The Night of the New Pope

On February 11th, 2013, only a few days after we arrived in the Eternal City, Pope Benedict XVI announced plans to step down from Papacy. To a heathen like myself it didn’t sound particularly Earth-shattering. Popes come and go, I thought. It’s the way of the Catholic world.

Not quite.

The last time a Pope resigned out of choice rather than the usual dropping dead of old age was in the year 1415 when Pope Gregory XII, in an incredibly complex sequence of events, abdicated his Popehood in order to heal a rift between western and eastern parts of the Catholic Church in Europe. At the time, three men claimed to be Pope, with rivaling political factions backing up their claim: it was a mess, but by the grace of God, they got through it with their mitres (tall Popey hats) intact. Regardless, when Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, it had been nearly six hundred years since a Pope gave his two weeks notice to a job that traditionally has an unspoken ‘till death do us part’ clause.

Heresy!

On my walk to school the morning of Benedict’s announcement, people were gathered in groups on sidewalks, talking in hushed-yet-passionate tones. My usual calm and perfunctory route was bustling with people. I strolled past a rarely used carousel lilting gently in the breeze, down by the ancient earthen stones of Castel St. Angelo, and across the bridge spanning a Tiber river engorged by winter rains into the heart of bustling Piazza Navona, where cafes encroached an ancient racetrack transfigured now into a cobblestoned playground for tourists and vendors peddling knick-knacks. It was like I’d stepped onto an enormous movie set- all about me were actors whispering in exaggerated tones, dramatic and overzealous, and I didn’t quite yet know enough Italian to understand what they were saying, but by the time I arrived at Café Arno just below my school building and saw the headlines scrawling by on the ancient television behind the bar, I had gathered that there was Pope-related news.

By that afternoon, Rome was in a tizzy. People poured in from all Catholic-centric parts of the globe starting that very day, carrying flags and banners with them, awaiting with an electric excitement the proclamation of who would be crowned next Earpiece to God. The streets rang with shouts and music, trattorias and gelaterias abuzz with talk of what had happened to Benedict the Sixteenth, and tourist trap shops and street cart vendors alike overflowed with Benedict-related paraphernalia: calendars, mugs, key-chains, the whole shebang.

It was a Benedict-going-out-of-business sale, and everyone was cashing in.

The longevity of the Popehood becomes most blatant when simply regarding the names of some of these guys: I mean, Benedict the Sixteenth? The U.S. had five James’ as President, meaning the next could perhaps be called James VI, but consider a position that has had sixteen of a name and each served an average of 7.3 years (of course, compared to the average 16.4 years a Supreme Court Justice of the United States serves, it’s not a hell of a long time…but there’s only one Pope at a time, and there have been 264 Popes at the time of writing this, while nine Supreme Court Justices sit a time and there’ve only been 114 of those). Roman Catholic tradition assigns St. Peter as the first Pope, having been given the keys to heaven by Jesus, and he passed in 64 CE.

The world of Popes is an odd one, but the ultimate oddity is the idea it boils down to: this man (it has always been a man and seemingly always will be) is seen as God’s interpreter. He hears God, he translates God, and he tells the rest of the Catholic world what God wants them to do. Though voted into office by mere mortals, he is God’s unquestionable mouthpiece, relating the words of the creator of the entire universe and everything in it to as many human beings as prescribe to Catholicism, all while navigating the choppy waters of Catholic bureaucracy: now that’s a lot of job pressure.

To think I’d get overwhelmed washing dishes during the dinner rush at Patxi’s Pizza.

A few days after the Pope’s retirement announcement, I got an email from my father with no body, only a title-

Subject : WHAT DID YOU DO?

Well, I wrote back, I’ve usurped the Vatican throne and will be commanding the Catholic Church from now on. First order of business is to get as many priests laid as possible: those guys obviously have some pent-up energy.

P.S. you can buy wine by the jug here!

Now, when the Pope’s position needs filling, several things happen. Firstly, the College of Cardinals is called upon to elect a new Pope (Cardinals being bishops from all corners of the globe, chosen by the Pope himself to perform one task and one task only: helping to elect a new Pope when the time is ripe). It just so happened that the time had become ripe in 2013, and so the Cardinals gathered from far and wide, arriving and shepherded immediately to the sacred halls of the Vatican to make the most important decision of their bishop lives: choosing who will be God’s chosen one.

