When the Pope Was Russian

THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN (374 pp.)--Morris L. West--Morrow ($4.95).

Kiril Lakota was a Ukrainian, and at 50 he was the youngest and most obscure of the 85 cardinals who met in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new Pope. His very name had just become known in Rome, having been kept in petto by the dead Pontiff--as are currently the names of three cardinals in the breast of Pope John. Said Kiril to his brother princes: "I have spent the last 17 years in prison. If I have any rights among you. let it be that I speak for the lost ones, for those who walk in darkness and in the valley of the shadow of death.''

Thus Morris L. West sets the stage in the most gorgeous of all theaters--the architectural and liturgical splendors of St. Peter's--for a novelistic drama of great power and immediate concern. West's tale of the Russian who becomes Pope surmounts two obvious hazards when the papacy is a subject for fiction--that of scandalizing Catholics or boring those outside the Catholic faith. Pope Kiril is no bore and is perhaps the first fictional pontiff to pass the severe test the subject imposes on the fallibility of novelists.*West's novel can be read as exciting fiction by a notable craftsman (The Devil's Advocate) and for the documentary expertise West acquired as Vatican correspondent for the London Daily Mail, not to speak of his years as a postulant of the Christian Brothers teaching order in his native Australia.

Satanic Parody. As Pope, Kiril must confront, as did his predecessor, the specter of atheistic Communism. But he must do so in an unprecedented way, for he bears on his face, hands and back, the scars of Communist torture. His interrogator in a Siberian prison was Kamenev, who has become head of the Soviets. The Pope, in fact, is thus a failed product of (or triumphant escapee from) that satanic parody of the confessional--the brainwashing process wherein men confess to crimes they have not committed to men who have no power to absolve. Yet Pope and Commissar understand, and, in a deep sense, love each other as heroic representatives of opposing faiths.

Out of this strange relation of love-hate. West produces a moral dialogue in which the essentials of humanism and Christianity are debated by two men who have staked their lives on their faith.

Kamenev speaks--and is allowed to speak well--for the humanistic religion of man's perfectibility on earth. The Pope speaks for man's spiritual nature. When a correspondence ensues between the two. there is dismay among those who think that the man in the Vatican has weakened in intransigence toward the visible enemy of the church. Peace is the ostensible subject of the Vatican-Kremlin secret exchanges, which are broadened to include the President of the U.S.. known cryptically as "Robert."

West has used a number of fictional devices to make vivid this confrontation of Christendom and Communism. The horror of nuclear war and atomic fallout is made a live issue by the birth of monster babies in Rome. They have been deformed by the merciful work of a doctor who gave their mothers a new soothing drug--something like thalidomide--and. with equal mercy, kills their offspring. The critical point between science and morals thus gives narrative weight to the Pope's concern over atomic war.

An Only Friend. The implications of modern science also intrude upon the Pope in the person of Jean Telemond, brilliant Jesuit scholar who becomes the Pope's friend. Telemond is clearly based on the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. whose writings tried to reconcile the scientific facts of evolution with the theological facts of man's consciousness and conscience. When Telemond is ordered by the Holy Office to re-examine the book that sums up his life's work, he dies in the crisis of submission to the church's will. The Pope thus loses his only friend on earth, but he, too, must concur as Pope in his own deprivation.

The Shoes of the Fisherman is a brilliant precis of what could be in the mind of a Pope who is also a saint--with all the church beneath him but alone with God. But the curious fictional feat is accomplished: West wins sympathy and belief for his papal creation as a man, not a holy effigy. It is a novel, not a pilgrim's guide nor a pietistic pamphlet. There are glimpses of la dolce vita, a homosexual

Italian politician, a knowledgeable New York newspaper Vatican correspondent foolish enough to tangle with divorce Italian style, a rapacious principessa.

These serve to highlight the central enigma of the Vatican--the headquarters of a huge, cumbrous international bureaucracy that nevertheless administers the intangibilities of the spirit. It is a business, but neither the Pope nor Novelist West lets anyone forget that its business is with men's souls.

:*One notable failure: Hadrian the Seventh, by Frederick Rolfe (''Baron Corvo"), an expelled seminarian whose bizarre fantasy of an English Pope who was assassinated was published 59 years ago.

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