The following chapter, adapted from the book Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is being republished in honor of Pope Francis, who passed away this week. This powerful narrative offers an intimate look at the journey of one of the most transformative figures in modern history. Through the lens of the challenges, conflicts, and groundbreaking reforms he navigated, the chapter sheds light on the pope’s unwavering commitment to social justice, humility, and profound faith. As we remember Pope Francis, this story serves as a tribute to his legacy, capturing the essence of his leadership and the lasting impact he made on the Catholic Church and the world at large. – Editors
Translated by William McCuaig
It takes eight hours to get by train from the Vatican to Effretikon in the canton of Zurich. Francis could depart from the station located in Vatican City (now transformed into an exclusive shop- ping center as well), and he would find himself in a reality light-years distant from that imagined by the prelates of the apostolic palace. At Effretikon, the priest of the Catholic parish is a woman. True, she cannot perform all the rites, but it is she who has the care of souls there.
The town has fifteen thousand inhabitants and is a cluster of modern houses surrounded by woodland. Getting off the train, a visitor from Italy finds the Stazione restaurant, the Aida bar, the Pomodoro piz- zeria, and the Tosoni butcher shop. A pregnant Muslim woman walks behind a tricycle ridden by her blond-haired daughter.
There are two churches, the Protestant one and the Catholic parish of Sankt Martin. The latter is a very modern design, built in 1982: blank white walls, a small tower with cement striations. The clergy house resembles a social center: conference room, offices, notice boards, numerous staircases, a coffee machine. There are plenty of windows, so plenty of light and a welcoming atmosphere.
And there she is, Monika Schmid, born in 1957, in black jeans and black sweater, a gold chain around her neck, a simple ring on her finger, her chestnut-brown hair worn in a pageboy cut, like so many northern European women who seem to pass unchanged from adolescence to maturity. Under the title of Gemeindeleiterin (in the feminine; Gemeindeleiter in the masculine), “guide” or “leader” of the parish, this lady cares for six thousand Catholic parishioners. Her bishop doesn’t care for the term, though it is in widespread use in German-speaking countries. Actually the Vatican doesn’t like it either and, after having allowed it in recent decades, has begun to block its use. The bishop and the Vatican are affronted by the connotations attached to the term leader, so the word is likely to be replaced by the more bureaucratic Gemeindebeauftragte, “individual placed in charge of the parish.”
But that doesn’t alter the substance. Monika Schmid studied religious pedagogy then theology at Luzern and Salzburg and is now taking a course in interreligious spiritual theology, focused on points of contact between Christianity, Jewish mysticism, and Islam. She arrived in the parish as a pastoral assistant and in 2001 took over leadership of the community on an interim basis, subsequently receiving the full canonical mandate. The document officially entrusts the parish to her, although its titular incumbent remains a male priest. But is an empty formality because there are next to no priests. In the deaconate to which Effretikon belongs, two-thirds of a total of around forty parishes have been put in the care of laypersons.
Still, the bishop at the time, Amadeus Grab, did not want a woman leading the parish. “He came here to discuss the matter, and the parishioners stood up one after another and said that they wanted me,” recounted Schmid. “After three-quarters of an hour, the bishop replied that he would not stand against the wishes of the flock. It is also the case, historically, that in Switzerland the parish community engages its curate.”
The crisis of vocations to the priesthood is as grave in Switzerland as it is elsewhere in the Western world. The bishops, like their counterparts in Italy, have created so-called pastoral units: a number of parishes are entrusted to a small team of priests, laymen, and nuns. It is a system that consumes the energy of the few remaining priests, who are forced to hustle continuously from one parish to the next to celebrate mass and hear confessions—a solution that masks the crisis rather than solving it. “The priests hereabouts,” says Monika Schmid, “are age ninety-two, ninety-one, and eighty-seven. Thanks to personal acquaintance, one or two come here to celebrate mass twice a month and for the rites at Easter and Christmas.” For the other 250 days of the year, more or less, the de facto parish priest is she.
On Sunday, dressed in white with a scarf of the liturgical colors, she leads the procession of ingress, followed by five choir boys (thirty at high feasts), and goes to the altar to celebrate the “liturgy of the word.” The first part of the rite is like a normal mass. The parishioners do the readings, Monika and the pastoral assistant (also a woman) take turns for the reading of the Gospel and the sermon. “I also preach when there is a priest to celebrate mass, but the current bishop, Mon- signor Huonder, wants to put a stop to that.”
