time documents-most particularly those canonical texts you sent us before the trial, Cardinal Mazzare-would change the path of the Church. How your people’s perspectives on religious freedom would change what you called the Thirty Years’ War. He rightly anticipated that the Austrian branch of the Hapsburgs would begin to drift away from the Spanish, and that the shifting of those veritable mountains of Roman Catholic strength would send earthquakes throughout the Christian world.” Vitelleschi suffered what might have been another tic or a suppressed spasm of sardonic amusement. “He did not foresee, however, that the epicenter of the first shocks would originate in Rome itself. But in your case, Father Wadding, he wanted to change history for the better: in the up-time world, you were pushed out of St. Isidore’s earlier this year. He thought that was not only unfair, but unwise.”
“Unwise?” echoed Wadding.
“Unwise,” confirmed a new voice. Urban had let his own mount slow enough to be proximal to their own. “Father Wadding, you, along with the late Father MacCaghwell, are among the best Franciscan minds of our times. But more important, you are also a person of high integrity. I will need that integrity very much as we arrive at our refuge, for now I may think and deliberate with you.”
“I am honored, Your Holiness, but why do you specifically want a Franciscan as an interlocutor?”
“Oh, I do not want only a Franciscan, Father Wadding. I need a Jesuit, too.”
Vitelleschi looked at a distant bird; Mazzare could not tell if he was squinting or scowling.
“And I need a priest who has lived in a world where Mother Church has benefited from an additional three- and-a-half centuries of our Savior’s guiding wisdom and the Holy Spirit’s guiding grace.” Urban looked at Larry and smiled. “One might indeed claim that you possess a truly unique Charism, Cardinal Mazzare.”
Mazzare was silent for a long time. Yes, this is what he had felt coming. He had felt it back in Magdeburg as news of Borja’s violation of Rome began coming in over the radio, as the communications from the Holy See made it clear that it was not merely a political takeover, it was the imposition of a theological junta. Nothing less than an attempt to change both the pope and the direction of the Church by means of a coup d’etat.
And what had been the issue that had started this sequence of dominoes tumbling, that had allowed an army to be put at Borja’s disposal-and with so little control that, even if he had exceeded his mandate from Madrid, there was now no way to stop him?
The threat was as profound as it was uncomplicated: true, sweeping, politically-protected and — enforced religious tolerance. At this moment in history, this was the dagger at the neck of the Church. And for its reciprocal part, that Church was not merely confident in its identity as the one true faith, but convinced of its duty to impose God-ordained correctness upon the rest of the world by force of arms and auto-da-fe, if need be. Indeed, all too many of its princes were not merely ready, but eager, to resort to those brutal methods.
And standing squarely against such a doctrine and such actions was not only the general religious toleration that prevailed among the up-timers, but the specific, and deeply contradictory, canonical pronouncements found among the Church records that had come back in time with Larry Mazzare’s library, ex cathedra directives that had emerged from Mazzare turned back toward the pope. “This is about Vatican Two, isn’t it?”
Urban’s smile was slow, appreciative. “Ah, Lawrence, I knew you would see it. Which is only right”-Urban’s eyes almost twinkled-“since you were so troublesome as to bring up the whole matter in the first place.”
“Vatican Two?” Wadding shaped the words almost as though he were employing a memory trick. “That was the up-time convocation to begin the reintegration of all their Christian sects, supposedly presided over by Mother Church, was it not?”
“It was,” the pope answered.
“And in which general religious tolerance was made canonical doctrine,” added Vitelleschi.
“I was not aware the pontiff ever reiterated the exhortations of that council ex cathedra,” Wadding murmured.
“Ah, see? And this is why I needed you, Father Wadding. Why I needed all of you.” Urban sat very straight in his saddle. “For a variety of now-urgent reasons, we must decide upon the canonical status here-in this world-of the decrees and doctrines that proceeded from the Holy See in Cardinal Mazzare’s world.”
