To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion, in contradiction of Catholic doctrine, that all war is unjust. Or his view that Ukraine should have ‘the courage to raise the white flag’ to stop more futile bloodshed which ironically is (more or less) Donald Trump’s view. Or his suggestion that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Or his more-the-merrier view on illegal immigrants.
No. The cause turned not on politics but on the heart. However absurdly, I had come to see the Holy Father as a love rival. My wife Carla, a devout Catholic, was besotted with him. ‘How I love him!’ she used to say. ‘You only have to listen to him speak and he enters your heart… He wanted to be in contact with his flock and not stuck on a golden throne. He said: “Like a good shepherd I want to be surrounded by the smell of my sheep” … Don’t you agree he’s the most fantastico man?!’ How could I not? ‘Yes,’ I hissed.
In 2017, when Pope Francis visited nearby Cesena, Carla was in the crowd with the youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, then two, in her arms. As the Popemobile passed, the Pope reached down and laid his left hand on Giuseppe’s head. Miraculously, a woman nearby took a photo that somehow captured the moment and she gave Carla a copy.
It is three weeks since Jorge Bergoglio died, and Carla is still bombarding me with WhatsApp messages containing links to examples of his immensity. They include a short video of him seated in his wheelchair, throwing a tennis ball at a black and white border collie. Carla, it is clear, is still besotted with him. But at least he’s gone.
When we met in 1998, Carla, who is 13 years younger than me, was not a practising Catholic. But soon after we met she became a most fervent one. This meant not just regular Mass but actual pilgrimages to places like Lourdes and Medjugorje, and visits to Rita of Rimini, just down the coast, who worked her magic in a building that was a cross between a church and a doctor’s surgery. Rita was able to heal any ailment, it was said, by rubbing her hands until they were hot and then placing them on the relevant part of the body. The heat acted as a conductor of a divine healing force. Rita told me that Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, once a favourite band of mine, had been to see her several times for his bad liver, which would kill him in 2013 aged 71. His last words apparently were: ‘Take me to the light.’
Carla insisted I convert to Catholicism, because we are two halves of the same apple and Protestants such as me were beyond the pale. The ceremony took place in a tiny chapel, tucked away down a secluded alley, as if somehow against the law. I had no qualms about leaving the Anglican Church, which has become so insipid, and do believe in God, though I find it hard to worship him.
Thankfully, Carla no longer believes that since 1981 the Virgin Mary has appeared in Medjugorje and regularly spoken to six children (now approaching old age) wher-ever they are (one lives in America). It was the huge amount of money they have trousered that convinced her it must be a mighty scam.
I once watched one of these veggenti switch into ‘we have contact’ trance mode, his face lighting up in a pantomime smile, and I wondered: would he snap out of it if someone gave him a hefty kick? The only miracle I witnessed in Medjugorje was that you could still smoke in bars.
Eventually Carla saw through Rita of Rimini as well, but not before naming one of our children after her.
In the kitchen, she still communes with an image of Jesus attached to the fridge door and an image of the Madonna next to the mirror above the sink. To the untrained eye, this may make her seem off her rocker, but she is saner and funnier than most and an incredible mother. And I find it endearing.
Her take on the new Pope, Leo XIV, is as good as anyone’s: ‘He seems like Francesco but camouflaged as a conservative.’ As she would, she likes his talk about peace and building bridges. But like so many Italians, she worries because he’s an Americano.
There’s been much talk of Leo XIII, the Pope who inspired his choice of name, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum is regarded as the first ‘social’ encyclical. It affirmed the right to form trade unions and receive a living wage. The atheist liberal-left which detests so many elements of Catholic doctrine nevertheless spends much of its time these days trying to press-gang popes as ideological allies. So it has played down Leo XIII’s rejection of socialism and communism on the grounds that private property is sacred. Nor does it mention his previous encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878), in which he describes ‘socialism, communism, and nihilism’ as a ‘wicked confederacy’ of ‘gathering evils’.
I WhatsApped Carla something else. In April 2022, when Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, Leo XIV said on local TV that the war in Ukraine was ‘a genuine Russian imperialist invasion… they are committing crimes against humanity’. Days later, Pope Francis told the Corriere della Sera the ‘barking of Nato at the door of Russia’ might have led to the invasion of Ukraine. ‘Which one is right?’ I asked. ‘The Pope is the Pope,’ she replied.
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