Authors: Flann O'Brien
There was a knock and I admitted Father Fahrt. Mr Collopy greeted him without rising.
–Evening, Father. And isn’t it a caution!
–Ah yes, Collopy, but we had a good summer, thank God. You and I don’t go out much, anyway.
–I think we deserve a smahan, Father, to keep the winter out of us.
As Father Fahrt produced his pipe, now a treasured solace, Mr Collopy dragged himself up, went to the press and took down the crock, two glasses, and fetched a jug of water.
–Now, he said.
Drinks were poured and delicately savoured.
–I will tell you a funny one, Father, Mr Collopy said. A damn funny one. I will give you a laugh. We had a committee meeting last Wednesday. Mrs Flaherty was there. She told us all about her dear friend, Emmeline Pankhurst. Now there is a bold rossie for you if you like, but she’s absolutely perfectly right. She’ll yet do down that scoundrel, Lloyd George. I admire her.
–She has courage, Father Fahrt agreed.
–But wait till you hear. When we got down to our own business, discussing ways and means and ekcetera, out comes the bold Mrs Flaherty with
her
plan. Put a bumb under the City Hall!
–Lord save us!
–Blow all that bastards up. Slaughter them. Blast them limb from limb. If they refuse to do their duty to the ratepayers and to humanity. They do not deserve to live. If they were in ancient Rome they would be crucified.
–But Collopy, I thought you were averse to violence?
–That may be, Father, That may well be. But Mrs Flaherty isn’t. She would do all those crooked corporators in in double quick time. What she calls for is
action.
–Well, Collopy, I trust you explained the true attitude to her—your own attitude. Agitation, persistent exposure of the true facts, reprimand of the negligence of the Corporation, and the rousing of public opinion. Whatever Mrs Flaherty could do on those lines, now that she is at large, there is little she could do if she were locked up in prison.
–She wouldn’t be the first in this country, Father, who went to prison for an ideal. It’s a habit with some people here.
–For public agitation you must be in the middle of the public. They must see you.
–How would the Church look on Mrs Flaherty’s scheme?
–I have no doubt it would merit strong condemnation and censure. Such a thing would be highly sinful. I think it could be classed as murder. It is not lawful to kill to ameliorate public misrule or negligence. Assassination is never justified. One must put one’s trust in elections and the vote, not in shedding human blood.
–I fear, Father Fahrt, that that is the gospel of chicks and goslings. My forebears were brave, strong-arm fellows. And what about the early Christian martyrs. They thought nothing of shedding their own blood in defence of a principle. Give me your glass.
–There is no comparison, of course. Thanks.
–Now listen here, Father. Listen carefully. This is the first part of November. In the year 1605 in England, King James the First was persecuting the Catholics, throwing them into prison and plundering their property. It was diabolical, worse than in Elizabeth’s time. The R.C.s were treated like dogs, and their priests like pigs. It would put you in mind of the Roman emperors, except that a thullabawn like Nero could at least boast that he was providing public entertainment. Well, what happened?
–James was a very despicable monarch, Father Fahrt said slowly.
–I will tell you what happened. A man named Robert Catesby thinks to himself that we’ve had as much of this sort of carry-on as we’re going to take. And he thought of the same plan as Mrs Flaherty. He planned to blow up the parliament house and annihilate the whole bloody lot of the bosthoons, His Majesty included. I know the thanks you’d get if you told
him
to busy himself with elections and votes. He’d slap your face and give you a knee in the belly. Remember, remember the Fifth of November.
–They lived in another age, of course, Father Fahrt answered.
–Right and wrong don’t change with the times and you know that very well, Father. Catesby got Guy Fawkes on his side, a brave man that was fighting in Flanders. And Grant and Keyes and the two Winters, any God’s amount of sound men, Romans all. Fawkes was the kingpin and the head bottlewasher of the whole outfit. He managed to get a ton and a half of gunpowder stuffed into a cellar under the House of Lords. But there were two other men lending a good hand all the time and saying God bless the work. I mean Greenway and Garnet. Know who
they
were, Father?
–I think I do.
–Of course you do. They were
Jesuits.
Hah?
–My dear man, Jesuits also can make mistakes. They can err in judgement. They are human.
