This blog was written before the death of Pope Francis.
Michael J Farrell writes: I often wish people would ask me what’s on my mind. What I would then tell them is anyone’s guess. But if the pope were in the news, I might tell the inquiring entity about my novel, Papabile, written forty-odd years ago, a commercial failure at the time, though I still sometimes see it on Amazon.poop or similar outlet. And yes, popes are in the news again, as they have been since Peter. The Conclave movie is getting attention good to indifferent. The thing is, people still care. And in the background lurks Francis, a decent man as popes go, but doubtless, at time of writing, packing his bags for the journey home.
A further aside. What most people don’t realise is that hundreds, make that thousands, know the next pope already, and don’t know they know him. (This is not the time or place to discuss the likelihood of a woman.) The future pope is actually sitting or soon may sit beside you on the bus, or at the next table in a restaurant. And if I may go out on a limb (God doesn’t work in mysterious ways for nothing), this may be the right time for a rakish, devil-may-care pontiff with whom St Peter and even St Judas might be at home, that is, one who would, on day one of his papacy, get the ball rolling by giving every underachieving member of the college of cardinals his walking papers before appointing a dozen can-do replacements, mostly women. Who might then, on day one, go all urbi et orbi and revisit the yarn about the ass and ox in the vicinity of the manger that first night. Some of that narrative, I mean, was actually made up; though it is admittedly too amazing for average words.
But to the gist. I wrote Papabile in six weeks in 1979. Except for the last chapter, but we’ll get to that. If I may quote myself, it begins as follows: ‘Only a beginning had been made. There would be many a broken heart, many a stab of pain, many a cry of betrayal before people realized that the old ways were gone and that they themselves were flame of the new fire, and then somewhere down the long road the charred world might become cities of gold and countryside of green and laughing people waving.’
This high-minded thinker’s name is Hugo Ovath, a promising young communist in an eastern European country in 1945, when the future of the world is more or less up for grabs. The book mentions that ‘the Party had the Russian army scattered in every village, a constant threat …’ This may sound familiar. The more things change, the more Russia remains the same.
Anyway, Hugo, currently an atheist, is persuaded by the communists to resurrect his lapsed Catholicism and enter the seminary and become a priest in order to scuttle the Catholic church, which the Party sees as a threat, but also an opportunity. Brilliant yet malleable, Hugo is groomed by a charismatic communist bureaucrat named Fust. Eventually he is ordained on a transcendent day. He rises within the church and party, using each as a stepping stone within the other, until he becomes a cardinal and then an international celebrity, sort of, one with a limp, in other words, until he is what in the church is called papabile. While Fust is his godfather in the Party, his godfather at the Vatican is the saintly Ladislaus, all unaware.
Then, doggedly authentic, Hugo, at the height of his power and consequence, develops qualms of conscience (a more acute malady then than nowadays, because hell had not yet been done away with).
Then the old pope dies.
What was I now to do with that last chapter? I had written, if I may say so, a compelling ending that held out great promise for the church and us all: one, that is, in which Hugo was elected pope. Tried by fire in two of the most unrelenting institutions you could find, circumscribed by big ideals and obligations such as loyalty, honour, even decency, he is unable to confront those who have elected him with a simple yes or no unless and until he confesses his treacherous past to his mentor Ladislaus. The latter, being but human, is mad as hell at his upstart protégé. After which Hugo embarks on being the best pope he can be. In my dreams I was already seeing the tantalising sequel to this triumphal ending. What would this unique pope do with the all-too-human though allegedly divine church?
But wait. Publishers failed to get excited about any of this. Finally, there was enough rejection to cause me to blame the novel rather than the naysaying editors. Suspicion fell on the last chapter. No novel is entirely on the money unless the ending is. So I wrote another last chapter. One in which Hugo did not become any recent pope. He turned the papacy down, a big deal in papal circles.
Soon after this defeatist compromise I found a publisher. We will never know whether it was the new final chapter that did the trick. The publishers did such an abysmal job of promoting the book and me that I hesitate to name them. Yet I’m happy to concur that the book’s failure was mostly mine. The publishers did not, for example, like the title. And they were right. No one knew how to pronounce the P word. So, we compromised and called it: Papabile: The Man Who Would Be Pope.
