4

The Vatican Museum

I bet Simon thinks the Vatican is a secret den of evil world controllers, Sarah thought as she poured hot water over coffee grounds while staring absentmindedly out the window at the cool, moist garden below. She loved the view from her apartment into the high-walled garden with a rococo marble fountain in the center. A smiling lion spouted water that flowed into a waterfall cascading into the large fountain bowl.

Sarah lived at 9 Via Ovidio near the Vatican in a small apartment owned by a friend of her father. As a visiting scholar, she spent many hours in the Vatican Library, a comfortable and stimulating place to read, with the sources she required, the prodigious background material on the early Church, close at hand. Yet what she loved the most were her thoughtful mornings at home.

Her kitchen was a little shoebox. To save counter space, her French press was on a wide stone ledge in front of a deep window casement where she contemplated her garden in the morning. The fine Renaissance house, now divided up into twelve small and very elegant apartments, was her first apartment since leaving her childhood home. The parlor had a single bed set in an alcove, leaving just enough space for a desk and a cozy chair. Deep window ledges built of thick-cut stone greatly expanded the room. The window seat at the end of her parlor had thick leaded-glass windows with circles pocked by blurry bubbles of trapped air. The original and elegant floors of checkered six-inch black-and-white marble squares were bordered by lacy gold filigree. According to the small cloisonné plaque on the door, her room was the bedroom of a very special daughter, Luciana Amelia—1583–1606 AD.

Coffee cup in hand, Sarah pulled in the tall window casements and leaned out to the flower garden below. Her hair fell around her neck and over the soft stone ledge. I am like Rapunzel leaning out of my tower window, imprisoned by my father to keep my lover away. She smiled at the strange thought.

Pulling back inside, she closed one of the leaded windows and snuggled down in the plush, emerald green velvet cushion of the window seat. Taking a deep draw on the warm liquid, she pushed Simon’s number on her cell phone. It was Saturday, and after a week of heavy reading she thought it would be fun to meet in the nearby Piazza San Pietro. Tapping idly on her cup, she listened to the phone ringing and ringing. Funny. He always answered right away. Where could he be?

Just as she finally hung up, the morning sun broke over the corner of a garden wall in a flash of clear light that illuminated the thick window glass. Sarah sat up in anticipation of her favorite time of the day. Sunlight struck the outside surfaces of the ancient bubbles as each one transformed into a convex lens that reflected miniature images of the garden below. With intensified light, color spectrums illuminated the bubbles, clarifying the reversed images of the garden. Like holograms of floating worlds, for a moment her window was a kaleidoscope of tiny flower gardens.

Today, however, Sarah couldn’t quite enjoy the beauty before her. Where was Simon? Did he really sleep with other women the way he said he would? He’s so attractive and charming, he must. I wonder what it would be like if I . . .

Hugging her knees and sipping more coffee, she opened the other window to let in more of the aromas wafting up from the flower garden. Am I crazy to insist he just be a friend? Sarah sighed. Maybe it was time to move past the rules of her father. Sometimes she wondered just what century she was living in.

Sarah’s window seat

The ringing cell phone woke Simon, who was wrapped in the embroidered covers of a giant four-poster bed. Slowly and carefully, he reached for the phone and turned it off, hoping not to wake the woman beside him. He slid back down into the cool ivory silk sheets and listened. She was breathing softly, still asleep, her black hair cascading over her pillow. He exhaled slowly, glad for the time to think.

Last night’s long dinner with Claudia had ended perfectly—exciting perfume, the aftereffects of expensive Chianti, and wild sex with no resistance. Claudia was one of several women he dated when he had time, a woman who always had fun and kept it light. She ran a successful boutique specializing in expensive shoes and bags. She was as beautiful as any Roman woman, gorgeous, in fact, and she liked to talk about the things that interested him. Last night, they had had a salacious conversation about scandals in the Church, the hot topic these days all over Rome.

He’d dated her on and off for a few years, but last night something had been different. When they came back to her apartment to make love, it had been great at first. Yet in the middle of their lovemaking Simon had realized he felt like an efficient machine. Claudia had seemed to be excited and satisfied, but he felt like he wasn’t really with her. Her constant laughter irritated him. Even now, he felt as though somehow a part of him wasn’t there.

He slipped quietly out of Claudia’s enveloping bower, tiptoed noiselessly across the thick carpet, and crept into the kitchen to brew coffee. He wanted to leave, yet that was not how he usually behaved. Still, Claudia knew where to reach him, so after he finished his coffee and she still showed no signs of waking, he decided to go.

