Pierced by a Sword (58 page)

The author of this historical survey openly exempts herself from any pretense of objectivity regarding President Slinger. He was the godfather of my first daughter, Amy Jackson, who was born on the day of the
first of the Quakes...

...therefore, the Vatican was temporarily relocated to Assisi, where the Great Pope Patrick reigned after his triumphant return from the reformed United States. Plans are already in place for the reconstruction of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome in the next decade, when the radioactivity will have dissipated enough for human habitation...

...it took more than five years for
missionaries to baptize the survivors in China...

...refer to
She Shall Crush Your Head
by Thomas Wheat. It is hard to discount Wheat's central thesis that the United States was spared nuclear disaster because millions of prayerful Catholics and Protestants (who converted to Catholicism by the tens of millions after the Great Warning) mitigated God's punishment. According to Wheat, these millions
were the "Ten Just Men" who formed the heel that crushed the head of Satan. These millions enabled the reformed United States to play a pivotal role in bringing order and peace back to the world after the Three Days of Darkness. Pope Patrick the Great, in his first worldwide satellite television address from Assisi, praised the United States as the country which responded most generously, if imperfectly,
to the messages from heaven in the years leading up to the Great Tribulations...

...so the unprecedented peace the reader enjoys today is owed not only to martyrs such as Saint John Lanning, but also to millions of men, women, and children who prayed in response to the urgent pleas of the Blessed Mother and Jesus. Perhaps readers born after the Dark Years will find it easy to imagine that they
would have responded well to heaven had they lived during the tribulations, but the fact remains that the vast majority of people claiming to be Catholics and Christians at that time
did
not respond, or responded in a lukewarm fashion. Had the whole world responded the way a remnant of Americans did, perhaps countless souls would not have been lost. The generous response of humble Catholics in
Poland, and to a lesser extent, in Ireland, seems to bear out Wheat's thesis. These countries suffered greatly, but did not suffer nearly as much as others. England, for example, lost millions to a massive flood which wiped out London. The rest of the population centers of England were nearly obliterated during the final stages of the nuclear exchanges...

...even hindsight is blurred. One thing
is clear: it was through the merits and sacrifices of a handful of obscure, humble, and unknown heroes that God's Will was accomplished on earth and in heaven. And the humblest, most obscure, and unknown hero of all was the Virgin of Nazareth, Mary. May we forever serve the Eucharistic Son of the Immaculate Queen of Heaven!

Rebecca Macadam Jackson, M.I.

Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Marytown,
Indiana

+  +  +

Father Chet's body, like Maximilian Kolbe's, was taken to a crematorium, mixed with the ashes of other sinners and saints, and scattered to the winds on a golden field of grass.

PART FOUR

After the Triumph

Days turn to minutes and minutes to memories. Life sweeps away the dreams that we have planned.
Johnny Cougar Mellencamp

For although our Savior's cruel passion and death merited for His Church an infinite treasure of graces, God's inscrutable providence has decreed that these graces should not be granted to us all at once; but their greater or lesser abundance will
depend in no small part on our good works, which draw down on the souls of men a rain of heavenly gifts freely bestowed by God.
Mystici Corporis (On the Mystical Body of Christ)
Encyclical Letter of Pius XII

The heart has reasons that the reason does not know.
Blaise Pascal

Chapter Twenty-Four

1

Five Years Later
13 May
Mishawaka, Indiana

The big man knelt before the Blessed Sacrament in Immaculate Conception Church. He was perfectly still. Joe Jackson had been praying for half an hour. The old football injury in his back was beginning to cause some pain. He only had a quarter of an hour before he had to go back to help Becky with the children (they had one daughter
and two sons now). It had been five years to the day since the Warning, and more than four years since the Three Days of Darkness.

His Warning had been different from most–because Joe was a saint. There had been very few mortal sins to review–only three–and relatively speaking, very few venial sins. Nevertheless, these few sins had been terrifying things to re-experience. Overall, his Warning
had been a wonderful experience. Especially meeting Mary. Despite his melancholic nature, he rarely dwelt upon his Warning. But on the anniversary of the amazing day when Pope Patrick celebrated the Mass that saved the world, Joe allowed himself to remember...CD Number 33. It still gave him chills.

