“I don’t have to be here for any of this,” Dree said. “I can wait for you outside or back at the apartment. I trust you.”
“After all we’ve been through, you deserve to see the end of this.”
Some clicks were audible through the speaker as his call was routed from Monaco’s 5G network to Italy, and then a man’s hoarse voice asked in Spanish,“Buenas?”
“Good morning to you too, Your Eminence,” Maxence said in Spanish. Gustavo and Maxence usually spoke Spanish together, even though they spoke English and Italian as well. Their most intense theological arguments had been in Spanish.
Plus, Dree could follow along just fine, as she’d proved.
“Brother Maxence? Why are you calling me at this ungodly hour?” Pope Vincent de Paul asked him.
“Coming from you, that’s quite the condemnation, Holy Father.” The time in the upper left corner of Max’s phone said that it was a few minutes after nine o’clock, but Gustavo had always been a late riser. In seminary, he was notorious for bustling into the early-morning Office of Readings at the very last possible minute and then going back to bed to sleep until Lauds.
“You know I don’t like thatHoly Fatherbusiness from you. You’re one of the few people from seminary days whom I can talk to. What couldn’t wait until later?”
“I have two very large problems, Brother Gustavo, and I’m sorry to lay them at your feet.”
“As long as you kiss my ring while you do it.”
Maxence chuckled. “The first one is something you told me would happen.”
“Ah,” Gustavo said, and Maxence had the distinct feeling he was rubbing the side of his face. “Has the day come when you would want to be laicized?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Gustavo’s voice brightened, and rustling suggested sheets being thrown back. “You owe me a good bottle of scotch. I would like a bottle of Gordon and MacPhail, the Generations Mortlach 75 Years Old.”
“You didn’t even hesitate,” Max complained.
“I have had my eye on a bottle of that for some time. I am but a poor priest, and I would never indulge in such a worldly acquisition.”
Maxence was already laughing at Gustavo before he could finish. While it was probably true that Gustavo still considered himself a poor Jesuit in spirit, as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, he could probably have a bottle of scotch if he wanted it. “No, I meant you didn’t even hesitate at my admission that I want to give up my status as a deacon.”
“Oh, Brother Maxence. We’ve been friends too long for that. I have now reached my desk in my humble cell—”
Which Maxence knew was the pontifical bedroom, and he’d probably had to struggle out of the enormous four-poster bed and shove aside several attending cardinals holding his robe and slippers out of his way as he’d made his way across the room, but we all have our little stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
“—and I am now signing and dating the document that converts your position as a transitional deacon to a member of the permanent diaconate. You may still assist at Mass. You are still considered a representative of the Church, but I am granting you a dispensation from the obligations consequent to ordination, including that of celibacy. That is what you want, right? Or did you want to give up your deacon status entirely? I have that paper around here somewhere, too.”
Max glanced up at Dree. Oh Lord, what she mustthinkof him if the pope was so ready to toss him out on his ass. “You had the documents already drawn up?”
Gustavo’s laugh rang from the phone and echoed in Max’s office.
Maxence considered telling Dree to leave, and he considered crawling under his desk to die. “If you would allow me to remain as a permanent deacon, I would appreciate the offer.”
“Do you feel the position of a permanent deacon is appropriate in your heart?”
“I do, Holy Father.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you were never ordained as a presbyter, no matter how many times you asked. The transition from an ordained priest to a deacon or a layperson is more difficult to justify.”
Which brought Max to his second topic of the phone call. “Do you realize that Pope Emeritus Celestine VI offered me ordination two days ago?”
Something clattered in the background of the phone call, and Pope Vincent de Paul shouted for someone else in the room toget outin three languages. After some muffled shuffling, Gustavo asked, his tone lower and almost sinister, “Could you say that again?”
“HisPreviousHoliness,” a joke about Celestine between the two of them for some years, “sent Father Moses Teklehaimanot to offer me ordination immediately. He said to get on a plane and come to Rome, and he would personally ordain me that afternoon. I believe Father Moses was merely obeying a directive and did not instigate the situation.” Maxence thought that should protect Father Moses from punishment.
“I haveexpresslyforbidden any priest or cardinal, and that includes Meinhard Waltz,” he said, spitting Pope Celestine VI’s birth name with venom in his voice, “from granting you ordination unless or until I approved.”
