The Judas Cloth Read Online Free PDF

Mastai’s spiritual director was promptly requested to let him know, there were very few men who could stop the state losing money let alone help it make any. Money was a bleeding wound in the Church’s side and it would be sinful self-indulgence for a man who could staunch it to waste his time playing at being St Francis of Assisi.
    ‘What bee has he in his bonnet now?’ Odescalchi inquired. Laicisa tion ? Retreat to a monastery? Did he not know – if he did not, would Amandi kindly inform him – that the first was unthinkable and the second justifiable only if he was irredeemably maimed by sin or epilepsy. Was he? If he was, should he not atone for this by service? Reluctance could only prove worthiness. Paradox was the Church’s climate. While mediating a higher reality for the world, it was itself stuck in some very particular mud with which its servants must occasionally dirty their hands.
    ‘Does he imagine he’s the only one tempted to devote himself to his own salvation? asked Odescalchi. ‘You may tell him from me that I wrestle with the urge on an average of once a fortnight. Tell him too that we’re praying for him.’ Then he advised Amandi to stress spiritual fellowship when talking to the archbishop. In time of need your fellows could provide support, and he and Amandi now held Mastai up, or anyway back.
    They presumed him to be a prey to scruples more precise than those mentioned in his letters. A temptation of the mind or, less importantly, of the flesh? Patriotism? Heresy? The excessive charity which leads to heresy? The cardinal knew that only a deep disarray could have made Mastai grind out the letter to His Eminent self and the one to Pope Gregory which ended: ‘Permission to withdraw would, Oh Most Holy Father, be the greatest expression of your love and I would be grateful to you always …’ Permission was not forthcoming, but Mastai was to receive more tangible grounds for gratitude when the following year – Donna Clara again! said the monotonous gossips – he was promoted to the Diocese of Imola. This was a major see, though not an archbishopric, so it was with a purely apparent loss of rank that he became for a while plain Bishop Mastai. He was forty now, and though he would not recover from the emotional disorders left by the epilepsy of his adolescence , had for years been judged sufficiently free of it to say mass unaided. Was he still beset by scruples? Perhaps, for he was unusually susceptible to signs and wonders and sent assiduously to solicit the prayers of the visionaries who, being numerous at this time, were thought to have been sent by God to comfort His people after the ravages of revolution. They must have comforted Monsignor Mastai, for the following year he received letters from Odescalchi and Amandi congratulating him on his new serenity. Amandi, who had been on missions to Paris and Brussels where he sharpened an already keen political sense, was particularly pleased at his friend’s elevation to a key diocese.

Two
From Monsignor Mastai to Monsignor
Amandi, Imola:
    August 1833  
    Now that you are back I warn that you may get more letters than you might like. While you’ve been away, I have been struggling to come to terms with my translation to this great see with its stipend of nine instead of three thousand scudi, and do not doubt that, after my protests, I must look in some quarters like a shrewd contriver.
    The same divisions prevail here as in Spoleto. Did I tell you that my first invitation was from a gentleman whose wife is a connection of yours, Count Stanga? This happy discovery was a trifle marred by a subsequent one that the count is held to be unsound. But then I am sometimes considered so myself by, among others, His Holiness who likes to quip that in my family’s household even the cat is a Liberal! I take this to mean that I am on the Church’s reserve, to be used only if it should one day need to show a Liberal face. Having, thus, little to