The Confessions of Frances Godwin Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t really shaking his fist at the Virgin, he was offering her a two-finger blessing. The Virgin was holding a book in her left hand, her fingers curled under the cover to keep her place. God observes from a little window at the top as a dove—the divine sperm, the divine Word —wings its way on a shaft of light toward the ear of the unsuspecting Virgin.
    I was no longer hung up on belief. Is it true or not true? Did God really impregnate the Virgin Mary? Did Jesus really rise from the dead, physically? Or are these stories just metaphors? These questions had been very important when I was in high school, but they no longer troubled me. I stopped worrying about all the misdeeds of the Catholic Church, which I’d thrown in my mother’s face—the Spanish Inquisition, the Great Schism (three popes at one time!), the dysfunctional attitude toward sexuality, the persecution of the Jews, Father Gordon’s predecessor (who’d disappeared after a scandal involving an altar boy), and so on—and just let myself experience what I was experiencing as I knelt next to Sister Teresa in what was probably the earliest Christian church in Rome—certainly the first to be dedicated to the Mother of God—built on the site of a club for Roman soldiers, a site where oil had gushed forth on the day of Christ’s conception, heralding the coming of the Messiah; a site where popes and antipopes had engaged in internecine warfare long before the scandal of the Avignon papacy. What I was experiencing was a feeling that I was a part of a larger whole. I couldn’t really follow the sermons in Italian, but I’d get the general drift, and that was usually enough, though one sermon in particular, during the third week of the program, stands out in my memory. At least the end of it does. “You need only one little word to be saved,” the priest said, several times. I listened as hard as I could, even cupping my hands behind my ears, but the priest lowered his voice to a whisper when he pronounced that one little word, and I couldn’t hear it. I could have asked Sister Teresa, but I didn’t want to raise the issue of salvation with Sister Teresa, a Dominican, very well educated. She taught Greek as well as Latin in the liceo in Florence, which was run by an order of Irish nuns, though the lessons were all in Italian.
     
    The next Saturday, after the one-little-word sermon, I went to confession. It was a week and a day after Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini had been elected and chosen the name “Paul.” By this time the evening gossip had turned from conspiracy theories to speculation about the new pope’s intentions. I was not an eager disputant in these slow-moving Latin bull sessions, but I was hoping that he’d do what he said he was going to do: follow the path laid out by his predecessor. Sister Teresa and I had our doubts, which we shared on the way down from the Janiculum.
    “You could make your confession in Latin,” Sister Teresa said. We were speaking in Italian as we walked along via della Lungara.
    “Right,” I said, as we passed the guards standing outside the big front door of Regina Coeli.
    “You could go to Saint Pat’s if you want to do it in English.”
    “Saint Pat’s?”
    “In via Boncompagni. There are four Irish churches in town.”
    “Italian is fine,” I said, and we stopped talking for a while.
    I thought Italian would be less traumatic than English. But kneeling in the deep shadows of the confessional I started to speak in Latin. “ Pater, pecavi  . . .”
    “ Piano, piano ,” the priest said. Slow down. “Did Father Adrian send you to test my Latin?”
    “Non,” I said.
    “Start over,” he said. “This time in Italian.”
    Was this what I’d been wanting all along? I thought so. Clean out my attic, as my mother liked to say.
    “I’ve committed adultery,” I said. No, not adultery, fornication. Not sure of the word, I tried fornicazione and hit the jackpot. “I’ve been