Saving Grace
Grumbach, Doris
Runaway pope SAVING GRACE Celia Gittelson Alfred A. Knopf, $10.95, 229 pp. Deris Grumbach No institution of any strength or endurance is without its satirists, and now the papacy has one. It...
...If we were to let on now that il Papa has left too . . . My God, we'd be finished...
...Il Papa says Mass in the mountains and in the meadows...
...foreign and domestic ties are unsubstantiated and the political maneuvering which surrounds the case arouses suspicions that quite a few are unfounded...
...REVIEWERS MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS is an editor and writer in New York and the author of Who's Minding the Children: The History and Politics of Day Care in America...
...Finally, I doubt that it will spoil the reader's enjoyment of the milieu, the chase and the authentic hierarchic background, to report that the ending is one of reconciliation and grace...
...Pope Leo tells his concerned sister, who herself has trouble getting in to see him, that "many of my colleagues complain about me...
...After the long section of chase perhaps too long but fitting if the book is taken as an entertainment, which ends in a hilarious scene during which the police try to run down the pope in a helicopter, Leo XIV is reported by the Vatican to be recovering from his long bout of influenza which has kept him from his public duties and out of the public eyes...
...If the world were ever to discover that the Holy Father has . . ." he lowered his voice, "broken out...
...Our posi - the position of the church - is unsteady at best...
...He visits his sister, dresses himself in the clothes of his sister's husband, and "liberates" his brother-in-law's truck ordinarily used to haul manure...
...I do not dare imagine what would happen...
...Il Papa finds a small village, built high up a volcanic mountain...
...The members of the household staff and his two close attendants, Monsignors Ghezzi and Rocca, design his life so that he is a virtual prisoner of ritual and ceremony...
...He writes and studies far more than he should, and makes too many pastoral visits to schools, hospitals, and prisons...
...Even the devout have begun to leave in large numbers...
...He poses as a salesman of religious objects, visits an hermitic, spoiled priest to ask him, futilely, to say Mass for him, and then he settles in, making his presence as a layman felt until the somewhat expected happens...
...The inhabitants assume he is lost: "It's the only reason anyone ever lands in this Godforsaken place...
...doris grumbach writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review...
...First, however, they discuss the implications: "We must handle this business ourselves...
...Nothing is being done.' "The Holy Father spends too much time on his knees,' they say, 'waiting for divine inspiration...
...Ghezzi and Rocca come after him at once, but he has made a successful escape...
...His priestly qualities manifest themselves, he is taken to be a saint who is capable of cures...
...Their conversation sets the tone for the ensuing chase, in which of course the police do become involved...
...They agree not to call the secular authorities, i poliziotti and i carabinieri, but to try to find him and bring him back themselves...
...father nicolas ayo, C.S.C, teaches in the liberal studies program at the University of Notre Dame...
...But nonetheless he is chosen as a compromise candidate...
...Pope Leo really did not want the job...
...Her books include Chamber Music and The Missing Person.The Missing Person...
...Rocca's next thought brought him fully awake...
...It will be argued that Cecila Gittelson, whose first novel this is, has written a farce rather than true satire, and perhaps that is right, because her portrait of the fictional Pope Leo XIV has a fine overlay of understanding and compassion and the action is, in its second half, as broad as Keystone-cops comedy-and as funny...
...In your wisdom . . . I beg you to forget me and to give your votes to a more zealous candidate...
...I knew of Celia Gittelson when she served a major publishing house as a publicity manager...
...Very quickly he begins to chafe against the restraints of the Vatican...
...Saving Grace will not add a cubit to the library of deadpan fiction on papal life and the Vatican, some of it written in fury, some with inordinate respect, but it will entertain and, in some places, enlighten you...
...Sitting in the sun on a wide Maine beach I found her story just right for the time and the place, and her skill, in her first novel, uncommon, unexpected, and most pleasurable...
...It even contains a fine supernatural moment which, in the light of all that has gone before in this skillful and amusing book, is entirely acceptable...
...He travels around the world as the work of the church piles up . . .' " So it is inevitable that Leo would escape...
...I am glad to make her acquaintance as a writer of playful fiction...
...As Cardinal Bellini he begged his fellow cardinals before the election "to allow me to return to my former life...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 23
