The Last Western (52 page)

He looked at them with love, the off-scouring of the world, the ragpickers of civilization, this remnant of fools who believed insanely against a thousand years of reason.

A lofty calm possessed him as he spoke.

“My brothers, my sisters,” he said. “Since the Lord came into this world, we have never had a day of love, not a single day when the world was everywhere tender and solicitous of loving, more tender and more caring of love than of anything else.

“Now we shall have a day of love, alone, when brother shall forgive brother and sister forgive sister and parent child and child parent—so that for a few hours, enmity will vanish from the earth.

“So that the old deathbound world will pass away and a new one come to be.”

And that is how the L-Day Plan began.

“
To end the old world
,” the pope told the world four nights later on live Telstar broadcast, “to make it possible for something new to start, we must have this one day, this one twenty-four-hour period, when no gun shall fire, brother shall not strike brother—one day when enemy will befriend enemy.

“Is it really so much to ask—just a single day?”

Willie spoke from the Vatican broadcast studio. Before him, beyond the camera, stood his brothers—Benjamin and Joto and Truman and Herman and Thatcher Grayson.

And beyond them were the others, disconsolate and shattered—Liderant and Nervi and Profacci and Tisch. Worn out with grief and argument, they were like men attending a funeral; Liderant wept.

“Some call this plan crazy. But is it so crazy, brothers and sisters, to try to be our best for a single day?

“Some say that a day such as this will interfere with the business of the world. Perhaps some of the business of the world needs to be interfered with. Will one day off from the making of guns and bombs be so bad?”

George Doveland Goldenblade, watching the telecast from his home in Houston, Texas estimated that the production loss would cost him $650,000, and took the name of the Lord in vain twenty-seven times.

“What can be more important than love and what day could be more important for the world than a day set aside for brothering and sistering, for forgiving and being forgiven, a day when all come together in the sharing of love?

“This is not a day for word prayer, not a day for going to church. Rather this is the day for the true prayer of deed and action.

“What does that mean? Just this. On this special day, let each man and each woman living in the world today, whatever their faith, whatever he or she thinks of God, of religion, of the church, let each go to that man, that woman, that person who is an enemy and embrace him in peace, forgiveness and love.

“This is the day when everybody will make up.

“This is the day of universal reconciling and coming together, involving everybody in the world, a day such as the human family has never known before.

“On this day no nationalities exist, all the barriers crumble, all the divisions cease to be. No one is a Russian or an American or African or Brazilian.

“There is no rich and no poor.

“There is no young and no old.

“This is the day when we are all only people.”

Willie wore the white cassock (on Benjamin’s advice) and he spoke very slowly and more formally than usual. Felder and Benjamin had talked him into preparing some of the speech ahead of time.

“I have the pope’s job,” he said. “They tell me I could make some sort of rule about the observance of this day for Catholics. But that would go against the whole idea, having a rule to make up with somebody you have hurt or who has hurt you. Besides, what about all the rest of you who aren’t Catholics? No, I do not wish to rule, brothers and sisters. I come to you as one who asks, in fact, pleads.

“And I come before you as a fellow human being, not as pope, to ask you to do this hard, simple thing.

“I ask every human being in the world to set this day aside. All you of the Jewish faith, beloved of God. All you of the Islam faith, beloved of God. All you of the Hindu faith, beloved of God. All you of the other religions and faiths of the world, beloved of God. All you of no faith and no religion, but beloved of God all the same.

“I ask you all to prepare for this day and give yourself to it and when it comes, to enter into it with all the trust and hope you ever had from your childhood or maybe what you can borrow from someone else, if you cannot believe yourself—and go out to your neighbor and be reconciled.

“What can we hope to gain by trying to come together and getting rid of the pride and the fear and the things that keep us apart?”

And what followed now became the most controversial part of the pope’s speech.

“An end of the world that we have known, the end of the pattern of things as they are. Yes, the definite breaking up and dissolving of all those arrangements that we have allowed to press down on our human growth, those systems and—ways of doing things—those ways we have developed of thinking of things—that have trapped us and confined us and held us in boxes.

“We may go back to our boxes again. But I tell you that they will never be the same again.

“I tell you that we will bring such a flame into our affairs as to consume and utterly destroy the world as we know it—the world of master and slave and rich and poor and the world of the starving children. We shall burn it,
we shall burn it away in a night!
”

At that moment, the incident occurred which many people remembered after they had forgotten the words that the pope spoke. Many who saw it happen said that it had been accomplished by a trick of lighting, that it had been planned deliberately so that the pontiff’s speech would seem more dramatic. There were a million explanations and opinions of it, though many people said they saw nothing at all.

His face, when he said the words We shall burn it away in a night, became wreathed with a sort of fire, and his countenance looked more Oriental than black or Latin or any other race or nationality he possessed, and it resembled, some said, an icon that seemed to flame and that, some said, they had seen before in the churches of Russia.

In the studio, Benjamin, Joto, Truman and Herman Felder saw the transformation of the fire and accepted it and did not speak of it, though Benjamin wept as the vision held.

Liderant and Profacci saw it, too, but saw it differently.

“The eyes of a madman,” whispered Profacci.

Liderant said nothing, but stared. The vision troubled him but he could not say how or why.

It lasted only fleeting seconds, then was gone. And Willie went on with his speech.

“I am leaving this place. I cannot live in a palace or great apartment and I cannot pray in a great church building that is a museum and a monument—not when so many have no place to sleep and not when so many have only the sky for their cathedral.

“I need to leave for other reasons. I need to come into your midst. For I, too, have a brother I have wronged, one whom I have raised my fist against. I have broken the sacred connection and now must do what I can to repair it.

“I must find that man and make amends.”

Here he seemed to stumble a little, and if he had a speech, he let it go now and spoke directly to them in little disconnected wishes and requests.

