It was a great hope of my husband’s mother that I would convert to Catholicism and marry her son in the Church. This never seemed an option to me. My father had left the Church to marry my mother in Manhattan in the late summer of 1951 and was summarily disowned by most of his family. He endured the estrangement for decades. I never had a desire to embrace an entity that could produce followers so dogmatically rigid and draconian in their beliefs.
Ironically, I married into a family with a Pope in its lineage. Through the years, I travelled with my mother-in-law and attended Mass with her in Paris, Venice, Bern, Berlin, Krakow and Cairo. I learned to love the lighting of candles and the smell of incense and the consistency of ritual.
When my father (some forty years outside the Church) was dying, I remembered something my husband’s mother had once told me—that anyone who was ever a Catholic was ever a Catholic and at the last would want a priest. And so the hospital’s chaplain was summoned and I saw firsthand the grace of the Latin as the words spread over my father’s suffering like a balm of honey and eased his lasped soul.
Years later, when my mother-in-law was close to death, I called every local Catholic church, but she did not belong to a parish and no one save one priest would come. He made the long drive up the moonlit Valley Road to Carmel to perform the Sacrament of the Dying.
After the Father had gone, my husband clasped his mother’s left hand and I, her right. Stretched out between us, at precisely five AM, she slipped into eternity. Then a salmon Venetian light tinged the air outside the bedroom window and the sun prepared to rise.
I am aware of the sanctity of vows. I do not know what happened between this priest and his accuser in 1976. I am only witness to his open heart and readiness to answer a call and administer a sacred rite at a stranger’s bedside on one late July night in 2004.
Perhaps between the left and right hand of the biblical God, at the centre of judgement and forgiveness, there sits an equanimous God for the saint and trespasser that mingle within each of us and for all who dwell in the middle ground between sin and sacrament, compassion and culpability.
Ex Opere Operato