Technically a Pope can be any baptized Catholic man, but the Pope has always been chosen from the pool of Cardinals within the choosing enclave, and these eligible cardinals are known as the papabili (quite literally the ‘pope-able’). When the necessary number of votes are attained for any one papabile, white smoke emerges from the chimney of the Chapel, signaling to the world, “Habemus Papam!”, or, “we have a Pope!”. Prior to 2013, the most recent time this occurred was April of 2005 when Pope Benedict XVI was elected following the death of Pope John Paul II.

I personally have never been a practitioner of the Catholic faith, nor any organized faith, in truth. I was baptized a Congregational/Protestant Christian at a small church upon entering the universe, but my parents stopped attending soon after I came into existence. Coincidence? I think not. My parents are gardeners who won the gardener lottery: becoming the caretakers of a Silicon Valley billionaire’s estate at the base of the coastal mountain range in the Bay Area. My sister I know was a purposeful procreation, but learned later in life that I was what Bob Ross called a “happy accident”, which I am more than okay with because, hey, the best things in life often come about entirely by accident! And there’s a good chance half of us Americans came about in such a way. [1]

The billionaire was beyond generous to my family, building a house for us on his property, and so in childhood I would wander daily and delightedly under the gargantuan redwoods of the estate, all alone, carving little paths back and forth through the forest floor. The more I walked, the more I escaped my physical reality and entered an entirely hypothetical world of my own making. One might call it a walking meditation of sorts, but at the time I just enjoyed the flowy state my mind would achieve in these wild, repetitive walkabouts.

Wildlife was abundant in those coastal ranges: foxes, red-shouldered hawks, salamanders, rattle snakes, coyotes, bob-cats…I observed it all, watching copious streams of ants become a collaborative mega-organism capable of near anything they put their little hive mind to. I followed the paths of coyotes, seeing their footprints appear in the mud and then disappear into swaths of tall grass populating small clearings between redwoods, and I wondered what the daily life of such animals must be like; to what extent could they “think” beyond basic survival measures? Did they have expectations, or things that made them happy? I found carcasses of felled deer, body munched by a mountain lion so only the head remained attached to a skeleton picked clean, maggots wandering in and out of eye sockets, but come spring new fawns would bounce around clumsily on uncertain legs, and the cycle of life continued. I watched seasons transition, plant-life flourish, fade and then flourish anew, wind and rain mold the landscape about me in nature’s chaotic and entropic waltz. I watched the dew at the tips of ferns dematerialize into moisture and be retaken back into the sky, wherein they’d wait for the next shift in state to eventually come careening back down to Earth.

What a rush, the life of a water droplet!

Half of the reason for going on my little wanderings outdoors was to ask questions, sometimes waiting for an answer in the forest around me, still uncertain if there was some sort of higher power at play. In childhood, they were basic questions: what am I getting for Christmas? Why is Kevin being mean to me? But in preteen-hood, they expanded- I wondered why things happened the way they did, and I wondered if there was some purpose laid out for each living thing. How am I alive, and why am I aware of it? Can I truly have the freedom of choice in this life? Why do I even have the capacity to ask unanswerable questions?

Looking back, I consider my walkabouts to be my own little form of religion, akin to paganism, I suppose: seeking answers in the natural world, open to the idea of spirits or perhaps Gods, beyond just the one and only Yahweh/Allah/Jehovah/etc. This tendency to look for signs of a higher power in the natural world around me declined over the years, but my observational wonder at the universe never did; in fact, it only increased as I experienced more of the naturally-occurring vibrancy of existence, and as I learned more about the differing world religions, I found them far too specific and self-serving to adequately portray the vast mystery of our reality.

Despite how my beliefs aligned, when I arrived in a city considered to be the functioning center of a major world religion, my interest piqued.

The tales of Papal abdications over the years is absurdly entertaining. A few early Popes may have resigned in one way or another, though it is harder to know exactly how it went down given the lack of records: Pontian allegedly gave up leadership in 235 after being sent to the mines of Sardinia by Emperor Maximus Thrax, Marcellinus was forced out in 296 for turning to paganism when Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians was ramped up, and Liberius was exiled to Greece in 366 for being at odds with Constantius II over what flavor of Christianity was the proper one.