Wadding sputtered. “Your Holiness? At the very least, is not a different world a different world?”
Mazzare smiled at Wadding. “Are you suggesting that there is more than one God, with one Will?”
“Your Eminences!” Urban actually laughed. He made a palm’s-down gesture as if he was calming obstreperous children. “You shall have time enough to compare these opinions. Indeed, over the next few weeks, I will ask you to be their champions.”
Mazzare felt slightly disoriented. “Your Holiness?”
“Yes, of course. You, Cardinal Mazzare, can hardly be tasked to speak for any position other than the positive, in this matter. The Mother Church of your world, whose extremely tolerant practices you have made manifest here, has not only its best advocate in you, but I doubt you could bring yourself to earnestly argue that its canonical pronouncements should have no standing in this world.”
Mazzare simply said, “I fear you are correct, Your Holiness.”
Urban nodded. “And Father Wadding will be the advocatus diaboli.”
The Irishman looked stunned. “Your Holiness? Me?”
“Certainly. Who better?”
“Many would do far better than I. For instance, Father Vitelleschi’s familiarity with the theological conundrums of integrating the perspectives of the up-time Church far outstrip my humble-”
“Father Wadding, your humility, while genuine, is also quite misguided. You were the veritable spearhead- theological, rhetorical, and spiritual-in the final canonical determination of Mother Church’s doctrine regarding our Savior’s Virgin Birth. And I know you have maintained a lively interest in the theological documents and implications of the arrival of the up-timers.”
Wadding looked a bit pained. “Your Holiness, what you say is true. But I fear that what I have learned has not left me comfortable with their presence in our world, or congenial to what they call their Roman Catholic faith, so changed is it from our own.”
“Which is precisely why you are to argue against one of its great changes: the radical inter-faith tolerance that did not merely arise from Vatican Two, but was its very raison’ d’etre.”
Wadding looked even more uncomfortable. “Might I point out, Your Holiness, that just thirty-five years ago, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for espousing the kind of radical toleration that the up-timers practice, and for claiming-as they also do-that many of His most wondrous miracles are in fact, merely laws of nature?”
“You most certainly may point that out, Father Wadding. Indeed, I expect you to do so. That will be part of your job, in the coming weeks. But it will also be important to remain mindful that the scientific assertions that brought such trouble to Galileo have now, in fact, been proven correct. And not just by the documents of the up- timers, but by our own observers, who now know what to look for, and how.” Urban folded his hands upon the front of his saddle, the reins held tightly beneath them. “Father, we have entered into a time when we must reconsider many matters in which we thought our knowledge was absolute. And this will, I suspect, take us down wholly unprecedented pathways of investigation and debate. Over which Father Vitelleschi will prevail as judge and arbiter.”
“Not you, Your Holiness?” Wadding sounded baffled.
“No, not me.”
“What role, then, do you intend to play in the proceedings?”
“I intend,” said Urban with a sly smile, “to watch, listen, and be edified.” Seeing the look of surprise, even dismay, upon the faces of the other clerics, Urban lifted a hand, striking a pose that painters often used in portraying Socratic scholars at work among their students. “Our Heavenly Father has, since the arrival of the up- timers, set us upon a fateful road that now forks in two opposite directions. And the respective choices are as terribly distinct, and as terribly portentous, as those that faced our Lord and Savior on the night he was betrayed and contended with his human frailties in the garden at Gethsemane.”
Wadding lifted his chin by the smallest of margins. “But there is this difference, Your Holiness: Christ could not err. His was a crisis of the heart, not of holiness, not of grace.”
“That is profoundly true-and so I am glad that you are with me to offer counsel. For you must now each argue for one of the two forking paths that lie before us.”
“You mean, toward Vatican Two, or away,” murmured Wadding, so distracted that he forgot to add the Pontiff’s honorific.
“Yes. And let us take another lesson from our Savior’s terrible night of trial, for Christ’s behavior always
