Angelina had not known what to expect of the church that had produced the video. The youth in the clip – somewhere in his mid-twenties, perhaps, cleanly kept and brimming with intensity – wore normal Italian street clothes, so at least she knew not to be expecting throngs in common robes or cultic uniforms. She’d chided herself for the thought as she and Ben had walked. Of course they wouldn’t wear such things. Ben dressed normally, and Angelina reminded herself that as utterly bizarre as it seemed to her, and as unusual as they were in Rome, charismatics were a large percentage of the Christian population worldwide, especially in America. She wasn’t exactly walking towards a cult.
She was, however, making her way towards something entirely beyond her realm of both comfort and experience. Religion was hard enough to swallow when it was simply adherence to codes of conduct and beliefs about the past that went beyond what was credible or substantiated by documentable fact. Once religion became something more . . . she wasn’t sure of the right word. Spiritual? Dynamic? Then it became something else entirely, and that ‘something’ was even harder for her to relate to in anything other than baffled, dismissive terms. The idea of God existing at all was a supreme invention of human need matched with creativity; to believe one’s self-crafted deity actually spoke to people, that his voice echoed down from heaven and whispered into their ears or bubbled up like a spring in their hearts – this was simply delusion.
A house of delusion, harbouring the deluded. That was what Angelina had decided she and Ben were walking towards.
Which made the plain, boxy, red-brick edifice before which they finally stopped something of a surprise. There was no great courtyard before it like there were with so many Catholic churches throughout the city. There was no dome, no steeple, nothing at all to mark it out as different from a warehouse or storefront. Only a neon cross lit above twin sets of glass doors, with metallic letters bolted to the brick between them spelling out ‘St Paul of the Cross’.
‘That’s it?’ she asked, eyeing up the building.
‘This is the place,’ Ben answered. He seemed to gain an inch in height as they drew closer to the entrance. ‘My spiritual home.’
Angelina cringed. Just the sort of language she expected.
Ben pulled open one of the doors and made the sign of the cross over himself, then propped open the door with his foot and beckoned her forward.
‘Are you ready to see? To truly see?’
She shot him a reprimanding look – Don’t try to sell your spiritual proselytism to me, Dr Verdyx – yet she couldn’t wholly conceal the fact that she did, in fact, want to see what was inside.
It took only a few steps for her to draw herself fully in, and realise it was nothing like any church service she’d seen before.
Angelina felt the service of charismatic prayer before she saw it. It came not as an interior, ethereal feeling, but a genuine pulsing of her senses. A drum beat filled the air, accompanied by guitar and other instruments, amplified to literally shake the flooring beneath her. For a moment she wasn’t sure whether she’d walked into a rock concert or a church, and when she rounded the subdivision of the narthex and saw hundreds of hands raised in the air, swaying and pulsing to the rhythm, she was even less sure.
She turned to Ben, seeking some sort of explanation, but found him following the example of the others, his own hands raised high and his eyes closed.
The music thumped.
Sing praises to the Lord, with all your soul!
Sing praises to the King, with all your heart!
Spiritual words, perhaps, but the tune would almost qualify as pop.
Finally Angelina grabbed one of Ben’s outstretched arms.
‘Ben,’ she tried not to yell, though the volume of the singing made it hard to do otherwise, ‘what’s going on?’
‘It’s the end of the morning Mass and praise,’ he said. ‘The last hymn. Something a little peppy to inspire people on to the day.’
Angelina’s forehead creased. She remembered the sombre hymns that were always listed as ‘Recessionals’ on the bulletins for the Masses she’d been dragged to as a schoolgirl. They’d certainly never sounded anything like this.
A few seconds later the music reached a harmonious climax and then, to Angelina’s complete shock, the whole congregation burst into cheering applause. It was only after the sustained cheering began to die down that a gentler voice, older, amplified over a sound system Angelina couldn’t see, broke through the melee.
‘The Lord is with us.’
‘And will be forever!’ the people cried back, as much a cheer as a communal response.
With that, the Mass had apparently ended. In front of them the crowd began to mill and move, gathering up handbags and hats, briefcases and babes-in-arms, and moving from the pews towards the exits. A whole sea of people swarmed past Angelina, the face of each one of them bright with radiant enthusiasm.
‘If the service is over,’ Angelina managed to say to Ben through the flurry of activity, ‘does that mean we can speak to someone in charge?’
‘There’s only one person at the head of this congregation,’ he answered. ‘He doesn’t normally speak with people after Mass, but I’ll see if he’ll make an exception. Give me a minute to have a few words.’
‘And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’ Angelina asked, suddenly feeling out of place and exposed.
‘Take a seat,’ Ben replied, motioning to a recently emptied pew. ‘You never know. The Spirit might just move you.’
Ben worked his way through the bodies, finally breaking out of the crush into an open space at the front of the sanctuary. He was sorry to have missed Mass, though it wasn’t often he was able to arrange his work schedule to allow for a late arrival at the Archives on a Wednesday morning, so not being here this morning was hardly out of the ordinary. Ben was religious about his Saturday and Sunday attendance and took part in his local stake’s morning prayers more or less daily, but being here at the tail end of a midweek Mass only served to remind him how much he wished he could be here even more often.
At the front of the room, a few volunteers were already beginning the normal motions of post-service clean-up, gathering leftover bulletins from pews and tidying the chairs that lined some of the side walls.
One was a fellow parishioner Ben recognised immediately.
‘Thomás,’ he said, walking up to the younger man, ‘I need to see Father.’
Thomás smiled at him, more than a simple friendly greeting. He looked bemused.
‘Is something funny?’ Ben asked, confused.
‘No,’ though a laugh followed the word as Thomás extended a hand and embraced Ben by the shoulder. ‘It’s just that it’s been less than twenty-four hours since I barrelled in here myself, saying just the same thing.’
His eyes were warm, energetic. He gazed into Ben’s and sensed the seriousness behind them.
‘You have someone with you?’ Thomás asked, nodding towards Angelina, sitting in a pew at the far end of the church. Ben bobbed his head in affirmation.
‘Okay,’ Thomás added. ‘Give me a minute. I’m absolutely certain Father Alberto will be willing to see you.’