“I want you to take this seriously. Look at me, Brigid. It’s not safe for you here. This is Rome. It’s Easter week. You’re a woman priest going against the Catholic Church. These are unsettling times. You know what I mean?”
Of course I knew. The deepening planetary crisis—rampant terrorism, mutating disease, dramatic weather patterns every year…none of these patterns were good. Science-fiction fantasies of a self-driving car in every garage and a top doctor on the other end of every phone had not come true on this ravaged planet, which was one downed airplane away from an apocalyptic war.
Even clean air and water and food, basics that people had once taken for granted, were in short supply. People asked why. Some answered that this was because of lack of faith in God.
Lifelong believers and the newly faithful were coming back to religion, and some saw JMJ as an attempt to overthrow the two-thousand-year reign of the Roman Catholic Church.
That had never been our goal. Never. We only offered an alternative to those who felt excluded by canon law.
“I hear you, Zach. I understand. But I couldn’t refuse an audience with the pope, could I? He’s assigned bodyguards to us. I’ll be back in Cambridge before you know it.”
Gilly brought me my sweater, and after a barely tasted chocolate-and-peanut “exotic passion” dessert, Zach said he had to go. Cheek kisses were exchanged all around, and then, with a tight smile, he left our room.
Gilly asked, “Is Zach okay?”
“Yes, of course. You don’t think so?”
“I think he loves you, Mommy.”
“He loves you, too, Gilly. Hey. Let’s unpack. Hang up our clothes and go to bed. Tomorrow we have an audience with the pope.”
For once, she didn’t argue with me.
Chapter 111
I WOKE up four or five times that night.
Each time I looked at the bedside clock, it was an hour closer to my private audience with His Holiness Pope Gregory XVII.
I tried on worst-case scenarios: he would say that I wasn’t a priest. He would tell me that none of the sacraments I had performed were valid: not marriages, Communion, last rites. He would tell me I was endangering mortal souls.
Was I doing that?
I groaned and shifted in the bed that I shared with Gilly. Along with having concerns about meeting with the pope, I was shocked at the anger we’d touched off with our breakaway church.
Zach was right. It was dangerous here. I should never have taken Gilly with me to Rome.
Gilly poked me with her elbow and told me to stop flopping around on the bed, to stop sighing. “Just think of fluffy clouds or something and calm down.”
“Thanks, peanut.”
“If Daddy were here, he would say exactly the same.”
We slept, and in the morning, we dressed in black, which was definitely a new look for my little girl and me. Thanks to my father, from whom I’d heard it, I remembered what Henry David Thoreau had written: Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Still, black dresses and headscarves were proper protocol for women meeting with the pope.
Giuseppe and Alberto, our dedicated gendarmes, picked us up outside the hotel without incident, and soon our sleek car, flying triangular, yellow-and-white Vatican flags from a pole on the hood, was speeding toward Vatican City.
During the time I’d lived in Rome, I’d learned the city, but to Gilly, this was all new, and it was grand.
Our car took us on Viale della Trinità dei Monti, passing the Villa Borghese gardens on the right. From there, we crossed the Tiber on the Ponte Regina Margherita, and not long after that, we turned onto Via della Conciliazione toward St. Peter’s Square, where preparations were being made for the expected millions on Easter Sunday.
And that was when my apprehension vanished, leaving behind something like sunny optimism.
I realized that I had been imagining the pope as another version of my supercritical father. But the pope had invited me to the Vatican. He had made me very comfortable and welcome and safe. Meeting with him was an honor, a privilege, and an extraordinary opportunity to tell him about my experience as a priest. I would tell him about my overwhelming acceptance and could cite examples of other woman priests in the many breakaway churches who were having a positive effect on their congregations.
The air was crisp and the temperature fair when we arrived at the Apostolic Palace, where Pope Gregory spent his days.
This was it.
Gilly and I were going to meet the head of the Catholic Church, the man who represented Christ on earth to more than a billion Catholics.
I was ready.
Chapter 112
FATHER RAPHAEL met us at the car and took us into the Apostolic Palace through the Portone di Bronzo. It was a true palace of enormous scale and breathtaking grandeur. I knew that it had a thousand rooms—fish ponds, conservatories, museums and chapels, including the glorious Sistine Chapel, and other rooms that were not open to the public.