The Secret Supper (26 page)

“Alas, Father Prior, I wish it were that easy.”

36

The good prior must have been unable to close an eye all night. Seeing him standing in front of his monks, his eyes red and his face haggard, I guessed that he had spent the night turning in his head the miserable Oculos ejus dinumera. I almost felt sorry for having burdened him with this new responsibility. To the obligation of having to unmask those among the brethren who professed heretical beliefs, and determining what kind of subversive message was being concealed in the decoration of his own refectory, I had added that of finding the friar who had been the cause of several deaths while convinced of acting in the name of a just cause.

The monks looked at their prior uneasily. The chapter was about to begin.

“Brothers,” the Father Prior started off in all solemnity, in a stern tone of voice and with both fists on the table. “We have been living between these walls for thirty years now, and never before have we had to face a situation like this one. Our Lord God has put our endurance to the test, making us witnesses to the death of two of our most beloved brothers, while at the same time revealing to us that their souls had been corrupted with the stench of heresy. How do you think He must feel seeing our weakness? How can we pray to Him now, we, who for our part have been blind to their errors and have allowed them to die in sin? The dead men whom we repudiate today ate our bread and drank our wine. Does that not make us accomplices of their faults?”

The Father Prior took a deep breath.

“But Our Lord, dear brothers, has not abandoned us in these terrible times. In His infinite mercy, He has allowed that there come among us one of his wisest doctors.”

A whisper ran through the community as the Father Prior pointed at me with his finger.

“That is why he’s here. I’ve asked our eminent Father Agostino Leyre, from the Holy Office in Rome, to help us understand the tortuous ways through which we must pass in these moments of pain.”

I rose so that all could see me and gave a slight nod of acknowledgment. In a more conciliatory tone, the Father Prior now continued with his sermon, trying hard not to intimidate the brethren.

“You all lived with Brother Giberto and Father Alessandro. You knew them well. And yet none of you denounced the irregularities in their conduct, nor their fatal allegiance to the Cathar faith. We slept peacefully, in the belief that this doctrine had been extinguished more than fifty years ago, and we were guilty of the sin of pride for believing that never again would we be forced to face it. And we were proven wrong. Evil, my brethren, is hard to dissolve. It profits from our ignorance. It feeds on our blindness. That is why, in order to try and prevent any new onslaughts, I’ve asked Father Agostino to illuminate for us that most perfidious of all Christian deviations. It’s probable that in his words you will recognize manners and customs that you yourselves may have practiced without knowing their origin. Fear not: many of you come from Lombard families whose ancestors may have had some form of commerce with these heretics. My firm purpose is that, before the setting of the sun, before you all leave this room, you forswear all these abominations and you reconcile yourselves with the Church of Rome. Listen carefully to our brother, meditate on his words, repent and ask for confession. I wish to know if our dead brothers were or were not the only ones infected by the Cathar plague, and to take measures accordingly.”

The Father Prior then called upon me to speak, gesturing toward the head of the table. No one moved an eyelid. The eldest of the monks, Brothers Luca, Giorgio and Stefano, too old to undertake any active work in the monastery, leaned forward to hear me better. The others followed my progress with palpable fear. I could tell, merely by looking at their eyes.

“Dear brethren, laudetur Jesus Christus.”

“Amen,” they all answered in one voice.

“I am unaware, dear brothers, to what extent you recall the details of the life of Saint Dominic de Guzmán.” A murmur spread through the assembly. “No matter. Today provides an excellent occasion for reviving his memory and reviewing his work.”

A sigh of relief rose from the table.

“Allow me tell you a story. In the first months of the year 1200, the first Cathars had settled in most of the Western Mediterranean. They preached poverty, the return to the customs of the early Christians, and they vaunted the merits of a simple religion that didn’t require churches, tithes or privileges for the ministers of the Lord. Their followers rejected the worship of saints and of the Virgin Mary, as if these had been savages or, worse still, Mohammedans. They renounced the sacrament of baptism. And these vermin even preached that the Creator of the world had not been God but Satan. What a perversion of the Christian doctrine! Can you imagine? For them, Jehovah, God the Father according to the Old Testament, was in reality a diabolical spirit who was both capable of expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise and of destroying the armies that threatened Moses’ exodus. In his hands, men were but puppets incapable of discerning good from evil. The common people accepted these lies with enthusiasm, recognizing a faith that excused them from sin and that allowed them facilely to believe that all the suffering in the world was created by the Evil One. Anathema! They placed God and the Devil, good and evil, on an equal plane, with identical powers and fields of action!

