Vatican Waltz

by Roland Merullo

  “I am going now,” he said valiantly, “to find you another hotel and talk to the people at the hotel you are staying in and tell them that what happened is unacceptable, and see if I can get you a refund.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said through my nervousness.

  “Will you give me the key? With your permission I can move your bags.”

  “But they’re all unpacked.”

  “With your permission I will repack them and bring them. Otherwise we will have to travel back there again.”

  “Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to focus on the hotel just then. I handed over the room key, tried not to think about Father Bruno packing my underwear into a suitcase. I thanked him, then got out and stood on the sidewalk, ten minutes early. There was no sign on the building, not even a small plaque, and for a moment I thought Bruno had mixed things up. Both sides of the huge wooden front door appeared to be closed tight. The first floor was gray stone, the top three floors the color of an apricot, and the large windows, standing in four neat rows, were tightly shuttered, as if the sun had already swung around and was shining on that side of the building—which wouldn’t be the case for several more hours. Father Bruno noticed my confusion. He leaned his body across the passenger seat and waved an arm, pointer finger extended. “There! Over there!” he yelled, jabbing the air. “Laggiù!”

  I turned. Between where I stood and the double row of concrete pillars stood a gated entrance I hadn’t seen. I wondered why Bruno hadn’t driven right up to it—for fear that his license plate would be written down in a secret notebook? Until I took a few steps in that direction, it looked to me like a delivery entrance, but when I reached the gates and turned in, I saw two of the famous Swiss guards, unmistakable, almost comical in their red-and-yellow knickers and berets. A street led from the gate into a large paved enclosure. A booth stood on the left-hand side of the street. After a conversation with one of the guards I was allowed to approach the booth. I took the letter from Cardinal Rosario’s office out of my purse and produced it for the man sitting there. It turned out to be a kind of magical document: in a moment I was being escorted around the gray corner of the building to the true front door. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, apparently, kept its back to the street. Another moment and I was led up a wide marble stairway and into a conference room with high-backed oak chairs surrounding a table twenty feet long. Left alone, seated at the table, I felt a familiar stirring in the center of myself, a spark, a shifting. I thought, not now. There was, on the wall I faced, a painting that reached almost to the ceiling: St. Jerome the martyr falling to the ground after being struck by a club wielded by one of two brutes with bare chests and bulging muscles. I was staring at it, studying the expression of terror on St. Jerome’s face, trying as hard as I could to resist—my palms were leaving wet prints on the exquisitely polished tabletop—when I went spinning away into one of my spells.

  There were times, in those strange departures from ordinary five-sense reality, when I’d find myself transported into worlds, or parts of worlds, that were alien to anything I had ever known. I’d never spoken about some of them, not even to Father Alberto, because I was ashamed of hearing the descriptions on my own lips. How could a sane person say the words out loud? Peaceful emerald fields set high above the struggles of earth. Crowded chambers with men and women talking and arguing beneath the faces of Jesus and Mary and various other holy figures. Deep, still, shadowed kingdoms stirred by a colored current or wind—as if I were at the bottom of the ocean. Who in her right mind would admit to those kinds of things after anything other than an LSD trip?

  But there were other times when, as if in a recurring dream, I would return to somewhat less exotic “places.” There, in the second-floor meeting room of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, I stepped out into one of those more familiar homes. It was an unpeopled realm, entirely inhuman, painted in pastels, with a steady low humming that seemed to come from movement all around the perimeter. In the center was a kind of sun, or sunlight, that was not too strong to gaze into. It was almost as if I’d somehow made my way down into a blood cell or some subatomic kingdom, where activity and stillness had been joined, all of it purposeful but calm. It was very pleasant to be there, a kind of homecoming. There was no sense of time, only that steady movement and illumination and a feeling of perfect acceptance. It went on and on, and then, at some point, I felt my normal self re-forming around me, withdrawing from that world, lifting up and away from it, without sadness or concern or hurry of any kind. Simply a moving away from that light and that perfect love and coming back to the mottled struggle that is life on earth. It was, I guessed, something close to what being born must feel like.

  I opened my eyes. Opposite me at the grand wooden table sat two unfamiliar men, a fairly young priest wearing tortoise-shell glasses and blinking repeatedly, and a much older man in a red robe with gold buttons up the front and gold thread along the seams of his lapels and epaulettes. Cardinal Rosario, most likely in his mid-sixties, had a thin, bony face, but with small sacs of flesh at the jowls and white eyebrows as stiff as the shortest toothbrush bristles. He was watching me with a steely attention. I took a breath and decided, instead of apologizing, to pretend nothing had happened—a trick I’d used dozens of times in school. I asked Mary to give me strength, to put the right words into my mouth, not to let me have come all that way in vain.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Your Eminence,” I said.

  The cardinal nodded, but the nod consisted of a single, quarter-inch movement of his chin. His eyes were like green marbles, unnaturally steady, and I couldn’t read anything at all in them. He folded one hand over the other and raised them in front of his mouth, keeping his elbows on the table, and he stayed there like that, barely blinking, his lips hidden from me and his crimson cuffs hanging down from his wrists. “I prefer to speak in English, if you don’t mind,” I went on. “My Italian is very good. I’ve spoken it since I was a girl. But what I have to say is so important to me, and I’ve come so far to say it to you, that I want to speak in the language that is most comfortable to me. Do you mind?”

