Rites and wrongs

As Pope Benedict’s visit approaches, Katie Grant, a cradle Catholic, feels torn between her loyalty to the Church and anger at its callous insensitivity

In 2005, shortly after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, my then 19-year-old daughter and I walked into St Peter’s in Rome. I don’t like St Peter’s, so superior and crushing, though the dead popes with their paper skin and velvet slippers offer a chilly thrill. I spied a confessional box in the dim distance and after I’d recited a dull list of sins, a young voice — urgent, American — asked, ‘Do you ever gossip?’ ‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘I’ve got five sisters, and that’s what sisters do.’ Silence. ‘I suppose,’ I was a bit flustered now, ‘our gossip isn’t kind, but it’s not wicked.’ He disagreed. I slunk out like a murderer.

My daughter went in. Two minutes later she shot out, pelted the whole way down the basilica, through the doors and across St Peter’s Square. I shot after her. She was crying. The urgent American had asked how many times, during her six months in Italy, she had missed Mass. ‘Only twice,’ she said rather proudly. He soon put her right. Missing Mass was a mortal sin. Mortal sins were a ticket to hell. She should be terrified. She was. Only the queue at security prevented me from kicking that priest into kingdom come. I was fair game, but it was unconscionable, right in the heart of the Vatican, to turn a teenager’s all-loving God into a vengeful Gorgon and her Catholicism into a curse. I was livid.

Three days later, I went to St John Lateran. It was closed but a man with a hoover was hanging about. Hoovers mean carpets, possibly red. Of course! It was the Feast of Corpus Christi. The Pope must be coming.