(1969) The Seven Minutes (60 page)

‘And this was the procedure followed in condemning The Seven Minutes, Father Sarfatti?’

‘Precisely,’

‘I have here Exhibit E, a copy of the Index published in 1940 -‘

‘May I commend you for your acumen and thoroughness.’

“Thank you, Father. Now, this is the earliest edition that I could locate in which J J Jadway and The Seven Minutes were listed. Yet, as I understand it, the book was prohibited in 1937, three years earlier. Can you clarify this?’

‘It is quite simple, Mr Duncan. New editions of the Index are published at irregular intervals. When J J Jadway’s book was condemned in 1937, the decree of prohibition was first published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis the official bulletin of the Holy See, and this bulletin was sent to bishops throughout the world to inform them of the official condemnation. Subsequently, all bishops and

parish priests, to protect the souls entrusted to their guidance, announced the ban to their parishioners. After that, the book was listed as prohibited in the very next edition of the Index to appear, which was three years later. I am pleased to add that our Protestant brothers, especially those in Europe, on their own initiative, also spoke out against the dangers from this particular book.’

‘Father, to understand better the gravity of this condemnation, I should like to ask you a number of questions about the Index itself and…’

Mike Barrett had tuned out, and was devoting himself to his notes.

Ten minutes later, his antenna caught something else. Curious about the investigation of J J Jadway himself.

Quickly Barrett tuned in, volume high.

‘Father Sarfatti, were you personally entrusted with this investigation of the author of The Seven Minutes?’

‘Yes, or rather I participated. I was a young priest at the time. In the years that followed, I assumed other duties in the Holy See. But recently I was reassigned to the Curia, to work in their new office known as the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which now has authority over the Index. When the Supreme Pontiff took an interest in your case, Mr Duncan, I was selected to offer what help I could, because of my early familiarity with the Jadway case and with our records of this case in the archives of the Vatican. Before coming to America, I extracted and examined those documents in our files that pertained to the prohibition of The Seven Minutes. The actual informal investigation of the author Jadway was conducted by the Archbishop of Paris in 1935 and 1936. I served as one of his assistants in the investigation.’

‘And your findings, Father Sarfatti, were they based on secondhand information or actual personal contact with J J Jadway?’

‘Everything I have submitted to be used in court was obtained first hand. You have the records.’

Duncan held up three sheets of paper, one of them affixed with a wax seal and ribbon. ‘I have these three records which I received from you. Do you recognize them as the documents from the Vatican file?’

‘I do.’

Duncan stepped away and moved toward the bench. ‘Your Honor, I would like to introduce into the trial new material that has not heretofore been marked. I would now like to have these documents marked as evidence.’

At the defense table, Barrett met Zelkin’s eyes. ‘Dammit,’ he muttered, and then he rose to join Duncan, the court clerk, and the Judge at the bench. During the next minutes, Judge Upshaw scanned the exhibits, then Barrett read them hastily, and then they were approved. The documents were given numbers by the clerk, and now they would be part of the evidence in the case against Ben

Fremont and The Seven Minutes.

As Barrett returned to the defense table and sank into his chair, Zelkin looked anxious. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

‘We’re in trouble,’ said Barrett.

The District Attorney was again stationed before the witness box. ‘Father Sarfatti, in your own words, can you summarize the contents of these exhibits ?’

‘Yes. The first is a transcript of a telephone conversation I had in Paris with J J Jadway. I had written to him from Rome that I would like to interview him, but I had received no reply. Once in Paris, I telephoned him several times and missed him. Finally he called me back, and I transcribed our discussion. The second document is a letter that Jadway wrote me - a rather defiant one, I might say -and this was sent me after our telephone conversation. The last document is a transcript prepared by a member of the Curia, since deceased, reporting on a statement Jadway made to him during a meeting in Italy. This statement was signed by Jadway and notarized.’

‘Does this information from Jadway confirm the testimony of his French publisher, Mr Leroux, about Jadway’s attitudes and motives relevant to his writing of The Seven Minutes ?’