  The priest beside Cardinal Rosario translated, but the cardinal’s eyes didn’t move from me. I could feel them, like long fingers, pointing, pressing. He made another small nod, and I sensed that the translation hadn’t been necessary at all. But when he spoke it was in Italian and in a voice that was quiet and precise, delivered from behind the folded fingers.

  “I have been asked to introduce myself,” the young priest said, in American English. “I am Father Clement, a.k.a. Francis Giordano, His Eminence’s translator and assistant. Niagara Falls, New York, born and bred.”

  I smiled at him, introduced myself in the same way, and said again how grateful I was that the cardinal had agreed to meet with me. Cardinal Rosario listened to the translation but still didn’t move his eyes from my face. I stared back at him, watching for any change of expression. Nothing. “I apologize for that delay. That happens to me sometimes, Your Eminence. It is not something I can control.”

  Father Clement translated, the cardinal kept looking at me, said nothing, blinked once, waited.

  “I’m here,” I said, and then I stopped because no words were coming. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. There was an awkward pause of probably ten seconds, and it seemed to me then that I could sense different aspects of myself—apologetic, brave, frustrated—fighting with one another for the right to speak first. “I’m here because, for the past few years I’ve been having, in my prayer life…I guess I would call them visions.” I waited for the translation. “In the visions I feel strongly that God is instructing me to become a parish priest. I’m a lifelong Catholic, from a good Catholic family. I know very well the Church’s position on women being ordained. At the same time, after speaking with two good priests at home, I’ve come to believe that it would be wrong for me to keep ignoring these messages. I’ve tried to ignore them, please believe m
e. I have suspected that they might be a trick of the Devil, that they might come from my egotism, even that they might be a sign of mental illness. But after so many conversations with those good priests and after praying about it for a long time, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a true message from God and that I have to act on it, whatever the outcome. So I’ve traveled all this way, alone, at my own expense, in the hope that the Congregation will at least consider a change in this policy.”

  Before the translation even started I saw a flicker of irritation scamper like a spider across the cardinal’s face. As I spoke, he moved his eyes over my forehead, mouth, and neck and then back to my eyes, small, deliberate movements, as if there were a numbered series of dots on my skin and he was following them to draw a picture: one, two, three, four, a demon woman appearing out of the blank page. When Father Clement finished with the Italian version of what I’d said, we sat, the three of us, in a pocket of silence. A chess game, I thought. A war. And then, in a deliberate, calm way, Cardinal Rosario brought his hands down from his mouth and set them on the table, one on top of the other. The nails were as neatly trimmed and clean as a surgeon’s. He spoke a short sentence— “Non è possibile”—which I of course understood. But, to be polite, I waited.

  “This is not possible,” Father Clement said.

  The cardinal spoke again, quietly and precisely. On his tongue the Italian language had a gentle, singsong rhythm to it and sounded nothing like the harsh dialect my father and grandmother had been fond of using with each other at home. They were Neapolitans, working people, peasant stock. This man would have had a different kind of upbringing entirely.

  “No change can be made,” Father Clement said. The cardinal added another few words. “Even,” Father Clement translated, “if you were a saint, this could not be done.”

  “I’m not a saint,” I said. “I’ve never made any claim to be anything but an ordinary woman.”

  The cardinal’s eyes lingered on me. When he spoke again it was in English, the words touched with a small accent but perfectly understandable. “Do you have the children?”

  “No, Your Eminence. I’m not married.”

  “Ah.”

  “I hope to be someday,” I said. “My dream has always been to have a family.”

  A wisp of amusement went across his eyes, quicker than the light of a fast-passing car on the curtains of a room at night. Cardinal Rosario blinked it away. “You wish to be a wife and mother and also the priest?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t wish to be a priest. I’ve never wished to be a priest. In fact, I don’t even think I’d be a very good priest. I’m too solitary in certain ways. And probably too selfish. I love my life the way it is, a quiet life. I live with my father. I can walk to our local church, which is a very beautiful church, built by Italian Americans. I like my work—I’m studying to be a nurse. I like helping people who are ill and afraid and in pain. Really the last thing I want is to be a priest.”

  “Why, then, did you come?”

  “May I ask, Your Eminence, if you were having these messages from our Lord, wouldn’t you want to act on them?”

  “I have never had those messages, daughter.”

  “But if you did, and if you became convinced that they were genuine, wouldn’t it be wrong to fail to act on them?”

  Cardinal Rosario pondered the question for a few seconds, his body very still, his eyes resting on me in a way that was cool but not unkind. “Placed against the rules set down by Christ himself,” he said, “what are such messages worth?”

  “What rules?”

  “His own choice of priests.”

  “But he had no priests then, Your Eminence.”

  “Of”—the cardinal turned to Father Clement, spoke a few words in Italian, and the priest said, “close associates.”

  “Mary Magdalene,” I said. “Martha. His own mother. Weren’t those women precious to him?”

