The pastors of the other churches had pitched in to lend an ecumenical perspective—even the endearingly deranged Reverend Al Green, whose effort to portray three hundred years of post-Reformation rapprochement as the Catholic Church’s progress toward the doctrine of justification by faith alone had had to be quietly but firmly edited out. The one exception, of course, had been the Reverend Enoch Wiley, whose blistering denunciation of the papacy as the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon had smoked its way into the rectory mailbox in response to the invitation. Father Heinzerling, formed in a world in which people tended to take action on the basis of their convictions, had been somewhat dubious about Mazarre’s reassurances that no mayhem would follow. His fellow down-timer, the Jesuit Von Spee, had actually admired the letter: “Classical Calvinist imagery, Gus, deftly applied. It’s astonishing, really, how well he employs it, given that Father Mazarre has informed me that the man is neither a scholar not trained in rhetoric.”
Now there remained only the final edit before any of their dwindling supply of electric typewriter ribbon was committed to the project. And there was another of the many little ironies created by the Ring of Fire. The up-timers considered typewriters “antiques” and made jokes about using them. But down-time artisans would pay a small fortune to get their hands on one—manual typewriters even more than electric—so they could disassemble them and begin designing what would soon become the cutting edge of a new world’s literary technology. Indeed, the first seventeenth-century typewriter had just appeared on the market. It was a great, monstrous clumsy thing, which almost needed to be operated by fists instead of fingers. It was also selling like the proverbial hotcakes.
The Reverends Jones had suggested a barbecue, and so the crisp autumn air was being blued with smoke while the ladies maintained Grantville’s internal lines of communication and the menfolk finished what Jones kept calling the “First Letter of Mazzare to the Romans.”
“Nope,” said Mazzare, interrupting Heinzerling’s smoker’s reverie. “Unitatis redintegratio was 1964. We’ve been admitting you heretics were human for nearly twenty years longer than you thought, Simon, and I suspect even before that.”
“Ha!” Jones reached for his beer. “Typical of the Whore of Rome. Denying innocent Protestants the joy of a good propaganda line. You’ll be telling me next that all the stuff I got out of Jack Chick comics has to come out, too?”
“Well, if it stays in, we have to explain why the Church in the twentieth century sanctioned the eating of babies at mass—”
Heinzerling broke in. “—when as any fool knows it is only on high days and holy days we do this in these more civilized times, ja?”
Mazzare shot him a look that suggested there might be a lecture later. Damnation, the man was only two years older than he was, there was no need for him to pretend to be some kind of father-figure.
The Reverend Jones was trying not to snork beer out of his nose. When he recovered, he said, “But seriously, though, what do you expect the cardinal will do with all this, beside use it to dither even longer about what to do with all this?”
Heinzerling realized that that was one he could answer. “Perhaps I might assist, ja? It is not perhaps the cardinal who wishes it, I think. I have made such reports before.”
“Oh?” asked Mazzare.
Both of the up-time clerics looked at him expectantly, and at each other. Behind him, he could all but hear the other Reverend Jones—another cleric, he forced himself to remember—staring at his back. “Ja. You do not forget that I am of the Societas Jesu? Such reports are the common coin of life in the Society, if one is about its work. All go, eventually, to the father-general.”
“And he’s asked for this through Cardinal Barberini?” Jones looked thoughtful.
“From what I hear of this particular Cardinal Barberini he is not much given to deep reading.” That much he had had from the gossip in Avignon, and confirmed from Mazarini as well. Cardinal Antonio Barberini the Younger was not in the studious, pious mould of his namesake uncle or his elder brother. A butterfly who ended up in the Church for no compelling reason and whose sole mission in life was to beautify his surroundings. Worthy, certainly, but hardly a scholastic heavyweight. “He is more concerned with things of art and beauty, and hang the consequences.”