‘To that question I would reply in the affirmative. Yes, the sum total of the Church’s findings, including these documents, tends to confirm what Mr Leroux has already revealed. I will say that, aside from these documents, our records of the investigation are somewhat circumscribed and formal. We possess no information about the author Jadway’s family or his life in America. But from these documents we know that the author Jadway was a Catholic, one who had fallen away from the faith. We know his tastes in literature were for the immoral and the atheistic. As he told me, his library contained Casanova’s Memoirs, as well as works by Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Karl Pelz, all of which were prohibited to Catholics. He had once participated in an anticlerical demonstration before Notre-Dame. His circle consisted of dissolute freethinkers who frequented the cafes of the Left Bank. He had consorted with prostitutes before living a life of sin with the young woman known as Cassie McGraw. I doubt that the Church’s condemnation played any part in his suicide. His suicide was a consequence of his having no moral standards, which is reflected in his single published work. After his death he was cremated, and it was said that Miss McGraw carried out his last wish. His ashes were scattered from a balloon over Montparnasse. It is a sad story.’

Throughout Father Sarfatti’s recital, especially during the last of it, Barrett felt the urge to voice legal objection. He had grounds -much of the clergyman’s testimony was irrelevant, and the last of it was hearsay - yet Barrett resisted speaking up. The material, in a different context, had previously been made known inside and outside the court by Leroux. Any objection, under these circumstances,

might make it appear to some jurors that the defense was trying to gag a minion of the Lord. Right or wrong, Barrett kept his peace and continued to listen closely.

‘Father Sarfatti, do your records give any evidence as to J J Jad-way’s motives for writing The Seven Minutes?’

‘Only in his remark, contained in the letter to me, that all religions and institutions of learning were trying to pretend the world was one huge candy box, whereas in his book he had set out to prove that it was - it was a dunghill - a dunghill that could ultimately fertilize truth and produce beauty if one ceased to pretend. Beyond that, I might suggest that his printed words, as well as his manner of life in Paris, bespeak his motives. He had no legitimate ties in Paris at any time. You may draw what inference you wish from that.’

‘Do your records give evidence of Cassie McGraw’s influence on Jadway during his writing of The Seven Minutes or, in fact, anything about Cassie McGraw’s - ?’

‘Your Honor, I object!’ interrupted Barrett. He could not let this go through or be stricken only after it had been answered. But Duncan, apparently, was going to make an effort to bring Cassie McGraw into the trial, for he was requesting a bench conference.

At the conference, Duncan tried to bend the information he knew Father Sarfatti was ready to offer by trying to relate it to obscene material in the novel. After all, Duncan argued, Cassie McGraw had been the prototype for the heroine. In his eagerness, Duncan not only bent testimony yet to come, but finally snapped it in two. ‘The Church has a copy of the birth certificate of Cassie McGraw’s child by Jadway,’ Duncan was saying. ‘The child was christened Judith Jan Jadway. Father Sarfatti is prepared to tell us that the last and most recent note in the Vatican file reveals that Miss McGraw was married in the city of Detroit in 1940 and that her husband was killed in Salerno during the Second World War. While neither his full name nor her married name were recorded, and while there is no indication of Miss McGraw’s eventual fate or her daughter’s fate, still I believe what is known about her will help tell the jury …’ He went on, and when he was done, Judge Upshaw impatiently chastised him for trying to introduce material entirely irrelevant to the case. ‘On this matter, your witness can tell the jury nothing of value,’ concluded Judge Upshaw. ‘I am sustaining defense counsel’s objection.’

Back at his table, Barrett could hear the District Attorney resuming his interrogation.

‘Now, Father, if we can return briefly to the procedure of…’

Mike Barrett tuned out.

Fifteen minutes later, his antenna trapped a sound. Offered the chance to recant while he was in Italy.

Swiftly Barrett tuned in.

‘You mean, Father Sarfatti, a member of the Church met with

Jadway personally and offered him the opportunity to recant his errors?’

