Vatican Waltz (5 page)

“I'm sure you do, but that's not the issue.”

“Shouldn't it be?”

“Perhaps it should. But let's examine the facts. You are, like me, a Roman Catholic. That means we live according to the rules of our faith. You know the position of the Church, don't you? You understand it?”

“I do, and I love the Church. I just feel so strongly that God is asking me to change that position. I think it might be part of the troubles the Church has been experiencing lately. I came to ask for your help.”

“Then you came to the wrong place.”

A silence fell over us, bitter as moldy bread. Behind or beneath it I felt that I could hear our thoughts doing battle with each other. I felt a surge of anger against him and I tried to let it dissolve before I said anything else. He looked at his watch.

“I'm sorry to disturb you, Monsignor, but I—”

“You're not disturbing me, you're disturbed. You need to see a lay counselor. You need to pray to our Lord for help. You need to understand, Miss Piantedosi, the way Satan works his evil magic in this world, the tricks he plays. If he had been a true spiritual adviser, Father Ghirardelli would have warned you about this years ago.”

“We talked about it, Monsignor. We—”

“The Church is the bride of Christ, his earthly spouse, do you understand? The ordained priest is the representative of Christ on earth. As such, he and the Church form a union of masculine and feminine, as it were, in a symbolic sense. Were females to be allowed to be priests, that relationship would become a homosexual one. Unnatural. The Vatican has been very clear and consistent on this doctrine.”

“Homosexual?”

“Yes, exactly. Outside the laws of God and nature.”

“So you don't think the rule has any chance of being changed? Not now, maybe, but—”

“I don't think it can be, nor do I think it should be.”

“Should priests be allowed to marry?”

“That is not for me to say. I took a vow of celibacy and obedience, as did Father Ghirardelli, I might add, as does every priest.”

“But, Monsignor, forgive me. I'll only take another minute of your time. Just in this city, just in the last two years, four churches have closed. When I was a little girl, there were five Masses on a Sunday morning at St. Anthony's and the parking lot was full for all but the earliest one. People are leaving. Millions of people are leaving the Church.”

“In many parts of the world she is gaining members and influence, thriving in fact. There is, in Africa and Latin America, an abundance of new vocations.”

“But not here, Monsignor.”

“No, not in North America, not in most populations, at any rate. But remember this: the Church has a track record of two thousand years and of not abandoning her principles in difficult times.”

“But we've seen changes. Saturday-night Masses. Meat on Fridays. My father says they used to have to wait three hours after eating before taking Holy Communion. Those things have changed.”

“I'm aware of those things,” the monsignor said coolly.

“And from the books I've read, the rules weren't always what they are now. For a thousand years or so after Christ's death priests were allowed to marry. Some popes were even married. Many of them had children of their own, and some of those children later became popes. And women were being ordained as late as the fourteenth century.”

“I'm not here to argue a legal case, Miss Piantedosi. I'm not a scholar of the Church, and neither, I'm afraid, are you. These stories you cite are not facts but Satanic bits of revisionist history. I have a schedule so full now—we have a new priest arriving next week—I'm afraid I can't—”

“I'd ask you for just another minute, Monsignor,” I said. “I've been in this parish my whole life.”

He pressed his lips together, and I watched him breathe through his nose. “This is an exceedingly difficult time.”

“I know it is, and I am sorry, but I believe with all my heart and soul and with complete respect for the traditions of the Church that God is speaking to me and instructing me to serve Him as a parish priest. I've had visions of myself at the altar. I—”

I stopped there because a change had come over the monsignor's face. His eyes had shifted to the side and down. The muscles along his jawline flexed. “Nothing in the world is as clever as Satan,” he said. “Nothing.”

“This isn't from Satan,” I almost shouted, and something changed in me, too. I felt a strength rising up from behind my veil of shyness, something absolutely new. I wanted to be polite and respectful as I'd always been, but underneath that the water was boiling, the steam swirling into a new shape.

The monsignor seemed to see it. His face softened. He said, “How does one know?”

“How does one know anything, Monsignor? At some point you have to believe in the way you feel, don't you? How do we know there's a God?”

“From the sacred scriptures.”

“But how do we know we can trust the scriptures?”

“You are stepping very very close to the edge of blasphemy.”

