26

“Fis ih ah-HAY-hee!” Joe exclaimed through a mouthful of food. With a gulp, he repeated, “This is amazing! How did I not know about this?”

I looked around the parish hall of this new church we were visiting, worrying that using too loud a tone would trigger the NOT CATHOLIC detectors and get us hauled out of the building. Joe was undaunted. He mashed a handmade tortilla stuffed with eggs and bacon into a mound of freshly prepared refried beans and stuffed it into his mouth. After he’d wiped the last molecules of food off his Styrofoam plate, he stood up to buy another one, but first he leaned down to proclaim solemnly, “I am going to come to Mass here every weekend, just so I can go to these breakfasts.”

Donald toddled after him, and I knew they’d reached the serving line when the cooks, part of a women’s group called the Guadalupanas, erupted in squeals of delight to hear Donald make his requests in the Spanish that he’d learned from Irma.

A hand touched my shoulder. “Are you new here?” a voice asked. It belonged to a woman who looked to be about fifty, with a soft, feminine face, and the kind of warm eyes so filled with compassion that they immediately gave me a sense of security. I had my right leg propped up in the chair next to me, and she took a seat in the next chair over.

When I said that this was our first visit, she asked how we found Saint William. The truth was that my blog readers had found it for me, one of their many acts of kindness after reading through my various spiritual flounderings. I didn’t want to reveal that I was one of those weird internet people, though, so I glossed over all of that and said that friends told me about it. “I just wanted to come by to welcome you,” she said, extending her hand, “My name is Janie Castillo.”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Castillo.”

“Oh, no, please call me Janie,” she said.

She didn’t need to tell me that she was the matriarch of a distinguished Mexican-American family—I’d had the pleasure of knowing many women like her over the years. My dad and his parents lived in Mexico for most of his childhood, thanks to my grandfather’s work as a refinery engineer, and to this day our family had many Mexican friends. Janie’s dignified presence was familiar, connecting me to a part of my life I hadn’t thought about in a long time.

“Are you visiting from another parish?” she asked.

Now I had to find a way to get around saying, “Until very recently I was a militant atheist who hated all things Christian and Catholic, but now I’m reading about the Catholic Church while occasionally shouting at God.” I really needed to change the subject. So I pretended I didn’t hear the question and turned it back to her. “How long have you been a member of Saint William?” I asked.

She let out a weightless laugh that sent musical notes bouncing through the air. “Oh, dear, my whole life,” she said. She explained that the parish started in 1916, when Mexican workers at the local limestone quarry met in her grandfather’s house. An Irish-American priest from Austin would come up once a month to hold Mass with the quarry workers, sleeping at Janie’s grandfather’s place before returning to town.

As she spoke, it reminded me of what I’d read of the lives of the saints. For as diverse a group of folks as the saints were, the one thing they had in common is that the people around them always remarked on their peace. To know a saint, I’d heard, was to know someone who was so in tune with God that he became a channel of supernatural love. Not necessarily through his way with words or his great deeds, but through mere presence, infused by something not of this earth. I’d always wondered what it would be like to meet someone like that. And now I was pretty sure I knew.

“Oh my, I’ve been doing too much talking,” Janie said. She leaned forward, as if conducting an interview with the most fascinating person in the world. “Now, which parish did you say you were from again?”

“Oh, I, umm,” I stammered. “I’m actually not Catholic.” I motioned to Joe, who was gesticulating wildly over in the serving line. “We’re working on that.”

She closed her eyes, as if I’d delivered amazing news. “Oh, that is just so great, Jennifer. I am so blessed to hear that.” Then she added: “Are you in RCIA?”

My blog readers had used that acronym before, but I never knew what it meant. “I’m sorry, what is RCIA?”

“Oh, of course. The Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. It’s an old, old tradition of the Church, going back to the very beginning, where people who are interested in coming into communion with the Church go through a formation process—so they know what they’re getting into.”

I’d read about the rites that potential Christians underwent in ancient times. They would meet by candlelight deep within the catacombs, using assumed names. They faced several “scrutinies” from the congregation, in part to see if anyone recognized an agent of the state who might be trying to infiltrate. It was fascinating to think that the ritual continued still today. It struck me that this Church was built for battle.

