Sacra Purpura

I attended the Consistory for the creation of thirty new Cardinals this morning, held in St. Peter’s Square. Some friends of mine, a young Australian engineer-turned-sculptor, his lovely Spanish wife and their sweet, inquisitive six-months-and-two-days old little daughter, were on pilgrimage to Rome for the occasion. George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, would be receiving the red hat today. I gladly joined them for the ritual.

The four of us sat only a handful of rows back from the great stagelike travertine steps of the Basilica, looming over us beneath a vivid Italian sky. I had left my hotel under Tiepolo clouds, gold melting to gilded pink, and now the fickle Roman fall weather had given us a sky as blue as the Virgin’s cloak.

Only a few days earlier, I had stood for five amazing five hours in the same square for the beatification of Mother Teresa. That morning had been joyous, all the pilgrim weirdness of Rome giving the solemnities the ecstatic mood of a hagiographic block party. Now, the exotic travelers around me, even the rites of the Consistory seemed to take on, not the saintly excitement of the beatification, but the sacral patina of antiquity.

Around me were emissaries from every tradition in Christendom, new and old. Near the altar already were representatives of dozens of religious orders, Carmelites in white and brown, piebald Dominicans, Trinitarians with their crusader’s crosses on chest and cape, Maltese knights in black. A few rows behind us were a concourse of priests in red-buttoned electric purple cassocks with identical soft-sided briefcases.

As the seats around us filled up and the clock bells tolled nine-thirty and ten, we feasted our eyes on our neighbors. Ghanians and Nigerians, fluttering their tricolors, stood across the aisle. I saw only of them first, his head shaved, his bare chest draped in an African toga in hallucinogenic pinks, greens and corn-yellow. We caught a glimpse of orate golden sandals as we passed. He was wearing tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses.

Soon, sturdy Yoruba matrons in whirling gold turbans, Nigerian nuns in elaborate bright blue veils, and Ghanian aristocrats with silver-studded circlets in their close-cropped hair had joined him. Above us, on either side of the sanctuary, European nobles in sober black tailcoats, their chests bright with sashes and medals, stood and chatted in small knots. Between them, cassocked priests moved with quick, precise steps back and forth between the empty Cardinals’ seats and the vivid yellow and scarlet of the flowers spilling down the steps.

Earler, I’d spotted a black Swiss guard standing soberly along one wooden partition, seeming as if he were the conjunction of these two different, but in the end harmonious, worlds of chivalry and kingship that had come to pay homage to the Princes of the Church.

Then there were the Poles, who seemed, at first, a bit more prosaic. A brass band composed of blonde Slavic teenagers in matching maroon ties and jackets suddenly appeared in the rows in front of us and proceeded to unpack their instruments. They were literally all over the place during the ceremony, interrupting the rites with ear-splitting fanfares whenever his newly-minted Eminence Stanilaus Cardinal Nagy, S.C.I., got a mention.

More exotic, unbelievably splendid, were their countrymen standing some ways behind us. These humble Poles seemed to personify that gorgeous democratic splendor that is the birthright of Catholic Europe, the world of peasant maypoles and village feast-days. They almost seemed more glorious than the aristocrats of Italy and Africa.

Young, high-cheekboned girls in vivid folk costume, flowers wreathing their heads, stood beyond the barricade, accompanied by their fathers and brothers in embroidered vests and round hats. One little boy was dressed in the blue and aramanth of a Napoleonic lancer, oversized white epaulets weighing down his shoulders. He was crowned by a towering square-topped antique military helmet that looked bigger than his whole head.

Their older sisters and young mothers, in their identical costumes, were more beautiful than the most delicate of Meissen shepherdesses. Some were partridge-plump, others slender and elegant. Their colors were eye-soaking. They wore low, tight red bodices laced up the back with trailing yellow cords beneath ruffled blouses, full black woolen skirts tasseled in gold and green and crimson. Lace-trimmed white petticoats fluttering around their scarlet-stockinged calves.

Some had incongruous modern haircuts, some cropped short, some blonde-frosted or pony-tailed. Another costumed young woman walked with peculiar, almost mechanical, mincing step atop her spindly high-heels. But their splendid, timeless costumes put the last five centuries of taste to shame, just as the Catholic glories of their culture rebuked the modern world that still encircles their borders. I fell hopelessly in love at least twice.

