The Judas Cloth Read Online Free PDF Page B

lose, I dine fearlessly with the unsound Stangas. At first we were always en famille. Then I met their friends. I fancy the aim had been to sound me out because no sooner was the ice well broken than a young guest began to praise my mildness during the Spoleto troubles. I told him that this had been due rather to charity than to partisan feeling, whereupon he remarked that charity was precisely what was bringing some priests to make their peace with Liberalism. He was unabashed by my saying that, being unacquainted with the ideas current in fashionable drawing rooms, I could not discuss them. His name is Gambara. He is greatly exercised by His Holiness’s condemnation of freedoms of thought and the press and by the new encyclical which, he fears, must drive Liberals from the Church. Did I know, he asked, that there is a secret movement for reform within the Church itself? I said I did not and marvelled at his knowledge. He claims he has it from his spiritual director, whose name he will not divulge, since the secret of the confessional should cut both ways. I took this to mean that I too might speak my mind without fear.
    This was impertinent but I own to some curiosity about his clericalfriends – Tuscans, would you not guess? – who espouse unorthodoxies, some of which go back at least fifty years to the Synod of Pisa which, as we know, was declared a non-event. This shadow-Church is, I suppose, the equivalent of the Carbonari, who equally secretly elaborate plans for an alternative form of civil government. The count is thought to be one of them and his young friend, a layman with a curiously clerical cast of mind, must, I suppose, aim to recruit me. To be prudent, I should delate him but am reluctant to do so – except now to you. In our conversations I am the soul of discretion and beg you to be the same by destroying this, which I shall not send by the public post.
From the same to the
same:
    April 1835
    Gambara continues to tease me. I ask the count about him and am imperfectly reassured by his replies. I fear that he too is rash and that his wife worries about this. She is a quiet, pretty woman and devoted to their small son who is about four. I suspect her health prevented her having another.
    Gambara’s spiritual directors talk, it seems, of abolishing mass stipends, confessions, benefices and, to be sure, ecclesiastical courts. Priests and laymen should be equal before the law! Parish priests should be elected by the laity and the clergy be of and with the people. It is a farrago of generous contradictions, not the least being Gambara’s status as a layman. On my saying so, I was surprised to see him redden like a girl.
    ‘Forgive me,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want to insult you – but neither do I want the privilege of being a priest. In this state, you see,’ he explained gravely, ‘the privilege is a worldly one, since only the clergy enjoy high stipends or qualify for high office.’
    I have decided not to visit the Stanga villa for a while.
    Amandi saved these letters. Later ones were peppered with sideswipes at the chronic absurdity of those around Mastai who was as easily roused to humour as to indignation. Both bristled in the margins of a pamphlet which he sent on with a complaint that someone was circulating it among his diocesan priests.
    It praised the Centurioni, a militia founded to ‘defend the godly against French doctrines’, and urged priests to keep an eye on free-thinking landlords and forbid labourers to work for them. ‘That,’ triumphed the pamphlet-writer, who signed himself ‘the water-sprinkler of truth’, ‘willteach these proud gentlemen that they need the people more than the people need them!’
    ‘Who writes such things?’ marvelled Mastai. ‘They undermine people’s respect for their betters. Our zealots don’t need a guillotine. They’ll cut off their own heads!’
    He had failed to hit it off with local conservatives who were alarmed by his hobnobbing with