Captain Reverend Mother

By the end of Friday, I had been double-cheek kissed by about twenty Italian women whose names I am still trying to remember. The Pope was also there.

I was part of the official Navy delegation to see him. My fifteen-year-old, who had lost his phone privileges earlier that morning, came with me. My spouse stayed home with our ten-year-old, who would not have survived the ordeal’s eight hours, and frankly neither would my spouse, who does not love a crowd.

We were told not to wear our uniforms, so I wore my collar since I was there in an official capacity. In Italy, a woman in a collar is something most people have never seen, which I did not quite register until I was standing in Piazza del Plebiscito with fifty thousand people, most of whom kept doing a small double-take when their eyes landed on me.

The piazza was electric. The crowd chanted Pa-pa Le-o-ne, Pa-pa Le-o-ne, with the energy of a soccer match. The choir mashed up an old Neapolitan love song with “Video Killed the Radio Star,” later throwing in “Tu vuò fà l’americano,” and two strangers near me clasped hands and danced like a couple at a wedding, because that is what strangers here do. A clump of high school and college kids held up a sign on what looked like the back of a poster board from somebody’s bedroom, I giovani di Napoli ti abbracciano (The young people of Naples embrace you). People were on their feet, swaying, weeping, cheering. No wonder Mass attendance is surging.

The Popemobile came through and a father near the barricade lifted his baby up over the railing. Pope Leo stopped the procession, leaned out, took the child in his arms, and kissed her. That child will hear about that kiss for the rest of her life. Family dinners. Holidays. Weddings. The story will outlive the kiss by at least ninety years.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Waiting for the bus afterwards, I noticed a group of about twenty women glancing over toward me and whispering. I knew it was about me before I remembered why. The collar.

One of them came up. Then the rest. They wanted to know if I was a priest. I told them I am a Navy chaplain. They cheered, actually cheered, and crowded in close. They grabbed my hands. They told me their names so I would remember them in my prayers. They asked for a blessing. Me? (They had just been there to see the Pope and they are asking me for a blessing?) I wrote one in English on my phone’s Google Translate, then offered it to them in my botched Italian. Some of them cried after my prayer. I teared up too.

Another of the women, before she let go of my hand, pressed something into my palm. A small, worn medallion, the kind you carry for years. She called it a “miracle medallion.” She had no idea how much I needed it. I immediately thought I should give it to my fifteen-year-old, who is trying to negotiate being a teenager and high school. Then I thought no, I need it too. We all do. The world does.

How does the Pope do this? Every day, every public encounter, for the rest of his life. I am not him, of course, and I am not anywhere near him, of course, and I could barely handle five minutes of this intensity. The hands, the names, the tears, the gift pressed into my palm. After five minutes of being received like that I had to sit down and breathe. 

There is a saying that “you have to see one to be one.” I had not understood, until those women, that the seeing changes the seen too.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

On the bus ride home my freshman said, unsolicited, “Even though I’m mad at you, I have never seen you so happy.” He had watched me be loved by strangers in a language I do not speak. We spend so much of our lives now looking at faces on screens. We miss the beauty of looking up. 

In God’s eyes, we are all kin (Galatians 3:28). There were no strangers on that piazza or at the bus stop. There was a baby being kissed, teenagers holding up a sign that said we embrace you, strangers dancing. There were Anna, Carolina, another Cinzia, Maria, Rita, Theresa, and a fifteen-year-old who, because he did not have his phone, got to see all of it.

We are surrounded by kin we have yet to meet. We are held more often than we know. May we look up.