“Conversion can be so difficult,” she added. “God doesn’t want you to go through the process alone, you know.”

She pulled over a napkin and fished a pen from her purse. “Oh, I think it would be so good for you to be in our RCIA program. We’re getting a new director—just a wonderful, holy man. His name is Noe, and he’ll arrive in the fall.” She slid the napkin over to me. “This is the main church number. Do give them a call about RCIA when you’re ready.”

Joe and Donald returned with new, overflowing plates, and we all chatted for the two minutes it took Joe to finish his food. We said our goodbyes to Janie, and I hobbled to the parish hall exit, leaning on Joe to keep my balance. We paused before going outside, and I noticed a laminated poster on the wall.

“You know, I almost told Janie to sign me up for that RCIA thing right now,” I said as I crouched to process the pain that walking had triggered.

Joe grabbed my arm to help me balance. “Why didn’t you?”

I jerked my finger toward the poster. “Because of that.”

It was an illustration that showed side-by-side cross-sections of two plants in the dirt: On the left was a decaying weed, one of those raggedy dandelion plants with jagged leaves that takes over your entire yard, sucking all the resources away from other living things. On the right was a vibrant, blooming rose bush. Written along the root of the weed was the word CONTRACEPTION. The rose’s root was CHASTITY.

I hobbled closer to read the words near the top, which indicated the supposed fruits of the pro-contraception worldview: I wasn’t surprised to see that they’d put Abortion and Marital Infidelity on there. It was a stretch, but at least both of those things involve sex. But the poster also included words like Euthanasia and Lethal Experimentation. “Yeah. That’s a bit much,” Joe said.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get how this Church can have so much other stuff figured out, but then. . .” I let my words fade away. For the first time, I internalized the fact that this Church really could be guided by God in its teachings. I’d said it, I’d thought about it, but this was the first time I let the idea seep in. And it occurred to me that if it did turn out to be true, then to say that I knew better than the Church on this or any other issue was to say that I knew better than God.

“I don’t know what’s up with that,” Joe said, holding out his arm for me to lean on. “But I feel like there’s something we’re missing.”

* * *

Back at home, I was confined to bed yet again because of the leg pain. I passed the afternoon reading through another inches-high stack of printouts from the internet, this time concerning Catholic teaching on contraception.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI triggered a worldwide hissy fit when he announced in an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, or On Human Life, that the Catholic Church still did not believe in contraception. Though nobody argued about the fact that this had been a key Christian teaching from the very beginning, every other denomination had reversed its stance on the issue after public opinion changed in the early twentieth century. The last holdout, the Catholic Church, was expected to do the same. It didn’t.

In Humanae Vitae, Paul VI reaffirmed the Catholic position on that issue and went on to suggest that contraception, if it did become widely used, would be bad for marriages. Everyone laughed at such a silly idea: After all, surely it would help couples if they were free to enjoy sex without the worry of pregnancy.

The encyclical was written in 1968, just three years after Griswold v. Connecticut made contraception legal throughout the United States. At the time, the divorce rate was about 10.5 divorces for every 1,000 women. By 1970, it was 15. Five years later, it was 20. And in 1978, ten years after the Church’s predictions, the divorce rate was 23 per 1,000 women. It had more than doubled.

So when I got to the part where Pope Paul also predicted that contraception would result in bad things happening to women, it got my attention.

To the pooh-poohs of society at large, Pope Paul VI warned that contraception would lead men to disrespect women. He said that once men got used to the widespread availability of contraception, they would “forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.”

A mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.

I looked down at a stack of old magazines lying on the floor next to the bed. I picked up four and tossed them on the bed. Each positioned itself as a source of advice for the modern, empowered woman. One bore the headline:

SEXY AT 70! ONE GRANDMA’S RACY PHOTO SHOOT

I grabbed the magazine and opened it to the promised article about the “sizzling septuagenarian”. I could be sexy at seventy, too, the article assured me. There was palpable desperation underneath the author’s words as she said over and over again that sexiness does not have to end at fifty, or even sixty. She assured the reader that many men like the maturity that comes with women of an advanced age, and she informed older women that they just had to use their years of sexual experience to do things in the bedroom that would blow their partners’ minds. The author took it for granted that, for a woman, your value is directly connected to how attractive you are to men.