  “All the people are precious to him.”

  “Can’t it be said that the cultural standards of his time and those of our time are different in terms of the role of women?”

  He shook his head. “The faith,” he said, and again he turned to Father Clement for a word and the young priest supplied it. “The faith is timeless.”

  “Of course, Your Eminence. But over the past twenty centuries the rules of the Church have changed, they’ve evolved according to custom and the society’s evolution.”

  “Nelle piccole cose,” the cardinal said. “In small things.”

  “But there have been many people who effected changes. The story of Saint Clare of Assisi—I was named after her…my middle name. Saint Agnes of Rome was an example of going against the mores of the time, a voice for the equality of men and women. Saint Teresa of Ávila was such a powerful figure. Saint Catherine of Siena, who returned the papacy to Rome.”

  The cardinal was nodding. For the smallest moment I thought I might actually be persuading him with my short list of historical precedents. “Have you ever,” he asked in Italian, “performed what could be considered a miracle?”

  “Not really,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You hesitated before answering.”

  “I…I’m in training to be a nurse, as I said. There have been a few times when it seemed as if I could change a patient’s condition by touching him or her.”

  “Bring the patient back to life?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure. There was one time when that might have happened, but it might have had nothing to do with me.”

  He nodded, studied me.

  “I’m not…I haven’t come here, Your Eminence, to talk about me.”

  “You very much care for the Church,” he suggested.

  “Yes, I do, Your Eminence, very much. And in my part of the world, she is dying.”

  “Ah,” he said, as if my part of the world didn’t count for much.

  “I am not a radical in any sense of that word. I’m the farthest thing from a troublemaker, you have to believe me.”

  “And yet at home, I understand,” he said, “you have caused there to be some trouble. With your monsignor.”

  My eyes shifted to Father Clement. It seemed to me that, with the mention of Monsignor Ferraponte, the young priest’s neck and face had started trembling; the heavy frames of his eyeglasses were moving in small jumps. I couldn’t tell if he was angry, embarrassed, surprised, or frustrated, but he seemed to me to be making an effort to keep the cardinal from seeing his reaction. A chess game, Father Bruno had said, but it was more like poker, and I’d proven to be terrible at poker the two or three times I’d played. In cases where there was even a small bit of deceit or secrecy involved, even for the purposes of a game, I’d always been a miserable failure. I couldn’t bluff. I didn’t know when other people were bluffing, manipulating, working a strategy.

  Once he was mentioned, though, I sat there wondering if it might have been Monsignor Ferraponte who’d actually arranged this meeting or if the monsignor and the archbishop had done it together, for their own mysterious purposes, and I’d wandered into some kind of Lamb of God trap, the consequences of which I could not even begin to imagine.

  “If I caused him to be upset,” I was able to say out of the depths of my surprise, “it was not from any malice.” The cardinal’s trimmed eyebrows lifted at the word. Father Clement explained it in two syllables of Italian. “Or any disrespect.”

  Cardinal Rosario pursed his lips. “Did your spiritual director perform the holy sacrifice in a state of mortal sin?”

  “Father Welch?” I asked. “I don’t know.”

  “Ah. But he has left the priesthood, no?”

  “I don’t know, Your Eminence. I think the archbishop intended that to happen, yes. And I think calling him my spiritual director isn’t really accurate. I simply went to Mass at his church and went to him for confession. We had some conversations, we—”

  “Perhaps he was using you to justify his own morta
l sins.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so. And I don’t know that he committed any sin.”

  “Ah. And do we judge that to ourselves, what a sin is?”

  “I believe the Lord has given us a conscience to decide such things, yes. And I believe Father Welch is a good man.”

  “Yes, daughter, He has given us a conscience, and He has also given us the rules of the Church in order to guide that conscience, in order to be sure that conscience is not confusing itself.”

  “With all respect, Your Eminence, I haven’t come here to discuss Father Welch. And I haven’t come here to get anything for myself. Becoming a priest would give me nothing in the way of material things or a better living situation, and I don’t care at all about status. I just feel that my Church is dying, and I believe that, in the depth of my prayer, Christ is asking me to help keep it alive. We’re losing good priests, fine men like Father Welch, and there are thousands and millions of good women who love God as much as you and I do and who are kept from serving their Church in the most essential way, commemorating Christ’s last night on Earth. I came here not to hurt anyone, certainly not to offend you. It’s a long way for me to come. It would have been so much easier for me to stay home, live my life, pray, go to Mass. I’ve mentioned a few historical precedents, but I’d ask you now, as a Catholic to another Catholic, one soul to another, I ask you only to consider beginning a process that could change the rules about who can serve as a parish priest and who cannot. Please believe me, Your Eminence, I don’t do this for my own ego or even my own wishes.”

  Cardinal Rosario watched me, unmoved and unmoving. Except for the ticking of a clock on the wall behind me, the room was completely silent. It seemed then, for just a second or two, that he was looking at me as if he were an ordinary man, untitled, unrobed. Some green shoot of possibility seemed to be sprouting on the table between us: speeded-up time-lapse photography of one impossible hope.