Read Online In The Name of The Father by A. J. Quinnell - Free Book Online Page B

was Father Jan Panrowski, the youngest of the group. He did not appear the youngest. His frail body was twisted as if by terrible arthritis. His hair was stark white and down his right cheek ran four parallel pink scars half an inch apart. Mennini had met several of the others but not this priest. He knew that of all of them he had suffered perhaps the most. Also a Pole, he had been put into a concentration camp by the Nazis in 1941 because he gave food to the Resistance. He miraculously escaped and made his way East and again worked with the Resistance, but in the Russians’ eyes he had been in the wrong group. When they rolled through towards Warsaw they shot most of his group. He again was spared, after a fashion. They sent him further East into Russia itself where, for seven years, he was made to work virtually as a slave. He combined this labour with a huge effort to give spiritual love and solace to his fellow slaves. With the death of Stalin he was one of the lucky few to be released and the Order managed to bring him out to Rome. However, like Klasztor, he had refused the comforts of a quiet secure life and in 1958 had gone as a secret priest to work in Czechoslovakia - the most virulent anti-Church state in the Soviet bloc. For two years he worked in an agricultural machinery factory in Liberec and then he was caught one afternoon saying the Angelus. He had spent the next eighteen years in solitary confinement in the notorious Bakoy Prison in Kladno. Solitary confinement, except for the times when they had taken him to the torture rooms. They let him out in 1980. After six months in a Rome hospital and a further six months in a monastery near the Pope’s summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, he had sought an audience with the then head of the Order and begged to be allowed to return to his birthplace in Poland, the city of Olsztyn. His mother and an aunt, both in their nineties, were still alive and he wished to care for them. The city also had an ancient seminary and he would like to teach. He was reluctantly allowed to go. That city was also on one of Van Burgh’s pipelines out of Russia and occasionally he proved helpful. Several times travellers going the other way dropped off a slab of bacon.
    He sat now like a bent sparrow, his eyes on his leader. Eyes that sent out a miasma of remembered pain.
    Mennini looked at all their faces and into all their eyes. The phrases he had composed vanished into the sea of his compassion. He started to say, ‘I am made humble before . . .’
    Then he broke down. He did not lower his head. He sat there erect while the tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.
    The tears had more eloquence than words. His visitors knew him to be an austere unemotional man. They looked at the tears and the humility in his wet eyes and they too wept in response. All except Father Panrowski. He put his arms around his bony shoulders and sank back deeper into the corner of the settee. He lowered his chin to his chest as though once more experiencing physical pain. All his tears had long since been shed.
    The Cardinal recovered. Father Botyan offered him a handkerchief which he accepted with a wan smile. He dried his eyes and face and when he tried to hand it back the old priest merely smiled and shook his head. Mennini tucked it into his sash with a grateful gesture of acceptance. Then he completed his sentence.
    ‘I am made humble before your suffering and your faith.’
    He heard their murmurs of deprecation. Now the words came easily to him. In a strong voice he talked about the martyrs and saints of the Order and how their faith and devotion had changed history and the face and mind of the world. He talked to them as equals about his hopes for the future, both for the Order and for the Church as a whole. He invoked their prayers for the beloved Holy Father.
    They said a short prayer together and then he gave them all his blessing. The audience over, they moved towards the door. He could