Cecilian Vespers Read online

  Come into the love! Come into the new day! His room is for all, a true meeting place. We are the ones He has called to the new way, We bring our light to the whole human race!

  All we in the love, all we in His peace, Will shake hands today with a peace that will bind All brothers and sisters. Divisions will cease. We are the light of all humankind!

  Well, that wasn’t going to get anyone inducted into the song-writers’ hall of fame. They’d have to come up with something better than that if they wanted to be seen as light to the whole human race. But my attention was wrenched from the music to the centre aisle of the church on the screen, where I saw a procession of … clowns! Everyone in the procession, including the cross bearer and the priest himself, was, incredibly, dressed in the red, yellow, and green costume of a clown. They were carrying balloons and stopping to pass them out to children in the pews. We all sat, stunned, as the elderly clown-priest read the gospel, gave a sermon, changed the bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ. Every one of the priest’s gestures reflected excruciating embarrassment.

  Then I heard the ancient tones of Gregorian chant, and the screen was filled with the rich blues and golds of a magnificent church, with marble floors and stained-glass rose windows. The priest approached the altar wearing gold-trimmed white vestments and a biretta, a square black cap with three ridges and a tuft on top. He looked very European, yet familiar. A younger, somewhat heavier Brennan Burke without a trace of grey in his pitch-black hair, his handsome face less hawkish than it was now. In the film he followed a procession of altar boys dressed in black cassocks under lacy white surplices. One carried the crucifix; the others brought candles. In the priest’s hands was a chalice covered with a cloth. I should have remembered the names of the items from my days as an altar boy. Purificator? Chalice veil?

  When he arrived at the foot of the elaborate high altar, the Father Burke on the screen removed his biretta and handed it to an altar boy. He prayed sotto voce, then made a profound bow and recited the “Confiteor,” striking his breast three times at the “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” Incense rose to the heights of the vaulted ceiling, and bells rang out at the consecration. In a universally known ritual essentially unchanged since the days of Saint Gregory in the year 600, the Mass proceeded to the sound of Latin prayers and solemn chant.

  When the morning class was over the present-day Burke stopped to chat with me in the corridor before the schola’s next session began. The composition-by-committee woman, whose name tag read “Jan Ford,” came up to him with a question: “Am I right? Were you the presider at the liturgy we just saw on tape, Father?”

  “I was the priest singing the Mass, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Right,” Jan Ford said, nodding, and she moved off down the hall. “As if I’d sign up for a life of celibacy to be a presider,” Burke remarked to me.

  “I didn’t see anyone leap to the defence of the clown Mass, Brennan. I’ve been to a lot of very beautiful and dignified Masses since the Council, so I assume you’re using an extreme example of post-Vatican II experimentation.”

  “An abomination. Shows how far things can go if unchecked. It happened on more than one occasion, believe it or not. There were basketball Masses, cowboy Masses, all sorts of liturgical chaos.”

  “The Latin Mass was magnificent, of course, as I well remember from my altar boy days.”

  “You still have the look of an altar boy, Montague. The blondy hair, the boyish face, the baby blue eyes. You don’t always behave like one, of course, but …”

  “Yeah, yeah. I nearly didn’t recognize you, though.”

  “It was a few years ago. When I was doing my graduate work in Rome. I’ll be teaching the rubrics of the Latin rite to the younger priests who missed out on it; no doubt it will be a refresher for some of the older fellows as well.”

  “Buongiorno, Brennan! I am sorry to have missed this morning’s sessions. I would explain but I do not wish to be indelicate. It is enough to say I was not feeling well.” The man spoke with a strong Italian accent. It was the elaborately attired priest I had seen in the church just before the choir rehearsal. He and Brennan exchanged a few words in Italian, then turned to me. The stranger extended his hand, and Brennan made the introductions.

  “Monty Collins, meet Father Enrico Sferrazza-Melchiorre.”

  “Piacere, Signor Collins.”

  “My pleasure. I saw you in the church. Where are you from, Father Sferrazza-Melchiorre?”

  “Mississippi.”

  “What? Forgive me. I don’t speak Italian so whatever you said sounded like —”

  “You heard me correctly, signore. I live in rural Mississippi.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Yes. It is impossible and yet, è vero, like the resurrection. It is the truth.”

  “You’re not native to the southern United States,” I insisted to the flamboyant European. “Surely I haven’t got that wrong.”

  “I am a native of Rome. My mother’s family is from Sicily.”

  “And what exactly did you do in Rome?”

  “I worked for many years in the Roman Curia — the bureaucracy of the universal church — and taught at the Lateran University also.”

  “My question remains: what did you do? To get posted to the American south?”

  “It is such a long story.”

  “I’m sure. Leaving that story — whatever it is — aside for now, what are the demographics down there? I wouldn’t have thought the Catholic population was very large.”

  “Oh! You are right, of course. Only five percent of the entire state is Catholic. Even less so where I work, in Mule Run. Eh! What can you do?” He shrugged.

  “Fit in well with the locals, do you?”