‘Exactly. It is not unusual, Mr Duncan. The Church moves slowly, and with considerable tolerance, against the author of a denounced work. Often an author will appeal to the Vatican, saying that he had written in good faith and had not realized fully the error of his doctrine. On such occasions the Congregation of the Holy Office, after making public the decree of condemnation, might then make public a notice reading, “The author has recanted and has repudiated his work.” The first condemnation will stand, but his name and work may be kept from the Index itself. I can give you one example. Henry Lasserre, an orthodox Catholic who wrote an excellent book on the miracle at Lourdes, decided to translate the Gospels into French. He was not satisfied to follow the original. He invested his translation with some of his own imaginings. This translation was soon condemned and prohibited. But, fortunately, Lasserre saw the error of his ways. Quickly he took his book out of circulation. He recanted. As a consequence, the Holy Office withdrew its prohibition and expunged the author’s name from subsequent editions of the Index.’

‘And J J Jadway - now, let me understand, did he wish to recant on his own initiative or was he offered the chance?’

‘He was offered one last chance. He had arrived with his mistress in Italy, and was visiting Venice, when a Church emissary was dispatched to meet with him. He was tendered the opportunity - a generous one, I must say - to repudiate The Seven Minutes and to take it out of circulation. He refused. You have the document signed by Jadway to that effect. TheChurch then had no choice but to condemn the work for its obscenity and sacrilege.’

Barrett tuned out.

With the end of Duncan’s effective examination, Judge Upshaw declared a two-hour lunch recess. Abe Zelkin already had the Index file from Donna and several pages of scrawled notes taken during a telephone conversation with Kimura minutes earlier. Sending an errand boy down to the lobby of the Hall of Justice for sandwiches and soft drinks, Barrett and Zelkin retired to a vacant office in the municipal building and spent the better part of the two hours reviewing the research and mapping out the strategy of the crossexamination.

Preparing to return to the courtroom, Barrett was briefly tempted to take the offensive in his crossexamination. The Church that Father Sarfatti represented must be held sacrosanct. Yet Barrett was aware that some of its history, like that of every other faith in the world, was highly vulnerable to attack. In the Middle Ages, and at the very time when the Index was being prepared, the Church and its flock were obsessed with sex. St Augustine had confessed that, before embracing Christianity, he had possessed ‘an insatiable appetite’ for sex and had ‘boiled over in … fornication.’

Whereas Augustine had overcome his weakness of the flesh, his successors to the cloth had often been less resolute. The Bishop of Liege had been known to have had sixty-five illegitimate children. A Spanish abbot at St Pelayo was said to have kept, in his lifetime, seventy mistresses. In Switzerland, married men had been forced to protect their wives from seduction in the confessional by petitioning authorities to permit their priests to keep one mistress apiece. In the Holy See itself, Marozia, daughter of a papal official, had had Pope Sergius III for her lover and her pawn; and in 931 a.d. she had conspired to have her illegitimate son named Pope John XI. Pope Leo VIII had expired of a stroke suffered while engaging in sexual intercourse. And Pope Alexander VI, admitted father of the Borgias, had possessed two mistresses while in the Vatican, one of them the seventeen-year-old Giulia Farnese. And this little more than fifty years before the Holy See had begun to condemn authors for immorality in the first Index.

What would Jesus have made of this? Might he not have said what he had said to the Pharisees on the occasion when they had brought before him an adulteress who they thought should be stoned to death? Might not Jesus have said, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ ?

Now, in open court, Barrett must contest a Church representative who was a protector of morals. Dare Barrett say,’ “He that is without sin among you …” ?’

He was sorely tempted. Then, finally, he knew that such an attack was impossible. It would be misconstrued. And if he did attempt it, he could predict Elmo Duncan’s protest: Irrelevant!

He would have to play it the hard way.

At two o’clock, confronting the formidable Father Sarfatti, Mike Barrett knew that he was not the match of the witness. In his knowledge of Church history in the matter of condemned literature, the prelate stood on a solid foundation, while Barrett realized his own footing was on quicksand. But still, he was charged to offer for the defense, and so now he did.

First, the procedure of the censuring apparatus.

‘Father Sarfatti, I heard you remark - correct me if I heard wrongly - I believe you stated that the Curia offices have been revamped and streamlined since J J Jadway’s book was published in 1935. Can you expand upon this as it would relate to book censorship ?’