The liturgy of the Word omits the consecration of the Host. That aside, Monika does advance to the ciborium, take the consecrated wafers contained therein, and distribute them to the faithful before the altar. The mass concludes in exactly the same way as when a priest officiates: the Lord’s prayer, the sign of peace. “Yes,” Monika adds, “I celebrate baptisms too. It is a sacrament, but one that any Christian may administer in case of need, so we have the bishop’s authorization. I celebrate funerals; I take care of liturgies in the old folks’ homes; I give the standard hour of religious teaching in the local school and the courses for adults.” She holds so-called pastoral colloquies because no layperson can administer the sacrament of confession. But when a parishioner is deeply anxious or gripped by doubt, there is no use telling him or her that the priest will be here in a few weeks, so come back then. “We give advice, we help people in crisis. I always supply the address of a priest and make a date for an appointment. Sometimes I suggest couples therapy because marital crises are fairly common. But people need to unburden themselves, and sometimes they say, ‘It’s like I really need to make confession.’ Then I answer: Shall we pray? We may recite the kyrie eleison together, and I tell them that they are accepted before God and that it’s a good thing to have laid their pent-up troubles before the Lord. It is the next thing to the sacrament of confession, so the bishop frowns on it.”
Sources of anguish for parish laity include “conjugal difficulties, mothers who think they are being too irascible with their children, despair at the death of a partner, feelings of inadequacy, fear of fail- ure.” I am reminded of the image of the field hospital that Pope Francis uses when he talks about the church’s primary task: giving assistance without requesting blood tests or identity cards. According to Monika Schmid, anguish provoked by the classic sense of sin is uncommon nowadays among the Catholic laity.
The parish is basically run by women. In addition to the parish leader herself, there is a female pastoral assistant and a female religious pedagogue. These three are flanked by an administrative employee and a social organizer for summer projects—both women. The only man invested with direct responsibility is a lay pastoral helper. There is also the choirmaster, Stefano Lai, who comes from Sardinia. The people are content. Questions still considered thorny in other parts of the Catholic world, such as how to deal with same-sex couples, have already been silently dealt with in many Swiss parishes. Monika Schmid won’t go on the record, but it is well known that in quite a few places priests and lay leaders of parishes do discreetly bless homo- sexual couples in front of the altar.
Rome is remote, and the sluggishness with which the church has confronted the woman question over the past half-century looks remote too. The pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes that came out of the Vatican II council in 1965 was the first sign of any awareness of it. The conciliar fathers regarded women’s freedom “to embrace a state of life or to acquire an education or cultural benefits equal to those recognized for men” as a sign of the times. The document states that “where they have not yet won it, women claim for them- selves an equity with men before the law and in fact.”
Paul VI was the first pope to admit female “auditors,” twenty-three of them—thirteen laywomen and ten nuns—to the conciliar debates. Since then the female presence has gradually expanded into animat- ing catechistic and educational activities in parishes, and beyond the confines of Italy they have also taken part in directing committees at the diocesan level. But at the higher levels, the posts of decision and command, the church remains male. Access to holy orders, the dia- conate, and the priesthood remains systematically blocked for Catho- lic believers of the female sex.
John Paul II was an ardent supporter of the “genius” of women in the belief that they were endowed with a charisma of “entrustment.” In the apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem of 1988, he put it this way: “God entrusts the human being to her, always and in every way, even in the situations of social discrimination in which she may find her- self.” Karol Wojtyla highlighted the active and important part that women played in the construction of the earliest Christian communities and then, over the centuries, in the transmission of the faith as martyrs, saints, nuns, and mothers of families. He maintained that the genius of women ought to manifest itself in our time by “ensur[ing] sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance: because they are human!”
In the apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis of 1994, however, the Polish pope reasserted in solemn fashion: “In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women.” Wojtyla was tempted to stamp this veto with the seal of papal infallibility but was dissuaded by Cardinal Ratzinger, who suggested the barely attenuated formulation: “and [I declare] that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful.”
