“I can’t give a million dollars a year,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who can.”
“We aren’t asking you to give a million dollars a year,” the Cardinal Archbishop said. “We’re asking you to put together a committee to raise it. Ten or so men, perhaps, with enough stature to contribute, say, fifty thousand dollars each—”
“I can do fifty thousand,” Andy said. “At least, I can do it this year.”
“—who could mount a long-term effort to cover what we need. Because quite frankly, if we don’t find some way to cover it, this archdiocese is finished. We’ll be bankrupt in six months. We’ll be absorbed into another archdiocese within a year.”
Andy sat down again, abruptly. “A committee,” he said.
“We thought you’d be a good person to head it,” Father Doheny said. “You know a lot of people. You belong to a lot of organizations. You’re active in the church. And you’re known to be a successful man. We thought there would be a number of other good Catholic laymen who would want to be part of anything you were part of.”
The Cardinal Archbishop blinked. Andy O’Reilly seemed to be swelling up in front of his eyes. “It’s very kind of you to say so,” he said. “Very kind of you. I have always tried to be a good Catholic and a supporter of the Church.”
“And you’ve succeeded,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“And I guess I could put together a committee. I don’t know if we could really raise a million dollars a year. But I could put together a committee.”
“That’s all we’re asking, really,” Father Doheny said. “We realize you can’t guarantee us results. We’re only hoping for somebody willing to try, and with a decent chance of making a success of it. You seemed to us to be the obvious choice. You’re one of the most committed laymen in the cathedral parish.”
Andy had brought a briefcase in with him. The Cardinal Archbishop hadn’t noticed it. Now Andy picked it up off the floor and put it on the conference table, and the Cardinal Archbishop was shocked to see that it was an exquisite Mark Cross number, made of black leather and probably costing the earth. It was totally at odds with the image Andy presented in his television ads, and with the image he had been careful to present here—the JC Penney suit, the Timex watch whose metal wristband was just a little too large for his wrist. Andy folded his arms across the briefcase and put his chin down on his hands.
“You should run it like the Knights Templar, or whatever it was,” he said. “A club of ten, and make it a club. Men who are on the inside. Who get information nobody else has. Like those secret societies are supposed to be.”
“Secret societies?” The Cardinal Archbishop was confused.
“You know,” Andy said. “Like Opus Dei. Or the old Jesuits. The Pope’s army. Except this time we’ll make it the Cardinal’s army. And we’ll meet here. Because they’ll want to be part of it. They’ll want to know that they belong. Don’t you see?”
“No,” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“I see,” Father Doheny said. “It’s a very insightful idea.”
“Yeah.” Andy stood up. “The Church is under attack. She needs an army to defend her. We’ll be that army. You give me about a week, okay? I’ve got to work out who to ask. Then we can get started. There’s just one thing.”
“And what is that?” the Cardinal Archbishop said.
“If there’s more to this scandal, I want to know about it before I read it in the papers. We all will. We can’t be blindsided by press reports about issues you know are sitting in the closet waiting to fall out. If we’re not informed, we can’t help.”
But all they have to do to help is to raise money, the Cardinal Archbishop thought. What do they think they’re going to do with privileged information? But then it struck him, because he was not a stupid man, that what they were going to do with it was simply to have it, to be the people who knew when nobody else did, to be the people who could hint to their less fortunate colleagues that they were privy to all the inner workings of the chancery and of Rome. Suddenly, the Cardinal Archbishop’s distaste for Andy O’Reilly was overwhelming. The arrogance, the conceit, the soul so lacking in anything of value that the only thing it could think of when Holy Mother Church was in grave danger was how to use that danger for its own advantage. He expected that kind of thing out of newspaper reporters, and the president of the local chapter of the American Humanist Association, and the writers who fed stories to the tabloid television shows. For some reason, he had been convinced that no “real” Catholic could be anything like this, that the people who knelt in the pews in front of him as the bread and wine became the Body and Blood of their Lord Jesus Christ felt as he did, about Christ, about His Church, maybe even about their own souls.