Book 226: Vatican City (English) – The Shoes of the Fisherman (Morris WEST)

I have an advantage, of course, in that no one quite knows which way I shall jump – I don’t even know myself. I am the first Slav ever to sit on the Chair of Peter, the first non-Italian for four-and-a-half centuries. The Curia will be wary of me. They may have been inspired to elect me but already they must be wondering what kind of Tartar they have caught. Already they will be asking themselves how I shall reshuffle their appointments and spheres of influence. How can they know how much I am afraid and doubtful of myself? I hope some of them will remember to pray for me.

Hooray, here we are at last at the final country of our odyssey, which took me a decade and which I finished on the last day of 2021 (there are still quite a few territories and other places to go though, so please don’t go away!) We’ve travelled from the country with the largest population (China) to the one with the smallest. You might wonder if it has any inhabitants, apart from the Pope, but it does have some.

This is also something of a homecoming, since the writer I’ve chosen was an Australian who was for a long time the Vatican correspondent of The Daily Mail (London.) I feel West is one of Australia’s best writers, though sadly neglected nowadays – I couldn’t find anything of his to buy in any Sydney bookshops (he has become print-on-demand). Thank God for our library’s stack collection.

Initially, for the Vatican I had chosen Windswept House by Malachi Martin, an Irish priest who lived in the city state. I gave it 50 of its 646 pages before abandoning it, the only novel I’ve given up on in this quest. It was frankly awful. It’s not too hard to find other conspiracy/corruption/occult novels involving the Catholic Church, such as Dan Brown’s much better Angels and Demons, but I felt I needed something perhaps more intellectual (while still very readable) and understanding, something from the inside the Church – in short, something more ‘mature’. Hence West’s novel (he was a practicing Catholic).

Of course, the Catholic Church, immutable as we tend to think it is, has changed enormously since 1963, as has the papacy. But looking back from today’s vantage point, in some ways West seems amazingly prophetic. His new pope, Kiril I, is young and the first Slavic pope (though a Ukrainian, not a Pole) and in some ways is very reminiscent of the later Pope John Paul II – he had suffered persecution during Communist rule of his country, has his eyes open to how the institution and the world really work, is not afraid of carefully engaging in politics, is determined to make the Church more relevant to modern life and to win or bring back acolytes, and intends to travel the world to do it. There is also a foreshadowing of the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI. And now that we have the first Jesuit pope, it was also prescient of West to bring a prominent Jesuit character into the mix. The brilliant theologian Jean Télemond (apparently modelled on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) tries to modernise and open out theology, which causes him to suffer the sanction of a judgement of ‘error’ from the conservative Holy Office (an obvious waste of talent and of opportunity to expand the Church).

Pope Kiril himself feels inadequate and not up to the demands of the job (I’m sure not the first). But he is courageous and conscientious (in order to see and understand real life, he roams the streets of Rome at night, like Harun al-Rashid.)

We follow the story through the eyes of George Faber, like West a journalist. He has a fraught custody battle with Corrado Calitri (rising star of Christian Democratic Party, a future Italian PM) over his lover/Calitri’s separated wife. Faber is persuaded to act as an intermediary between the US and the USSR to maintain a Cold War channel of communications to try to avoid a nuclear war, although West draws a curtain over the actual interaction between Faber and Soviet leader Kamenev (who had tortured Kiril earlier in his life – perhaps Kiril has too much knowledge of the world for someone who had spent so much of his life in a prison within a prison?) In any case, for the sake of both men’s better interests Kiril and Kamenev realise that they need each other.

Lastly there is a depressed and disillusioned widow who Kiril rescues and who finds purpose in helping the needy.

There is a taste of the increasing number of medical and other scientific discoveries that the Vatican (and society generally) try to deal with morally – in this case, a doctor who uses a drug to kill deformed babies.

This is a tale of tortured souls (from the Pope down) wrestling with Catholic theology and laws and how to live as a good person in modern society. Obviously, the Catholic Church is still struggling to make itself relevant (not least in Italy) but it has survived and is still trying.

There is a profound, insider’s view of how the Holy See really works, and how the Church (and Catholics more generally) may have felt about the world in the time of the Cold War and the almost contemporaneous Vatican II attempt to drag the Church kicking and screaming into the modern world. These are issues that it is still grappling with. It’s a long time since I’ve read one of West’s novels, and from memory the others were better. The plot could have been more exciting, and I felt like a lot of the issues were left hanging at the end… However it was a big bestseller at the time, and there’s still a lot to think about here. I’ll have to read the other two books in the Vatican Trilogy to find out if the answers are there. It was still an excellent read. And that goes for the rest of my decade-long world reading marathon as well. Thank you so much for following along!

West, Morris (1916 – 1999), The Shoes of the Fisherman, London/Melbourne/Toronto, Heinemann, 1963

The Vatican Trilogy consists of The Shoes of the Fisherman; The Clowns of God; and Lazarus.