“The Church tried to correct these miscreants, from the pulpit, but failed. The heresy’s increasingly numerous sympathizers realized how uneven the battle was. Many of the common people ended up taking pity on the heretics, considering them to be, for the most part, exemplary neighbors. They argued that the Cathars preached by example, showing themselves to be humble and poor, while the clerics dressed in ornate chasubles and frippery, condemning them from altars decked in costly ornaments. So, instead of banishing the heresy, what the Church succeeded in doing was spreading it far and wide, like a great sickness. Saint Dominic was the only one to see the mistake and decided to descend to the level of these Cathars or ‘pure men,’ which is what katharos means in Greek, in order to preach to them from that very same apostolic poverty they so admired. The Holy Spirit made him strong. It gave him the courage to penetrate the heretic bastions of France, where the Cathars were legion and where he countered their objections one by one. Saint Dominic dismantled their absurd propositions and proclaimed that God alone was the Lord of Creation. But even an effort such as his proved futile. The evil was far too extended.”

The Father Prior interrupted at this point. He had studied their history in his years of theological training and knew that the Cathars had won followers not only among the peasants and craftspeople but also among kings and noblemen who recognized in their tenets a perfect recipe for not paying taxes and not conceding privileges to the clergy.

“That’s very true,” I agreed. “Not to pay the tithes that the Bible prescribed for priests was to scorn the laws of God. Rome could not remain impassive. Our beloved Saint Dominic was so concerned with this straying from the rightful path that he decided to act. He assembled a group of preachers with whom he would evangelize vast territories, such as that of French Languedoc. We, today, are the children of that group and the heirs of its divine mission. However, at Saint Dominic’s death, seeing that it had become impossible to fight against evil with words alone, the Pope and the kings faithful to Rome decided to organize a military repression on an immense scale to finish with these devils once and for all. Blood, death, entire towns wiped out with fire and sword, persecution and suffering—for many years that was the lot of God’s people. When the papal troops would enter a city in which the heretics had taken root, they killed all men, women and children, making no distinction between Cathars and Christians. When they reached Heaven, the soldiers said, God would distinguish His own.”

I lifted my eyes and observed my audience. No one broke the silence. I continued.

“Brothers, that was our first crusade. It seems incredible that it should have taken place barely two hundred years ago and so near to where we are now. In those days we didn’t hesitate to raise our swords against our own families. The armies made justice by the sword, broke up the groups of ‘pure men,’ exterminated many of their leaders and forced hundreds of heretics into exile, far from the lands that once were theirs.”

“And so it was that, fleeing the Holy Father’s hosts, the last of the Cathars reached Lombardy,” the Father Prior added.

“They arrived in these lands much weakened. And even though everything seemed to indicate that they were on the point of extinction, luck was on their side: the political situation favored the heretics’ reorganization. Remember that this was the time of war between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The former argued that the Pope was invested with an authority superior to that of any monarch. For them, the Holy Father was the representative of God on Earth and, therefore, had the right to His own army and to great material resources. The Ghibellines, on the other hand, with Captain Matteo Visconti at the head, rejected this notion and proposed instead a separation between the temporal and the divine powers. Rome, they said, should busy itself only with things of the spirit. Everything else was the task of kings. Therefore, it was to nobody’s surprise that the Ghibellines welcomed to Lombardy the last of the Cathars. It was yet another way of defying the Pope. The Visconti lent them their support, secretly, and later the Sforza continued the same policy. It is almost certain that Ludovico il Moro pursues these same directives, and that is why today this house, which lies under his protection, has become a sanctuary for this vermin.”

Nicolo di Piadena stood up and begged leave to speak.