“I don't think so,” I said forcefully. “I'm a good woman. I do no harm in the world. I go to Mass three times a week. I spend at least two hours a day in prayer. Father Alberto and I had dozens of conversations about the possibility of being deceived—”

The monsignor raised a hand to me, palm forward. “Stop,” he said. “Stop there, please. I don't think it wise to rely on the spiritual guidance of a man like Father Ghirardelli, may God rest his soul. Some of the things he said from the pulpit I would never have allowed had I been his superior. We have priests who succumb to the temptation of lust. We have priests who succumb to laziness. And we have priests who succumb to the temptations of power and ego, who enjoy the attention one garners by being different, radical, extreme. The same can be said for people who have so-called ‘visions.' What I'm telling you is that you should be careful that these visions you say you are having are, in fact, not coming from someplace other than God.”

“I feel like I can tell the difference.”

He let out a breath. “If this visit was to ask me to help you become a priest, then the answer is no. Categorically. Absolutely. The rest of this is, given the circumstances, I'm sorry to say, a poor use of the hour.”

“All right,” I said. “Is there anyone I can appeal to?”

“Any and every appeal would be useless.”

“Then I won't take any more of your time.”

He stood quickly, before I had a chance to change my mind. “I appreciate that.” His tone was more conciliatory then, his posture less stiff. At the door he shook my hand and said, “I'll make the offer again. If you'd like me to be your confessor, I'd be willing to do that.”

I don't know what came over me then. From the moment I'd stepped into St. Ann's I had felt annoyed and off balance. The place seemed to me to echo with hymns being played in the wrong key. I said, “Two things, Monsignor. First, may God bless you, may He give you every blessing, a deep and abiding peace.”

“Thank you.”

“And second—I have to ask you this before I go: Do you think there's any chance that somebody associated with Lamb of God killed Father Alberto?”

I admit, though I'm not proud of it, that I thought the question might upset Monsignor Ferraponte. As I asked it I watched his face very closely, but nothing remotely like surprise showed there. He pushed up the middle of his lips the way some people do when they're considering an interesting question, and then he said, “Ah, I see what this is about now.”

“He was receiving threatening phone calls before the accident,” I said, but the monsignor's face had hardened.

Instead of answering my question he half closed the door and said, “Good-bye, Miss Piantedosi…and be careful.”

I felt as though I'd gone in to see Monsignor Ferraponte carrying some delicate hope, a fine sculpture made of thin sticks and rare paper. I'd lifted it out of its protective box and handed it carefully across the table to him, and he'd taken it into his hand and squeezed hard, once, crushed it to pieces, and handed it back to me, ugly and broken.

But after I'd walked a few blocks from St. Ann's, replaying the conversation in my mind, I felt a new personality growing inside me, pushing out hard against an old skin. It was almost as if, with the breakage of my delicate sculpture, a shell had broken open, too, and a stronger, more forceful, more assertive Cynthia Piantedosi had been brought to life. It began to seem to me that the monsignor, with his ramrod-straight posture, his fear of the Devil, his need to put people into boxes, might have done me a peculiar favor, punctured the shy and polite surfaces I'd been living beneath for the past few years, and allowed this new woman to breathe.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Father Alberto had been fond of saying. A cliché, sure, but on his lips the truth of it pushed up through the surface and sprouted fine, white blossoms of understanding. “You think something bad has happened,” he liked to say, “the last thing you want, and then a little time goes by and you see it differently. The pain is like fertilizer on a fruit tree. It stings, it smells, it hurts your eyes, but then by and by you have this beautiful sweet peach.”

I believed that, in theory at least. Walking away from St. Ann's, I thought it might be possible that something good would come from the meeting, a change in me, if not in my Church.

STILL, DESPITE THIS HOPEFUL NOTION,
the overall effect of the conversation was that, for a time, I completely gave up any ideas I might have been holding on to about changing the Catholic Church. It began to seem not that the Devil was the source of my visions but that my ego might have gotten involved. I was a simple person, really, not stupid but provincial, a nurse in training who lived with her father and had seen almost nothing of the world. And here I was, going to the offices of important men and trying to convince them to do things that were unprecedented and obviously impossible.

So for a month or more after that meeting with Monsignor Ferraponte I kept to my quiet routine and bothered no one. As I feared it would, the investigation into Father Alberto's death yielded nothing beyond a few dead-end leads and two suspects with alibis. It eventually shriveled into a dusty file in the police station. Father Gerencia was a persistent disappointment to me, but I went to Mass as I'd always done, spent many hours alone in the church, cooked for my father, and, with each course and examination, each hour of clinical training in a different hospital ward, moved a step closer to becoming a nurse.

As that was happening, as I was living out my days in what people said was supposed to be the prime of my life, I felt as though the new creature inside me was being wrapped up and strangled like an insect in a spider's web. For a few days after the meeting at St. Ann's I'd felt her stretching her strong arms and legs, lifting her head high, pushing away the old walls of bashfulness. But then steadily, day by day, my usual routine and habits wound her up again in sticky gray filaments.