–Faith then they didn’t err in judgement when Guy Fawkes was found out. They scooted like greased lightning and Father Greenway and another priest managed to get to a healthier country. Father Garnet was not so alive to himself. He got caught and for his pains he got a length of hempen rope for himself, on the gallows high.
–A martyr for the Faith, of course, Father Fahrt said evenly.
–And Fawkes. They gave him tortures you wouldn’t see outside hell itself to make him give the names of the others. Be damn but he wouldn’t. But when he heard that Catesby and a crowd of his segocias had been chased, caught and killed, he broke down and made some class of a confession. But do you know what? When this rigmarole was put before him for signature, believe it or not but he couldn’t sign it. The torture had him banjaxed altogether. His hands were all broken be the thumbscrews. What’s your opinion of that?
–The torture Fawkes so heroically endured, Father Fahrt said, was admittedly appalling and terrifying, the worst torture that the head of man could think of. It was called
per gradus ad ima.
He was subjected to it by direct order of the King. He was very brave.
–I needn’t tell you he and several others got the high jump. But Lord save us, poor Fawkes couldn’t climb up the ladder to the gallows, he was so badly bet and broken up in the torture. He had to be carried up. And he was hanged outside the building he tried to blow up for the greater glory of God.
–I suppose that’s true enough, Father Fahrt said meekly.
–For the greater glory of God. How’s this you put Latin on that?
–
Ad majorem Dei gloriam
. It is our own Society’s watchword.
–Quite right.
A.M.D.G.
Many a time I’ve heard it. But if blowing up councillors is bad and sinful as you said, how do you account for two Jesuits, maybe three, being guilty of that particular transaction, waging war on the civil power? Isn’t Mrs Flaherty in the same boat as Mr Fawkes?
–I have pointed out, Collopy, that events and opinions vary drastically from one era to another. People are influenced by quite different things in dissimilar ages. It is difficult, even impossible, for the people of today to assess the stresses and atmosphere of Fawkes’s day. Cicero was a wise and honest man and yet he kept slaves. The Greeks were the most sophisticated and civilized people of antiquity, but morally a great many of them were lepers. With them sins of the flesh was a nefarious preoccupation. But that does not invalidate the wisdom and beauty of the things many of them left behind them. Art, poetry, literature, architecture, philosophy and political systems, these were formulated and developed in the midst of debauchery. I have—ah-ha—sometimes thought that a degraded social climate is essential to inspire great men to achievement in the arts.
Mr Collopy put down his glass and spoke somewhat sternly, wagging a finger.
–Now look at here, Father Fahrt, he said, I’m going to say something I’ve said in other ways before. Bedamn but I don’t know that I can trust you men at all. Ye are for ever trimming and adjudicating yourselves to the new winds that do blow. In case of doubt, send for a Jesuit. For your one doubt he will give you twenty new ones and his talk is always full of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, rawmaish and pseudo-theology. The word I have heard used for that sort of thing is
casuistry
. Isn’t that right? Casuistry.
–There is such a word but it’s not true in this case.
–Oh now you can always trust a Jesuit to make mischief and complicate simple things.
–That word Jesuit. Our founder Ignatius was a Spaniard and had a different name for the Order, but it was called Societas Jesu by command of the Holy Father Paul III. Originally the title Jesuit was one of hatred and contempt. What was intended as an insult we accepted as a compliment.
–I suppose that’s what I mean—you are for ever double-thinking and double-talking. You slither everywhere like quicksilver. There’s no pinning a Jesuit down. Then we’re told it is a mendicant order. Sure there isn’t a better-got collection of men on the face of the earth, churches and palaces all over the world. I know a thing or two. I’ve read books. I’ll tell you something about 35 Lower Leeson Street, the poor cave you hid in yourself.
–What?
–The emaciated friars in that place have red wine with their dinners. That’s more than Saint Peter himself had. But Saint Peter got himself into a sort of a divarsion with a cock. The holy fathers below in Clongowes Wood know all about cocks, too. They have them roasted and they eat them at dinner. And they are great men for scoffing claret.
