Gospel (45 page)

“I see the spirit of denial has not abated,” noted O'Hanrahan.

“If I drank a whole glass, I'd fall asleep, which I don't want to do because this town is so marvelous. I went up to Santa Chiara this morning.”

“Did you see the veiled nuns?”

“Yes,” said Lucy taking a sip of the
rosato.
“Clare's incorrupt body was there, dark and shriveled up. So I thought of you.”

(St. Clare was less of a wimp than her pamphlet biographies of timid obedience would have one believe. When the indefatigable Frederick Barbarossa marched on Assisi, St. Clare placed the consecrated host in a monstrance and marched to the highest point of the city walls. The sight of her there, sickly, held up by her fellow sisters, against the wind, imbued with a power not of this world, caused Frederick uncharacteristically to retreat. Unarmed Assisi was spared.)

“There's so much legend,” said Lucy, thinking back on her sightseeing. “My guidebook said the famous stigmata of Francis never existed.
He
saw them, but they weren't present on his body. That's the most famous thing about Francis and it isn't even true.”

“Same with St. Catherine of Siena,” said O'Hanrahan, tearing at the bread. “Only she could see her stigmata as well. And her wedding ring.” The professor fixed Lucy with a gleam in his eye.

Should she ask?

(You'll just be putting off the inevitable if you don't.)

Their pasta arrived and Lucy decided to risk a repeat of yesterday's unappetizing lecture. “Catherine's wedding ring?”

O'Hanrahan held forth: St. Catherine of Siena, who practiced the 14th-Century arts of masochism and self-flagellation, the first famous anorexic and bulimic, who would punish herself by throwing up whatever she had eaten, who gave new resonance to the phrase “eat dirt,” because she did, was happy to share her mystical visions, which involved a marriage with Christ, the Virgin giving away her son with her blessing, and Christ walking down the heavenly steps to embrace her amid her raptures and ecstasies. As a sign of their union, Christ placed on her finger his discarded circumcised foreskin as a wedding ring.

Lucy slowed in her eating of the
ditali
in cream sauce. “You're doing it to me again, aren't you?”

“Now later in life, Sister Lucy, this ring that only she could see, as part of her divine humiliation, changed its aspect and she was blinded by its brilliance when she looked at her hand, so laden with the jewels of Heaven it was, so dazzling was Christ's ruby-encrusted, diamond-studded foreskin.”

“This woman was made a
saint
?”

“Funny thing,” said O'Hanrahan, enjoying his pasta, “one generation's crackpot, burned at the stake, becomes the next generation's saint. Trot out the foreskin story in Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 1600s and see where it'd get you. St. Anthony fed the consecrated host to a mule, to show how even the animals desire the eucharist while humans are lazy and don't go to church. The Church has killed thousands of Jews for lesser imagined profanations.”

“Well, let's not talk about Divine Body Parts, if we could—”

“You mean, like The Holy Placenta?”

Lucy called his bluff. “No way.”

“Yes indeed, there was a Holy Placenta relic and a Holy Umbilical Cord relic, both in the treasury of St. John Lateran in Charlemagne's time. One imagines if merely touching the hem of Christ's garment could get one healed, that there was a path beaten to the placenta. Ancient peoples and Mediterranean alike commonly eat the placenta as sort of a folk ritual. Maybe the placenta in the Lateran was a fake, and the real one was cooked up by Mary and Joseph. A little salt, a little garlic…”

Lucy chewed resolutely. “Would there have been a placenta in a Divine Birth by a woman who was immaculately conceived?”

“These are the types of questions—like whether Christ had a navel—that obsessed the medieval Church. You see icons and portrayals of the Crucifixion with and without navels, depending on the disposition of the artist toward Christ's humanity. More curious would be Mary's physiology.” O'Hanrahan tore at the heel of the bread loaf. “Do you suppose a clitoris was provided for her?”

Lucy nearly spewed the wine across the table. “Sorry,” she stammered.

“If she was conceived without sin and is held by the Greeks to be the
Theotokos
and the Catholic Church to be this half-holy, perfection-bearing vessel, one has to wonder if she had the capacity for such sinful stimulation.”

“One does
not
have to wonder,” said Lucy, who had found her voice. “Listening to you is enough to make you wanna turn Protestant.”

