The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West

First published: 1963

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Philosophical realism

Time of plot: Early 1960’s

Locale: Vatican City and its environs

Principal characters

• Cardinal Lakota, archbishop of Lviv, Ukraine, and future Pope Kiril I
• Cardinal Rinaldi, a Roman Catholic official
• Kamenev, the Soviet premier
• The Reverend Jean Télémond, a Jesuit scientist-theologian

The Story:

In the wake of the death of the pope, the sacred college of cardinals convenes in Rome to select a successor. Among the cardinals summoned to Rome is Cardinal Lakota of Ukraine, at age fifty the youngest cardinal and only recently freed from nearly seventeen years of harsh imprisonment in a Siberian labor camp for practicing his faith. Cardinal Lakota, handpicked by Cardinal Rinaldi to offer the sermon on the opening day of the conclave, moves the college with his earnestness, delivering impassioned remarks about the duty of the Papacy to serve the forgotten souls of the Roman Catholic Church. The following day, the charismatic Cardinal Lakota is elected pope by acclamation on the first ballot. He takes the name Kiril I.

Determined to return the Church to its pastoral mission and to raise the spiritual life of the Church’s despondent and indifferent millions, Kiril embarks on a historic call for change. There are crises everywhere—political turmoil in Africa, mass starvation in China, religious persecution in communist countries, global environmental pollution, escalating world population, financial crises in both Europe and the United States, and, supremely, the ever-escalating nuclear arms race. However, Kiril, writing of his spiritual agonies and the immense burdens of his elevation in his diary, sees the Church as made up of individuals needing to realize the hope of their faith. To that end, Kiril, wearing only the simple cassock of a parish priest, ventures out into the Roman streets. He shares coffee with some workers (he is embarrassed to discover he has brought no money), and in a tender moment he offers last rites for a man ravaged by tuberculosis and bonds with the spiritually troubled young woman who is the man’s nurse.

Shortly after his elevation, Kiril is contacted through diplomatic back channels by Kamenev, the Soviet premier who years earlier was his jailer in the Siberian camps. Indeed, Kamenev, who had come to be impressed by the prisoner’s unshakeable faith, had arranged for Kiril to escape. Now, Kamenev wants to secure the new pope’s assistance in organizing a diplomatic initiative with the United States to avoid escalation of the nuclear arms race into catastrophe. Kiril, torn by concerns over the appropriate role of the Church in translating the word of Christ into Christian action, and wary of the possibility of the Vatican being used as a dupe, agrees after much soul-searching to use the cardinal of New York to communicate with the U.S. president.

Meanwhile, Father Jean Télémond, a world-renowned Jesuit paleontologist, is summoned to Rome. His incendiary writings challenging Church doctrine on special creation and original sin had caused him to be censured in a kind of virtual exile for twenty years in a variety of exotic outposts. Now, he is summoned to Rome to deliver the sermon at Rome’s Gregorian University on the feast day of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. However, there is more at stake in this journey to Rome. In frail health, Télémond is seeking permission from the powerful Holy Office to at last publish the first volume of his controversial treatise. Its profoundly optimistic vision of humanity evolving inevitably toward an eventual union with Christ, seen less as divine and more as a cosmic force, had merged the argument of Darwinian evolution with the Christian doctrine of creation. Vatican opponents see Télémond’s argument as a grave error. If creation evolved toward union with God, then creation was a necessary act, thus abrogating God’s free will.

Bound by his Jesuit oath, Télémond cannot publish without the Church’s imprimatur. Kiril, himself concerned by the pessimism in the Church and by the world’s spiral toward nuclear apocalypse, is moved by Télémond’s sermon and its luminous argument that humanity’s long history of warfare would give way ultimately to the emergence of a species-wide consciousness, that humanity would perfect itself in a convergence with the energy of Christ. The pope invites the controversial cleric to the papal retreat at Castel Gandolfo. There the two share a lengthy discussion over the mystery of evil and the essence of hope itself—and Kiril is much moved. Despite the pope’s sympathies, however, the Holy Office denies Télémond’s request—crushed, the priest dies just days later. Pope Kiril, arguing that the Church must shred historical patterns, recommends that the Jesuit’s writings be published in their entirety with appropriate annotations.

When the U.S. president agrees to meet the Soviet premier, Kiril confronts the challenge of putting into action his vision of a pastoral Church. With the endorsement of the Papal Curia, the pontiff agrees to go to Lourdes, the sacred Catholic shrine in France that commemorates the appearance of the Virgin Mary, despite centuries of the pope steadfastly maintaining his position in St. Peter’s. Also, far more important, Kiril accepts the responsibility to begin to broker a historic summit between the Soviets and the Americans. The Church is prepared now to go out into the world. Pope Kiril, calm and ready, accepts what he knows in his soul will be a long and difficult pilgrimage.

Bibliography

Confroy, Maryanne. Morris West: Literary Maverick. Milton, Qld.: John Wiley & Sons Australia, 2005. A literary biography of West, one of the rare book-length studies of the author. A slim sketch, but helpful to beginning students.

Gandalfo, Anita. Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. An important assessment of Catholicism in the mainstream fiction of West’s generation, which witnessed the groundbreaking theological events of the Second Vatican Council.

Lennan, Richard. An Introduction to Catholic Theology. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1998. A helpful guide for readers not familiar with West’s theological argument. Outlines the basic tenets of Catholicism, the superstructure of the Vatican, and the Church’s position on activism and the pastoral imperative.

Pelikan, Jaroslav Jan. Confessor Between East and West: A Portrait of Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1990. Still the most comprehensive biography of the religious figure upon whom West based Pope Kiril. Explains the long history of Soviet attempts to dismantle the Greek Catholic Church.

Savary, Louis M. Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu Explained—A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2007. A helpful explication of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s complex theology, which is central to West’s narrative. Reviews the nature of Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of evolutionary humanity and shows how it conflicts with traditional Catholic doctrines of God’s free will and the divine nature of Christ.