When in Rome—eternal city of parrots, umbrella pines, impossibly bountiful culture and history, and half-assed A.C.—one eats carbonara, gapes at the Caravaggios gathered in the Palazzo Barberini, and swings by the Vatican.
I’m here to attend my first Mass since the mid-1960s, to be said this morning in Saint Peter’s Basilica by Pope Leo XIV. I don’t believe in God. To me the Church means second-class status for women, acres of gold, real estate bought with bogus get-out-of-Hell-free cards, putatively celibate priests raping children. Even so, I’m a big fan of Leo.
As an altar boy during the Kennedy administration, I sometimes fantasized about laddering up a few steps to become the first Irish American pope. At about the same age, Bob Prevost was an altar boy who also pretended to say Mass at home in Dolton, a suburb south of Chicago not far from our house in Lisle.
I’m told by one of the gaudy but helpful Swiss Guards that there are about five thousand worshipers here, with thousands more watching on screens in the broiling sun of Saint Peter’s Square. Yesterday it was ninety-eight cloudless degrees, zero breeze, as we waited for Leo to cruise by in his Popemobile. I’d shrewdly relocated into the narrow shade of the Egyptian obelisk, forgetting its shadow would never stop rotating past me.
And now here is Leo again, in gold and white, smiling and blessing us as he walks past the Pietà with a retinue of junior clerics, everyone in red and white vestments. After mounting the steps of the altar, Leo incenses the length of it with a gold thurible packed, if memory serves, with burning frankincense and myrrh. I’ve packed and even swung my fair share of them.
After the choir chants the Kyrie, Leo delivers a homily in Italian about Peter and Paul, who laid down their lives for the sake of the Gospel. After the readings and a shoutout to the Ukrainian bishops, the Gospel is sung in Latin by a dark-haired young cantor. Leo’s own tenor has a mild, pleasing timbre. From time to time he doffs his white skullcap or mitre, revealing a pale olive dome and gray comb-over. At sixty-nine, he’s the first pontiff younger than me.
He spends almost an hour bestowing a pallium upon each of the new metropolitan archbishops, signifying their role as shepherds to their various flocks. He has a brief but warm back-and-forth with each of his fifty-four fresh lieutenants, though I can’t hear a word of it.
I stopped attending Mass at age fourteen, not long after I’d retired from serving. I’d planned to enter a Jesuit seminary, but the vow of celibacy was too much. Forty years later, Father Prevost and I both attended the first game of the 2005 World Series, in which our White Sox defeated the Astros five to three before sweeping the next three games, finally breaking the curse of the 1919 Black Sox. My prayers had been justly ignored; his were answered.
A pope for all Catholics, Leo is quintessentially American. It’s not just the White Sox fandom. With his flattened As, working-class values, and unruly family tree—twelve slave-owning ancestors, seventeen others Black, identified in genealogical records as “negresse,” “free person of color,” “quadroon,” and “mulâtresse créole”—he authentically reps the Sout’ Side as well as the Global South. He earned a B.S. in mathematics from Villanova and taught physics and math at Saint Rita’s, an Augustinian high school in Chicago. A steady defender of human rights and diversity, modest, compassionate, Leo is one of the main reasons being Catholic is suddenly cool.
Two hours in, Communion is being distributed. My lower back is killing me, and I need to find il bagno A.S.A.P., but I still join one of the lines to receive the Host. When in Rome, right? Some communicants ahead of me are choosing to receive on the tongue. But the closer I get to the altar, the more disingenuous it seems for me to partake. Sheepishly I return to my seat. Maybe I do need a shepherd. Soon my silent prayer is answered when the dark-haired cantor finally intones, “Ite missa est.” Go, you are dismissed.