God, at least I’m not horny for a change, he was thinking when he closed the door. Spending lots of time with Sarah when the rules were “No Touch” had really screwed up his energy balance and his ability to think straight. Not a good thing, in light of the article he was writing about Vatican connections to the sexual abuse scandals in the Boston Archdiocese. I wonder what old daddy Adamson will think when my story appears in the Times next week. I wonder what he’ll think about celibacy when he reads what I have to say about what went on in the Boston rectories?

Simon returned Sarah’s call as soon as he got home, and he and Sarah arranged to meet later that morning outside the Vatican. As he approached, he saw Sarah standing in front of the obelisk in the middle of St. Peter’s Square. Oddly, he felt like he was seeing her in a dream. It was early May, just getting hot, and she wore a blue paisley skirt and a thin white camisole, her wavy hair flowing over her shoulders.

She’s like the goddess Athena visiting from another world.

Simon was suddenly so grateful for his night with Claudia. Otherwise he’d break all the rules today. After all, it had been two months. How much could a guy take?

Feeling very much in control of his feelings and his body, Simon came up behind her and put his right hand lightly on her bare shoulder. Sarah felt a jolt of electricity and shivered as her nipples hardened. She turned to face him, searching his dark eyes. Desire and curiosity lurked in her own green eyes. Can she guess where I was last night? Does she know?

She swallowed and turned toward the obelisk they’d come to see. He could see from the rise and fall of her chest that her breathing had accelerated.

“Another Egyptian obelisk,” she said. “This one is not incised, which is unusual.” As always, returning to the world of the mind had calmed her, and she was now more in control of her body’s responses. “It’s as if the pope who set it up chose to avoid having the beliefs of the Church compared to Egyptian symbols.”

They decided to go the Vatican Museum to see if they could find more information about the obelisks. As they wandered through the Egyptian rooms, Sarah reached for Simon’s bare arm below the sleeve of his seersucker shirt; his skin warmed to her tentative touch. They stood in front of a large seated statue of Sekhmet, the famous lion goddess who towered imperiously above them and the surrounding crowd. Simon glanced sideways and noticed Sarah’s slender body becoming rigid as she faced the great royal lioness. Her eyebrows furrowed as if she disapproved of something.

“Look around this big room,” she said. “There must be a dozen or more of these huge seated and standing statues of Sekhmet! Like the obelisks, there are more here in Rome than in Egypt! When I was on a tour of Karnak a few years ago, I paid a guide to spend some time in the temple with the only Sekhmet left in her original temple. She is the principle of chaos, the goddess who rages and causes destruction when people sin against the gods, the goddess of cataclysm and disorder. She watches when evil enters the world. Her seated statues protected the dynasties, the power of royalty. Now the Vatican uses them as devices to ground and protect their global power base; but, Sekhmet is pagan!”

Simon had been working on his article about priestly sexual abuse in America for weeks now, and he was on edge and low on sleep. He blurted, “As I stand in front of the great lion goddess, she’s being used to cover up misogyny, the virulent hatred of women in the male hierarchy. I’ve spent the last few weeks reading the reports on what really went on in the Boston Diocese since the 1980s. The ugly reports of abuse inflicted on young children, mostly boys, turn my stomach. It’s an unstoppable nightmare that got bigger and bigger and went out of control. Sekhmet rages right here in the Vatican!” Before Sarah could respond, a sea of tourists flowed around them.

The subject didn’t come up again until dinner. As they sat in a very private cubicle at Giovanni’s Wine Cave near Sarah’s apartment, she realized Simon was really upset.

As soon as the waiter poured their wine and left the table, Simon began ranting. “It’s just so abnormal for anybody to abuse bodies that way, to entrap and torture little boys like squashing bugs on the floor. I’m sorry; my brain is still flashing with all the graphic reports I’ve had to read. As horrible as they are, I think everybody should read them. When you really look at it, such systematic and continual abuse has to go right to the top.”

“Do you think the pope knew what was going on and didn’t do anything? Is that really possible?” Sarah pictured her father’s pudgy, trusting Irish face in her mind as she spoke.

Simon set his wine glass down on the table with a firm clink. “Sarah, he had to know. Look at how the Church is structured. It’s a pyramid with all the power in the capstone—the cardinals and the curia with the pope at the tip. Nothing happens in the lower levels of the hierarchy without the knowledge of the top.” Simon could tell his words were upsetting to Sarah by the way she sipped her wine more quickly than usual. As she reached for the bread, he placed his hand over hers. “Look, Sarah, I watched Benedict’s career when he was Cardinal Ratzinger in charge of the office that used to be called the Inquisition. He knew exactly what was going on. They elected him as the pope just because he knew! He was supposed to orchestrate the cover-up, but he botched it. He could be counted on to protect the guilty ones in the hierarchy, since he had so much to lose if he got caught. This agenda possesses the whole Church. Apostolic succession from Christ is baloney; it was invented to funnel the power falsely claimed by Peter through all subsequent popes.”