  “Let us say there was a process of adjustment. There was, I recall, some confusion at the first seminar I conducted in the church hall. I thought it might be helpful to give people a little history of the Catholic Church. To dispel some false ideas. Striving for a popular touch, I advertised it as ‘Introduction to AAA.’ I was encouraged when I peered outside and saw many large vehicles roaring up to the building. But my set piece on Augustine, Aquinas, and Abelard was not well received by those assembled.” He sighed. “I hope we shall meet again, signore.” He turned and was off in a swirl of luxurious fabric.

  I raised an eyebrow at Burke.

  “Later,” was all he said.

  III

  Great was the company of the preachers.

  — Handel, “Messiah,” from Psalm 68

  “This is some information the insurance company requires,” I told Brennan when I returned to St. Bernadette’s rectory after work that day. “You’re already covered, but they need this form completed and signed.”

  “Why? In case somebody arrives home and claims he wasn’t taught the difference between a punctum and a podatus in chant notation? He’s going to sue me for failure to deliver the goods?”

  “No, it’s in case somebody doesn’t arrive home. Never makes it out of your course alive! Or goes home on crutches because you didn’t clear the steps after the first snowfall. Typical liability insurance.”

  Burke scribbled his answers on the insurance form.

  I was stuffing the paperwork back in my briefcase when Monsignor O’Flaherty came in and announced that he was going to the airport. “To pick up our final guest. Student, I suppose I should say, though it seems odd to apply the word student to people in middle age!”

  “We could call them scholars but that sounds a little grand,” Brennan said. “Or disciples, but I wouldn’t presume …”

  “Good of you, my lad.”

  “So, who is it you’re picking up?”

  “A Father Stanley Drew. Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s an American, apparently. Working overseas. That’s all I know.”

  “Thanks for fetching him, Michael.”

  That evening at the Midtown, the waiter had just placed
our glasses of draft on the table, and Brennan had lit up his first cigarette, when Monsignor O’Flaherty appeared before us again.

  “Brennan!” O’Flaherty was all out of puff. “Hello to you, Monty. Brennan, you’ll be hard put to believe me!”

  “Evening, Michael. Have a seat, and let us treat you to a draft.”

  “Thank you. I’ve an awful drouth on me, all the talking I’ve just been doing.”

  “How did you ever know to find me here, Monsignor?”

  “Amn’t I after following a star in the east? But no, all coddin’ aside. Wait till I tell you! Thank you. Ah. Goes down like liquid gold.” He smiled and put his glass on the table, then looked at each of us in turn. “You’ll never guess in a million years who our latest student is!”

  “Stanley Drew,” Burke replied in a deadpan voice, “an American who’s been working overseas —”

  “No! Drew is just a pseudonym for —” Monsignor O’Flaherty paused for dramatic effect, then blurted out his news “— Reinhold Schellenberg!”

  “You’re having me on!” Brennan exclaimed.

  It wasn’t often I saw a dumbstruck look on the face of Brennan Burke. They stared at each other in amazement.

  “How could we not have known he was coming? Why the false name?” Brennan asked.

  “Security reasons!”

  “What do you mean?”

  Here O’Flaherty looked uncertain. “I don’t know exactly. He wasn’t all that forthcoming on the subject. But he’s a lovely man.”

  “So what did he say when you met him? Did he identify himself right away?”

  “No. Not till we were alone in the car coming into town. But you know, there was something familiar about him. I just didn’t twig to it. He hasn’t been in the public eye for a long time. He used to sport a beard, but that’s gone now. He has only the slightest accent; his English is perfect. You wouldn’t know right off who he was. Did you ever meet him, Brennan, during your time in Rome?”

  “I attended a couple of lectures he gave, and saw him at a conference or two, but I never had a conversation with him.”

  “Gentlemen.”

  “Yes, Monty?” O’Flaherty turned to me.

  “Who is Reinhold Schellenberg?”

  “Do I take it that theology was not among the subjects in which you excelled during your illustrious academic career, young Collins?”

  “You wouldn’t be wrong in drawing that conclusion.” “Father Schellenberg is a noted theologian who became quite famous — infamous might be the better word — in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council. He was a figure of some controversy in controversial times. It apparently got too much for him and he entered a monastic order. He hasn’t been heard from in public since — what would it be, Brennan? — the early 1980s, or thereabouts. Ten years or so.”

  “What kind of controversy are we talking about?”

  “His theological positions didn’t sit well with some in the church.”

  “Didn’t sit well with whom? Liberals or conservatives?”

  “It’s never that simple, Monty, but, em, he attracted criticism from both ends of the spectrum.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “He started off as what we’ll call a liberal, at the time of the Council in the 1960s,” Brennan replied, “pissing off traditionalists and other conservatives. Then he did an apparent about-face, renounced his liberal positions of the past, and pissed off his former adherents. But his ability as a theologian has never been in doubt.”

  “And now he’s here to learn at the feet of the Reverend Doctor Brennan Burke at the Schola Cantorum Sancta Bernadetta.”

  “You find that surprising in some way, Collins?” Burke demanded.

  “Not at all, Father.”

  “I thought not. Well, we’ll have to make his visit a memorable one.”

  IV

  Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus.

  These are the latter times, not the better times.