Red stockings, red seminarians’ fascia flapping beneath white surplices. Red cassocks. Red was everywhere there in all its gradation, from the crimson of the velvet hangings and canopy, to fuscia of the bishops, even amid the variegated tulips wreathing the open-air sanctuary. As the new Cardinals processed in to the thunder of the organ and the tolling of bells, their orange-red robes joined the color-spectrum. Nigerian flags fluttered in the breeze. And then came the Pope, surrounded by churchmen in purple, arrayed all in gold, his pastoral crucifix carried behind him. The Crucifixion, the scarlet Passion.

After a series of Latin orations and the lengthy litany of proper names and titular churches, the liturgy of the Word began, and the scarlet returned to our minds. Red was in the words of the Gospel, proclaimed in chanted tono recto by a golden-dalmaticked deacon amid swirling incense. Christ asked His disciples, in the Latin of the Vulgate, “Potestis bibere calicem, quem ego bibo?” Can ye drink of the Chalice I will drink from? The cup of suffering, the cup of the crucifixion.

Could these stocky, grave prelates accept this ultimate sacrifice? Some had no choice. One already, it seemed, was on his way towards Calvary. There were thirty-one cardinals proclaimed by this consistory, but only thirty were named. One was kept in pectore, in the breast of the Pope, a secret cardinal whose life would be forfeit should the red hat become visibly his. Perhaps a persecuted priest of China or one of the new Cardinal-Archbishop of Khartoum’s countrymen. This red hat which they would receive, for the “praise of God and the ornament of the Apostolic See,” as the prayers ran, was only given in the expectation it would remain the crown of the prelate ad sanguinis effusionem, even to the spilling of scarlet blood.

As the schola sung the interlacing strains of Palestrina’s Tu es Petrus, billowing delicately like the incense at the Gospel, I saw the silver trays on which rested the scarlet birettas. Silver trays like the platter St. John’s head had rested upon, a relic, now lost, that the chivalric legends of the Middle ages reckoned to be almost as holy as the Grail, that cup of suffering.

And on their heads were placed the red birettas, one by one, as the commentator read out their tituli, the numerous ancient churches in Rome, many bearing the name of martyrs of long ago. San Giustino, Sant’ Agata dei Goti, Santa Prisca.

Somewhere, there was a church in Rome with an empty Cardinals’ shield that belonged to that unknown priest or bishop, perhaps huddled in a darkened cell or looking over his shoulder for the footfalls of secret police. Meanwhile, the Poles played a fanfare again as the aged Cardinal Nagy tottered up the Papal dais. Another Cardinal accidentally put his biretta on sideways.

But these are strong men, body and soul. Cardinal Pell himself played Australian-rules football at the highest level in his youth. Perhaps they may not shed blood, but they will elect the next pope, a task in which dying to self may prove just as important to the fulfillment of God’s plan.

God only knows when it will be the Holy Father’s time will be to go. These putative successors to Peter are from all over the world, as Catholic as the beautiful Polish maidens and Nigerian monarchs. They are from Brazil, from Croatia, from Guatemala and France, from Hungary and Spain and the Sudan, even from Philadelphia. What will they ever have in common and how will they work out their scores of difference when they cast their ballots under the bright Catholic colors of Michelangelo’s frescoes?

When I left, the Poles were still blasting away in competition with the tolling bells and the organ postlude. Though as I strolled away, and took a few parting glances at Vietnamese Oratorians, the Slavic beauties in their doll-like dresses, and Nigerians in their eye-popping robes, I saw a Highland bagpiper in full Stuart tartan kilts playing Scotland the Brave as the cross of St. Andrew waved overhead. (Keith Michael Patrick Cardinal O'Brien, Archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh.) Then I realized he was playing almost in time to the thud of the Polish band’s big bass drum a hundred yards away. Harmony, or about as close as you can get outside Sistine choirboys.

We’re Catholics. Unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. And sometimes it takes the polyglot kaleidoscope of Roman pilgrims to make us realize that’s more than enough to bring a billion men and women together under one sign, the bleeding scarlet sign of the Cross.