in the Barrio de Trafalgar, for a late supper. He eats absent-mindedly struggling to reconcile history, art, human nature and the politics of discretion.
In his room at the venerable Hotel de Rome on Bebelplatz, off the lime-tree-lined Unter den Linden in the German capital, Montvert reviews his notes for the next day’s symposium. He remembers van den Haag’s letter, still resting in the breast pocket of his jacket. He walks to the closet, retrieves it and stretches on the king-sized bed. Once again, he studies the exquisite penmanship, the stamp, the postmark. He wearily tears the envelope open and removes a sheet of buff-hued paper bearing an impeccably symmetrical italic hand-written message.
P.O.B 3579, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
30 September 2008
Dear Monsieur Montvert,
We share similar interests, political leanings and metaphysical ideals, many of them embodied in the Regius Poem and later reaffirmed in Anderson’s Constitution. You and I are also heir to the same wanderings and tribulations that have darkened the pages of history. It is in that spirit that I write.
I am the direct and last descendant of a legendary artist whose name I cannot reveal at this time. In my possession is a manuscript this early freethinker penned shortly before he died. A codicil stipulates that it will not be opened and circulated until five hundred years after his death. The document has been safeguarded by my family over the centuries and his injunction was scrupulously respected –- until now. Old, unmarried and childless, unsure I will reach the year 2016, when the contents of my ancestor’s revelations can be made public, guilt-ridden but consumed with curiosity, I broke the wax seal and perused an extraordinary compendium of insights and affirmations about his work, personal convictions and the perils of whimsy -- or grotesque realism -- in an age of austere literalism. What I read has left me shaken, enthralled, confused and apprehensive.
Your reputation and that of Señor Albeniz in the world of art and art history are unrivaled. So is your untiring patronage of Surrealism, primitive and contemporary, as are Señor Albeniz’s grasp of inter-doctrinal affairs and expertise on the rift that continues to divide the Church and the secular world.
My forebear’s musings, I believe, need to be made public, studied and deliberated. The airing of this startling document can only be entrusted to a professional, someone whose character, eminence and authority command attention, someone who can stand firm against the firestorm of controversy, perhaps of rancor, that my ancestor’s final words are apt to ignite.
If you wish to learn more and, having done so, can pledge your willingness to shepherd what will surely result in a scandal of sizable magnitude, please write. If not, I apologize for the intrusion with every assurance that I shall bear you not a trace of ill will.
Respectfully and Fraternally,
Jan Henryk van den Haag.
CC. Dr. Manuel Albeniz
Van den Haag’s ornate signature ends with three dots forming an equilateral triangle.
In his luxurious quarters at the papal apartments, Pope Benedict XVI consults with the second most powerful man in the Catholic Church hierarchy, his successor and trusted Inquisitor, the hard-nosed Cardinal William Joseph Levada. The in-camera tête-à-tête focuses on two matters. The first concerns a projected trip by the pontiff to the Middle East, where he will try to mend fences with Jews and Muslims. The second explores new strategies aimed at hardening the Church’s stance on Freemasonry, more specifically the official branding of Catholics who join Masonic lodges as heretics guilty of a mortal sin.
As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctirne of the Faith, then pope-in-training, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger earned a reputation as a hard-line enforcer of Catholic doctrinal absolutism. After heaping syrupy praise on René Descartes, the 17th century French rationalist philosopher, Ratzinger abruptly suspended his homage by condemning Descartes and forbidding Catholics to read his books “on pain of sin.” He condemned Liberation Theology, the oxygen-rich ministry that redefines and, for the poor and voiceless, enlivens an otherwise stolid Roman Catholicism, and he punished its disciples with public humiliations, swift and irrevocable defrocking, and summary excommunications. He also excoriated and suppressed neo-liberal theologians and delivered hostile orations against abortion, homo-sexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood.
When Benedict ascended to the Papacy his election was halfheartedly welcomed by some Jewish groups (one of them the right-wing and very accommodating Anti-Defamation League, which is more interested in ingratiating itself with the Vatican than in rehashing history). He received a more tepid welcome from world Jewry which hoped that Benedict would “continue along the path of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II in supporting the State of Israel and committing to an uncompromising fight against anti-Semitism.”
Critics accuse Benedict's papacy of being insensitive towards Judaism. They cite the expanding use of the Tridentine Mass, which calls for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and denounce the reinstatement of four excommunicated bishops, all members of the Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic organization. One of these bishops is American Richard Williamson, an outspoken Holocaust denier who struggled to issue a skewed apology but did not recant his position on the well documented event.
Pope Benedict's dealings with Islam -- 1.2 billion-strong and growing at about three percent per year -- remain, at best, strained. On September 12, 2006 the pontiff delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where he had served as professor of theology. Entitled “Faith, Reason and the University -- Memories and Reflections,” the lecture received critical attention from political and religious authorities. Muslim politicians and religious leaders recoiled at his pompous insensitivity and protested against what they perceived to be inflammatory rhetoric and an odious mischaracterization of Islam. They were especially offended by the following statement:
“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
The pope said nothing about the Crusades, the “Holy” Inquisition and the “Conquest” of the Americas, which, in addition to fattening the Church’s bulging treasury, were waged to spread Christianity … by the sword.
Other pontifical gaffes would follow, all dramatic evidence of a Church woefully out of touch with reality, to say nothing of how prone it is to tinker with history. On his first visit overseas, Benedict told a gathering of Latin American bishops in Brazil that preaching Jesus and his gospel did not intrude upon or corrupt pre-Columbian cultures. This callous falsehood triggered a storm of indignation, prompting the Vatican to issue a hasty but unconvincing “clarification,” not a Mea Culpa. Instead of expressing regret for the evils of colonialism and forced conversions, the clarification indemnified the modern Church by disingenuously claiming that it in no way condones the excesses of the past.
When Benedict was elected pope, one of his first and perhaps most surprising supporters was PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). PETA expediently or naïvely portrays Jesus as a vegetarian, which he may have been when he was not eating fish, but in whose honor the ritual of Holy Communion turns his followers into cannibals. The pontiff’s passion for traditional papal garb, especially gold-embroidered ermine-trimmed vestments, once a royal entitlement, prompted animal lovers everywhere to ask Benedict to live up to his words and give fur a rest. No one knows for sure whether such mundane petition had any effect on papal prerogative.
Distancing himself yet again from actuality, bent on taking the Church back to its darkest days, Benedict, on his first trip to Africa, a continent where at least 25 million people are infected with HIV, told the gathered masses that condoms are not only useless in the prevention of AIDS but that they may actually aggravate the problem. The