“Curious you should say that in Assisi. St. Francis
was
the first Protestant, preaching fidelity to the gospels over Church tradition. Within a few generations, radical Franciscans were being burned at the stake for exhorting poverty to the pope. One of my favorite bits of Vatican-think was John XXII's 14th-Century
Quia vir reprobus.
”

(A sterling defense of papal materialism, which insisted Christ approved of his apostles owning possessions. John decided that God gave Paradise to Adam and Eve as
property,
an investment, real estate that they were to own.)

“The papacy merely wished to return man to that prelapsarian state…”

“Whoo boy,” said Lucy. O'Hanrahan poured himself another glass and Lucy allowed him to provide her with another half-glass while Lucy did some inner calculations: “You mean to tell me,” she asked, “that there are no Pope Johns from the time of Avignon until the John XXIII who was pope when I was growing up?”

(Our beloved John XXIII, the briefly reigning pope of the 1960s, was a big St. John fan and he tried to rehabilitate the name, the most numerous of the papal nomenclatures, but also one of the most tainted. If he had lived longer Our John might have rehabilitated Catholicism.)

“John was an unlucky name,” said O'Hanrahan, recollecting. John I went to Byzantium in 526 and got such a lavish reception that it made King Theodoric of Italy jealous—the pope was consequently imprisoned until his death. John III was chased out of Rome by the Lombards; John VIII is the first pope to be assassinated—first poisoned unsuccessfully, then clubbed to death. John XII turned the Lateran into a brothel with an oriental harem, surrounding himself with courtesans and virgins to defile. Several synods convened to depose him, but they needn't have bothered because his sexual appetites destroyed his health, and while performing in the papal bed with a married woman he suffered a stroke … at twenty-seven.

“Good going,” said Lucy, impressed.

O'Hanrahan's list continued. “John XIV was deposed by a pretender to the throne, flung into prison, and allowed to starve to death. One Pope John, you'll be interested to know, was a woman.”

Lucy was skeptical.

“Look in Siena Cathedral,” he suggested. “Amid the gilt and barbershop stripes of this temple of Ghibelline excess, is a statue of every pope up to the present time. There is among them a bust of a woman. Reformers like Hus and Luther and Calvin were familiar with Pope Joan and used it in their tirades against Rome's corruption. And Rome never denied it.”

(Here's what happened: under all the robes, a young woman of great learning and piety was able to fool her fellow cardinals all the way to the papacy in the 800s. For two years she ruled, beloved by the people, only to be discovered as a woman when she gave birth during a public procession … the poor thing was so otherworldly that she wasn't aware of the mechanics of sex and was taken advantage of by an unscrupulous priest. At times, Pope Joan truly forgot she was a woman. But she is with Us now where there is no man and woman.)

“And to this day, papal parades avoid the old route between the Colosseum and San Clemente,” O'Hanrahan concluded. “Where she dropped the kid.”

“Cool,” said Lucy, approving of an equal-opportunity papacy.

“John XVI,” related O'Hanrahan with savor, “ran afoul of the Holy Roman Emperor's wrath and had his eyes put out, his tongue pulled out, his nose cut off, his lips torn off, his hands mutilated, and then he was put backward on a mule and paraded through the city where refuse and dung were hurled at him by the populace, always ready for a show. Then he was left to rot in a monastery. He lived on for years.”

“I think we've had enough of Pope Johns, thank you,” said Lucy.

“The ceiling fell in on John XXI.”

“I don't care.”

Soon, Lucy and the professor found themselves alone in the
trattoria
and they took the hint to leave from Mama, who emerged to gather crumb-covered tablecloths and sweep up, impatient but not one to overtly rush the
religiosi.
They paid the bill and stood outside for a moment and declared their afternoon activities:

“I'm going back to the monastery to look at the scroll,” said O'Hanrahan. “It's a waste of time, but I thought I'd skim the library here and see if anything on Matthias or proto-Oxyrhynchene turns up.”

“That term sounds familiar. Oxy…”

O'Hanrahan could live happily never saying the damn word again. “Oxyrhynchus was a Roman city in Egypt and the African-influenced dialect of early Coptic writings is Oxyrhynchene.”

“Sounds like an acne medicine.” Then Lucy's face changed. “I
don't
believe it.”

