“Ugo,” he says, so severely that I know his teeth are clenched, his emotion barely willed back, “God put me there to help you. I am the one who failed you.”
“No,” I say. “Simon, that isn’t true.”
“Forgive me,” he whispers. “O God, forgive me.”
Unsteadily, he makes the sign of the cross. Then he hides his face in his hands.
I put my arm around him. I pull him against me, holding him there. His massive body shudders. The flames of the candles bow low and rise again. I look down at those giant hands now balled up in fists, digging into his thighs, and silently I join in his prayer. I beg forgiveness for us all.
WE WAIT TWO DAYS for punishment to be handed down. Then four days. A week passes. No phone call. No letter in the mail. I become unable to get Peter out the door for school on time. I burn dinner. My distraction is becoming total. Each new day of waiting changes the scale of waiting yet to be done. It may be weeks. By October, I realize it may be months.
I visit Ugo’s cemetery plot often, keeping out of sight of the mourners at other headstones, not wanting to scandalize villagers with the sight of Simon or me by Ugo’s grave, not knowing what they might have heard. After so many days of praying from afar, the distance begins to feel symbolic. When Ugo abandoned me, I kept him at arm’s length. I never let him reenter my life. And though this is a small sin in the world of laymen, it is a significant one for a priest. The Church is eternal, proof against all setbacks, so whatever may happen to the Turin Shroud, I know in my heart that Catholics and Orthodox will someday reunite. But the life of a single man is precious and brief. Guido Canali told me once about an old man at Castel Gandolfo who has no other job but to collect eggs from the henhouses without breaking them. A job, Guido said, you might figure anyone could do, except it takes special hands. I often think of those words as I stand in the graveyard. They seem equally true for priests.
During breaks in my workday I visit the exhibit. It satisfies an appetite that gradually comes to feel like an addiction, the need to see people interacting with Ugo. He remains here, some part of him intact. These galleries are a reliquary, holding the best of a good man. And yet it causes a churning uneasiness in me to see these thousands of innocent people staring at the walls, reading the placards and stenciled letters, following Ugo’s timeline of Christian art. The relic they’ve come for isn’t the memory of a dead friend but the cloth of Christ, still mounted in the Sistine Chapel, so in their eyes this exhibit is a reliquary of a different sort. A vessel so ornate and impressive—paintings so grand, manuscripts so old, a confession so frank that we stole the Shroud from the Orthodox—that it convinces them the relic is authentic. Droves of them react the same way, with nods of understanding and agreement, then gradually with tongues clicking and even hands clasped over hearts as if to say, I knew it. The exhibit has given the world permission to believe again. So has the news that the Holy Father is returning the Shroud to the Orthodox, which most of Rome seems to have absorbed not as a milestone in Church relations, but as proof that Ugo’s exhibit is the gospel truth about the Shroud. If only John Paul could see the people in these galleries, he would know what I know. I will miss having Ugo so close by. But this show can’t go on.
On October the twelfth, I am called into the office of the pre-seminary rector, Father Vitari, for the only unscheduled meeting I have ever had with my boss. Vitari is a good man. He rarely complains that I have to bring my son to work sometimes or ask for days off when Peter’s sick. Even so, there’s something oddly hospitable about the way he sits me down and asks, right off, if he can get me anything to drink. I notice that my personnel file is on the desk. Sadness settles over me. The small but insistent fears that have hovered around me like flies, the uncertainties about the future, now go quiet with expectation. So this is how it will happen. Mignatto said the verdict would come in the form of a court document, but I see now that it would be easier to sweep the problem away quietly. It couldn’t be difficult, in a country of priests, to find a replacement gospel teacher.