  Let us stand watch.

  — Bernard of Cluny, De Contemptu Mundi

  Everything I had heard about the students of the schola and the controversies swirling around them made me keen to catch some of the show. So I popped in to the school two days later, on Thursday, when a client failed to show up for my last appointment of the afternoon. I headed down the hall and turned left, on my way to find Brennan or Michael, or perhaps the famous and now reclusive Schellenberg. Someone had set up a table and chessboard in a little alcove off the corridor, where two men were engaged in silent combat. They appeared to be in their late fifties. One had very pale blue eyes and greying blonde hair in a short military-looking cut. His opponent was a priest with fluffy white hair and rimless spectacles reflecting the light from the window at the end of the hall. The priest gave me a pleasant, if absent, nod as I stopped momentarily to observe the match. The man with the military appearance looked up, kept me in his gaze for a few seconds, then returned to the game without any change of expression. I felt I had been scanned, comprehended, and committed to memory.

  I continued on my way and found Father Burke leading a seminar billed simply as “The Great Latin Hymns.” I pushed the door open and took a seat in the back.

  “The ‘Dies Irae,’ the Day of Wrath, is attributed to a Franciscan friar in the twelve hundreds. Walsh’s book on the thirteenth century contains a description of the ‘Dies Irae’ as ‘the greatest of all hymns, and one of the greatest of all poems … nearly or quite the most perfect wedding of sound to sense that they know.’ The author concludes that perhaps no one with the exception of Dante or Shakespeare has ever equalled the ‘Dies Irae’ as poetry. Two verses will suffice to show he’s right:

  Recordare, Jesu pie,

  quod sum causa tuae viae:

  ne me perdas illa die.

  Quaerens me, sedisti lassus:

  redemisti crucem passus:

  tantus labor non sit cassus.

  “As for melody, Walsh tells us the creators of the great Gothic cathedrals developed music worthy of those magnificent temples. He means of course Gregorian chant.

  “Now let’s hear what is on offer in the hymn books of today:

  The lowly ones, they come to sup.

  The rich man, shamed, is drawing near.

  The lame, the leper, all are here

  To share His brimming, saving cup!

  Burke gave a shudder, then turned a new page.

  Share the courage of the songfest.

  Join His dance around the table.

  If the proud ones come among us,

  Call them forth if you are able.

  “Does that make any sense at all? Woe betide anyone I catch doing the shimmy around the altar in my church. This sort of goofiness is everywhere in the hymn books now. Along with all those songs in which the members of the congregation congratulate themselves endlessly about being the light of the world, and aren’t we grand? All this is yet another selective interpretation of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, in this case Lumen Gentium, Light of Nations. Which in reality did not replace worship of God with worship of ourselves.

  “Ah. Mr. Collins. Thank you for drawing near. Come forth if you are able. May I present to you Mr. Collins,” he said to the class. “You may have seen him around. Not only is he the schola’s wise legal counsel; he is also a member of the St. Bernadette’s choir.” I nodded to the group.

  After the lecture I saw Monsignor O’Flaherty standing alone by the chessboard, looking down at the pieces.

  “Are you a chess player, Mike?”

  “Alas no, Monty, I can’t even win at checkers.”

  “Who are the two men I saw playing chess here?”

  “You haven’t met Father Schellenberg yet, have you? That’s who you would have seen at the chessboard. And a fellow by the name of Bleier, who’s actually Colonel Bleier. He’s a German policeman, ‘Oberst der VP.’ The Volkspolizei! Retired now, apparently. They live in Berlin. She teaches there.”


  “She?”

  “Doctor Jadwiga Silkowski is Bleier’s wife. She’s a leading authority on moral theology.” He leaned forward, a mischievous look in his eyes “She told me she got in trouble on a couple of occasions. Ran afoul of the authorities.”

  “Government authorities?” I asked.

  “Well, now that you mention it, she may have got herself in the soup there as well, considering that it was East Berlin they were living in till the wall came down. But I meant the church authorities. Some of the positions she has taken from time to time have not gone down well in Rome.”

  “I don’t suppose the colonel could help her there.”

  “No.”

  “I wonder why Colonel Bleier and Father Schellenberg weren’t in the seminar.”

  “Who knows?”

  V

  Judex ergo cum sedebit

  Quidquid latet apparebit,

  Nil inultum remanebit.

  When therefore the Judge takes His seat

  Whatever is hidden will reveal itself.

  Nothing will remain unavenged.

  — “Dies Irae,” Requiem Mass

  I called Brennan Friday morning to ask where the choir would be meeting for vespers that evening.

  “We’ll all go directly to Stella Maris. That way we don’t have to arrange drives for all the little lads.”

  “That’s what you have insurance for.”

  “Spoken like a true lawyer. We have insurance but we don’t have the vehicles. So the parents will drop the boys off. We’ll meet outside and have a procession. Put on a little show for Saint Cecilia.”

  “Right. She’s the patron saint of … music, is it?”

  “Church musicians. This is her feast day, November 22. Oh, and wear your surplice. You got it from the choir loft?”

  “Yes, I did. I feel like an altar boy again.”