Habemus Papam - A Touch Of Evil, Monte Carlo, And The Splendiferous Rise Of An American Pope

Henry Cabot knew Bobby Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV when they were boys in Chicago.  Henry always thought that the Prevosts were an odd family, fond of bratwurst and beer, shanty Irish or Polish or something not quite American about them; but then again any family would seem an outsider to the Cabots, descendants both of the Mayflower and Jamestown, pureblood Americans whose families had been top rung without dilution since the 16th century. 

 

How and why the family moved to the Midwest and Chicago was uncertain, it didn't do them much good, and as it does to most people, flattened out their curves so that little was left of that special patrician nobility that endured in the East. 

Be that as it may, Henry and Bobby went to Catholic school on the South Side, Bobby an indifferent student and Henry at the top of his class.  When his classmate went off to Villanova, Henry went to Yale, back to his roots to the university founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony's ultra-Puritan minister John Davenport who, sick and tired of the flaccid Protestantism of Boston headed south to form his own more stern and originalist colony, the New Haven Plantation. 

Yale in those days was still a patrician New England redoubt, but the religious legacy had faded.  Gone were any thoughts of salvation and redemption as the students prepared for Wall Street and summered on the Vineyard.

Henry, however much he thought the Prevosts were hayseeds and saltbox settlers, he followed his old classmate's trajectory with interest.  A religious vocation given the very ungodlike course of history was a curious thing.  

The irony of faith - God's creation of a sentient, intelligent, creative, and insightful being, allowing him to live for a few decades, then consigning him to six feet under for all eternity - and the marvelous political debauchery of the ages, was always a wonder.  The fact that Bobby Prevost not only took reformist divinity seriously, but signed up for the program was even more interesting. It was one thing to be an altar boy, but the priesthood?

Bobby Prevost became an obsession for Henry, but in its own curious, devious way. The more holy and sanctimonious Bobby became - all that snookering with the poor in the slums of Lima and holier-than-thou treatises on faith and divine order - the more Henry was tempted by the other side of things. 

Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov got it right in one - I am a vaudevillian, he said, a trickster, a carny barker, a conman, and a comedian. Without me life would be a desperate, gloomy, thudding, lifeless bore. 

 

Ivan wondered what he had seen and heard, this ordinary, shabby looking man challenging his assumptions about righteousness and divinity who might be right after all if one gave up credulity and simply looked around. 

And so it was that Henry became the anti-Prevost.  The whorehouse was his seminary, the nightclubs of the Left Bank and the cabarets of Berlin his grounds, the beautiful people his peasantry.  The more that Bobby rose in the ranks of the Church and curried favor with the Vatican, the more promiscuous, libertine, and unschooled Henry became. It felt good to be a counterweight to restore the moral balance, to inject some reality into what had become a very sanctimonious fantasy. 

He became a scion of Wall Street as Bobby was headed for Rome.  He made millions through canny investments, buying managerially dilapidated businesses, restructuring them, and selling them for thousands of percent profit.  He spent every last cent of his fabulous earnings on everything from arm candy to Lamborghinis, houses in St. Barts and Gstaad, a cavalcade of riches and pleasure. 

'Remember me, Bobby?', Henry wrote to now Archbishop Prevost, and asked him to lunch on one of his trips back to Chicago to see his brothers; and the two old schoolboys had a grand old time at McFadden's Irish Pub sharing stories of their childhood. 

After the corned beef and cabbage, the Archbishop became serious, took his friend's hands, and clasped them in an embrace.  'What has happened to you, Henry?' and went on to draw parallels and metaphors from the slums of Maravilla, his beloved Peruvian neighborhood of good people, simple people, people of God. The life that his friend was spending at the watering holes of 'the diaphanous rich', wasting his soul 'in barren wastes' was not what God had ordained. 

Who was this fool? wondered Henry, this pompous, windy prelate? But the more Bobby went on about the poor, the marginalized, the refugees of oppression, and the more he felt the pendulum of moral balance getting more and more out of whack, the more he wanted a drink with one of Madame de Miramon's girls and a long evening at the tables in Monte Carlo.  

Sanctimony comes with priestly territory, apparently, for Bobby was never as bad as all that, prayerful to be sure, taking the altar boy thing more seriously than most, but still a Southside kid; and here he was expounding, expatiating like every priest he had come across.  God only knew - no pun intended - what the Church would be like if he ever rose to the top. 

When Prevost was named Cardinal by Pope Francis, Henry wondered if he might actually become the new Vicar of Christ.  What a laugh that would be, he thought, but stranger things have happened, and in one final, anticipatory blowout, he draped himself with the finery of beautiful women, was seen in the best places of Europe, a splendiferous show of money and what it could buy.  For every priestly homily about sharing, compassion, love and divine affection, he spent another thousand in a jubilee of excess. 

When the puff of white smoke was seen eddying up from the chimney of the Vatican, and its spokesman saying, 'Habemus Papam' called the name of Robert Prevost, Henry was as surprised as anyone. It was one thing to have elected an American, but Bobby Prevost, White Sox fan, master of the glib homily, pastor to the most overstated minority on earth - the underprivileged - and tireless bore about Jesus and Calvary? 

 

The jousting game was over.  Bobby had won.  Now that he was Pope, there was nothing that Henry could do to reset the clock, to adjust the pendulum.  Goodness - at least in the moral wrestling match of the two schoolmates - had come out on top. 

So, Henry Cabot tied up his fortune in offshore accounts, pulled in his horns, sold off his properties and moved to a modest home in Apalachicola, Florida - a piece of the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera where he could eat oysters and grilled grouper and look out over the Gulf.  Now that Bobby was on the papal throne, what better place to settle than this neither-here-nor-there parcel of Americana?