I looked at the cover again: A twenty-year-old girl cocked her hip seductively, her lips slightly parted, her eyes lowered at the camera. Her breasts bulged against a stretchy sequined top, which was cropped short enough to reveal a stomach like that of a fourteen-year-old boy. One of the other headlines promised in large, neon letters to enlighten readers about the top ten things that men found unattractive. Another was about how to lose weight. I scanned the covers of the other magazines: woman in a bikini, woman in a micro-mini skirt, another woman with large breasts about to flop out of her skin-tight dress. All of them had the word “sexy” or one of its synonyms somewhere on the cover, usually more than once.

I pulled up another stack of glossy rags and pushed them around my bed so that I could see all the covers at once. Something I had always wondered, but had never articulated, came to the forefront of my mind: When, exactly, did the standard of beauty become a dictate that we must all look like Stripper Barbie?

When I saw pictures of my ancestors, the women always looked beautiful, but in a way that didn’t overwhelm the senses with their physical beauty alone. The faded photographs of my grandmothers and their grandmothers showed clothing styles that left some attention for their faces, that didn’t detract from the subtleties of their expressions. The draping of the material smoothed over details so that a few extra pounds could be smoothed into graceful curves.

Now, a century and a half later, a woman could hardly consider herself truly beautiful without a tight abdomen, perky breasts, a taut posterior, wrinkle-free face, and even, to quote one of the magazines in front of me, “ultra-sexy upper arms”. Upper arms? Did our ear canals now have to be sexy, too?

This was not a standard of beauty built on respect for women. In fact, it seemed like an outlook spawned by a society that demanded that women make themselves objects for men’s pleasure. And when I considered when the standard of beauty began to change, I realized that it was right around the time that everyone started using contraception. Pope Paul VI wouldn’t have been surprised.

Half-buried in magazines, I came to the dizzying realization that the Church was not entirely wrong on this issue. I still didn’t know if it was completely correct, but I had to give it credit that it alone predicted that contraception would have unintended consequences, articulated what they would be, and had been proven right. It continued to say, as it had always said, that society urgently needed to take an honest look at whether contraception has really been a good thing for women.

These thoughts swirled in my mind all weekend, and as soon as I woke on Monday morning, I knew what I wanted to do. I snatched the napkin with Janie Castillo’s handwriting on it from my nightstand and eased my legs over the bed. I was pleased when the pain was only mild and rushed to my feet to find the phone.

Two seconds later, something grabbed my leg. It felt like a demon’s claw had reached from under the bed and attacked my calf, and was squeezing and digging into it with the intent of tearing it off. I dropped to the ground and cried out in such agony that Irma, Donald, and my mom came rushing into the room at the same time, English and Spanish and baby-talk all raining down on me at once.

My mom knelt down next to me. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure.” I pulled up the leg of my pajama pants. The calf was swollen, but there was no visible damage on the outside. Then I remembered that thing the midwife and the ER doctor had done. I stretched out my leg, leaned forward, and grabbed my big toe. They said that this was a sure test of whether or not you had a deep vein thrombosis. I pulled my foot back toward my body.

BAM! Bombs went off up and down my calf, and I craned my neck in a silent scream. It was a DVT.

“I need the phone,” I gasped.

I was able to breathe again once Irma returned with the phone, and I dialed the midwives. When I told the receptionist I had a likely DVT, she immediately shouted across the room for the owner of the birthing center to get on the phone, now. The owner, who was also a nurse practitioner and the head midwife, asked me to go over my symptoms again. I hadn’t even finished describing them when she interrupted me and told me to get to the ER immediately.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” my mom asked after I got off the phone.

“Yes,” I said. “But I need to make a call first.”

I unfolded the napkin from the crumbled ball I’d turned it into when the pain first hit, and I dialed the number into the phone. When I got an answer, I said, “Hi, my name is Jennifer Fulwiler. My husband and I need to sign up for RCIA.”