With the bus ride from the MBTA station, the trip was even longer than I’d expected. The Pastoral Center of the Archdiocese of Boston was housed in a modern, four-story, redbrick-and-glass building set in an industrial park. Except for the statue of Mary near the entrance, it resembled nothing so much as a corporate headquarters.
I entered from what seemed the back of the building, at ground level, near an enormous parking lot. I checked in at a circular desk backed by panels of light wood with a hand-disinfectant dispenser and a framed photo of the pope nearby. After waiting only a minute, I was greeted by a large woman, hair in neat cornrows, whose name I didn’t catch and who said she was Archbishop Menendez’s chief of staff. The woman was a bit kinder than the receptionist at St. Ann’s but unsmiling and formal, not a person to make small talk with. So I held my nervousness inside and followed her up a set of stairs to a small waiting area. I took a seat there, opened a magazine—Catholic Living—and immediately closed it. Said a prayer for Father Welch. For Father Alberto. For my father and my mother and Aunt Chiara and my grandmother, and myself. I needed to use the bathroom but decided to wait.
Soon Archbishop Menendez himself, dressed in plain black pants and a plain black shirt with a small square of white collar showing in front, opened the door to an office and motioned me in. He shook my hand—I was embarrassed at my sweaty palm—nodded as I introduced myself, made good eye contact, and smelled of Ivory soap. The office was bright with sunlight. There were plants on the window sills, a framed, signed photograph of the pope on one wall, a crucifix, an overloaded desk, and a set of bookshelves with titles I glanced at but couldn’t quite read. It had a very different feeling, I noticed right away, from Monsignor Ferraponte’s office, and Archbishop Menendez had a very different way about him. It gave me a burst of courage.
The archbishop led me to a leather sofa that looked new and sat opposite me in a matching leather armchair on the other side of a glass-topped coffee table. Everything except his desk was perfectly clean and orderly. There was a pitcher of ice water on a tray in front of him and two glasses. He filled them both, handed mine across, then sat back and studied me. I studied him in return and decided that, even in the black uniform, he looked more like a judge or professor than a man of the cloth. Or perhaps a surgeon, nearly old enough to retire. He had that same kind of confidence and brainy energy I’d seen in the OR, as if the winds of doubt never blew across his warm valley, as if nothing on this earth could possibly frighten or upset him.
“It’s a good grace to meet you finally,” he said after he’d inspected me and had a sip from his glass. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
“How?” I asked. I’d put on my best blue dress, and I smoothed it over the tops of my legs and saw that my hands were shaking.
The archbishop laughed but didn’t answer. He set his glass down on a coaster, sat back again, and interlaced his long fingers. I couldn’t help but compare him with my father. He was the most clean-shaven man I’d ever seen, his cheeks shining in the window sunlight and his shock of salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from his forehead in smooth strands. But the difference between them was more than texture of skin or hair color. My father was a man of the body; he loved to work with his hands, his presence in the house felt like that of a block of stone or wood that moved, slowly, solidly, from kitchen table to living room chair, from front seat of the car to the front steps or the garden. The archbishop seemed light, almost translucent, as if he might float away if a window was opened.
“Diocesan gossip,” he said at last. “The word around here is that you have a rich prayer life.”
“Word?” I said. “From who? What word?”
Another polite laugh, a smile with sparkles at its edges. “Sources never to be named. Is it true? About you having a rich prayer life, I mean?”
“I do, yes, I think so, Your Holiness.”
“Let us drop the formal titles, shall we, just for this meeting?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I could feel myself blushing. I hadn’t blushed since seventh grade, and it made me a little angry at myself. I didn’t want to have come all that way for what would surely be my only meeting with an archbishop, and suddenly go little-girl shy. “Yes, I think I do.”
“I admire that,” he said. “I envy it. One of the aspects of this job I dislike, and there are many aspects to like, is that it leaves so little time for quiet prayer. I often think of Thomas Merton at the Gethsemane monastery, placing a notice on the bulletin board, pleading with his fellow monks not to elect him abbot for just that reason. He put his prayer life first. The right thing to do.”
“He’s become a hero of mine,” I said, and I barely kept myself from telling him it was Father Welch who’d introduced me to Merton. And then I felt, guiltily, that I was turning my back on Father Welch in his moment of trouble, and I was angry at myself again.
“Yes,” the archbishop agreed, “Merton was a radical in some ways, wasn’t he, perhaps even a troublemaker. But a Catholic monk to the end and a good one, I believe.… Well”—he took a breath and kept his eyes fixed on me— “tell me why you’ve come.”