Joe was too humble to think about CD Number 33 often. Even now as he prayed, he reminded himself
that he was only a link in the chain. After all, Professor Wheat had spent decades developing his speaking skills and years researching the talk. Joe realized that he wouldn't have produced the CD if some dedicated Catholics hadn't taken the trouble to put the "Metairie Family Rosary" on the radio when he was a youngster. And most of
those
people had been Catholics because their families had passed
on the faith down through the centuries. It was a chain that stretched all the way back to the apostles, and found its origin in the Holy Trinity. The first link was Jesus.

The CD.

Like Nathan, Joe was also shown the ramifications of all the
good
acts of his life. There were too many to chronicle, and he had begun to forget. He could not remember Mary's face very well, which was disappointing.
He accepted this with equanimity. But he could not forget CD Number 33, which would always remain capitalized in his mind.

It was "Marian Apparitions" by Thomas Wheat–the recording which Joe had produced at the Kolbe Foundation. During his Warning, Joe was shown that he had been inspired to
conceive
the idea of recording Professor Wheat in part by the grace merited by his real mother, Mary Johns.
(The first thing Joe told Becky after the Warning was that he had seen his birth mother.)

By the time of the Warning, more than eight million copies of "Marian Apparitions" had been produced. What happened during the Warning seemed an impossibility, but Joe had seen every single person who had heard the talk. He saw each person, all at once, each individually. The good the talk had done in individual
lives was stunning, to say the least. He could only remember a small fraction of those he saw. His mind could not hold that much information.

But Joe Jackson remembered Number 33 now, as he did every year on the thirteenth of May. It was the thirty-third CD he had given out at the Marian Congress in Chicago. He didn't even remember handing it to Mrs. Hannah Carle until the event was shown to him
during the Warning.

Hannah loved the talk by Tom Wheat. She listened to it seven times in two weeks after the congress. She wrote to the Kolbe Foundation and received twelve copies, which she promptly distributed at her Rosary Society meeting. One of the ladies at the meeting, Mrs. Dorothy McLain, also liked the talk, and decided to give a copy to her son, Randall. She was so excited that she
didn't write to the Kolbe Foundation. Instead, Dorothy burned a copy of "Marian Apparitions" on her home computer. Randy McLain took his sweet time before listening to it–four weeks–and was only mildly impressed. He gave it back to his mother, who left it in the back of Saint Jerome's Church. Dorothy said a little prayer to the Holy Spirit when she put the copy on a table next to the bulletins with
a note that said, simply, "Free CD About Mary. Real Good." Two days later, after Sunday Mass, Mr. Hal Werthlin picked up the CD out of curiosity.

Hal went bananas over it. He ordered a grand total of four hundred and fifty-eight copies from the Kolbe Foundation over the next six years. One of Hal Werthlin's copies went to his accountant, Jim Rice, who eventually gave a copy to his best friend,
Sam Fisk, who lived in Cleveland. Sam didn't like the talk–it was too scary. Sam gave it back to Jim, who gave it to Rosanne Hawley. Rosanne got ten copies. She gave one to Helen Anthony, who gave it to Mary Collins, who gave it to Richard Tiant, who gave it to Bill Conigliario. Bill Conigliario didn't listen to it, but he left it in his car, where it sat for three weeks until his wife Sandy played
it while driving her daughter home from Franciscan University of Steubenville. Sandy's daughter, Rebecca "Reba" Conigliario, had been forced to go to Steubenville by her devout mother (Bill didn't care where his daughter went to college).

Reba had hated the solidly Catholic school for the first few months, but made some great friends–the first truly Catholic friends of her life–and gradually came
to love the place. Reba was praying a daily Rosary by her senior year and liked the CD enough to give it to her friend, Juan Rivera (no relation to Father Juan Rivera of Tule River Indian Reservation), a fellow senior. Juan wrote for several copies and gave one to his mother four months later. Juan's mother also liked Tom Wheat's talk and began attending daily Mass after hearing it. Mrs. Rivera
ordered several Spanish translation CDs from the Kolbe Foundation.

By then it had been almost two years since Joe Jackson had given out Number 33 in Chicago.

