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the citizens of the nationwhom secular history’s chance happened to hand the executioner’s ax. Forgive them, Oh Lord, for they knew not what they did.
    Cardinal Silver was also a political priest, a breed of which I have never been overweeningly fond, some sort of economic and public relations Richelieu muttering the balance sheet and the opinion poll results into the ear of the Pope.
    The Church needs such prelates if it is to survive in the world, and judging from its present sorry standing, more not less, nor would I even go so far as to deem them an evil of necessity. They too serve, and more of them than not in a state of genuine belief.
    But John Cardinal Silver had steered Mary Gonzalez’s election as Pope through the College of Cardinals like an accomplished Chicago party boss of yore, swapping favors, promising pork, and arguing theology like a campaign consultant.
    The deliberations are supposed to be kept secret and no minutes are recorded, but believe me, Cardinals are not immune to the temptations of juicy gossip, nor are other priests reluctant to pass along choice tidbits from on high.
    The College, like the Church, was deadlocked, and over the same issue, the one that has haunted it for most of my life.
    The self-styled progressives contend that the falling away of the faithful is proof positive that the Church has failed to adapt to the times, that it isentirely self-defeating to excommunicate the souls of those who would download their consciousness into successor entities, that perhaps we should even reach out for the lost souls of the unbelievers on the Other Side who surely must be in desperate need of salvation.
    Traditionalists, among whom I stand, retort that the numbers on the membership rolls are no measure of the Church’s spiritual condition, still less if one were to pad them out with the Devil’s constructs.
    Such were the polarities in the College of Cardinals. Between them was a broad middle who just wished the whole problem would go away and who were blocking all candidates on one side of it or the other.
    Cardinal Silver did not play his hand until the College was nearing the point of exasperated exhaustion. When the moment came, he proposed Mary Cardinal Gonzalez.
    Mary Cardinal Gonzalez may not have been among the first female priests, but she had been the first female everything else, Monsignor, Bishop, Cardinal, so why not the first female Pope?
    The amazement and consternation that greeted this nomination need not be described, though I have often enough been subject to the gory details.
    When the dust had settled, Cardinal Silver made his telling point. The mere suggestion of a female Pope had galvanized the conclave, whicha moment before had been paralyzed by the unresolved schism that was tearing the Church asunder, draining its energies, losing it all public credibility with its dwindling communicants, not to mention those it would seek to convert.
    If we can’t resolve the issue, let’s put it aside, and let the public forget it, let’s show the world that the Church is capable of dynamic vision, let’s deny our phallocracy to half the world’s potential converts, let’s capture the headlines with something positive, let’s elect ourselves Mary Cardinal Gonzalez and create a papal superstar to rival John Paul II.
    Or more subtle words to the same effect.
    Had I been there, I probably would have been convinced too, had the choice of female Pope not been Mary Cardinal Gonzalez. Mary Gonzalez had grown up in the mean desert streets of dying Los Angeles during the Water Wars, had been some sort of eco-terrorist as a teenager, and had fled into a nunnery one step ahead of the law.
    That was long decades ago, and those youthful follies have achieved the romantic status of the author’s wretched odd jobs on a cover biography. The mature Mary Cardinal Gonzalez was a shining example of the redemptive power of the Church, and indeed I believe it; from her public persona at