Six of them were waiting when Father McGillicuddy unlocked the doors of the little church just after seven in the morning. Usually, he said the daily Mass for the straggle of faithful who attended each morning; there were never more than three or four. Six people was an unusually large number and everything that followed was also unusual.
He had laid out the clothing of the Mass for Father Tunney. Alb, white, and chasuble, red: the color of blood and of martyrs in the elaborate symbolism of the Church. The old priest threw the alb over his thin shoulders and pulled it down, unmindful of how ludicrously large it was on his frame. He was praying to himself as he dressed, his eyes open yet turned inward.
McGillicuddy had watched him from the door of the sacristy. He did not want to be with Martin Foley just now; he had risen early and said prayers and eaten a quick breakfast in the yellow kitchen. He wanted to stay away from Foley for as long as he could, especially after the cold, methodical interview with him last night.
Leo Tunney mumbled Latin words. He pulled the white rope tight around his waist. It was the cincture, the reminder to priests of the rope that bound Christ on his last struggle to Golgotha.
Like the alb, the red chasuble was too large and hung in elegant folds.
“I’m sorry about this, we have smaller garments but they’re in mothballs, I’m afraid, I told you that most of the other fellows are on loan to the parishes and…” He let his voice trail; it was all so hopeless. When Tunney had arrived at the motherhouse he had seen it as a good sign, that better days were coming to the Order. But now Martin Foley from Rome had been most emphatic about keeping the presence of Tunney a loose secret. No publicity, no interviews with the local press, no holy freak show. Holy freak show. McGillicuddy felt mortified by the words of warning from the younger man; as though he, McGillicuddy, could be capable of transforming the suffering of this man into profit. It was just that the Order… for the good of the Order… that Father Tunney’s life could be an example to—
“Nothing,” Martin Foley had said, like a judge. “Not a word.”
“I’m ready now, Father,” Leo Tunney said gently. “Sometimes, in the jungle, when I thought of this moment, it was almost too much to bear.”
“But you offered Mass in the—”
“No. Not for a long time, Father.” The blue eyes looked with infinite sadness at the fat priest. “I remembered all the prayers, I said them to myself. I offered the Mass but no one was there. And then, for a long time, I was not worthy.”
“None of us is worthy, Father.”
“No. But few of us know it, know it so deeply that we are ashamed of our sins.”
“Father.” McGillicuddy felt moved in that moment and the feeling was uncomfortable to him. He was a man of the world in his way and it was so obvious that Tunney had left that world long ago. He was like a child with a face of suffering, gaunt and gray, his blue eyes piercing McGillicuddy like lasers.
“I’m sorry,” Tunney apologized again, half-bowing in that Oriental manner of artificial grace.
McGillicuddy nodded, started to speak, and thought of nothing to say. He left the sacristy and entered the church, kneeling heavily in the second pew on the right.
So it began, as none of them expected it.
Tunney entered the sanctuary and went to the altar and placed the chalice on the white cloth and came down the steps and stood facing the altar.
The old woman who always came to Mass began it; they could hear her tears after the first few words. They were happy tears and the sobs were not so loud but they could all hear them and they understood why she wept.
Mrs. Guidotti, Father McGillicuddy thought. A retired widow and the gossip of the neighborhood.
She would tell everyone what had happened in the chapel with the new priest, an old man with white hair and blue eyes.
Father Tunney blessed himself at the foot of the altar and then said:
“In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo, et doloso erue me. Quia tu es, Deus, fortitudo mea: quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus?”
In the back of the church, Father Martin Foley stood, his mouth open, a frown slowly clouding his face. Outside, the gloomy morning rain continued to fall, no longer soft but hard as winter.
McGillicuddy turned, saw Foley, and he could not help smiling when he heard the sobs from the old woman. The Tridentine Mass. The forbidden Latin Mass. None of them had thought of it but it was all that Tunney knew. He had been gone so long that he did not know everything had changed, that the Latin Mass was banned.…
A man in a green twill work shirt and green trousers picked up the words after the first few minutes. He was a middle-aged landscape gardener with a sun-blackened face who lived alone with his aged mother. He remembered the words and his voice joined the priest’s:
“Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis apostolis Petro et Paulo…”
McGillicuddy found himself saying the words of the Confiteor aloud as well. He knew this would not please Martin Foley.
The old priest had been in the jungle for twenty-one years. All the reforms of Vatican II, all the changes in liturgy in the Roman Church over the two decades had washed over the world without touching him. And the intense nostalgia for the old Mass had moved an elderly woman to tears and a middle-aged gardener to the recitation of prayers buried in his subconscious for twenty years.
Leo Tunney again made the Sign of the Cross, asking for pardon and absolution in words of a dead language. Slowly, with medieval grace, the old Mass proceeded at the stark, modern altar and Tunney spoke the words like a man in a trance, caught in the past, unseeing in the present.
At the moment of Communion, the congregation rose and came forward, kneeling at the rail in the old-fashioned way, holding their mouths open and their tongues extended.
McGillicuddy had thought himself incapable of being so moved. With the others, he rose and joined the congregation at the railing; he knelt and waited, with eyes closed, for the Communion wafer.
Only Foley still held back, standing in the rear of the chapel, a frown creasing his broad features. He was incapable of action.
Leo Tunney, his eyes shining with tears and his thin hands trembling, came down the three steps from the altar and went to the old woman at the railing. He picked the wafer out of the chalice, held it and said, “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam. Amen.”
He placed the wafer on her tongue and went to the next and the next, saying the holy words, placing a wafer on each tongue.
McGillicuddy, receiving the host, felt as though he were still a child, still that little boy from Boston he had been so long ago, when the air was perfumed with incense and the expectation of great things about to happen. A child lost in the mysteries of the Faith, his eyes closed to the world, open to thoughts of God, heaven, hell and death, love and sacrifice, crucifixion and resurrection.
McGillicuddy felt awed, as though it were miracle enough that he could touch — briefly — the soul of himself as he had been, fifty years before.
When he turned from the Communion railing, he saw that Foley was gone from the door.
Slowly, the Mass proceeded like a dream to McGillicuddy and to the rest of them. After the Last Gospel and the admonition to leave, when the Mass was ended, after Tunney had disappeared through the door to the sacristy, the congregation lingered, unwilling to break the spell.
McGillicuddy went through the second door to the sacristy and found Leo Tunney standing at the chest of drawers, leaning on it, his face pale beneath the patina of sunburn.