“Good-night, brothers and sisters. Good-night, all you children of the world.

“Think well of yourselves, everybody.

“I will come to you again and speak of our day of love and reconciliation.

“Write me letters and tell me what you think of our plan. ‘Maybe we have left something important out.

“Call me and—we’ll talk.

“Have faith in this simple idea.

“We have all tried many difficult things in the past. Have they worked so well?

“We have to find a date for L-Day, as we are beginning to call it here. Think of a good date and send us your ideas.

“We shall all have to wait and listen for important messages that come to us from God and from our hearts.

“We can make plans to make up with that one person or maybe a couple of people we have hurt the most.

“I think we will have to fast to get it straight in our minds—I mean those of you who can afford to fast, and that of course means the pope, who can afford so much.

“As for you who have nothing to eat, forgive this scandal—that we can speak of giving up food.

“Sleep well, brothers and sisters.

“Even to think about love is holy.

“You are the sacred now, remember, and the more people-like you become, the more sacred you become.

“Peace to-you all, in the deepest place inside.”

And Willie signed the world with the sign of J., and the storm broke.

From the newspapers of the world the next day:

Pravda
: “Sentimental tripe. The last gasp of bourgeois religion.”

New Delhi Times
: “A new day for justice and humanity. A triumphant statement reflecting the best of the West.”

London Daily Blade
: “Theatrics, and poor theatrics at that.”

Le Soir
: “The pope is a conscious naif. He believes in the show-business approach to the problems of the international order. A most unfortunate point of view.”

The New York Times
: “The pope is a singularly appealing figure, modest, warm, and humorous. He is also an exceedingly simple man. For all his personal qualities, however, we cannot help questioning the merit of a grand gesture at this moment of history. Does anyone imagine that the complex problems of international justice can be solved in a day of vague ‘love’? Even more troubling are the pope’s remarks about the end of the world. What can the theologians of the Christian church think of such a pronouncement? And does not the emphasis upon such a specifically Christian belief pose a discouraging roadblock to the achievement of the very unity within the human family that the pope is trying to bring about?”

Berlin Express
: “The pope’s argument for unstructured programs of life and for the human family do not make much sense. From an economic point of view, they are positively harmful.”

Recife People’s Bulletin
: “Reactionaries of the world will love the pope’s words, which will leave all consciences untroubled and riveted even more strongly on incidental works of piety and old-fashioned private charity. It is indeed unfortunate that the pope cannot continue along the lines of his predecessors and at least approach the social problems of man from a rational ground.”

Hollywood Mirror
: “About time somebody came out and declared for old-fashioned neighborliness.”

The Laguna Herald (Charismatic Newspaper of the United Heavenly Church of the Holy Paraclete Descending in Fire All Over):
“IT’S OVER, SPIRIT TELLS POPE! Now even the most staid Roman Catholic must believe the message we have been proclaiming for years—The Judgment of God is at hand! ALLELUIA!”

Television stations all over the world immediately set up panel discussions of the pope’s speech. Universities established seminars and institutes.

Political leaders in every country studied the text of the papal statement and made analyses of it. The analyses were beastlike or spiritlike, depending on the people who made them, and few of them dealt with the meaning of L-Day but dwelt rather on what were called its underlying motives and its long-range effects.

A few of the Marxist countries, departing from the line advanced by
Pravda
, said that the idea of a day of universal reconciliation had much to recommend it—especially in the capitalist countries which encouraged competition, aggressiveness and swinish acquisitiveness.

In his weekly press conference, the President of the United States, Clyde Shryker, said, “We applaud the pope’s good will. Certainly we all need to rededicate ourselves to brotherhood—particularly those in the revolutionary nations, and in the monist and hard-line Marxist countries. They can learn much from the Christian leaders of the world even though they are atheistic in outlook and have refused to commit themselves, as we have so often committed ourselves, to the principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For our part, regardless of the brutality, tyranny, corruption and treachery of the monist and Marxist leaders, we shall receive them with forgiveness, ever mindful of the words, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’”

“LOVE FACTOR UNCERTAIN INFLUENCE ON ECONOMIC GROWTH,” said a headline in
The Wall Street Journal
. “Pope’s Plan May Harm Defense Industries.” After the pope’s announcement, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average dropped sixty-five points.

Everywhere, in every city of the world, L-Day was news. Nightclub entertainers made up jokes about it. Students debated the merit of the plan in their high school speech classes. It became the number one topic on radio call-in programs. In Lincoln, Nebraska a young composer named Stork R. Wether set to work on a ballad called
 
, which in two weeks’ time would become the most popular song in the English-speaking world.

Religious leaders of the world all made statements regarding the papal announcement. The majority of the leaders favored the idea of L-Day, but the more intellectual of the religious journals called the L-idea simplistic, melodramatic, naive, individualistic, divisive and apocalyptic.

In Sauna, Georgia a woman named Margot de Menthe said that during the pope’s telecast she had a vision, and in the vision she saw Christ playing with the world like a boy playing with a balloon. Then, in the vision, Moses came along—he was dressed like a Georgia state trooper—and he said to Jesus, What you got there, boy? Jesus said, The world. Then, according to Margo de Menthe, Moses took a branch from the limb of a nearby tree and struck repeatedly at the world, like a man killing a snake, until it exploded. Jesus, she said, sat down in some high grass and cried like a baby.

“It was very sad. I could see everything. It looked like Jed Mim’s place up 101 where it happened. I could see beer cans along the road. All I can say is, Jed Mim better get his ass in order. Someone who would make Jesus cry is not a right person, I don’t care if God did give him the Ten Commandments. That goes for his companions too. As for the pope, I have nothing against niggers whatsoever because after all whose fault is it?”