Mrs. Rivera lived in Youngstown, Ohio, but she sent a Spanish copy to her childhood friend, Roberta Sanchez, who lived in San Antonio, Texas. The chain almost broke with Roberta, who was a good Catholic, but threw her copy into an open trash
can by a bus stop, several weeks after listening to it. She just wasn't the type of person to give talks to others. It was taking up space in her pocketbook.

During his Warning, Joe saw the guardian angel of a man named Pedro Martinez urge Pedro to
look
at the trash can for almost twenty minutes before Pedro's bus arrived two hours after Roberta had thrown it away. Pedro spotted the CD and snatched
it up just as his bus pulled to the stop. He listened to
«Apariciones Marianas»
on his Walkman the next day while doing his janitorial work at the IBM building in San Antonio. It had a profound effect on his life. Pedro, who was sixty, returned to the sacraments after a twenty-five year absence. He became a faithful man of prayer. Pedro immersed himself in the sacramental life. He also distributed
fifty copies of
«Apariciones Marianas»
(and more than one hundred copies of the English version) over the next eighteen months.

The very last Spanish copy he distributed (before he died of a heart attack) was a copy he sent to a friend, Felix Morales. Felix and Pedro had gone to school together in Mexico City before crashing the border. Felix had eventually moved to Los Angeles and had done well
as a computer technician. Even though they had lost touch during the past decade, Felix had been praying for Pedro for years. By the time he received the CD from his old friend, Pedro was in heaven interceding for him to
really
listen to it.

Felix did, and gave out several copies. He gave one to his parish priest, who sent an English copy to his nephew, Diego Baerga, who worked on a ranch in Wyoming.
Diego's mother had been very worried about her son, who had stopped practicing the faith as a teenager in the barrios of Los Angeles.

The CD transformed Diego's life. It really wasn't the talk that changed him. It was the grace of Jesus distributed through the Mystical Body of Christ. Before listening to it, Diego was unhappy working in what he considered his dead end groundskeeper's job. He was
uneasy about the sorry state of his spiritual life. He was tired of the endless string of women he had slept with over the years. He wanted to get married. He was open to the grace. He came back to the simple, profound faith of his childhood after hearing Professor Wheat's talk. He rediscovered his boyhood love and devotion for the Mother of God.

Diego's fellow worker and friend, Manuel Ruiz,
was already a devout Catholic. Manuel had been offering his daily Communion for Diego for months and was absolutely thrilled by Diego's return to the Catholic faith. Yet it was Diego who convinced Manuel to place the copy of "Marian Apparitions" in the limousine of Karl A. Slinger.

Which changed the life of Karl Slinger.

Who helped Pope Patrick change the lives of everyone.

Everyone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

1

Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception
7 December, 16 R.E.
Marytown, Indiana

The old man's laugh was not as loud, but it still boomed across the room of the Jackson's home. The children in the playroom couldn't help but turn their heads toward Karl Slinger, former president of the United States of America. Karl had finished his first term and didn't seek another. He
didn't cotton to politics. He had been elected after running unopposed. He had been drafted by Chip Williams. Chip had practically forced Karl to run. Karl's political career was a distant memory–finished for almost a dozen years.

Chip and Christy Williams were presently in the air on their way to Marytown. Denny's son Zack had picked them up in Virginia in Denny's old Cessna 172. Zack was fifteen
years old, and almost as good a pilot as his legendary father.

"What's so funny, you stupid Polack?" Lenny snapped with good humor.

Lenny was sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket on his lap. He was next to Karl, who sat in a big stuffed chair, his head turning red. It was the same chair Pope Patrick had preferred during his annual visits until he passed away a decade earlier. Historians and
laymen alike were already calling him Patrick the Great–the pope who saved the world with a Mass.

"You're
what's so funny!" Karl replied. "Look at you! You're an old man. I saw you make a beeline for that rocker. And that blanket on your lap–that's precious." Karl laughed again.

In the kitchen, Becky looked at Amy's godfather and shook her head. She whispered conspiratorially to Joanie, "If Uncle
Karl laughs like that one more time, our statue of Mary is going to rattle off the mantelpiece and knock Lenny on the head. Watch," she nodded toward the two old men. Joanie giggled.

