If the only Jesuit you ever met was a character in a work of fiction in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library when he entered the search term "Jesuit" and filtered it through the genre of "Fiction". The novels that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar Jesuits.
This week: Monsignor Michele Archenti SJ, one of the main characters in Mark Frutkin’s Fabrizio’s Return.
There are two parallel time periods in this novel. The first relates to the miraculous and stigmata-receiving ministry of the fictional Father Fabrizio Cambiani in Cremona in the 1680s. The second shifts to 1758 when Monsignor Michele Archenti SJ is sent to Cremona in his role as The Promotor Fidei – or devil’s advocate – to determine if Cambiani’s cause for sainthood ought to proceed.
1758 is not a random choice by Mark Frutkin as this is the year that the non-fictional Pope Benedict XIV was succeeded by Clement XIII, the pontiff who eventually suppressed the Jesuits. This is a shadowy subtheme in an otherwise playful, clever, and engaging work of fiction, a novel that is steeped in the culture of the baroque with theatre and music imagery running all through it.
On his website, Mark Frutkin, the Ottawa-based novelist, outlines his Jesuit ‘street cred’: “I attended an all-boys Jesuit high school in Cleveland (St. Ignatius) and a Jesuit university in Chicago (Loyola) spending the third year at a special campus in Rome, Italy. I can thank the Jesuits (also one red-haired Jesuit brother who taught high school English in particular) for my interest in language.”
All we know about the fictional Michele Archenti is that he has “penetrating eyes radiating a dark intelligence.” He is quite senior within the Jesuit curia and has already determined the cause for twelve candidates for canonization, a job for which he was handpicked “by the head of the Jesuits.” Then something happened in that Roman “snake’s nest of plots and sub-plots” causing him to leave “under a cloud.”
Archent’s purpose in Cremona as Promotor Fidei is: “to search out the moral flaws of any candidate for sainthood.” Alone, he admits out loud, “People expect me, as the devil’s advocate, to be not only intelligent but wise, with the ability to see into souls and minds, no matter how shadowed. But I have learned that there is much I do not understand, and will never understand.” (p. 17)
This Jesuit has a strong independent streak. “I answer to no one, you see, but God, Mother Church and the Society of Jesus. And the Devil too, if necessary.” (p. 20)
He is challenged by a recurring problem: “Though I am a priest of the Church, and sincerely believe in the possibility of sainthood, I, for one, do not believe in miracles.” (p. 25) During his interviews, person after person witness to some form of inexplicable event. “What am I to make of such levitation, such willingness to believe, such faith?” (p. 94)
Secrets must be uncovered. “We must have no secrets, none at all, when it comes to the trail of a candidate for sainthood. …I cannot report to my superiors that the testimony surrounding Fabrizio Cambiati was a nest of secrets.” (p. 106)
In the decades following his death, this local saint has been acclaimed by the locals. “Many Cremonesi already considered [Cambiati] a saint and prayed to him daily. Dozens of the faithful claimed miracles attributed to his intercession, but few if any of these were definitive.” Always the voice of his Jesuit superiors back in Rome sounds a warning in his head: “As devil’s advocate, it is your duty, your responsibility. Mother church cannot abide ambiguity. You must decide.” (p. 107)
Over time, his position on miracles begins to shift. “The miracles are so diffuse and persistent, I begin to suspect some of the them may actually be true.” (p. 126) This priest is used to approaching everything with a yes/no approach and is now stumped. “What am I to do? I cannot run back to Rome now. And yet I am assaulted here by doubts and worries and an inability to decide about the candidate – for the first time in my experience as devil’s advocate, I am failing, failing! … I must have the truth, but how am I to know the truth? I despise this ambiguity.” (p. 132)
In the fading days of Benedict’s XIV’s pontificate, Archenti confides during an interview that “there is many a robed devil walking the streets of Rome and the halls of the Vatican. Evil incarnate. Ambition beyond belief… Lately, especially, there is something brooding about this atmosphere – as if something is about to happen, some evil about to come to the surface.” (p. 141)
And then he falls in love with one of his young and beautiful interviewees. “He stared at her again and admitted it to himself. I am trapped in her beauty.” (p.150) A little later: “I feel as if I am in a dream, a drowning man struggling in a dream.” (p. 194) And then: “It was both wonderful and terrible, what was happening to him. As if he were being torn in two – one foot in an old life, one foot in a new one. But he couldn’t pull himself wholly into one or the other.” (p. 252)
He struggles with two challenges at once: one is deeply personal and emotional one, and the second with the arrival of Pope Clement XIII, is about his future as a Jesuit. “Where can I go? Crawl back in a few months to Rome and beg for a sinecure, to be put to sue somewhere, in distant Japan likely, a kind of death sentence? I don’t think I could stand the blow to my pride. My pride … it sickens me.” (p. 272)
All of this takes place in the midst of alchemy, levitations, sexual impropriety, raucous commedia dell’arte, transcendent music, frightening comets, and inexplicable cures.
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Mark Frutkin's Fabrizio’s Return is publishsed by Knopf Canada 2006
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Next in Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Fiction – Azhar Abidi’s Passarola Rising
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Note to the Reader:
– This series represents a tiny selection from a wide range of possibilities.
– igNation invites readers to describe a Jesuit character they have encountered in fiction. Tell us about the character in 300 words or less and send your article to pungente@sympatico.ca [1]
– igNation welcomes your articles!