“I think,” I said, and then I stopped, completely intimidated. I tried to remind myself of the pledge I’d made, to accept what came, to emulate Christ’s courage, Mary’s surrender. I could feel Father Alberto pushing me. I clasped my hands together and said, “For a long time, my whole life, really, I’ve been having, I don’t know what to call them…spells, visions, moments, sometimes hours when I’m taken, I guess that’s the way to say it, taken in prayer. It’s been happening since I was a small girl. I had a grandmother who was very devout and I was very close to her, and then later there was a priest at St. Anthony’s; he died not so long ago, Father Alberto Ghirardelli. I’d confess to him every Saturday, and then after a while, as I grew older, the confessions turned into long conversations about these spells and other things. I was a little worried that maybe there was something wrong with me. I had friends. I had a fairly normal life, except that my mother died when I was very young, but then there was this other part of me where I’d just go off. It worried my father. He took me to see doctors when I was in the second and third grades. I even had some tests done at Mass General, which is where I hope to work one day. I’m a nurse, training to be a nurse, I just finished—”
The archbishop shifted impatiently, the tiniest of movements.
“I’m sorry. I’m rambling.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “You’re nervous, it’s fine. But tell me exactly why you wanted to meet with me. Because of these moments in prayer?”
“No, no, Archbishop. If it was just that, I never would have come here and bothered you. In fact, it wasn’t my idea to come here at all.”
“It was Andy Welch’s idea.”
“Yes, it was…and I read about him today in the paper. Just now. On the train.” I waited for the archbishop to say something then, but he only shifted his eyes out the window—sadly or angrily, I couldn’t be sure—then looked back at me. “I feel like the last year especially, I feel like God has been giving me a specific message in these times of prayer. Instructions almost. It’s very intense. Confusing to me, intense, troubling. But it feels absolutely real and clear, and one of the reasons I spent so much time talking with Father Welch was because I worried it might be something else.”
“What is the message, exactly?”
“I feel,” I said, and then I had to push hard against a big wave of fear, a hand cupping itself over my lips. “I feel very strongly that God is asking me to become a priest.”
I watched him closely then. He didn’t laugh, didn’t seem in the slightest bit surprised. I decided he must have been given advance notice by Father Welch or perhaps Monsignor Ferraponte. He watched me carefully, unsurprised, unmoved, and, as Father Welch had warned me, impossible to read.
“How?” he asked.
“Excuse me, Archbishop?”
“How,” he repeated, “exactly how are these
messages presented to you?”
“Different ways. Sometimes I see myself serving at Mass, raising the chalice, speaking the prayer of communication as the host is blessed. Or I see what seems like a photograph of myself dressed in a priest’s robes, standing at the altar or in the room where priests get ready for Mass. Or I just get a message, though most of the time it’s a message without words. I imagine it’s something like what a person feels when he has a true vocation. I’m sorry. It’s a difficult thing to explain.”
“If it were an easy thing to explain, I’d be less inclined to believe you.”
I had to blink away a small rush of tears and then a wave of embarrassment. I’d half expected him to mock me, give me a lecture on the temptations of the Devil as Monsignor Ferraponte had, even end the meeting as soon as he reasonably could. But now he seemed to be saying he believed me. “I would have come forward earlier,” I said, encouraged, “but I’m…it’s strange, Your Eminence, I’ve taken care of myself my whole life. I grew up in a fairly rough place.”
“Where was that?”
“Revere. I learned to take care of myself. I had some fistfights—I even fought a boy once, when he was tormenting a younger cousin. The word in school was not to mess with me. I’ve calmed down as I’ve grown older—”
“That’s one of the benefits of deep prayer,” he said in a joking way. “Not so many fistfights.”
I smiled. “Yes. I think so, too. But I’m not, I don’t see myself…I’m not comfortable making waves.”
“I’d be less inclined to believe you if you were.”
“And I want to say…I think Father Welch is a good man and a good priest. I’ve been attending Mass at the Paulist Center. I like it there. I’m sorry for what happened, but he’s a good man.”
“He is a good man,” the archbishop said, surprising me again.
“And he never told me about his relationship,” I said. “It’s not like he put the idea into my head for his own purposes or anything…to make it easier for him to be married and stay a priest.”
“You don’t need to apologize for what’s happened,” the archbishop said. “For yourself or for Father Welch.”
A tear leaked out of the corner of my right eye. The archbishop saw it and looked away. I swatted it with the back of one hand. “You’re sure,” he asked, and at that moment it seemed like the professionalism holding the features of his face broke apart a bit. He seemed suddenly very human, almost ordinary. “You’re sure you might not be getting the details a bit mixed up, that the imagery might not be intended to lead you somewhere else? To a life of a different kind of service in the Church? As a missionary, a nun, a deacon…and the robes and altar and so on are just the symbols of that?”
I nodded.
“How, may I ask? How do you know that?”
“It’s an interior knowing. I can’t say how, but I’m sure of it. I’ve thought about that, too, I’ve wondered about it, I even hoped that was what was happening, but it isn’t. I can’t say anything more except that I feel the presence of God behind it.”
“And what is that presence like? How does it manifest itself?”
“A feeling of being surrounded by something that’s all-knowing and totally accepting. Totally. The word ‘love’ can’t begin to describe it.”
“Does it give you peace, coming here like this?”
“Not particularly, no. The prayer does, not this. But if I didn’t try to do this, I think it would be unbearable.”
“Have you asked the Holy Spirit for guidance?”
“Many times.”
“Have you had other…instructions…from Our Lord?”
I shook my head.