A decade later, Cardinal Ratzinger, in a Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World, proclaimed that “women should have access to positions of responsibility which allow them to inspire the policies of nations.” But with respect to the church as an institution, both Ratzinger and Wojtyla always forced Catholic women into the likeness of Mary of Nazareth. Wojtyla stated that the fact that Mary received neither the mission of the apostles nor sacerdotal status proves that their inadmissibility to ordination as priests is not discrimi- natory but rather “faithful observance of a plan to be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe.” And Ratzinger followed up:
“The reservation of priestly ordination solely to men does not hamper in any way women’s access to the heart of Christian life.”
The refrain in the Vatican has always been that the priesthood is not a power but a service. In that case, many female theologians reply, it cannot but be open to all. The theologian Lilia Sebastiani comments that as long as women are excluded from the diaconate and the priesthood solely on the basis of their sex, they will “inevitably be excluded from any governing and magisterial function” and will thus exert very little influence, however important they may be in other respects. “They will be ignorable.”
In the Roman Curia, there are just two women in positions of authority: Sister Nicoletta Spezzati, undersecretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (in common parlance, the Congregation for Religious), and Signora Flaminia Giovanelli, undersecretary of the Council for Justice and Peace. Benedict XVI specified the obstacle that stands in the way of anything more for as long as the traditionalist viewpoint prevails: “There’s a juridical problem: according to canon law, the power to take legally binding decisions is limited to sacred orders.”
Pope Francis has opened a breach in the wall. A few months after his election, he sent a concrete message: “It is necessary to broaden the opportunities for a stronger presence of women in the church. . . . The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions. The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.” No pope had ever expressed such a notion before.
Cardinal Walter Kasper takes the view that it is feasible to achieve greater participation by women in the Synods of Bishops and has no doubt that in future women may be chosen to head the pontifical councils for the laity, the family, culture, social communications, and the new evangelization.
The church envisioned by the Argentine pope is markedly feminine. It is a theme he often touches on. “I suffer—to tell you the truth—when I see in the church or in church organizations that the role of service, which we all have and should have . . . when a woman’s role of service slides into servidumbre [servitude, subjection].” The pope, who was speaking in Italian, used this strong Spanish term in a speech commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the apostolic letter Mulieris dignitatem at an international symposium in October 2013 attended by more than one hundred women from Catholic associations in twenty-five nations, and he repeated it to convey the force of his denunciation: “When I see women carrying out acts of servidumbre, it is because the role a woman should play is not properly understood.” Emphasis on the presence of women in the church and the need to place greater value on it are important to him. He believes that women are indispensable for the church —indeed, that “the church cannot be herself without the woman and her role.”
But he refuses to contemplate the ordination of women to the priesthood. “That door is closed,” he stated, referring to John Paul II and manifesting his opposition to the ideology of feminist power, which he calls “machismo in skirts.”
He is preparing to walk a fine line. To appoint women to top positions will generate mute opposition from conservatives in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while exposing him to criticism from women theologians who demand complete equality since they believe that exclusion from the priesthood is no longer justifiable. His strategic stance is that “we can’t imagine a church without women, but women active in the church, with the distinctive role that they play.” He amplifies and qualifies that last reservation: “we have not yet come up with a profound theology of womanhood, in the church . . . we need to develop a profound theology of womanhood.” It is a reservation that has already generated dissent.
In the United States, the National Catholic Reporter sought reactions from women to these statements, including from some who had attended the meeting in October 2013. “Personally, I am not sure why there needs to be a theology of women, and certainly not one writ- ten by men,” said Marti Jewell of the University of Dallas’s School of Ministry. “There is no talk of a theology of men. We are all disciples by virtue of our baptism.” Vicki Thorn, founder of the postabortion ministry Project Rachel, noted that “we keep talking about women as if they were just invented.”
The latter comment is a pertinent observation. The Catholic Church, seen in the long perspective of history, is just emerging from a patriarchal and entirely masculine mental universe in which its hierarchy remains profoundly immersed. When the Osservatore Romano published an insert on the question of women a few years ago, there was a certain amount of smirking and joking in Vatican corridors about the paper’s new cooking and gardening pages.
In 1981, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini had already raised questions that still await answers at a gathering in the diocese of Milan: “Why, women are asking, do we equate the image of God with that transmit- ted to us by masculinist culture? . . . What signs are there of a global language, including liturgical language, that, in its elaboration will not leave women feeling excluded? Why are there so few and such inadequate responses to the valorization of one’s own body, of physical love, of the problems of responsible maternity? Why has the presence of women in the church, extensive as it is, not had any impact on its structures?” Giancarla Codrignani, a Catholic essayist and former member of the Italian Parliament, forwarded Martini’s statements to Pope Francis.
Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian religious belonging to the Suore di Nostra Signora, a professor for twenty years at the Theological Institute of Recife, and an activist who works in the favelas, is the most pungent voice of Latin American Catholic feminist theology. In 1995, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith imposed two years of silence on her, which meant she was prohibited from teaching, publishing, speaking in public, or giving interviews.
“How can Pope Francis simply ignore the strength of the feminist movement and its expression in Catholic feminist theology over the last thirty or forty years?” is the combative question the nun, now in her seventies, puts today. “Please, let him use the Internet to find out about aspects of feminist theology, in the Catholic world at any rate.” Sister Ivone points out that there are plenty of relevant texts that are not studied in the principal theological faculties and so contribute nothing to the formation of future priests. “Church officialdom hasn’t given them the right of citizenship because the intellectual production of women is still considered inadequate for male theological rationality.” And that’s not the only reason: female theology “appears menacing to the male power that predominates in the churches.”
Riding the wave of Francis’s other changes, a portion of the female laity is attempting to make fresh inroads. In autumn 2013, a group of theologians, men and women, from Europe and the United States published an appeal for the nomination of women cardinals. Their reasoning is that until the nineteenth century the cardinalate could also be conferred upon members of the laity and the pope does have the power to abrogate the current canonical statute requiring priestly ordination for those making up the College of Cardinals. The idea had already been advanced in 2011 by the journal of American Jesuits, America, and was put forward six months into the Bergoglio pontificate by Lucetta Scaraffia, a Catholic historian and editorialist for the Osservatore Romano: “It would be a revolution strong enough to shake up the stance of mistrust and lack of interest that a large portion of the clergy adopts vis-à-vis women, whether nuns or laity.” Scaraffia, who had earlier been responsible for the paper’s insert on the woman question, conceded that the exhortations of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to recognize the presence of women in the church “have yielded modest fruits.”
It constitutes a paradox that in the Vatican organizations concerned with the religious orders, with the laity, with the family and health— dimensions in which women play a preponderant role—women are totally absent from the top chairs. Pope Francis probably has plans to step in and remedy that. The hypothesis of a female cardinal has, however, been rejected by Cardinal Maradiaga, coordinator of the pope’s privy council of cardinals: “A woman cardinal? I don’t think so. There is no point in clericalizing the role of women in the church, though it should certainly be assigned greater value.”
Just how exactly? Maria Voce, president of the Focolare movement, suggests that women should systematically be placed in the “organs of consultation, reflection, and decision that are developing in the church.” She would wish to see a council of laymen, composed of men and women, flanking the privy council of cardinals and likewise advising the pope. And she believes that in future it would be appro- priate for laypersons of both sexes to take part, along with the cardinal electors, in the meetings that precede papal conclaves—personalities who “are performing duties in the church and can contribute from their own experience.” The president of the Focolarini judges the challenge of a female priesthood “not insuperable” and regards it as “not impossible” that in future the doors of the conclave may be thrown open to the superiors of the religious orders and the heads of Catholic lay associations, making the election of the pope a more “choral” affair.
While this debate was going on during the first year of Francis’s pontificate, in England the Anglican Church adopted, in a synod of 20 November 2013, the principle that women should have access to the epsicopate. The resolution was practically unanimous: 378 votes in favor, 8 against, and 25 abstentions. Women had already acceded to the Anglican priesthood twenty-one years earlier.
At Effretikon, Monika Schmid told me that if she were to ask her parishioners one Sunday whether they wished to have women priests, three-quarters would answer yes. Young people are especially baffled at the exclusion. If she had the chance to address Pope Francis, she would tell him: “Listen to women and dismiss the gratuitous rationale that theological motives bar them from the priesthood.” Her dream is that by the time she retires, the Vatican will at least have authorized women deacons. When Francis was elected, Monika was extremely pleased, “but the moat separating the people from the institution is wide. I would wish for a papal audience, not just for me alone, so we could tell him how we are living at the base.”
