Dublin (60 page)

  "But it would be a terrible pity to lose her," as Gilpatrick's father had very truly said.

  And now, six months after the sad event, a solution had presented itself that promised to be satisfactory to everybody. Last week, his younger brother had come up from the farm and spoken to his father. An understanding had been reached.

  All the parties were agreeable.

  The young man was to marry his brother's widow.

  "I couldn't be happier, Gilpatrick," his father said. "They'll wait until the year has passed.

  And then they will marry with my blessing. And yours, too, I hope."

  Gilpatrick took a deep breath. He'd been preparing himself for this. His mother had told him about it two days ago.

  "You know very well that I can't," he now replied.

  "They will have my blessing," his father repeated sharply.

  "But you know," Gilpatrick pointed out reasonably, "that the thing is impossible."

  "I do not," Conn replied. "You know yourself," he continued in a conciliatory tone, "that they are perfectly suited. They are the same age. They are already the best friends in the world. She was a wonderful wife to his brother and will be to him, too. She loves him, Gilpatrick. She confessed it to me herself. As for him, he's a fine young man, sound as an oak. As good a man as ever his brother was.

  There can be no reasonable objection to the marriage."

  "Except," Gilpatrick said with a sigh, "that she is his brother's wife."

  "Which marriage the Bible allows," his father snapped.

  "Which marriage the Jews allowed," Gilpatrick patiently corrected. "The Pope, however, does not."

  It was a much disputed passage. The book of Leviticus actually enjoined a dutiful man to marry his brother's widow. The medieval Church, however, had decided that such a marriage was against canon law, and throughout Christendom such marriages were forbidden.

  Except in Ireland. The truth was that things were still done differently in Christendom's north-western corner. Celtic marriages had always been fluid affairs, easily dissolved, and even if it did not quite approve, the Celtic Church had wisely learned to accommodate itself to local custom. The heirs of Saint Patrick had not with held their blessing from the four-times-married Brian Boru who was their loyal patron; and to a traditional Irish churchman like Conn, such canonical objections as this question of the brother's widow seemed like nit-picking. Nor did he feel any sense of disloyalty to his church when he remarked a little sourly, "The Holy Father is a long way away." : Gilpatrick looked at his father affectionately.

  In a way, it seemed to him, the older man represented all that was best-and worst-in the Celtic Irish Church. Half hereditary chief, half druid, he was an exemplary parish priest. He was married with children, but still a were priest. These traditional arrangements extended to his ecclesiastical income as well. The lands with which his family had anciently endowed the monastery-and Conn had added those valuable lands at Rathmines as well-had passed into the parish, and so they technically belonged to the Archbishop of Dublin now But as the parish be priest, his father received all the revenues from these lands himself, as well as those from the family's large estates down the coast. In due course Gilpatrick himself might succeed him as priest, and in all likelihood one of his brother's children, assuming this uncanonical bebbandbrvbarbbandbrvbarbbmarriage produced sons, might follow on after. It was so in churches and monasteries all over Ireland. andbrvbarbbandbrvbar;" And, of course, it was a scandal. Or so, at least, thought the Pope in Rome.

  For during the last century or so, a great wind of change had been sweeping across western Christendom. The old church, it was felt, had become too rich, too worldly, lacking in spiritual fire and passionate commitment. New monastic orders dedicated to simplicity, like the Cistercians, were springing up. The Crusades had been launched to regain the Holy Land from the Saracens. Popes sought to purify the Church and to extend its authority, even issuing peremptory commands to kings.

  "You have to admit, Father," Gilpatrick gently reminded him, "that the church in Ireland lags behind our neighbours."

  "I wish," his father replied gloomily, "that I'd never let you go to England."

  For one country in particular that had felt the force of this vigorous new wind had been the kingdom across the water. A century ago, the old Saxon Church had been notoriously lax. When William of Normandy began his conquest, he had easily obtained a papal blessing by promising to clean it up.

  Since then, the Norman English Church had been a model, with archbishops like the reforming Lanfranc and the saintly Anselm. Not that Gilpatrick was the only Irishman to catch the reforming contagion there. Quite a number of Irish churchmen had spent time in the great English monasteries like Canterbury and Worcester. The ecclesiastical contacts were many. For a while, indeed, the bishops of Dublin had even gone to England to be consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. "Though they only did that," Gilpatrick's father had remarked with some truth, "to show that Dublin was different from the rest of Ireland." As a result, many of the leading churchmen in Ireland now had a sense that they were out of step with the rest of Christendom and that they ought to do something about it.

  "In any case," the older man said irritably,

  "the Irish Church has already been reformed."

  Up to a point, it had-the administration of the Irish Church was certainly being brought up to date. The ancient tribal and monastic dioceses had been redrawn and brought under four archbishoprics: the ancient seat of Saint Patrick at Armagh, Tuam in the west, Cashel down in Munster, and lastly Dublin. Archbishop O'Toole of Dublin had set up new monastic houses, including the one at Christ Church, which followed a strict Augustinian rule that couldn't have been bettered anywhere in Europe. In Dublin, at least, many of the parishes now paid taxes, known as tithes, to the Church.

  "We've made a start," Gilpatrick said. "But much still needs to be done."

  "You would consider my own position needed reforming then, I dare say."

  It was a tribute to Gilpatrick's filial respect that he had always managed to avoid discussing this issue with his father. There had been no need to discuss something that wasn't going to change anyway. It was the realisation that the discussion of his brother's marriage might lead to such larger issues that had made him dread this meeting with his father in the first place.

  "It would be hard to defend outside Ireland,"

  Gilpatrick said gently.

  "Yet the archbishop has made no objection."