“What?” O'Hanrahan turned to see a beaming, waving figure approach. “That's uh, the guy from yesterday—”

“Farley,” she said blankly.

“He likes you, Sister Lucy. I saw him stealing glances at the market. We'll be leaving Assisi soon, so you don't have much time. Gotta work fast if you want the big date.”

Farley approached them and smiled, then wondered if he'd made a mistake because of Lucy's nun's habit. “Hi, Lucy, remember me?”

Lucy, slightly blushing, managed, “Hi, Farley.”

“Man alive, you really
are
Catholic, aren't you?”

“What brings you to Assisi?” said Lucy, wishing the professor wasn't hulking there smiling at them both.

“Well, I was gonna go straight on to Rome, but you said Assisi'uz worth seeing, so here I am.”

“What a coincidence,” said O'Hanrahan, putting a fatherly hand on Farley's shoulder. “We'll be in Rome next, for a week or so. You'll have to drop in and see us. That is, when Sister Lucy isn't doing her special assignment for the pope.”

“Sister Lucy?” said Farley, crestfallen. “Oh, hello to you too, sir. I didn't recognize you in your monk outfit.”

O'Hanrahan went into his now-familiar hyper-Irish parish priest: “Ah, Lucy darlin', I must be off to mass and have a wee tipple with the bishop. Bless you, Sister.” He made several signs of the cross over an unamused Lucy, then over Farley too. “And bless ye too, my lad.
Virgo virginum praeclara, mihi iam non sis amara.
Don't forget, Sister, confession at nine tonight. My room!”

And then O'Hanrahan headed downhill to the main square, leaving Farley perplexed, but more or less confirmed in his vision of Catholic mumbo-jumbo anyway.

“Pay no attention to Father O'Hanrahan,” said Lucy, striking an air of beatitude.

“I didn't know you were, like, a nun.”

“I may retire soon.”

“You can do that?”

“With the pope's permission,” she said, vaguely annoyed with herself for playing these games with her rustic acquaintance. Today Farley's fashion sense was down a notch in jeans and a T-shirt, a John Deere farmer's cap to shield him from the sun. But the kind of looks that grow on you, thought Lucy.

“My daddy says the pope isn't any more special'n anybody else and his being a big deal ain't really the work of Jesus.”

“A lot of Franciscans at the moment would agree with you, Farley,” she said, now looking for some escape. “Are you traveling by yourself?”

“Oh, no. I'm over here with some people from my school, my Bible College I was telling you about, back in Louisiana? We're gonna do Rome, Nazareth, Jerusalem.”

“Right,” said Lucy, stopping at the entrance to a small church. The sign in front announced San Francesco Piccolino. “I think I have to say my rosary now, Farley.” Poor kid, she thought, he was really disappointed they couldn't be friends. Okay, he is not the end of the world, cute in his own Southern right-out-of-the-barn way, but you can do a lot better than this, your track record notwithstanding—

“Can I watch you doing it?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your rosary. I'm sort of curious. Do you pray to the Virgin Mary?”

Lucy crossed her arms. “You could, I guess. Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit whom I prefer, and the saints. Pray to any or all, mix and match.”

Farley wasn't convinced, shook his head. “I don't think you're supposed to pray to people like St. Francis.”

“John Calvin, the most radical Protestant reformer and enemy of the Catholic Church, held Perseverance of the Saints to be doctrine, Farley.
First Corinthians
6:2,
Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?
”

Farley smiled widely. “Wow, you know your Bible, Lucy! Uh, Sister Lucy.”

“But I agree the saint business
is
out of hand in a country like Italy. Close to idolatry.”

“Yep,” said Farley, not out of conversation ploys; he commenced a series of questions, with no sign of imminent depletion.

“What about you, Farley?” Lucy asked, hoping for a pause in her Catholic
summa theologica.

She learned he was named after the TV preacher Farley Bullins, his brother was named Billy Graham for his first two names, his sister was named Katherine Kuhlman, and she just had a baby who was going to have the full name Jimmy Swaggart Jones but that was out now since Mr. Swaggart's lapse, but then Swaggart wasn't a very nice middle name anyway, huh? Louisiana is as hot as Italy but it was worse in Louisiana because it was more humid. Sometimes, over in Gulfport where his family goes on vacations, it gets so humid you can't go out of your motel room—