The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey Read Free Book Online

and barbarians ravaged humanity, it had been the Church that stood firm and saved Christendom. Church and—later—the Constitution: these were the absolute truths in his home, and if anyone doubted either, he was a heathen.
    Sometime during his years in high school, Chris developed what he would later call “a terminal case of ‘Prove it!’” “I wondered,” he said later, “were there any absolute truths? I decided probably not, except that hate was a universal trait; but surely Catholicism would be my last refuge.”
    But the more he read history and science, the more he wondered if he had been hoodwinked. Reality was not like the Baltimore Catechism. He asked himself, Why don’t modern Catholics lay down their military burdens like St. Paul and the converted Christian martyrs in the Roman legions to live at one with Christ? Now they went to war and killed—like Catholic Bavaria for Hitler and Catholic South Vietnam. It wasn’t something new; hadn’t Catholic Popes called for the Crusades to reconquer the Holy Land? Chris decided there had been a widening gap between the original teachings of Christ and the teachings of his church since the second century.
    It was a realization that Chris did not take lightly. He began to wonder if he had been betrayed , made a fool of. He began to question the rationality of accepting as infallible the word of the Pope, and as he read more about the papacy, he wondered if the Vatican was not just another selfish political power center wrapped in jewels, hypocrisy and ritual. Once his doubts surfaced, they cascaded out; he was troubled by Church teachings on the Virgin Birth, by stories of barbaric murders during the Spanish Inquisition, by the secondary place of women in the Church and other elements of Catholicism. Yet he could not be sure. The stitches of faith sewn in his conscience by his mother, Father Glenn, Monsignor McCarthy and the sisters at St. John Fisher did not all rupture at once. Some were sewn too tightly. On one side of his mind was the awakening of reason challenging dogma; on the other side, the dogma, well entrenched, continued to tug and nag at his conscience.
    A panic began to engulf Chris regarding his future. Years earlier he had decided to become a priest. Now he was nearing the end of high school, when he should be making plans to enter the seminary. Yet the foundations of his faith were rocking beneath him.
    At the same time he was experiencing this crisis of conscience, the nightly news was haunting him in a different way.
    The revulsion toward war and what he saw as its roots that had begun to flower in his mind was fertilized by the drumbeat of the televised casualty reports from Vietnam and his reading of history books and biographies that he brought home from the school library. Chris concluded that Vietnam was part of a long continuum of history: they were all the same, from Carthage to the Central Highlands, mindless wars of man butchering man for idiotic concepts of patriotic pride. Just as he had begun to suspect he had been hoodwinked by the nuns and priests, Chris began to wonder if he had been betrayed also by his country and its teachings of liberty and justice for all. He decided America was living a lie: its citizens were afforded liberty and freedom, but to protect these freedoms, didn’t it encourage repressive dictatorships around the world where such freedoms were forbidden? Modern America, he decided, was like ancient Athens. It provided liberty and parasitic prosperity to its citizens while exploiting its empire of slaves on the Aegean.
    In the recesses of his mind, Chris no longer thought of himself as an American. He rejected nationalism as a fundamental evil of mankind and as something that conflicted drastically with his—and, he felt, God’s—vision of, and hope for, One World, a “universal state.” That state, Chris hoped, would come someday, but not before