The chokepoint for the church is the crisis of the clergy. The parish was the great invention of Christianity: a territory, a population of the lay faithful, a spiritual leader in close contact with them. This structure, which has sustained the fabric of Catholicism for centuries, is crumbling because of the dramatic decline in vocations. In the United States and northern Europe, churches are for sale. Everywhere in the developed world, parishes are being dissolved into larger units, and daily contact between priest and parishioners is being lost. In the developing world, many parishes are so large and remote from one another that no priest visits for months on end. As this crisis intensifies, the question of women in the priesthood has mutated. If in the 1970s it was perceived primarily as a matter of gen- der equality, and still is to some degree, in the twenty-first century— with the very survival of the church’s territorial structure at stake— the outlook is different. The problem is no longer purely subjective but the objective one of what structure the Christian communities of the future will have.
While at Rome the previous two pontificates were putting obstacles in the way of a leadership role in parishes for laymen in general and for women in particular, these resources themselves were dwindling. Germany in this respect has always been a laboratory where mutations in Catholicism show up first. In recent years, there has been a quantitative and qualitative decline in the new intakes of lay “pastoral assistants.” There is still an acute shortage of priests, and there is starting to be a shortage of laity prepared to shoulder the bur- den of pastoral responsibility. And that includes women. In Switzer- land, the parishes seek laureates in theology from Germany. “If you seek to recruit a pastoral assistant nowadays, you run into difficulty,” explained Monika Schmid. “There isn’t the same wide choice there was thirty years ago. You encounter people with mediocre training. In my time, at the University of Lugano, there was a good large group of women passionate about feminist theology . . . we read books, we debated texts, we did biblical research. Now the women presenting themselves are of a more bigoted kind.”
That the female religious orders, the backbone of Catholicism all over the world, are being shunned by women is a matter of estab- lished fact. The numbers of nuns and women living under vows are in steep decline: in 2001 their count reached 792,317; in 2011 the number had dropped to 713,206.22 The rise in vocations in Africa and Asia has not been enough to offset this slump overall, but it does mean that the center of gravity is shifting from the West to the third world, the origin of one-third of nuns today. This shift impels many religious orders to import fresh sisters from Asia and Africa to swell their thinning ranks in Europe—a “trade in novices” of which Pope Francis is critical.
The Bergoglio papacy is striving for change, but no one can predict the form it will take. Benedict XVI left the Argentine pope a poison- ous legacy of conflict with the largest and most important organiza- tion of U.S. nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The Vatican has had them in its sights for more than ten years on account of their critical stance toward the exclusively male priesthood and for their positions on abortion, homosexuality, contraception, and the church’s claim to supremacy over the other Chris- tian confessions.
In 2012, with Ratzinger on the papal throne, the Holy Office (short for “Holy Office of the Inquisition,” as the renamed Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger’s former fiefdom, is still often called in common parlance) published a harsh assessment of the LCWR, accusing it of “radical feminism,” doctrinal errancy, loss of the sense of the church, contrary positions on sexual matters, and “theological interpretations that risk distorting faith in Jesus and his loving Father.” The Holy Office decided to appoint a delegate with a mandate to carry out a revision of the statutes of the organization of American nuns within five years and to control its initiatives and publications in order to align them with “the teachings and discipline of the church.” The LCWR was requested to rewrite its training manuals. Speakers at events organized by the LCWR were to be subject to approval by the Vatican delegate. It was an outright administrative takeover.
The nuns responded that the accusations were “unfounded and potentially . . . destructive to the continuation of their mission.” Since then, negotiations have dragged on between the Vatican delegate, Archbishop Peter Sartain, and the LCWR leadership. The organization’s former president, Pat Farrel, said that with respect to sexuality “the teaching and interpretation of the faith can’t remain static and really needs to be reformulated, rethought in light of the world we live in. Women religious stand in very close proximity to people at the margins, to people with very painful, difficult situations in their lives. That is our gift to the church.”
After his election, Pope Francis had a meeting with the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, and confirmed the directives given by Benedict XVI. The pon- tiff let the new president of the LCWR, Florence Deacon, know that “it is not possible for a religious, man or woman, not to feel as the church feels” and that this demands “fidelity to its teachings.”
