Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

The question is: how can I bear not to marry Lola? Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

“Time for mass,” says Mother, rising briskly. “Won’t you come with us, Dusty?”

But Dusty, who is a Baptist, makes his excuses, socks himself in his joyful-eccentric style, and hops the hedge.

We walk over to Saint Pius XII’s. Pius XII, the last Pope recognized by the American Catholic Church, was canonized by the Sacred College of Cicero, Illinois. The present “Pope” of the A.C.C., a native of Anaheim and Bishop of San Diego, took the name Pius XIII.

Property Rights Sunday is a major feast day in the A.C.C. A blue banner beside the crucifix shows Christ holding the American home, which has a picket fence, in his two hands.

Mother sits up front with the other Business & Professional Women. I skulk at the rear with the ushers, one foot in church, one foot in the vestibule. It is possible to leave at any time, since I told Mother I had to keep my appointment and might not see her after church.

I can leave any time I please, but it is deliriously cool in here. The superb air-conditioning always put me in mind of the words of the old Latin mass (to which the A.C.C. has returned as a patriotic gesture): “Grant us we beseech Thee a locum refrigerii ….”

Monsignor Schleifkopf reads the Gospel from Matthew that relates how Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, believed in Christ and gave him his tomb. He preaches on the resurrection of Lazarus, who was also well off.

“Dearly Beloved: we are reminded by the best commentators that Lazarus was not a poor man, that he lived comfortably with sisters in a home that he owned. Our Lord himself, remember, was not a social reformer, said nothing about freeing the slaves, nor are we obliged to.”

After the sermon Monsignor Schleifkopf announced triumphantly that this week the congregation had paid off the debt on the new church, the air-conditioning, the electronic carillon that can be heard for five miles, and the new parochial school

Moon Mullins, who is an usher, greets me in the vestibule. He stands around in true usher style, hawking phlegm and swinging his fist into his hand.

Monsignor Schleifkopf prays for victory over North Ecuador and for the welfare of our brothers in Christ and fellow property owners throughout Latin America and for the success of the Moonlight Tour of the Champs in the name of “the greatest pro of them all.”

I begin to think impure thoughts. My heart, which was thumping for no good reason, begins to thump for love of Lola Rhoades and at the prospect of seeing her this very afternoon and later inviting her out into the gloaming.

When the congregation rises for the creed, I see my chance and slip out.

Christ have mercy on me. Sir Thomas More, pray for me. God bless Moon Mullins, a good fellow, a better man than I. Lord have mercy on your poor church.

Goodbye, Pius XII. Hello, Lola baby, big lovely cellist. Let us go out into the gloaming and lie in one another’s arms and watch the constellations wheel in their courses.

Father Rinaldo Smith is sitting on the tin-roofed porch of the tiny slave-quarter chapel. In his rolled-up shirt sleeves he looks more than ever like Ricardo Montalban. He is waiting, I suppose, for his tiny flock. The Roman Catholics are a remnant of a remnant.

We sit on the steps.

“You know what we need, Tom?” he asks with a sigh.

“What’s that, Father?”

“A bell.”

“Right, Father. And I have an idea where I might lay my hands on one.”

“Splendid,” says Father Smith, kicking a cottonmouth off the steps.

Though Father Smith is a good priest, a chaste and humble man who for twenty-five years had baptized the newborn into a new life, shriven sinners, married lovers, anointed the sick, buried the dead — he has had his troubles.

Once he turned up in the bed next to mine in the acute wing. It seemed he had behaved oddly at the ten o’clock mass and created consternation among the faithful. This happened before the schism, when hundreds of the faithful packed old Saint Michael’s. When he mounted the pulpit to make the announcements and deliver his sermon, he had instead — fallen silent. The silence lasted perhaps thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is a very long silence. Nothing is more uncomfortable than silence when speech is expected. People began to cough and shift around in the pews. There was a kind of foreboding. Silence prolonged can induce terror. “Excuse me,” he said at last, “but the channels are jammed and the word is not getting through.” When he absently blew on and thumped the microphone, as priests do, the faithful thought he was talking about the loudspeaker and breathed a sigh of relief. But Father Smith did not continue the mass. Instead he walked to the rectory in his chasuble, sat down in the Monsignor’s chair in a gray funk and, according to the housekeeper, began to mutter something about “the news being jammed”—whereupon the housekeeper, thinking he meant the TV, turned it on (strange: no matter what one says, no matter how monstrous, garbled, unfittable, whoever hears it will somehow make it fit). Monsignor Schleifkopf later said to Father Kev Kevin, the other curate, “Beware of priests who don’t play golf or enjoy a friendly card game or listen to The Lawrence Welk Show —sooner or later they’ll turn their collar around and wear a necktie.” This was before Father Kev Kevin married Sister Magdalene and took charge of the vaginal computer in Love.

So there was Father Rinaldo Smith in the next bed, stiff as a board, hands cloven to his side, eyes looking neither right nor left.

“What seems to be the trouble, Father?” asked Max, pens and flashlight and reflex hammer glittering like diamonds in his vest pocket.

“They’re jamming the air waves,” says Father Smith, looking straight ahead.

“Causing a breakdown in communication, eh, Father?” says Max immediately. He is quick to identify with the patient.

“They’ve put a gremlin in the circuit,” says Father Smith.

“Ah, you mean a kind of spirit or gremlin is causing the breakdown in communication?”

“No no, Max!” I call out from the next bed. “That’s not what he means.” What Max doesn’t understand is that Father Smith is one of those priests, and there are a good many, who like to fool with ham radios, talk with their fellow hams, and so fall into the rather peculiar and dispirited jargon hams use. “When he said there was a gremlin in the circuit, he meant only that there is something wrong, not that there is a, um, spirit or gremlin causing it.” Priests have a weakness for ham radio and seismology. Leading solitary lives and stranded in places like Pierre, South Dakota, or the Bronx or Waycross, Georgia, they hearken to other solitaries around the world or else bend an ear to the earth itself.

“Yes, they’re jamming,” says Father Smith.

When I spoke, Max and the other doctors looked at me disapprovingly. They had finished with me, passed my bed. I am like a dancing partner who’s been cut in on and doesn’t go away.

“They?” asks Max. “Who are they?”

“They’ve won and we’ve lost,” says Father Smith.

“Who are they, Father?”

“The principalities and powers.”

“Principalities and powers, hm,” says Max, cocking his head attentively. Light glances from the planes of his temple. “You are speaking of two of the hierarchies of devils, are you not?”

The eyes of the psychiatrists and behaviorists sparkle with sympathetic interest.

“Yes,” says Father Smith. “Their tactic has prevailed.”

“You are speaking of devils now, Father?” asks Max.