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An Only Friend. The implications of modern science also intrude upon the Pope in the person of Jean Telemond, brilliant Jesuit scholar who becomes the Pope's friend. Telemond is clearly based on the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. whose writings tried to reconcile the scientific facts of evolution with the theological facts of man's consciousness and conscience. When Telemond is ordered by the Holy Office to re-examine the book that sums up his life's work, he dies in the crisis of submission to the church's will. The Pope thus loses his only friend on earth, but he, too, must concur as Pope in his own deprivation.
The Shoes of the Fisherman is a brilliant precis of what could be in the mind of a Pope who is also a saint—with all the church beneath him but alone with God. But the curious fictional feat is accomplished: West wins sympathy and belief for his papal creation as a man, not a holy effigy. It is a novel, not a pilgrim's guide nor a pietistic pamphlet. There are glimpses of la dolce vita, a homosexual
Italian politician, a knowledgeable New York newspaper Vatican correspondent foolish enough to tangle with divorce Italian style, a rapacious principessa.
These serve to highlight the central enigma of the Vatican—the headquarters of a huge, cumbrous international bureaucracy that nevertheless administers the intangibilities of the spirit. It is a business, but neither the Pope nor Novelist West lets anyone forget that its business is with men's souls.
:*One notable failure: Hadrian the Seventh, by Frederick Rolfe (''Baron Corvo"), an expelled seminarian whose bizarre fantasy of an English Pope who was assassinated was published 59 years ago.