The Cardinal.

The Cardinal  by Henry Morton Robinson (London: Macdonald 1951, originally published U.S.A).

This was on the shelf at home, jostling James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, and lots of books by Graham Greene, Nevil Shute, Somerset Maugham, Morris West, A.J.Cronin, Pearl S.Buck, Taylor Caldwell, Howard Spring, Jean Plaidy, Lloyd C.Douglas, Canon Sheehan, and Dickens. It was considered an adult book: I was not allowed to read it until I was around 15 and my mother was shocked to hear of a son of friends of theirs who read it when he was 12. The Cardinal is a story that traces the meteoric career of Fr Stephen Fermoyle, but also describes his parents, brothers and sisters, and the people – lay and clerical – he encounters, in America and Europe between the wars.  It is a good, absorbing, racy read, but it has become notorious for one incident, which I will mention straightaway.

This is the notorious death-in-childbirth of Mona, when there is a clear and stark choice between her death and that of the baby to whom she is unable to give birth naturally. (It is too late for a section, the baby is halfway down the birth canal.)  Her brother Stephen decides her fate, to the doctor’s disgust and disbelief.  In Catholic theological terms Mona’s death is ‘justified’  because intervening at that stage to save her life would involve the direct killing of the baby, by dismembering it (I know, it’s horrible), while Mona is not directly ‘killed’ but allowed to die ‘naturally’ while the baby is born. (That’s horrible too.) Mona, who is unmarrried, has left home sometime before, in her early twenties after Stephen (at their mother’s pleading) persuaded her to break off with her very good Jewish boyfriend. Her subsequent engagement to a very respectable Irish-American Catholic man made her feel so trapped that she ran off with a dancer of Spanish extraction. Before she gets pregnant, Stephen and his brother George track her down and beg her to come home, Stephen promising not to oppose her relationship with the Jewish boy any longer; but he has already married. (The fact that a rabbi’s son would probably not want to marry a Catholic is never really explored.)  So Stephen blames himself quite squarely for Mona’s ultimate fate; marriage to a Jew (and probably conversion) would not have been the end of the world. In that way the book is modern.  Still, what the reader remembers about Mona is the fact that she has to die so that her baby can live. I wonder how many Catholics began to have the first glimmerings of doubt about the Church and women while reading this.

Mona’s fate is all the more striking because a constant theme of the book is acceptance of new ways of looking at life, and new ideas.  The theory of evolution is reconciled with Christian belief, and a priest who derides Freud in a public lecture is depicted as a time-serving toady. At a crisis in his life Stephen is psychoanalyzed, and finds the insights very helpful. Democracy is the best form of government, and all the best lines are given to Stephen in his argument against Italians and other Europeans who argue for other kinds of polities. The Duce is acclaimed at the beginning of the book and deplored by its end, which is a fair reflection of the way many Catholics became disillusioned with the Italian dictator’s early promise of the corporate state and the way it degenerated into dictatorship and fascism. In America, Stephen constantly defends the Church against charges  that Rome wants to take over the world. Separation of Church and State is central to the survival and security of the Catholic Church. Stephen goes south at one stage and encounters a Klansman and again, sails through the encounter with dignity and style.

The book also manifests some disquiet at patriarchal bullying. Stephen’s father ‘Din the Down-shouter’ who drives a ‘car’ (what we would call a tram) and suffers bad health in silence, is held up throughout the book as a moral exemplar, but a rather ambivalent one.  Although he is never violent and reveres his wife, Din thumps the table and lays down the law. In middle age when they meet up for a holiday, Stephen and his two brothers wonder if their father’s dominance has anything to do with the fact that none of them has married. Other dominant males stride and bluster through the book;   ‘Dollar’ Bill Monaghan, Stephen’s first parish priest, Cardinal Lawrence Glennon, Corney Deegan, the millionaire, and Gaetano Orselli, the rather irrelevant Florentine sea-captain. In an inter-denominational conference in the 1920s which Stephen attends, the last word is given to a rather cranky old rabbi, who tells an incomprehensible (to me) parable which is meant to settle all arguments. 

The patriarchal authority of the Church is never questioned, however, and the rituals of conclaves and coronations (two of them in the span of this book) are described in loving (and fascinating) detail. (If anyone reading or watching Conclave wondered how cardinals all foregathered in the days before air travel, this book explains how some simply did not arrive in time.)  Pope  Pius XI has a soft spot for Stephen (fact and fiction are blended quite shamelessly here), whom he makes a cardinal, and Pius XII (Pacelli) is described as such a hero that one wonders if the author has his eye on a red hat himself  -but his preface makes it clear that he is a layman.  There is heavy but effective symbolism in the last few pages, when an America-bound British ship is sailing carefully through a field of icebergs in 1939 and this is meant to stand for the Church’s attempt to find a road between fascism and communism.  Naturally there are both a Nazi and a Soviet representative on board, naturally there are political discussions and naturally, again, Stephen gets all the best lines.

But to return to the novel’s single most shocking incident; Mona’s daughter Regina, adopted by her aunt and uncle, grows up to become a brilliant young concert pianist.  Stephen, listening to her play, muses that this is the baby the ‘white-coated doctor would have destroyed in routine fashion.’  And he goes on to reflect that ‘From the broken arc of Mona’s life, [God] had shaped this perfect round.’ This is not only chillingly smug – the doctor wouldn’t have ‘destroyed’ the baby ‘in routine fashion’, but with great regret, to save the mother. And Regina is not – we hope – perfect. But most of all, surely Christian teaching tells us that nobody’s life is broken beyond repair, not even that of a woman who has a baby outside marriage?

So The Cardinal – is it a classic? I don’t think it can be compared to The Edge of Sadness, which I discussed some weeks back; Edwin O’Connor’s book is timeless and can be enjoyed by non-Catholics and atheists, while The Cardinal is very dated in its attitudes to women. I don’t see anyone rushing to re-publish it, especially when an anti-abortion leaflet I picked up recently is claiming that the Catholic Church has never believed that a mother should die to save the life of her child. But it is a page-turner and has some very vivid characters and good plot-lines, and it is well worth a read.