J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

“I’m happy here, Your Excellency.”

“I can see that.”

“What parish, Your Excellency?”

“I’m looking for a new chancellor.”

“Gee,” Father Gau had said. “Gee, Your Excellency.”

In September, Father Gau had moved into the Cathedral rectory. He handled the routine work at the Chancery, drove the Bishop’s car, heard confessions at the Cathedral on Saturdays, and said two Masses there on Sundays. He also organized a children’s choir — this at the earnest request of the Bishop. All went well. Then, with the Bishop’s consent, Father Gau formed a men’s chorus, and there was trouble. Mr McKee, the director of the Cathedral choir, a mixed group, said that if male members of the choir wanted to get together on purely social occasions and sing “Dry Bones,” that was one thing, but if they were going to sing sacred music, that was something else. The men’s chorus would be a choir, and a choir couldn’t serve two directors, said Mr McKee and Monsignor Holstein backed him up. Father Gau took no part in the controversy. In fact, he offered to resign as director of the men’s chorus, or to disband it, or to turn it over to Mr McKee — and the children’s choir as well, if that would help any. The men of the chorus wouldn’t have this, nor would the mothers of the children. The Bishop said nothing — wouldn’t discuss the matter with anybody, not even Monsignor Holstein. In the end, in a surprise move, Mr McKee resigned. And so Father Gau, who already had enough to do, was obliged to assume the direction of the choir. But what the Bishop had feared, an all-out choir war, hadn’t happened, and for this he was grateful to all concerned.

Then, a week before Christmas, soon after Father Scuza’s funeral, the men of the chorus put on bright tights and sweatshirts and, thus attired, went caroling through the streets of downtown Ostergothenburg. The Ostergothenburg Times , whose editor Father Gau had already got to know better than the Bishop ever had (the Bishop didn’t like the man’s politics), printed a very nice story about the minstrels in their colorful medieval garb. The Bishop had just finished reading the story when in came Monsignor Holstein, who said he’d spotted the men in Hokey’s, the town’s leading department store, and complained bitterly that they had been singing pagan-inspired drinking songs. The Bishop listened to him but said nothing, and Monsignor Holstein went away. Did it matter to Monsignor Holstein that the minstrels were important men in the community, that they thought they were engaged in a good work, that the Times thought so? Monsignor Holstein had just plunged in, as was his habit — a very bad habit. Monsignor Holstein was a rash man, an unsuccessful man, and even when he was right, as he sometimes was, there was something wrong — something wrong about the way he was right. However, the Bishop did feel that jolly songs shouldn’t be performed under his auspices during Advent, which, as Monsignor Holstein had said, was a penitential season second only to Lent, and so Father Gau was asked to see that such songs were dropped from the minstrels’ repertoire, the Bishop citing “Jingle Bells,” and another that, to quote Monsignor Holstein, went “Ho, ho, ho, the wind doth blow!” When Father Gau heard these words from the Bishop’s lips, he smiled, and then the Bishop, too, smiled. Until then, he had been worried that Father Gau might think that the Vicar-General was running the diocese. Father Gau, though, had made a joke out of the incident — and, to a certain extent, out of Monsignor Holstein.

In January, after Monsignor Holstein left town — he was appointed pastor of St John Nepomuk’s, in New Pilsen — the Bishop and Father Gau were often seen together in the evening, in the main dining room of the Hotel Webb. The food was good and plentiful at the Webb. The tables weren’t placed too close together, there was light enough to eat by, and there was music. In fact, the organist, a nice-looking middle-aged woman who didn’t use too much make-up, was a Cathedral parishioner.

These evenings at the Webb, topped off with Benedictine and Dutch Masters, were great occasions for Father Gau (who called himself a country boy), and this was a good part of the Bishop’s pleasure in them, although he also did most of the talking. He spoke of his youth “in and around Fargo,” of his years of study at home and abroad, of his ordination at the hands of a cardinal in Rome. Back and forth in time he journeyed, accompanied by Father Gau, who now and then asked a question. One evening, the Bishop spoke of the curious role the number two had played in his career: curate in two places, pastor in two, chaplain to the Catholic Foresters for two terms, fourth Bishop of Ostergothenburg (and four is the square of two), and consecrated on his forty-second birthday, on the second day of the second month. “In 1932.”

“Gee.”

On another evening, the Bishop said, “I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d landed St Paul or Milwaukee, or more pleased.” The Ostergothenburg diocese might well be what it was sometimes called, “the biggest little diocese in the world,” for you really couldn’t count Europe and South America. There might be dioceses to compare with it in the French part of Canada, but had the faithful in those dioceses been completely exposed to the temptations of a high standard of living? Ostergothenburg, and all the roads around it, blazed with invitations to drink, dine, dance, bowl, borrow money, have the car washed, and so on, but let the diocese stage a rally of some kind at the ballpark and there wouldn’t be much doing anywhere else. Oh, of course, if you looked for Ostergothenburg on the map, or judged it by any of the usual rules of thumb — population, bank debits, new construction — you might not think it was much of a place. It had no scheduled air service and no television station and it had lost its franchise in organized baseball. But if you looked at the diocese —well, pastors in Minneapolis and St Paul, who might compare their situations very favorably with those of bishops in barren sees to the north and west, knew they weren’t in it with Dullinger. Catholics outnumbered non-Catholics by better than three to one in the diocese. The Bishop had a hundred thousand souls under his care.

“We’re well over the hundred thousand mark, Your Excellency.”

“When I first came here, we were under seventy thousand.”

“Gee.”

Another man arriving in such a diocese, with no previous experience as a bishop and only forty-two years old, might have chosen to leave well enough alone. This the Bishop had not done. He had twice voted for F.D.R., had backed the New Deal in all its alphabetical manifestations, and, in general, had tried to do what the government was already doing for the common man, only spiritually. “My words were widely quoted. I was referred to as ‘the farmer Bishop.’ Some thought it sounded disrespectful. I didn’t.”

“I don’t.”

But then had come the war and prosperity. The Bishop went out as before and spoke to gatherings, not so large as before but interested. After the war, to combat the changed times — changed for the worse — the Bishop had reached into the faculty of the seminary for Monsignor (then Father) Holstein.

“We were all sorry to see him go,” said Father Gau, who had been a seminarian then.

“A good man, in his way.”

Monsignor Holstein had done well with public events of a devotional nature — field Masses, “living rosaries,” pilgrimages, and processions. And he had stamped out the practice of embellishing the cars of honeymooners with crude sentiments. But in too many ways he had failed. There had been no change at the Orpheum, and at the normal school some smart alecks who hadn’t been organized before — before Monsignor Holstein — now made themselves heard on the slightest provocation. When the second Kinsey report had come out, Monsignor Holstein had played right into their hands, telling the Times , “Only an old priest with years of experience in the confessional should write such a book, and he wouldn’t.” This, though true, had looked silly in print.