Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

Pope Stephen had totally revolutionized the Catholic Church during his brief five-year reign. Indeed, as the French feminist Jeanne Paulette Sartre said, "This one man has single-handedly turned the most reactionary church on this planet into the most progressive."

It was due to Pope Stephen that the "social gospel," previously preached only by a minority of far-out Jesuits and worker-priests, became the official Vatican policy. By being the first to denounce Hitler and Mussolini, and excommunicating their supporters, Pope Stephen had knowingly risked the biggest rupture within the Church since the time of Luther; but, while nearly 30 percent of the Catholics in Germany and Italy continued to follow their national leaders, over 70 percent obeyed the Pope, and both dictators fell from power.

Adolf Hitler became a portrait painter again; and Benito Mussolini, deprived of power, returned to his early belief in anarchism and spent his declining years writing fiery journalism against all those who did manage to achieve and hold on to political power.

At the time of Pope Stephen's death in 1940, it was estimated that the wealth of the Vatican was less than 10 percent of what it had been when he took the Chair of Peter, but its prestige about 1,000 percent higher.

The Pope had spent 90 percent of the Vatican's wealth in projects for the abolition of poverty, disease, and ignorance.

Many regarded him as a saint, but Pope Stephen always tried to discourage that view. He ended every conversation with "I am a sinner, also," which became a habit with Stephenites: Father Starhawk, for instance, ended all his conversations that way, and also used it for the tag line of all his theological articles and his private correspondence.

It must be admitted, however, that the first Irish Pope did have his own brand of arrogance: He believed he was the best Latin stylist since Cicero, and was rather vain about his command of English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Danish, and Hebrew, also. He was also convinced that he was a greater psychologist than James or Jung, and it was only when their names were mentioned that a tinge of uncharitable sarcasm would enter his speech.

Pope Stephen, in fact, had a habit of listening far more than he spoke, which led many to regard him as a bit aloof. Actually, he spoke little because he was so busy observing. This passion for studying other human beings had gradually turned him from a disputatious young intellectual into an almost pathologically sensitive middle-aged man, because the more he observed people, the more he liked them, and the more he liked them, the less able he was to bear seeing or hearing of injustice to anyone anywhere.

On one occasion a learned and erudite French Cardinal said to the Pope, referring to the steady parade of visitors to the Vatican, "You must find most of these nonentities profoundly boring." He was making the usual mistake of interpreting the Pope's long silence as a sign of ennui.

"But-there are no bores," Stephen said, shocked.

"You are being paradoxical," the Cardinal chided.

"Not at all," the Pope said dogmatically. "I have never met a boring human being."

It was the only time anybody ever heard him pontificate.

It was due to Pope Stephen that every Catholic priest was not only allowed, but encouraged, to get married. "Living with the mystery of the feminine mind," he said, "is the best training for trying to cope with the greater mysteries of the Divine mind."

He himself had married a peasant girl from Galway, who was said to be barely literate, and his love for her was legendary.

Nobody knew what the Pope and his wife ever found to talk about, since she obviously did not share any of his intellectual interests.

Actually, with his wife, as with most of humanity, the Irish Pope spent most of his time listening, not talking.

Because of the liberality of his sexual views, the Irish Pope was still controversial among conservative Catholics, who claimed he was a pervert and were forever trying to have him posthumously excommunicated.

They also spread rumors about his private life, which had gained so much currency that whenever his name was mentioned somebody would mutter "garters, garters, garters."

Pope Stephen's whole philosophy was derived from a single sentence in Aquinas:

Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas.

Which may be rendered:

Three things are required for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance.

It was Stephen's thought that the universe, as the product of a Great Artist, must be comprehensible in terms of integritas, consonantia, claritas- wholeness, harmony, radiance. Why, then, he asked himself, does it not appear so to the ordinary human mind? The only answer he could find was that we are not paying attention. We have not learned to observe closely enough. We do not have the Artist's eye for detail.

And so Pope Stephen paid very close attention to everything that entered his field of perception.

At the time of the Irish Pope's death in 1940, obituary writers all over the world compared him to every saint and sage in history: Buddha, Whitman, Plotinus, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart, John of Arc, St. Terrence of Avilla, and so on, and on; but the one who came closest to categorizing how Stephen's mind worked was an obscure Canadian professor of literature who wrote, "The only mind in history comparable to Stephen's was that of a fictitious character-Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street."

Like Tobias Knight, Pope Stephen had spent all his life "trying to find out what the hell was really going on," although he never expressed it that way.

He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

The Stephenites called themselves "Seekers of the Real" and were always watching very closely to see what was going on. They all had posters in their rooms with the sainted Pope's famous remark: "If you don't pay attention to every little detail, you miss most of the jokes."

When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was stopped on the street by a haggard and wild-eyed minor bureaucrat who said his name was Joseph K.

"They have everybody mind-warped," Joseph K. said, clutching Dashwood's sleeve desperately.

"Yes, yes," Dashwood said, trying to disentangle himself. "But I really must hurry-"

"What are the charges against me?" Joseph K. demanded. "What are the charges against any of us? We all try to obey their rules, don't we? Of course we do; we know what will happen at the slightest, the most minute, the most microscopic infraction, do we not? Not that I mean to imply that they are wrong, necessarily, or unjust- you won't find any subversive literature or pornography in my room, I can assure you absolutely-no, certainly not unjust or in any way unfair, but it must be admitted that in the application of the rules, in the application, I say, they are sometimes overfinicky, a bit strained and literal, if you take my meaning."

"Certainly, certainly," Dashwood said, struggling to remove Joseph K.'s fingers from his sleeve. "But if you were to see a good counselor-not a psychiatrist, necessarily… I don't mean to imply-"

"We are all guilty," Joseph K. said flatly. "They have established so many rules, and recorded them in archives that the ordinary citizen cannot consult, that we must all, the most loyal and decent of us, stumble on a mere technicality occasionally. Not that I mean to assert that technicalities are not necessary, you understand, since it is important to spell out in detail the exact meaning intended in a statute, don't you agree, George?"

"Frank," Dashwood said automatically.