–Such talk is most unworthy. We eat and drink according to our means. The suggestion that we are, well … sybarites and gluttons is nonsense. And offensive nonsense, Collopy. I do not like such talk.
–Well, is that so? Mr Collopy said testily. Is criticizing the Jesuits a new sin? Would you give somebody five rosaries in the confessional for that? Faith then, if criticizing the Jesuits is a fall from grace, let us say a Hail Mary for the repose of the soul of Pope Paul IV, for he told Ignatius Loyola that there were a lot of things wrong with the Order that would have to be put right. Did you know that? And did Ignatius bend the knee in front of the Holy Father? Not on your life. Give me your damn glass.
–Thanks. I do not say that Ignatius was without fault. Neither was Peter. But Ignatius was canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, only sixty-six years after his death. He is now in Paradise.
–You know he died without the last rites?
–I do. He was called suddenly. He was weak of body but his labours in this world were prodigious, and nobody can take from him credit for the great deed of founding the Order, which is now and ever has been the intellectual vanguard of the Catholic Church.
–I wouldn’t say the story is quite so simple as that, Father Fahrt. By Dad, the same Order caused a lot of bad bloody ructions at one time.
–The Fathers are all over the world, they speak and write in all languages, they have built a wonderful apparatus for the propagation of the faith.
–Some people at one time thought they were trying to banjax and bewilder the One, Holy and Apostolic. Oh and there are good people who are alive today and think the Church had a very narrow escape from the boyos of yesteryear.
–I know it is useless asking who those important people are.
–In the days of my youth I met a Jesuit in Belfast and he said the Jesuits were the cause of the Franco-Prussian War and the Boer War, for ever meddling in politics, and keeping a sharp eye out for Number One—money.
–Do you tell me so? A Jesuit?
–Yes, a Jesuit. He was a married man, of course.
–Some dreadful apostate, you mean?
–He was a most religious man, and told me he hoped his daughter would become a nun.
–You must have been talking to the ghost of Martin Luther.
–I think the Jesuits are jealous of Luther. He also tried to destroy the Catholic Church. I often think he made a better attempt than you people did.
–Dear me, Collopy, you are very irresponsible. If you talked like that among strangers, you would be in grave danger of giving scandal, of leading others on to sin. You should be more circumspect.
–I am as fond of my altar and my home, Father Fahrt, as the next. But I revere truth. I
love
truth.
–Well, that is good news.
–I think you are fond of truth, too, provided it is the truth you like, the truth that suits your book.
–Nonsense. Truth is truth.
–There is a phrase in Irish—I’m sorry that through no fault of mine I am largely unacquainted with the old tongue. But the phrase says this: The truth does be bitter.’ I think you know how right that is.
–
Magna est Veritas et prevalebit.
–You never said a truer word, Father.
–Aren’t we the stupid and presumptuous pair to be talking in this loose way about the Order of men such as Ignatius and Francis Xavier?
–Hold on a moment now.
–Xavier was the evangelist of Japan. Jesuit evangelists preached the Gospel, often in face of persecution and martyrdom, to the Indians of North America, to the natives of the Philippines and the countries of South America, even to the English when the Catholic Church was proscribed there. They went everywhere. Nothing stopped them.
–Hold on a moment now, Father. Whisht now for a minute and listen to me. It is true that the Jesuits were everywhere and had a finger in every pie. They were cute hawks. They were far too powerful, not only in the Church itself but in the world. They made all sorts of kings and queens and captains take to themselves a Jesuit chaplain. Can you imagine Parnell with a Jesuit chaplain?
–Parnell was not a Catholic, and I don’t believe he was a real Irishman. It is an English name.
–Those devout priests infested the courts of Europe and had the same courts in their pockets. They were sacerdotal politicians and that’s what they were. Those ignorant and drunken princes and emperors were no match for them. Sure they’d excommunicate you as soon as they’d look at you.
–Nonsense. A priest has no power of excommunication.
–Maybe so. But hadn’t they the bishop in their pockets as well. The bishop had to do as they ordered him.
–You’re annoying me, Collopy. Here, play with this glass.
–Certaintly. But there were two very great men in France, Pascal and Voltaire. That pair had no time for the Jesuits at all, and neither had the Jansenist crowd. Am I right?