Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [44]
Yet emerging nations in the plural was not on Palestrina’s agenda. One nation, in the singular, was: China herself. And outside of a very few—Pierre Weggen and the pope’s remaining men of trust—no one, not even the Holy Father, had any idea of the secretariat’s real objective, which was to see the Vatican become a wholly anonymous yet major partner and influencer in the future of the People’s Republic, economic and otherwise.
The initial step was tonight, with the hand holding of the Chinese. The second would take place tomorrow, when Marsciano would present the newly revised “Emerging Nation Investment Strategies” to a commission of four cardinals charged with him in overseeing the Church’s investments for ratification.
The session would be tumultuous because the cardinals were conservative and not open to change. It would be Marsciano’s job to convince them, to show in exhaustive detail the regions his extensive research had targeted—Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Russia. China would be there, of course, but hidden within the sweeping term Asia—Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, China, South Korea, Taiwan, India, etc.
The trouble was it was a deliberate fabrication. Unethical and immoral. A calculated lie designed to give Palestrina exactly what he wanted without ever divulging it.
Moreover, it was only the beginning of Palestrina’s plan. China, the secretariat understood all too well, was, for all its openness, still at heart a closed society, tightly controlled by an authoritarian Communist guard. Yet authoritarian or not, China was modernizing quickly; and a modern China with one-quarter of the world’s population and its accompanying economic leverage would, with little doubt and in little time, become the most formidable power on earth. With that truth came the obvious—control China and you control the world. And that was the heart and soul of Palestrina’s plan—the domination of China in the next century, reestablishing the Catholic Church and its influence in every city, town, and village. And, within a hundred years, to create a new Holy Roman Empire. With the people of China answering no longer to Beijing but to Rome, the Holy See would become the greatest superpower on earth.
It was madness, of course—and to Marsciano an all too clear illustration of Palestrina’s progressively deranged thinking—but there was nothing any of them could do about it. The Holy Father was enamored with Palestrina and had no knowledge of his plan whatsoever. Furthermore, slowed by precarious health and an exhausting daily schedule, and trusting Palestrina as he would trust himself, the pope had all but handed the global directives of the Holy See over to his secretariat of state. So to go to the Holy Father would be doing nothing more than going to Palestrina himself because, if called, the secretariat would deny everything, and his accuser would be summarily shipped off to a parish unknown and never heard from again.
And therein was the true horror of it. Because, with the exception of Pierre Weggen, who believed in Palestrina fully, the others—Marsciano, Cardinal Matadi, Monsignor Capizzi, the remaining three most influential men in the Catholic Church—were all in one way or another terrified of Palestrina. Of his physical size, of his ambition, of his exceptional ability to find a man’s weakness and then exploit it to further his own ends, and—perhaps most frightening of all—the tremendous force of his character once you became the focus of his attention.
They were terrified, too, of the madmen who worked for him: Jacov Farel, who was, on the one hand, the very public and outspoken chief of the Vatican police, and on the other, the