What risks had I ever taken? I started asking myself. I'd lived my whole life in the same small city, in an upstairs room in my father's house. I had a few friends and a lot of loving relatives, but other than going to college in Boston, only a subway ride from home, I'd never ventured out of my safe little circle. As the weeks passed—winter to spring—a virus of impatience infected me. It was as if, half wrapped up and frustrated to the marrow of her bones, this new me was being held hostage in a room with a loudly ticking clock. The sound had burrowed inside her brain and would not be scalpeled out. Looking back on that time now, I think it was almost as if Father Alberto—the memory of him or his actual spirit—was urging me out of that safe enclosure, cajoling me, pushing me. Some days I woke up and I was sure I'd heard his voice in a dream.

MY FATHER HAD SAID MANY TIMES,
in both the languages he used with me as well as with bits of Neapolitan dialect, that I shouldn't feel I had to come home every night and cook him supper. “I can make the pasta, you know. I can fry up-a the saw-seege.” The truth was, though, that I enjoyed cooking for him. From the days when I'd watched my grandmother at the counter and cutting board, I'd always loved the sensual aspect of preparing a meal, the textures and colors, the sound of uncooked pasta being poured into a pot, the fragrance of simmering garlic. I liked being able to perform a simple service for him. More than that, I enjoyed having a dependable routine. Probably I would have been happy as a cloistered nun, all decision and uncertainty removed from my life, a time set for waking up, for prayer, for work, for meals, for sleep. Probably, if there had been a convent still active in Revere, I would have been tempted in that direction.

Instead I made a semimonastic routine for myself: I woke up early and prayed, ate an egg or a bowl of oatmeal, some fruit and coffee, took the bus to the subway station, the subway to the hospital or to school. Afterward, I'd retrace that route and stop in at St. Anthony's for an hour before going home. I'd make dinner, ask my father how his day had been, take a walk or a short run, read a bit, go to bed. On days off I'd occasionally accept an invitation for lunch with a friend or a cousin or, in summer, spend a few hours swimming and sunbathing at the beach or working in the garden. For whatever reason, I wasn't a person who liked surprises or change.

So it was unusual for me that, one April afternoon, instead of getting right onto the subway and heading back to Revere, I left the hospital and went for a stroll around downtown Boston. Without any particular destination in mind, I meandered up the back of Beacon Hill, through its narrow old streets and past the brick town houses and flower boxes, the small-paned windows and wrought-iron railings; then I cut behind the State House and found myself at the north edge of Boston Common. There was some kind of music festival going on there, and I didn't feel like being part of a crowd—just the opposite—so I turned left and followed the edge of the Common toward Tremont Street, headed for a different station on the same subway line.

Before I reached the T station, though, I passed a small Catholic church I'd never noticed before. It was set there, improbably, squeezed tight between brick office buildings. Three red doors right on the sidewalk, a crucifix, a schedule of Masses in a glass box out front. I tried one of the doors and was surprised to find it open. The nave was more modern than St. Anthony's, the pews set at an angle facing a stylized altar festooned with colorful banners. Not exactly my kind of religious motif, but I knelt and prayed for a while, then sat back in the pew, closed my eyes, and let my mind be still and quiet. “Contemplative prayer,” St. Teresa called it, as opposed to “vocal” prayer. Wordless, imageless, just a stillness, an interior silence. That kind of prayer had been my hobby, my passion, my addiction since I'd been old enough to speak. I found it a strange and wonderful fact that saying and doing nothing had so much joy in it. We're a society of doers, people who believe contemplation is suspect, the province of the lazy and foolish, but that stillness always lit a fire of pleasure inside me, and it does so even now.

After a time I heard footsteps, and after another few minutes I opened my eyes. A small man in jeans and a T-shirt, with crew-cut gray hair, was walking across the altar with a polished candelabra in one hand, and I knew, somehow, that he was a priest. There was something refreshing in the way he was dressed—like an electrician or a taxi driver—and in the way he crossed the altar without the slightest self-consciousness or fuss, as if it were a place exactly as sacred as every other place on Earth. I felt an immediate kinship with him, one invisible person to another, and decided, right then, that I would try going to Mass at his church.

The Paulist Center, it was called, and I knew from the first Sunday that I'd made the right decision. The small priest's name was Father Welch, and his sermon might have been taken from Father Alberto's notebook. Inclusiveness. Kindness. Charity. Openness. “These qualities,” he said, “are precisely what the term ‘imitation of Christ' actually means.”