“Would you be prepared to sacrifice, in the most selfless way, for this outcome?”
“I believe so, Your Eminence. I believe I already have sacrificed certain things.”
“You feel God is calling you to be—how should we say it?—the standard-bearer for this new era?”
“I don’t have a name for myself,” I said, “or for this. I don’t even have a name or a face for God anymore. I just know that I’m being asked to do something. I know it like I know that the sun is out today. I’m not an expert on the Church, but even in my lifetime I’ve seen things change. So I’m wondering, I’m hoping that maybe this might change, too.”
The archbishop lightly pinched the tip of his nose once, then a second time, the closest thing I’d seen in him to a nervous tic. He coughed into his hand, took a sip of water. “The changes you’re referring to were relatively minor things,” he said. “What you’re talking about now is major. Almost we could use the word gigantic.”
I watched him lower his eyes to the water glass and work his lips gently back and forth. When he lifted his eyes, they came to rest just to the right of my face. “I’m no expert on the legal system,” he said. “But it seems to me that in the law there are certain procedures, certain fixed rules. Of evidence, for example. Of deliberation for the jury. The fact that people stand when the judge enters, that only the lawyers are allowed to present a case, to approach the bar. Correct?”
“Yes, but I’m not—”
He held up his hand again. There was a bit of command in the gesture, the expectation of being obeyed.
“Those laws are not always sensible, but what they do—correct me if you think I’m wrong—is they allow the system—and it’s an imperfect system, as we all know—they enable it to function. They steer the procedure away from chaos. They allow things to get done.”
“But laws change all the time,” I said. “Women can be judges now, for one example. We can sue for equal treatment at work.”
“Yes, yes, and rightly so. But even that bit of progress has taken how many years? And in a system that claims, what, two centuries of tradition? Our system, that of the Holy Mother Church, claims a tradition ten times as long. Its rules seem antiquated, even insensible to some, but they exist to allow the functioning of the larger body.” The archbishop’s voice softened almost imperceptibly. In a less charming man it could have been taken as condescension. “Despite our recent problems, I know Father Welch to be a good man,” he said. “He spoke with me about you, as I’m sure you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“He did. And, at his word, I know you to be a good woman. We have, as I’m sure you can imagine, a number of people every year who come forth claiming to have received instructions from the Lord. It’s actually fairly common, and we’re trained, all of us who’ve been spiritual directors, in a kind of vetting process. Ninety-some percent of the time these so-called visions prove to be psychological fixations—caused by mental illness, stress, overwork, a craving for attention, an excess of zeal, experiences that aren’t grounded in God at all. The other ten or so percent have legitimate experiences in prayer. I had a conversation with Father Welch about you, it must have been six or eight weeks ago.”
“He never mentioned it.”
“I asked him not to. We discussed that process in your case. I believe he implemented some of my suggestions for, if you’ll forgive me, ‘testing’ the validity of your experiences. There is little question in my mind—and none in his—as to their validity. As to your interpretation of God’s will for you and for the Church, I am less sure, but we could discuss that ad infinitum to no avail. To get to the base of my feelings here, I will tell you simply that I took a vow of obedience. I obey the cardinals and the Holy Father. I respect and obey the laws of the Church, even when I question them interiorly. Am I speaking too indirectly?”
“No, Archbishop. But there have always been priests and archbishops and even popes who challenged the prevailing attitudes. Who broke new territory. John XXIII is the best modern example, but there are dozens of others in Church history. Catherine of Siena, Francis of Assisi, Brigid of Ireland—”
The archbishop smiled and turned his glass a quarter turn without lifting it. “Extremely rare examples. And, in the latter case, not even completely reliable.”
/> “I know that, but if I can be blunt, Archbishop, you could risk your standing, your position, and come out publicly in favor of the idea of letting women be ordained. It would be good for the Church, in my opinion. And it would go a long way toward furthering my ‘case,’ if we can call it that.”
“I disagree. It would go a long way toward ruining your case.”
“How?” I asked. I sensed the shadow of fear in him then, as though he worried what the more extreme elements of the diocese might do to him if, like Father Alberto, he dared to raise his voice.
“I’d be set upon by the forces of the Church bureaucracy and the American media. You can see the latter at work on today’s news. You can see what they’re making of the Father Welch situation—a circus. I would become the next story of the month, the next animal act. Just as Father Welch is—and we speak in confidence here, I trust.”
“We do. But didn’t your office issue the order that he could no longer say Mass?”
“There was, under the circumstances, no option.”
“You could have refused to do that or resigned in protest.”
“True,” he said, and when he paused I sensed his fear again. “In fact, I meditated on that. On my knees, in fact, for the better part of last night. I came to the conclusion that it would accomplish nothing and would erode or end whatever small amount of good I feel I am able to do from this office.”
“But isn’t that…forgive the comparison, but isn’t that the way, in history, all kinds of people justified their own behavior to themselves? ‘If I speak up, I’ll get fired. And it won’t do any good in any case.’ So the dictator tells them to eliminate or arrest or torture someone, and they do it. Isn’t that what Pontius Pilate did?”
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