Justice of The Peace

By Mayo Mohs

THE VICAR OF CHRIST by Walter F. Murphy Macmillan; 632 pages; $12.95

The proposition is preposterous. Once again the Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church gather to elect a successor to the late Pope, killed in a plane crash. The conclave is deadlocked. An Italian prelate offers a radical proposal: elect a monk. Said monk is not your average Trappist. He is a former U.S. Marine colonel who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for leading his troops out of a deathtrap during the Korean War; a Pulitzer prizewinner for the book he wrote about the experience; a former presidential emissary to the Vatican; and, until his retirement to the monastery, Chief Justice of the United States. Why not Pope?

One of the classic tests of a writer is his ability to persuade an audience to suspend disbelief. Walter F. Murphy persuades. In his hands, the audacious thesis of this massive, complex first novel becomes fascinatingly logical and intellectually gripping. No better fiction on the world of the Vatican is now in print. Murphy, a Princeton law professor, is a compulsive storyteller, and in The Vicar of Christ he tells three tales that could have made books in themselves. Part 1, reliving Declan Walsh's military adventures in Korea through the ripely phrased recollections of a Marine master gunnery sergeant, is a crisp, realistic novella. Part 2, narrated in the fastidious accents of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, makes the arcane milieu of the Nine Old Men for once intelligible. Part 3 is the center of the novel. Its narrator, Ugo Cardinal Galeotti, is an urbane Vatican veteran who enjoys fine wine and good company. He possesses a thoughtful spiritual vision as well, and it is through his eyes that the reader is led along on Declan Walsh's odyssey of the soul as Pope Francesco I.

Francesco is dogged by a destiny that oscillates between a quest for sanctity and demonstrations of hubris. He is crowned with the triple tiara that Popes John Paul I and John Paul II rejected, to let men know precisely who is running the church. When police in Spain murder priests under the approving eyes of Cabinet ministers, Francesco revives medieval precedent and threatens to place the entire country under interdict unless the culprits are punished. When a cabal of Cardinals plots to depose him, he dispatches them into exile with all the brutal efficiency of a Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre. "Declan, Declan," warns a purged friend on another occasion, "because you love no one, you think you love God."

Despite his autocratic methods, the Pope remains a theological liberal, a doubting Declan carrying the keys of the Kingdom. Sensitive to the anguish of Catholic couples, he adroitly bypasses the birth control ban of Pope Paul VI's Humanae vitae. He sets afoot a plan to bring divorced and remarried Catholics back to the sacraments from which they are barred. He admits that "every intelligent human has some doubts about an afterlife." But his messages can be demanding. Visiting the U.S., he becomes a Savonarola, exhorting Americans to repent and share their wealth with poorer countries. Finally, this onetime combat hero courts assassination at the hands of the world's competing powers by telling Christians they must not bear arms in any modern war.

Neither Francesco nor the novel that contains him is without great flaws. The barracks vulgarity of Part 1 is as tedious as basic training, and the narrator's stilted diction in Part 2 is hardly more en dearing. Women serve principally as walk-ons in The Vicar of Christ, including Declan's wife Kate, whose tragic death drives him to the monastery.

Ultimately, though, Murphy's work is a novel of ideas: political and religious, sa cred and profane. The moral problems of war and peace, life and death, change and tradition, poverty and riches are questions that pursue every human. Murphy can not fully answer them, nor can Pope Francesco I. But they are asked in a way that cannot be ignored, and they will haunt the reader long after this remarkable epic is finally laid down.

--Mayo Mohs

Resemblances between the Vicar and the author are not entirely coincidental. Born in Charleston, S.C., to a pharmacist father and an English schoolteacher mother, Walter Murphy, 49, grew up a cradle Catholic, studied at Notre Dame and earned a Marine Corps commission in time for the Communist invasion of South Korea. As a combat platoon leader, he won the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross, then came home to teach government at the U.S. Naval Academy. Mustered out in 1955, he took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Since 1958 he has taught at Princeton, and in 1968 was named McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence. He has written six books on law and politics, one of which figures as an inside joke in The Vicar of Christ: the Associate Justice narrating the second part cites a title from a certain "vulgar political scientist."

Murphy's researches in Rome in 1973-74 and last year gave him an eerie prescience. In the novel, Pope Francesco visits Mexico and enunciates the church's position on political involvement: "The church must be independent . . . We can not have a material stake in the status quo or in revolution or in any of the other possible political events in between. We must be free to preach justice and to do justice." Those were the precise ideas, if not the very words, of Pope John Paul II on his visit to Mexico last January, well after The Vicar of Christ had gone to press.

Still, the religious attitudes of the main characters do not necessarily reflect Murphy's. The Marine gunnery sergeant, the Associate Justice and Declan Walsh himself a11 express some distress at the new Roman Catholic ritual, with its abandonment of the old music and the Latin. Murphy and his wife Terry (their two daughters now live in other parts of the country) regularly go to an English-language folk Mass.

Though he will be back living and teaching at Princeton next fall, Murphy plans more novels. One, a spy story, is almost finished. Another, on which he has already done considerable research, will be a fictional biography of St. Peter. Although Murphy has yet to hear criticism from Vatican sources, he has already received a severe appraisal from one reader. His mother, the English teacher, is uneasy with the language in the Korean War section. She allowed that she "understood the point," reports Murphy, "but she didn't approve."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.