I loved it when priests took a biblical phrase I'd been hearing my whole life and turned it in a slightly different way, allowing a new light to shine on it. I remembered Father Alberto doing that with “in the fullness of time.” “Think about that,” he'd said, so happily. “
In
the
fullness
of
time!
There's two parts to it. First, if we're really living, if we are hearing with our ears and seeing with our eyes, as Christ told us to, then the day has a richness and fullness to it that gets diluted if we spend the hours worrying, doing five things at once, or desperately hoping for something that might or might not happen. If you spend all day thinking about being rich, for example, then time isn't full at all. It's just a rickety bridge to some imagined future. You don't care about
now,
all you care about is some imaginary
then
when you'll be rich. It's like a child wishing away his youth so he can be grown up enough to drive or go to work every morning!

“And second, by
the
fullness
of
time
the biblical writer could have meant eternity. God's eternity! Think about it! Year after year, century after century, filled with all kinds of different opportunities to move closer to Him. There's your free will. That's what it means, if you ask me. Absolute freedom in how we use the time that's been given to us. Now, you might say, Father, I don't have no freedom of time. I gotta be at work at nine a.m., Monday to Friday, fifty weeks a year. Sure, okay. But when you're at work, when you're cutting that two-by-four for a new house or filling a tooth or answering the phone or selling a chocolate-glazed donut, where are you, really? What are you doing? Are you
there?
Or are you picturing the beer you're gonna have in front of the TV that night or the new dress or car or swimming pool you're gonna buy after you hit the lottery? You see my point here? You can do those things creatively, see? In a way that brings you more in touch with God's world.”

It was almost as if I could hear Father Alberto's voice there in the modern surroundings of the Paulist Center, almost as if his spirit, or a kindred spirit, had taken possession of Father Welch and was speaking to me in a kind of liturgical poetry, the new meanings opening up like a cracked walnut, the sweet rich flesh there nourishing me again after all those hungry months with Father Gerencia.

I liked the Paulist Center, too, because it kept its doors open during the week. Father Welch didn't quite have Father Alberto's passion and sense of humor. He didn't have anything close to his abilities as a speaker. He didn't walk down the aisle waving his arms and getting his parishioners excited or angry. And he didn't force anyone to sit quietly for five minutes at a time contemplating the nature of the modern Jesus. But he was my kind of priest.

So I began going regularly to his Masses, and to confession there, too. Little by little, in the confessional, I found myself speaking about my moments of silent prayer. “It's more than a conversation with God,” I heard myself say, the sticky filaments snapping one after the next as the new woman inside me awoke, stretched, and stood up. “Not that I feel I
am
God—I'm not crazy, Father, and I don't think I'm conceited—but that God really is alive in me. The only thing is, that word—
God
—it doesn't fit anymore and hasn't for a long time. I grew up thinking of God as a big man in the sky or Jesus on the cross, but this God is more a kind of loving energy, and I feel it not just in myself but in everything and everyone. Does that sound ridiculous?”

At first Father Welch didn't offer any opinion. He didn't ask many questions about my prayer life, the way Father Alberto had, and didn't seem particularly curious or helpful. After two or three conversations in the confessional, though, he invited me to meet with him in his office. We sat there in the small, cluttered upstairs room, and he asked what my upbringing had been like, which people I'd been close to, exactly what happened to me in prayer, how that had changed over the years, what I thought was the origin of those moments and visions. He asked if I'd ever been in therapy, and I said that I had not. He asked if there was any mental illness in my family, and I said that other than my father's love of gambling at the dog track and my grandmother's somewhat compulsive cleanliness, I didn't think so. He laughed at that, and from then on the conversations were easier for both of us.

Every Thursday afternoon I met with him in his office and we talked about the same things I'd discussed with Father Alberto—though in a slightly more intellectual way. The lives of various saints, their experiences and challenges, the ways one's own ego, mental difficulties, or stress could cause one to have the kinds of experiences I was having. We talked about temptations to be wary of—feeling special, superior, judging others, even wanting the experiences to go on and on instead of accepting them as precious gifts, given according to God's timing and purpose.

“In your case,” he said, “it's highly unlikely that these moments are caused by stress, unless you were particularly stressed out as a four-year-old. The issue about becoming a priest, though, is a little bit different. I've had a few people in my counseling sessions who've spoken about a prayer life that was somewhat similar to yours, but no one had the experiences with as much intensity, and no one had them over such a long time, and none of the women felt they were being called to the priesthood. I don't sense any kind of ulterior motive here. You certainly don't seem like the kind of person who wants attention. You don't seem particularly angry at the Church or anything or anyone else—with the possible exception of your monsignor. The only question, as far as I can see, is how to act on this. How long to wait for God to give you that answer.”