Then a funny thing happened. In the short space between accepting Papabile and printing it, the publisher, stepchild of a big conglomerate, decided to discontinue its fiction line. This might explain why the promotion was lacklustre. I worked for a well-known newspaper at the time, and secured an array of enthusiastic blurbs. The Library Journal gave it a ‘recommended.’ It won the prestigious Thorpe Menn Award. Bestselling author Andrew Greeley wrote a review; which had all the acceptable words but there was no starch in them. If only, I thought, he could have come up with one outstanding word, such as masterpiece. Determined to a fault, I asked the publishers for their mailing list and wrote my own beguiling press release. Their mailing list, alas, was also a dud. It included, for example, the name of the Los Angeles Times’s books editor, who, however, had left the paper ten years previously. How do I know this? Because I had applied for his job when he left.
There is nothing more pathetic than the author of a failed novel making excuses. For forty years I made no excuses. Until now. I feel I owe it to Ladislaus to reconsider. I even owe it to the ruthless Fust, who got qualms of conscience too, though only in the final compromised chapter. I also owe it to nameless souls without number who in the prime of their lives did a brave and selfless thing for a good cause, real or imagined, and all too often paid with their lives.
Then, in the years between, a curious thing happened. I discovered that the fiction I thought I was writing had been only a few heartbeats away from real life. The old Soviet Union, I learned, had assigned fake seminarians to be priests, and some of these were rumoured to have lost their lives in the cause of either Joseph Stalin or Jesus or both. While guns and bombs were devastating Europe, a separate amalgam of ideologies and theologies, intrigue and deceit, spies and saints, was fighting the same war at an intellectual and spiritual level. It was of the nature of their devious assignments that their histories should remain obscure and unreliable. I, for one, knew nothing about them. I was a lazy researcher.
There’s more. At the very time my Papabile was going nowhere, along came Nothing Sacred: Nazi Espionage Against the Vatican 1939-45, co-authored by David Alvarez and the Jesuit Father Robert Graham, the latter described by one reviewer as ‘one of the best-known authorities on 20th century Vatican diplomacy’. This thoroughly researched work recounted the wide-ranging efforts by Hitler’s bureaucrats to insinuate themselves into the Roman Catholic church (Stalin’s crowd worked instead with the Russian Orthodox church). The intrigue was something fierce. Even the vilest despots know enough about human nature to play on the decent, spiritual side of their would-be dupes. Good-natured people were persuaded to provide money for what they thought were worthy causes. Similarly, naive priests were sucked in. For example, Fr Michael Tarchnisvili, originally from Georgia, persuaded Rome that the church would benefit from a Georgian College to prep new priests. Berlin loved this well-meaning man, especially when he agreed to install electronic spy equipment in the new seminary. One entrepreneur’s spyware is another’s short cut to heaven. Hard to say what Jesus would have thought. Six suitable students were lined up. However, to maintain a credible cover, the college would actually have to be what it purported to be: a college for real Georgian students pursuing clerical studies. And so it was done. There is no record of how many genuine students made it to the priesthood. The six interlopers, it soon turned out, were more interested in girls than in theology, and vamoosed in quick succession.
Too late I realised my fiction was but a stone’s throw away from the real knavery.
Years later, I discovered the aforementioned co-author Robert Graham was the same I had interviewed in 1995 for the National Catholic Reporter. ‘I’m from California,’ he had said by way of introduction. ‘My father was a baseball player.’ His father played professional baseball for Boston long before they were called the Red Sox. Robert, lacking athletic inclination, joined the Jesuits instead. I wrote at the time: ‘Graham is 83 now, wiry and feisty. For a lifetime he has been one of the church’s ubiquitous vagabonds, prowling the world’s archives, kicking up theological and historical dust. A pilgrim on a mission.’ We were, at that, two quaint ships passing in the night, each unaware of the papabile conundrum we shared.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have stuck with the uncompromising ending. I would have challenged Pope Hugo to fire those old cardinals for starters and then limp bravely off to give salvation one more try.
That’s the trouble with novels: once they are written they are written.
20/5/2025
