“Tell me about John,” Tibor said. “Two days ago, he calls me here, he’s the next thing to hysterical. It isn’t like him, Krekor.”

Gregor nodded. He didn’t doubt that John O’Bannion had been hysterical, or that it wasn’t like him. The few times Gregor had spoken to him, the good Cardinal seemed to be a man with an exceptional amount of self-discipline. That was what made his blinding obsession with Father Andrew Walsh so inexplicable.

“The trouble with your friend,” Gregor said, “is that he wants to hear what he wants to hear, and that’s it. If you tell him something different, he just blocks you out.”

“You told him something he didn’t want to hear?”

“I told him there was nothing I could do about that priest of his, and he certainly didn’t want to hear that.” Gregor shifted in his chair. There was a spring loose somewhere in the cushion, and it was biting right into his rear end. “Has he told you anything about this? About Father Andrew Walsh and the bran muffins?”

“Bran muffins?”

“What about St. Agnes Parish? Or the CYO? He throws all these names and initials at me and I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “With the Roman Church, there are always names and initials. They have orders of nuns with names so long, you forget the first half of them by the time you get through the second.”

“The only nuns in this case are called the Sisters of Divine Grace. They run the school at St. Agnes’s,” Gregor said. “Anyway, as far as I can make out, it goes like this. There was Vatican Two, and after that the membership of the Church in America split into two camps, liberal and conservative. The conservatives still don’t use artificial birth control. The liberals not only do, they think everybody ought to. Rome is conservative. Many of the American archdioceses are liberal. Or have been. In the parishes—”

“Yes, yes,” Tibor said. “In the parishes, there is a mess. I know, Krekor. I play cards every night with other priests, one of them is Harry Ryan. I hear all about it. That is why reunion   is so important. The Eastern Churches all together again, the Eastern and the Western Churches all together again. We need each other.”

“Fine.” Gregor didn’t want to get into a discussion of the Greek Schism. It was one of Tibor’s favorite topics, and it always made him feel as if he’d wandered into a lecture on religious history. “The thing is, Vatican Two was a long time ago. And with this Pope, Rome is not just conservative, it’s very conservative. The bishops he’s appointing, like your Cardinal O’Bannion, are Church hard-liners. But in a way the worst would have been over even without them. Most of the real radicals left for politics or Anglicanism long ago. In Colchester, however, O’Bannion finds himself saddled with a priest who’s more than a little of a—”

“Nut?”

“That’s putting it mildly. Very mildly. The name of this priest is Father Andrew Walsh. He likes being called Andy. No Father, no Walsh. Don’t ask me why. Don’t ask me why this man does anything. What he did with the bran muffins was consecrate them at Mass.”

Tibor’s eyes grew wide. “But Krekor. When you consecrate, you bring the Body and Blood of the Lord. The real body and blood. Not just a symbol. There would have been crumbs, on the floor. There would have been—”

“Don’t do this to me,” Gregor said. “Cardinal O’Bannion already did. Father Andy has pulled a few more stunts, including telling some women’s lunch group that birth control ought to be a sacrament and delivering a homily at his best-attended Sunday Mass on just how awful he thinks the Pope is. To make matters worse, St. Agnes Parish is within walking distance of the Cathedral. Which means Andy Walsh is always right under Cardinal O’Bannion’s nose.”

Tibor was confused. “But Krekor, why doesn’t John get rid of this man? Surely he has had enough provocation.”

“He’s had more than enough provocation,” Gregor said, “and he’d love to get rid of him. Unfortunately, he has to get rid of him to someplace, and nobody else will take him.”

“But they could take him out of the parish, surely?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “And O’Bannion may do it, although he’s going to take a lot of flak if he does. There are liberal as well as conservative Catholics in this parish. O’Bannion thinks they want to hold onto Andy. The conservatives, of course, want him replaced with the ghost of Fulton Sheen. O’Bannion wants him defrocked. That’s not easy these days, if it ever was. He’d have to have evidence of something serious to take to an ecclesiastical court. Post-Vatican Two, oat bran muffins won’t do it. That’s why O’Bannion is hoping to turn this other thing into the answer to all his problems.”