  It was one of the great wonders of the rule of Lawrence O'Toole that, like many great leaders, he had the genius-there was no other word for it-to live in two contradictory worlds at once. Gilpatrick had been given a number of tasks by the archbishop since his return and had had the opportunity to study him.

  He was saintly-there:. was not a doubt of that-and Gilpatrick revered him. O'Toole wanted to purify the Irish Church. But he was also an Irish prince, I every inch of him, a poetic soul, full of a mystical spirit. "And it's the spirit that matters, Gilpatrick," the great man had often said to him. "Some of our greatest churchmen, like Saint Colum Cille, were royal princes. And if a people revered God through the leadership of their chief, there surely can be no harm in that."

  "That is true, Father," Gilpatrick now replied, "and until the archbishop does object, I shan't say a word about it."

  His father looked at him. On the face of it, Gilpatrick was being conciliatory. But did he not realise, his father wondered, how patronising that answer was? He felt a flush of anger. His son was patronising him, telling him he would tolerate his position in life until such time as the archbishop called it in question. It was an insult to him, to the family, to Ireland itself. He felt like hitting out.

  "I'm beginning to see what it is you want for the Church, Gilpatrick," his father said with a dangerous gentleness.

  "What is that, Father?"

  The older man looked at him coldly. "Another English Pope."

  Gilpatrick winced. It was a low blow, but telling. The previous decade, for the first and only time in its long history, the Catholic Church had had an English Pope. Adrian IV had been unremarkable, but for the Irish at least he had done one thing that made him remembered.

  He had recommended a Crusade against Ireland.

  It had been at a time, just after his accession, when King Henry of England had briefly considered an invasion of the western island. Whether to please the English king, or whether he had been misled about the state of the Irish Church by Henry's ambassadors, Pope Adrian had written a letter telling the English king that he would perform a useful service in taking over the island "to increase the Christian religion."

  "What could you expect from an English Pope?" men like Gilpatrick's father had asked. But though Pope Adrian had now departed this life, the memory of his letter still rankled. "We, the heirs of Saint Patrick, we who kept alive the Christian faith and the writings of ancient Rome when most of the world had sunk under the barbarians, we who gave the Saxons their education, are to be taught a lesson in Christianity by the English?" So Gilpatrick's father would storm if ever the subject came up.

  Pope Adrian's letter, of course, had been an outrage; Gilpatrick wouldn't deny it. But that wasn't really the point. The real issue was larger.

  "You speak as if there were such a thing as a separate Irish Church, Father. But there is only one Church and it is universal: that is its great strength. Its authority comes from the one Heavenly King. You speak of the past, when barbarians were fighting over the ruins of the Roman Empire. It was only the Church which was able to bring peace and order because it had a single, spiritual authority beyond the reach of earthly kings. When the Pope calls upon the caret knights of Christ to go on Crusade, he calls upon them from every land. Disputing kings set aside their quarrels to become warriors and pilgrims together.

  The Pope, the heir of Saint Peter himself, rules all Christendom under Heaven. There must be only one true Church. It cannot be otherwise."

  How could he convey the vision which inspired him and so many others of his kind-of a world where a man might walk from Ireland to Jerusalem, using a common Latin language, and finding everywhere the same ordered Christian empire, the same monastic orders, the same liturgy. Christendom was a vast spiritual machine, an engine of prayer, a universal brotherhood.

  "I will tell you what I think," said his father softly.

  "The thing which these reformers love is not a matter of the spirit. It is power. The Pope does not take hostages like a king, but takes spiritual hostages instead. For if a monarch disobeys him, he excommunicates him and tells his people, or other kings with a power to do it, that he should be deposed. You say such things are done to bring the nations of the earth closer to God. I tell you they are done from a love of power."

  Gilpatrick knew that his father had a point. There had been many clashes of will between popes and monarchs, including the kings of France, England, and even the Holy Roman Emperor about whether the Church's vast lands and its army of churchmen were subject to royal control. At this very time King Henry of England was locked in a furious dispute with Archbishop Thomas Becket of Canterbury over just this issue-and there were senior churchmen in England who thought that the king was in the right. It was the ancient tension between king and priest that was probably as old as human history.

  "And I will ask you one thing more," said his father.

  "Have you seen a copy of Pope Adrian's letter in which he tells the king to come to Ireland?"

  "I believe I have." The letter had become widely known.

  "What is the condition that the Pope makes, what thing must the King of England do to obtain a blessing for his conquest? It is mentioned not once, but twice," he added nastily.

  "Well, there is the question of the tax, of course…"

  "A penny to be levied upon every household in the land, and sent to Rome each year. Peter's Pence!" the older man cried. "It's the money they want, Gilpatrick. The money."

  "It's only right and proper, Father, that…"

  "Peter's Pence." The older man raised his ringer and stared so fiercely at his son that Gilpatrick could almost imagine that he was being admonished by a grey-bearded druid from ancient times. "Peter's Pence."

  And then, suddenly, the older man turned away from his son in disgust. If Gilpatrick did not understand even now, then what could he say? It was not the money.

  It was the spirit of the thing which offended him. Could Gilpatrick really not see that? For seven centuries, the Irish Church had been an inspiration to all Christendom because of its spirit. The spirit of Saint Patrick, of Saint Colum Cille, Saint Kevin, and many others. Missionaries, hermits, princes of Ireland. It had always seemed to him that the Irish had been touched in some special way, like the chosen people in ancient times. Be that as it might, Christianity was a mystic communion, not a set of rules and regulations. It was not that he was ignorant of the ways of other countries. He had met priests from England and France in the port of Dublin. But he had always sensed in them a legalistic mentality, a love of logical games that repulsed him. Men like these did not belong in the beloved silences of Glendalough; they could never fashion the Book of Kells. They might be priests but they were not poets; and if they were scholars, then their scholarship was dry.