"You're just jealous because a skinny Jew can beat you across the room without even trying," Lenny quipped.

"Don't go using that old 'skinny Jew' routine with me, Lenny," Karl retorted. "You've been a Catholic for
sixteen years already!"

"You're impossible! Big Mister President! Mr. Tomato Head, that's what I say. I don't know why I even bother talking to you..." and so the same conversation rolled on and on.

Since Dottie passed away several years ago, The Partners, as Becky dubbed them, had been inseparable.

Denny Wheat and his wife, Molly, had flown the two nonagenarians from Houston a couple of days
ago. Down in Texas, they were Founding Fathers. Up in Indiana, they were just two old men looking for a barber shop where they could chew the fat.

And they were dearly loved by their adoptive families, the Wheats and the Paynes. Karl had just turned ninety. Lenny was ninety-one. Even dying was a contest between them. Joe had bet a newborn calf on Karl. Nathan took Lenny Gold–and gave Joe a two-year
spread. Karl and Lenny were well aware of the bet.

Karl Slinger's goddaughter, Amy Jackson, was going to be married to Jon Payne the following morning. After the Dark Years, people started getting married at ages more typical of agrarian societies. Nathan's eldest son, Jon, was only seventeen. Amy was slightly older.

Jon considered himself more than lucky. In his opinion, Amy was by far the most
beautiful girl in the state. His opinion was shared by just about every young man in Marytown (Mishawaka and South Bend had been merged and renamed Marytown after the Great Tribulations). Amy had taken after her mother, except for her thick brown hair, which reminded Becky of Sudden Sam, the girl's father. Sam had died in a concentration camp after the Fall of Chicago.

Fortunately for Jon, Amy
had also inherited her mother's choleric personality, and had fallen deeply and completely in love with him at age seven. For Amy, tomorrow's nuptial Mass was nothing more or less than the culmination of a decade of patience. Jon finally fell in love with "the brat," as he lovingly referred to her, four months ago. Engagements were much shorter in the Eucharistic Reign. Amy called him Jon-Jon, as
she had as a little girl.

Bishop Phillip Washington was scheduled to arrive in an hour–on horseback (although automobiles were making a comeback, horses and airplanes were the preferred modes of transportation in the new world). The good bishop would preside over the wedding, of course. Until Pope Nugumbu tapped Phillip to be the Bishop of Fort Wayne, Father Phillip had been content to be the
pastor of Immaculate Conception parish. Tomorrow, more than a few people at the wedding would wonder why Becky Jackson insisted on calling him Lee.

Outside, Joe and Nathan were just finishing quarterback-coaching duty for their older eight children in a game of touch football. All four boys were Jacksons. All four girls were Paynes. Billy and Beth Wheat were also playing. Two more Jackson boys
were inside playing at the feet of Karl and Lenny. Three more Payne girls were in the house helping their moms prepare the rehearsal dinner.

Tom Wheat and James Sullivan watched the game from the sideline, chatting amiably with Greg. The game was being played behind the cemetery of Immaculate Conception Church. Immaculate Conception was still heated by the ancient woodstove in the center aisle.

It was chilly, but clear and sunny. Good football weather. Everyone except Nathan wore homemade sweaters. Nathan wore an ancient, ragged Seton Hall sweatshirt–a gift from Father Chet over two decades ago. Nathan always wore this particular sweatshirt for the traditional touch football game on the eve of his wedding anniversary.

Joe had put on a few pounds over the years, and his bad back had slowed
him down. Back surgeons were in short supply in the new world, but Joe never complained. Nathan looked the same, if a bit older.

He's catching up to his eyes,
Joe thought suddenly, looking across the line, preparing to rush the smoothest quarterback in the new world.
Nathan always looked younger than his eyes.

It didn't seem to bother Joe that Nathan's team was winning big. (Nathan's team consisted
of two of Joe's incredibly tall sons, two of Nathan's redheaded daughters, and Beth Wheat.) Whatever it was that Nathan had, he still had it. His teams always won. Even Joe's kids knew it, and always lobbied to be on Uncle Nathan's team when sides were chosen. His younger boys had to take Nathan's stories of Joe's Super Bowl heroics on faith. There was no such thing as professional sports in
the new world.