But this opposition between the Vatican and the LCWR, which represents around 80 percent of the approximately fifty-seven thou- sand women religious in the United States, was at odds with the style of the Argentine pope. On issues such as homosexuality and abortion, the American nuns have progressed to a pastoral rather than ideologico doctrinal approach that conforms much more closely to the atti- tude of Francis than the rigid stance of Pope Ratzinger. As 2014 was drawing to a close, the Brazilian cardinal João Braz de Avis, prefect of the congregation concerned with religious orders, made public a Vatican document that brought the dispute to an end. No anathemas were uttered, and the social commitment of the American nuns was recognized: “Since the early days of the Catholic Church in their country [the United States], women religious have courageously been in the forefront of the evangelizing mission, selflessly tending to the spiritual, moral, educational, physical, and social needs of countless individuals, especially the poor and marginalized.” A specific communication was subsequently sent to every single religious order.
To face up fully to the role of women in the church constitutes a ford in the stream that the Bergoglio pontificate must cross. The ecclesiastical structure built around the dominance of the male clergy is gradually breaking apart. The question faced by the Catholic Church as it enters its third millennium is: What will be the physiognomy of the communities of believers of the future? Will they still be strongly institutionalized? Will they become more fluid? Or will an organizational form be found that combines the necessary unifying links with a flexibility of lived experiences?
Should Pope Francis happen one Sunday to cross the Tiber, he might arrive at a large shed in Via Ostiense and attend one particular mass. The altar is a table covered by an embroidered white tablecloth. It has wheels so it can be moved around. A bunch of flowers and a small wooden cross are placed at the center, with a little peace flag in rainbow colors beside them. The chalices of everyday wine and two baskets of bread are ready for the rite. From the large windows at the end the daylight filters in.
A bearded young man tunes a guitar and croons, “Christ came to be with us . . . hallelujah . . . he will take away our fears.” A woman wearing a sweater steps up to the altar and reads the act of penitence. Another in an overcoat comes forward and reads a passage from Isa-iah. Then a woman wearing a wool jacket reads the letter of Paul to the Corinthians, followed by a fourth in a windbreaker who proclaims the gospel.
Since the 1970s, Via Ostiense 152 is the home of the community of Saint Paul, formed after the abbot-bishop of the ancient monastery of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Giovanni Franzoni, was removed from office for having denounced the murky involvement of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in speculative construction projects at Rome.
The walls of the former storage facility are whitewashed; just one wall of the large cubic space has been painted in trompe l’oeil to resemble an old Roman palazzo; I can make out the statue of a woman wearing a mask and the profile of a few columns. Farther along there hangs a poster of Monsignor Juan José Gerardi, the Gua- temalan bishop murdered by three military men in 1988 for having published a report on the violations of human rights perpetrated by the army in his country. “Mártir de verdad y paz,” it says in Spanish.
A white-haired lady in her fifties delivers the homily. Her attire, like that of the other women, is that of normal daily life. A blue pullover, a beige wool jacket, glasses, earrings, a beaded necklace. Every hour, she reminds hearers, two thousand people die of hunger in the world. The data are from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The mass is a shared meal, the Gospel reading is about the wedding at Cana. But no one must be excluded from the banquet. “As long as people are dying . . . we shall not be the joy of God.”
A mentally disturbed boy enters and circulates among the faithful, saying loudly, “Where’s Mamma . . . I told Mamma . . . Have you seen Mamma?” Nobody is annoyed; they follow him with affectionate glances as he wanders, listening to the reflections about the Gospel and the readings of the day. Many of them stand up to speak. Some- one mentions that in the Old Testament and the first Christian com- munities, the gift of prophecy was shared by men and women.
The moment of the consecration of the Host arrives. Two women approach the altar, one makes a quick kneeling gesture, and together they break a loaf of bread into small pieces, which they place in the baskets. Everyone holds hands in a chain, reciting the Lord’s Prayer. They advance toward one another from opposite sides of the storage shed to give the sign of peace. An atmosphere of friendliness prevails. The communion is the meal the believers share. They form two rows at the sides of the altar, and each takes a piece of bread, dips it in achalice of wine, and eats it. “Your first miracle, Jesus,” runs the com- mon prayer, “is a banquet of love.”
My mind turns to a singular mosaic I saw in the ancient cathedral of Santa Sophia at Kiev. The altar is a real table, and there are two Christs, one turning to his right to offer the eucharistic bread to Peter, the other turning to his left to offer it to Paul. The Son of Man enfolds every dimension of life in his embrace.
