Poor Kid to Papal Prince

THE CARDINAL (579 pp.)--Henry Morton Robinson--Simon & Schuster ($3.50 and $1).

Monsignor Stephen Fermoyle, Irish, good-looking and rising fast in the church, was in deep trouble. Only seven years after his ordination as a priest in Rome, he was back in the Holy City as a member of the Vatican Secretariat of State. He stood well in the Vatican, was the protege of Boston's Cardinal Glennon.* Now this brilliant son of a Massachusetts streetcar conductor saw both his soul and his career endangered by his love for a beautiful Italian countess. Instead of concentrating on his papal chores, he kept thinking of himself lying on the grass beneath a flowering pear tree with Ghislana Falerni.

Anyone who reads that far in The Cardinal will know that Ghislana doesn't really stand a chance of getting Stephen away from his calling. Author Henry Morton Robinson, a onetime Reader's Digest roving editor, has at this point only half digested his hero's fictional possibilities. By having Stephen confess it all to wise old Dom Arcibal, Author Robinson handily saves Stephen and his novel as well.

Not in many a season has so slick a candidate for bestsellerdom come along. Weeks before publication, Manhattan wiseacres in the trade had it tagged as igso's biggest sales package and its publishers ordered a first printing of 250,000, of which 150,000 would have paper covers and go for $1. The Cardinal has all the ingredients to justify such optimism.

Stephen Fermoyle's poor-kid-to-papal-prince story is only one. In scores of inside scenes the intimate work of the Roman Catholic Church is described, from a destitute U.S. parish to the Pope's chambers. Church politics are examined, from curates parochial gripes to Vatican policy on Hitler and Mussolini. Figures in the novel include three Popes, many cardinals and archbishops whom readers may think they recognize, a powerful Boston-Irish contractor and political boss, high personages in prewar Italian society.

When the Vatican wants a report on Catholic affairs in the U.S. South, Stephen is sent down for a look and is horsewhipped by Klansmen. When Al Smith gets bogged down in religious bigotry in 1928, it is Stephen who dashes to New York to instruct Al in the proper Catholic answer.

The Cardinal is one of those novels that may have the undesired effect of cheapening a fair cause. In this instance the cause is the right of the Catholic Church to teach and sustain Christianity in its own way. To some extent. The Cardinal is an outright, often vigorous pro-church tract that ploddingly touches on nearly everything from birth control to Author Robinson's view of the church's view on separation of church and state. But the author has included so many banal fictional tricks that both tract and story quickly reach a sustained level of stupendous boredom.

* Not to be confused with the late John-Cardinal Clennon, archbishop of St. Louis.

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