“Gustavo, I’m hurt.” Oh, yes, Dree was hearing that, too, even though she sat serenely in the chair across the desk from him with a kind smile on her luscious lips.
“You wanted it so badly that I suspected you would shop around for a bishop to ordain you. I was just telling Father Benito last week that if you didn’t get married or crowned as the Prince of Monaco in five more years, I was going to give in. Which one was it?”
“Both.”
“Then you owe me two bottles of the Gordon and MacPhail. You didn’t already attempt marriage, did you?”
“No.”Max wasn’t stupid or foolish enough to attempt the sacrament of marriage before he’d been released from his deacon vows.
“Good, good. That would be hard to reconcile. But you can, starting tomorrow. I will need Father Moses to make a statement that his Holiness Celestine VI has defied me.”
“Oh, it doesn’t stop there,” Maxence said, waving to Dree to let her know that she should leave the office now.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” His Holiness swore, and then he continued to swear in increasingly colorful Spanish that made Dree raise her pale eyebrows and giggle silently.
He waved for her to leave, and this time she rolled her eyes, nodded, and vacated her seat. Maxence watched Dree’s voluptuous body sway, the generous swells of her breasts and hips bending around her narrow waist as she walked the long,longlength of the office, between the bookcases and to the door at the end, where she turned and winked at him before exiting.
The door clicked shut.
Maxence related the entire scandal to his friend Gustavo, including Celestine’s apparent interference in Monaco’s princely election and the coordinated attempt by a Russian bratva to do the same.
The pope was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “I wish I could tell you I don’t believe you. Pray for our Holy Church today.”
“Yes, Holy Father.”
Gustavo sighed again, agony and anguish filling his breath. “At least there are no innocents involved inthisone of Meinhard’s scandals. We were too merciful last time, allowing him merely to abdicate the papal throne.”
Maxence had nothing kind to say about Pope Celestine VI. His involvement in the entrapment that had led to Celestine’s abdication and installment as a pope emeritus was not known outside of a few people in the Vatican. “I am sorry to lay these two problems at your feet, Gustavo.”
The pope sighed again. “It goes with the territory and the job.”
“I am especially sorry that I did not know myself well enough to have not bothered you and your predecessors all these years.”
“Bah,” the pope said to him. “I am very glad you and I attended the same seminary, and thus we have become friends. Monaco and the Holy See have always enjoyed a close relationship, but now you and I will do great things together.”
“You always knew I wouldn’t make it, didn’t you?” Max sighed.
“Oh, my Brother Maxence, ordination as a priest is not a prize that you win or a race that you finish. You have tried all these years to be the most perfect Jesuit so that we would have to allow you to take the next level of Holy Orders. It’s not that you weren’tworthy.You were worthy, but it wasn’t right for you.”
“I tried to change myself to be right for the Church,” Maxence told him.
“I have always seen how hard you have tried, but you shouldn’t have totrythat hard. I came to the Church and the Society of Jesus with joyous, open arms. I prayed for you that someday, you would feel it, too.”
If a pope praying for you didn’t do the trick, nothing would, but Maxence’s shoulders still slumped as he sat in his chair.
Gustavo continued, “The sacraments are personal commitments of love. Ordination is a sacrament, and the closest sacrament to it is marriage. A priestmarriesthe Church. As we have always known, the Church is female, and the Church becomes his spouse. A priest has tolovethe Church like a man loves a wife, to want to protect and nourish and cleave to his wife to the exclusion of all else, to havepassionfor his wife, which is what gives the priest the freedom to love the rest of humanity with the love of Christ and not as a spouse.”
Maxence’s hand curled on the desk. “I thought I did.”
Pope Vincent de Paul said, “I know you love the Church and our living Christ, but your love for the Church always felt to me like the love for a sister. It is deep and true, yes. It is a lifelong bond, but it is not the bond that a husband feels for his wife or a priest feels for the Church. Go in peace, Brother Maxence. Remember this season of your life fondly, like a time when you lived with a sister in familial affection, but your true love lies elsewhere.”
Chapter Nine
And the Beginning of Another
Dree
Carving time out of their schedules to go to New Mexico so he could ask her daddy for her hand was taking a few days to arrange, which was logical. World leaders, even ones who hadn’t officially been crowned yet, were busy.
