Ribaldry in Rome

THE KEYS OF ST. PETER (380 pp.)--Roger Peyrefitte--Criterion Books ($4.50).

Truly scandalous books are rare these days, particularly books about religion. This novel is truly scandalous. It has already sold 500,000 copies in Italy (where it was banned) and in France. It is not the first among the nine novels by sometime French Diplomat Peyrefitte to enjoy a popular, scandalous and critical success (Diplomatic Conclusions drew indignant disclaimers from the French Foreign Office). Waspish Author Peyrefitte writes like a countryman of Rabelais and Voltaire, but in the U.S., where there is no comparable tradition of anticlerical literature, he is likely to shock more than to entertain.

Crow & Cherries. The book's hero, a kind of clerical Candide, is the Abbe Victor Mas, naive young seminarist at Versailles who is sent to Rome to study and to live in the household of His Eminence, Cardinal Belloro, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites. The cardinal is not far from being a Renaissance figure. He does not care much for the unceremonious style of modern cardinals like New York's Spellman ("the American Pope"). He savagely attacks Pius XII, whose order curtailing the length of cardinals' trains by one half annoys him, and he is inclined to sarcastic shoptalk about the business of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, e.g., the authentication of relics and miracles, the litigation and expenses involved in canonization. Yet for all his apparently worldly way, the cardinal is a man of great spiritual astuteness, and his young French abbe comes to understand what His Eminence meant when he said: "You must learn to know what the Holy Roman Church really is; and then love her all the more."

Presumably to help the reader know the church, Author Peyrefitte mixes painstaking research with scurrilous gossip, pokes facile fun at the hairsplitting of moral theology and at the bookkeeping of indulgences. (The church, the abbe is told, no longer sells indulgences but gives them away, and his Roman associates collect them "like a crow after cherries.")

Moreover, the book involves the young hero with temptation of the flesh, in the person of dark-haired, "cassock-crazy" Paola, niece of the cardinal's chaplain. Victor Mas has not yet taken his vows of chastity, but he struggles heroically. Finally Paola wins.

France & Purity. The ending is, nevertheless, edifying. The cardinal collapses while celebrating Mass, and dies. With his last words he says to Abbe Mas: "Be happy in the Lord." And "in that moment the abbe found his vocation again . . . The old man . . . on whom miracles had long palled had performed a miracle." When they laid out his body "it was found that this ironist, this witty censurer, had worn a hair shirt."

The abbe quietly returns to his cell at Versailles. Thus to oppose essential French "purity" to Roman "corruption" is Peyrefitte's ultimate sardonic aim--and an old theme of Gallicanism, that ancient anti-Roman movement in the French church. At its worst, the book is outrageous, unjustifiable and unquotable. However, old-fashioned rationalists should be warned that The Keys of St. Peter is no mere Menckenesque scribbling on church walls, and that those who come to scoff may possibly remain to pray.

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