As a lifelong Catholic, Sarah was more than familiar with the hierarchy he described, but hearing Simon put it all together to point out the pope’s complicity in the abuse scandals was profoundly upsetting. She took a deep breath. “In Boston our whole family watched in horror as the truth came out piece by piece. I knew a few priests who were exposed, and I knew several families that had children who were abused. Looking back, I can now guess why some of the kids I was in parochial school with acted like zombies. My father and probably everybody else in Opus Dei has been giving the Church gobs of money to help pay for the lawsuits. It is just so painful, so sad. Sometimes even I can’t believe these stories are true even though I know they are. A lot of Catholics I’ve known for years refuse to admit it or even think about it. It is the ultimate taboo, a terrible time to be a Catholic and hold our faith. Maybe I’ve been drawn to study the early Church to retain my faith.

Suddenly, she looked up. “You know, Marcion warned that the angry, avenging god Yahweh would pollute Christianity if the Hebrew Bible was retained and the new religion of love and compassion couldn’t take root. The sexual corruption in the Church could be exactly the kind of thing Marcion warned about. The early Jews struggled to end child sacrifice, and now children are sacrificed sexually!”

Sarah’s green eyes were filled with pain as she sought his, but Simon was someplace else, his inner mind flashing with last night’s smooth white thighs, rippling breasts, soft fingers, and luscious lips. He realized the night had been tainted by his long days poring over the disgusting reports and he wondered if evil was an eruptive force.

He looked down at his plate and said in a strained voice, “I’m going to say something to you I never thought I’d say. Considering the work I’m doing right now, I’m grateful you want our relationship to be platonic, to be pure.”

Inside his strong cynical side noted, Boy, this is the best one-line come on I’ve come up with yet! Here I am with the most gorgeous and sweet woman I’ve ever known; Claudia is nothing compared to her. How could I have fallen down into a sex pit last night just when I’m reaching so high, just when I want to be more?

She reached across the table to touch his arm. “It is really special that you say that. Sometimes I feel like I’m a weirdo. Your respect for me makes me feel what’s happening between us really matters. I have to face what’s going on in the Church and stop being Daddy’s daughter. I’ve really only been out of my home for half a year. All the rest of my life I was in dorms or at home. I can’t just toss everything I’ve believed while growing up. I still don’t feel free. I feel like Ariadne trying to find her path out of the Cretan labyrinth, except my labyrinth is the Roman Catholic Church. I’m following a thread through the dark that I hope leads to light. The Marcionites believed sex was created by the demiurge, a limited god who was so potent and dangerous that they believed they needed to be celibate to avoid being controlled by him! Considering what’s been going on in the Church, maybe the Marcionites were right? What else explains a world where dragons consume infants? Abusers pollute the Church’s altars like the Canaanite rituals stained the early religion of the Jews.”

Simon was impressed by Sarah’s ability to face the truth about her religion so quickly. “Forgive me, Sarah, if I go too far, since I am not quite myself today. Some anti-Catholics say Christ created the Communion to supplant the blood sacrifices being practiced in his time. Maybe the Mass was invented to lift people out of blood lust. With time, however, I think the constant repetition of Mass in churches all over the world has built up a tremendous sacrificial force, an evil power that perverts good men into torturing children. This must seem like blasphemy to you, but the abuse reports stir up these kinds of thoughts because it’s impossible to comprehend what people do. What goes on is even worse than you know. Often boys were seduced by priests approaching them with words of pious Christian love that the boys couldn’t protest against. Handicapped and deaf children were used; orphans were fair game.”

“As for blasphemy,” she interjected, “the more I study the Gnostics and Marcion, the more I have similar thoughts, ideas that would have angered and offended me a few years ago. The Gnostics believed sex was the easiest way for good people to be invaded by evil, something that certainly seems to have happened to the priests who have done these terrible things. I’ve also wondered whether the Mass serves evil as well as good forces, since the Mass is the central ritual of a power-based global religion. When I’ve taken Communion, I’ve felt many levels going on. For example, what goes on if I take Communion from a priest who just raped the boy who is serving the altar?

“I still go to Mass when I’m home in Boston, but not here in Rome where the man at the top is so close; he looks and feels evil to me, almost reptilian.” Her eyes widened. “But if you ever meet my father, be sure you don’t mention any of this to him!”

“Don’t worry about it, Sarah,” Simon said with a teasing grin. “I’m afraid you have something bigger to worry about. What is your father going to think about Simon Isaac Appel’s article about the Boston Diocese in the New York Times next week? And, by the way, I won’t be able to see you for a week because I have a nasty deadline to meet.”

And I won’t be seeing Claudia either, he noted as he walked Sarah home with his arm resting happily on her shoulder. It is over.