“Father Agostino, are you accusing our duke of being a Ghibelline?”

“I can’t do so officially, Brother,” I answered, avoiding his invidious question. “Not without proof. However, if I were to believe that one of you harbors these proofs, I’ll not hesitate to set up a Holy Tribunal, and even resort to torment if necessary, in order to obtain them. I’m determined to reach the bottom of this matter at whatever cost and by whatever method.”

“And how do you intend to demonstrate that there are ‘pure men’ in this community, Father Agostino?” Brother Giorgio exclaimed, relying on his fourscore years for protection. “Will you torture all these brothers yourself, one by one?”

“Allow me to explain exactly what I’ll do.”

I made a gesture to Matteo, the Father Prior’s nephew, to bring forth a wicker cage in which I’d placed a barnyard hen that I had requested minutes before the chapter. The startled fowl was cocking its head in all directions.

“As you know, Cathars don’t eat meat and refuse to kill any living thing. If you were a bonhomme yourself, and I gave you a chicken like this one and asked you to kill it, you’d most certainly refuse.”

Brother Giorgio’s face flushed when he saw me raise my knife over the bird.

“If one of you refuses to kill it, I’ll know who you really are. The Cathars believe that animals are inhabited by human souls who died in sin and who must return to this Earth to purge it. They fear that by sacrificing the animal they’ll be taking the life of one of their own kind.”

I held the bird firmly on the table and stretched its neck for all to see. Then I handed over the knife to Brother Giuseppe Boltraffio, the monk closest to me. At my command, the blade cut through the chicken’s neck, splattering us with blood in the process.

“So you see: Brother Giuseppe is free from suspicion,” I said with a smile.

“And is there not a more subtle way of detecting a Cathar?” asked Brother Giorgio, horrified by the spectacle.

“Of course there is, Brother. There are many ways of identifying them, but they are all less conclusive. For example, if you set a crucifix in front of them, they’ll refuse to kiss it. They believe that only a satanic church like ours can adore the instrument of torture on which Our Lord was killed. Nor will you see them worship relics, nor lie, nor fear death. Though this, of course, is only characteristic of the parfaits.”

“The parfaits?” Several of the monks repeated the French term inquisitively.

“The ‘perfect men,’ ” I explained. “They are the men who govern the spiritual life of the Cathars. They believe that they follow the apostolic life as none of us can. They refuse all property, because neither Christ nor his disciples had any. They are in charge of initiating all those aspiring to join them, into the melioramentum, a genuflexion that must be performed every time the novice meets a parfait. They are the only ones entitled to lead an apparel-lamentum, public confessions during which the sins of the heretics are brought to light, are debated and publicly absolved. And, as if all this were not enough, they are the only ones allowed to administrate the only sacrament accepted by the Cathars: the consolamentum.”

“The consolamentum?” the group asked once again.

“It served as baptism, communion and extreme unction all in one,” I explained. “It was administered by placing a sacred book on the head of the neophyte. But never the Bible. This act was considered by them to be a ‘baptism of the spirit’ and whoever was worthy of receiving it became a ‘true’ Christian. One of the ‘consoled.’ ”

“And what has led you to believe that the sexton and the librarian were both members of these ‘consoled’?” asked Brother Stefano Petri, the jovial bursar, always proud of having well in hand the material life of the community. “If I may say so, I’ve never seen them abjure the Holy Cross, nor do I believe that they were baptized by having a book placed on their heads.”

Several of the brothers nodded in assent.

“However, Brother Stefano, you must have seen them perform extreme feats of fasting, have you not?”

“We all saw them do that. Fasting lifts the spirit.”

“Not in their case. For a Cathar, extreme fasts are one of the ways by which to reach the consolamentum. And as far as the Cross is concerned, we must not confuse matters. For a Cathar, to wear a Latin crucifix around the neck with no compunctions, it’s enough to file down the ends and make them blunt. And if the crucifix is patté or Greek, then they’ll tolerate it as well. And I’m sure, Brother Stefano, that you’ve seen them recite the Our Father with us all. It is in fact the only prayer they’ll accept.”