June 21 – Dear Jesus, I just have a little something to say. I never learn anything when I am spanked into it. And I’m getting too big to be spanked, even if there was a fire. Everybody had their panties in a bunch over the screaming, but that’s what saved us. Someone called the fire department when we first started screaming. When am I going to improve in others’ eyes? Mother says I’m bossy; Clara says I’m selfish; Daddy says I act too much. Please help me to be perfect and pleasing to you, as well as to others. We were just trying to announce that it’s almost Pope time!
We had a Papam, alright, but it wasn’t the Papam we wanted. It was a disaster, a complete, unmitigated disaster, for me and for the Shea family, formerly the church darlings. It went like this: it was a Friday morning, June 21st, and the church was full to brimming. Everyone was there to pray for the election of our pet Cardinal, Francesco Stefanucci. The conclave had been voting for two days, and they already had six ballots.
Monsignor Boyle said Mass. His sermon was predictable: if it’s God’s will, then Cardinal Stefanucci will become Pope. Otherwise, we have to look in our hearts and continue with the work of the Lord. Now that it was down to the wire, I could see both scenarios. The winning: we’d have continued super-star status in the parish, the Pope would be the first Pope to visit Pasadena, and we’d be in all the Catholic newspapers and magazines. We could milk it for years.
But if he lost? Shame to the bones. Humiliating beyond the beyonds. We’d be shunted off to the corners again. The Feeneys would still reign as Best Catholic Family, and Martin Feeney would win the Christmas stamps contest, like he had the past four years. We would still live in the same tumbledown house, which was unbearably messy all the time. Sure, our dad had retired and he didn’t wear Navy uniforms around anymore, but we’d still be forbidden to do all sorts of normal things and I’d have to keep cleaning both bathrooms every Saturday, whether I liked it or not. On top of it all, there would always be the enduring memory of our family’s failed attempt at stardom lurking in the back of everybody’s minds. Whenever they saw any one of us on the playground, or at Mass, the thought would be there. Who did we think we were to dare such glory?
When I thought that Monsignor couldn’t possibly drag out his sermon any more, Father Pierre genuflected onto the altar and climbed up the steps into the sermon booth. Monsignor Boyle turned around to face him. A buzzing rose up from the congregation. I started to blush, even though nothing had happened. Monsignor Boyle held his hand over the microphone until it squeaked and we had to hold our ears. When he turned back to us, he was nodding. As Father Pierre descended the pulpit, Monsignor Boyle spoke, his voice booming through the microphone.
The magnificent expanse of the Roman marble columns stretching the length of the church on either side framed the hopeful faces of the congregation. The dome above our heads seemed to stretch to the heavens, contributing to the picture of our insignificance.
“Habemus Papam!” he said, but no one exhaled. All faces hung onto the silence. I heard Daddy clearing his throat. My eyes fastened on the marble star on the floor in between the pews.
“God’s will be done,” said the familiar Irish brogue of Monsignor Boyle. I looked up as he paused again, his eyes lighting here and there as he made eye contact with the parishioners. He locked his gaze onto Daddy. I could almost make out a staring path in the air between them.
“Giovanni Battista Montini,” he said slowly and clearly, as if we needed to hear it spelled out, “the Archbishop of Milan, is the new Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He is to be known as Pope Paul the VI.” There was a loud, collective, “Aaaaahhh!” from the congregation and an immediate buzz of voices all whispering together. I felt dizzy. My chest heaved up and down as I gasped for air. My ears were ringing. And then someone right behind me started clapping. What? Clapping? Everyone in the church followed, all the parishioners and nuns and altar boys, who took the time to come to church that day. A huge ovation. I couldn’t help myself; I started to cry. Real tears came down my cheeks as fast as I wiped them from my face.
“Too bad,” someone whispered a little too loudly, “it wasn’t meant to be.” The voice had a twinge of self-righteousness in it and was coming from just behind me in the pew. I looked over my shoulder. Teresa Feeney! She must have been hoping and praying against Father Stefanucci just as hard as we had been praying for him. Teresa Feeney’s prayers worked!
I had to sit through the rest of the Mass in the front row with Teresa’s gaze boring into my skull—the most humiliating twenty minutes of my life. I thought about the black smoke from the burning ballots, maybe God noticed that. Then there were the lies I told to the class, to Monsignor Boyle, and to the rest of my girlfriends. I wish I could take it all back and clear off my soul once and for all, but to confess it would double my shame. God knew I didn’t really want to become a nun. Maybe He wanted to teach me a lesson.
How could I have believed with all my heart that my fervent wishes would reach the heavens? And be granted? How could we have thought that our unruly and socially inept family deserved any kind of special treatment in this world? Even if Father Stefanucci had been elected Pope, we would never learn to get to church on time, our shoes would always be scuffed, our lunch bags would still be stocked with one peanut butter and jelly sandwich wrapped in wax paper everyday, maybe an apple, and very rarely, two Oreo cookies. We sucked back our food in 30 seconds after we all said grace at supper like a barnyard of turkeys, because if we weren’t fast enough, someone else would get there first. John-the-Blimp would always be the undisputed King of Burps, cassock or no cassock. The twins would move through our lives as The Darlings, the decoys, the two who always attracted the focus, no matter what else was going on. There was no reining us in or teaching us manners or getting us to clean up after ourselves. Maybe it was just too much of a reach, even for God. Maybe we really were unworthy. We were descendants of Adam and Eve, born with original sin. Why should I be surprised? We were stained, damaged goods from the get-go. What was the point of it all?
How could Teresa Feeney look so cool, be so neat, know what to say? How could she be from a family as big as ours and so smart in school but without the mandatory nerd personality to go with it? Our Paul, supposedly brilliant in math and science, wore white shirts that were almost transparent (you could see his right nipple), short sleeves that showed off his bony elbows, white plastic pen holders in his breast pocket with blue ballpoint ink stains everywhere. He smeared his giant boogers on the hallway wall like he was proud of them. Worse than that was, they stayed there for a whole week—nobody noticed them, or if they noticed them, weren’t significantly disgusted to do anything about them. I finally had to clean them off. How could our whole family be so oblivious to common decency?
The very moment Monsignor Boyle said, Habemus Papam, our destiny shifted. We had to finally face it, own up to our origins. Accept ourselves as individuals in the family to which we were born and make the best of it. As parishioners, the seas no longer parted for us as we trailed into Sunday Mass, tardy again. We went back to being an annoying aberration of a Catholic family, distastefully big, living the letter of the law, tolerated but not loved—perhaps an entertaining spectacle (like a circus act) but not an envied one. Monsignor Boyle stretched out our humiliation by giving sermons on every aspect of the new Pope for the next month at Sunday Mass but even the importance of this began to fade.
We had been dazzled by the promise of being chosen and elevated to the heavens, but with Cardinal Stefanucci’s defeat, our wings melted and our eyes opened to the sprawling and unbearable fullness of our own lives.
That moment was an end of something about all of us, even though we didn’t really understand what exactly had happened. Sitting there in the church we couldn’t have understood how Clara’s disastrous story would unfold, a story there was no turning back from, a story that would affect each and every one of us. We couldn’t have foretold that we were indeed mortal; that even famous people of the highest glory in the land could be taken down in a few seconds under the sun that shone on us all, riding in the back of an open car in Dallas.
Our whole world was about to change.