Nathan faded back, looking to the right side of the field for Joe's son Joey. Seeing Nathan's gaze, Joe took an outside rush around Catherine Payne, who smoothly guided her Uncle Joe around the pocket with surprising strength for her pixie size, laughing the whole time. Nathan smartly stepped up in the pocket and released a touch pass to his twelve-year-old daughter Bridget, who
had slipped under the zone. She caught the ball with a lazy, casual kind of ease, then quickly reversed her direction, leaving Joe's son Chet to slip and fall. Bridget picked up the first down before Helen Payne tagged her.

I saw Joe Montana do that a hundred times,
Joe thought with a familiar kind of admiration for Nathan.

"Feel the Pain, Old Man," Nathan whispered, a playful smile on his face,
as he passed Joe, walking toward the new line of scrimmage, clapping his hands to huddle up his team.

+  +  +

The kids and the older folks were in bed. It seemed like only those who grew up with electric lights wanted to stay up more than a few hours past dusk. In the new world, people lived more by the sun than the clock. It wasn't so bad. Electricity had been back for over a decade, of course–but
it didn't mean what it used to mean. Even Maker's Mark was back. Denny Wheat made an annual flight down to Loretto, Kentucky, to stock up for the whole town.

The Paynes, the Jacksons, and Bishop Washington sat on the big porch of Joe's house. Joe and Becky had never moved out of the farmhouse. Like Tom and Anne Wheat, they simply added on as the family got bigger.

Nathan, Joanie, Becky, and Joe
were covered with blankets on a huge old davenport. Lee eased back and forth on his favorite Adirondack rocker. Becky and Nathan were sharing one of Nathan's homegrown cigarettes. A bottle of Maker's Mark was being passed around. No one got drunk in the new world, either. That wasn't missed at all.

Lee went down the list in his head:
No drunkenness, no heresy, no fornication or adultery, no sects,
practically no mortal sin. It's heaven on earth. All because of the superabundance of grace flowing through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Eucharistic Reign is a superabundance of grace! I got a foretaste of it after Our Lady came to me. After that, I would rather die than reject God's grace by sin. It all comes down to grace.

Children simply didn't believe what happened in the Dark Years.
You mean they used to actually kill babies in their mothers' wombs?
they asked all the time.

Amazing Grace! You'd think they wrote that song just for me.

"You know," Becky said to no one in particular, "how come we still call the New Kolbe Center the New Kolbe Center? It's fourteen years old, isn't it? It's almost thirteen years older than the
old
Kolbe Center at the old Kolbe Center's oldest age."

Joanie sighed pleasantly. Nathan chuckled. Becky nodded toward the "new" Kolbe Center, which needed a fresh coat of paint. There wasn't much paint in the new world. No one missed it.

"Huh?" Joe asked. "Could you run that by me again, Beck?"

"I don't think I could," Becky answered honestly.

"Nathan could," Lee suggested.

"But I don't want to. I want more medicine."

Joe passed Nathan the bottle of
Maker's.

A long silence ensued.

Joanie looked at her watch. "It's past midnight. It's the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The whole world will celebrate. It's almost as big as Christmas and Easter, and tied with Divine Mercy Sunday. But for me, it's the day I married you, lover."

"You're the queen of my heart," Nathan replied sheepishly. Joe was amazed at how much more Nathan spoke from his
heart since he first met him.

"Aren't you going to say something mushy to me, Joe?" Becky asked sweetly, and without a trace of sarcasm.

"I'm thinking, Beck," Joe replied. Everyone waited for two minutes while Joe Jackson thought.

"After all these years," Joe said finally, "I still feel honored to be your husband. During the Dark Years, when everyone was hungry and thirsty, I could always look
at you and quench my thirst with my eyes." No one had ever seen Joe cry, except for the few moments after the Great Warning, but his eyes were misting over. He was remembering Becky sleeping on the bed in the Palmer House on their honeymoon. It seemed like yesterday.
I am my lover's and my lover is mine.

"That's beautiful, Joe," Joanie whispered kindly.

Another silence passed.

"I miss you guys,"
Lee said softly.