Pope Benedict IX didn’t abdicate in 1045 so much as sell his Popehood when, after a history of excommunicating church leaders and fooling around with the ladyfolk, the Romans forced him out and he fled the Eternal City. His replacement, Sylvester III, was intimidated out of town by Benedict’s brothers, so his godfather Giovanni Graziano bought the Popehood from his exiled god-son Benedict and took the throne. That same godfather, dubbed Pope Gregory VI, refused to step down a year later when Benedict and Sylvester III returned to the Vatican. The three Popes all claimed rights to the Papacy and in December of 1046, Henry III, German Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, effectively said they were all wrong and a new Pope named Clement II took the seat. But Benedict wasn’t quite done yet, and when Clement II died in 1047, he returned and re-declared himself Pope (his third attempt, mind you). The situation was only resolved when Henry III ordered the forceful driving out of Benedict by an army, and the dude went off to the monastery of Grottaferrata to repent.

In 1294, Pope Celestine V stepped down after only five months of Pope-ing, for he’d taken the job half-heartedly simply to fill a seat left vacant for two years, and really only wanted to live a life of hermitage (but was not allowed back to that peaceful life due to suspicious bishops, and even after a dramatic escape attempt via the Adriatic Sea, he was interned in Fumone Castle and died there). In 1415, it was Pope Gregory XII, and leading up to his resignation there had been a Pope in Rome, a Pope in the French city of Avignon, and even a third Pope in Pisa, all claiming legitimacy with an enclave and followers in their own right. Personally, I don’t see why there couldn’t be three Popes at a time: what better way to test that hypothesis of God than to see if you can triangulate his message?

Rumors circulated high and low across the city in 2013 as to the reasons for Pope Benedict XVI’s abdication. Had there been foul play? Was the Pope being forced from office? Our history professor, a meditative Alabama-transplant with the jawline and piercing blue eyes of Thor, stopped a lesson midway through one afternoon to paint a dramatic picture of the pressures being applied to poor Benedict from all sorts of places, including the Mafia and a secret society or two.

A 300-page dossier was presented to Benedict a few months prior to his resignation detailing corruption within Vatican City. Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the President of the Vatican Bank until May of 2012, apparently resigned due to fears over death threats from Mafia godfathers whose dealings he was trying to make more transparent, which is simply one story in a history of mysterious deaths and money laundering surrounding the Vatican Bank. There was also the issue La Repubblica’s report on the network of gay priests within the Vatican who were being blackmailed, and since the Vatican’s official position on gay sex is that it is “intrinsically disordered” (oh, the irony) and sexually active gay men are barred from studying for the priesthood, they couldn’t have such a scandal continue. Also, there was the small problem of the far-flung scandals of child sexual abuse by priests (pretty much across the board of the Catholic world), which would, in theory, be the end of any modern brand like immediately, and yet the Church somehow manages to march onwards, accepting Mafia money, discriminating based on sexual orientation and plowing children.

If I haven’t made it clear up to this point, there’s been a bit of chaos within God’s house. Corruption runs rampant, and not solely at any one point in history: this is a pattern. But shouldn’t God’s ultimate earthly house be a pristine and holy site? Would it not stand to reason that the rest of the world would house the darker tendencies of man, whilst the Vatican stood a shining example of God’s perfection? The Pope, being the one and only earpiece to our Father who Art in Heaven, should be so clean of sin that his shined and primed buttocks could be used to land airplanes.

Hundreds of thousands make the pilgrimage every year to see the most Holy of Catholic places on Earth: are they disappointed to find the same greed and sin as the rest of this world, upped to the tenth degree? When someone in need of actual help arrives at your door with their last penny and you take it, promise God hears them and then shoo them away because you gotta get back to the Mafia-sponsored orgy, why do we continue to place any sort of value in that institution? And why wouldn’t God stop that?

I do feel for Pope Benedict XVI, though. His lack of leadership in steering the Church in a satisfactory direction got him forced out, and seemingly all he wanted to do was read and write, undisturbed. I wonder if he still hears God’s voice, or if God stopped talking to him once he decided to retire. Maybe God has a super annoying voice, like Miss Piggy turned up to eleven, and Benedict just couldn’t handle it anymore.

Regardless of the reasons for Pope Benedict XVI’s exit, French toast was being made the evening of March 13th in my shared apartment in Rome, and the online BBC feed chortled from my open laptop on a lopsided yet sturdy dinner table the living room.

Our living room was spacious enough for twelve people or so. The couches were a functional sort, navy blue and not at all comfortable, lumpy like bags of trash. Flowered pillows littered the room, along with lamps of varying degrees of functionality, and a cobwebbed television set sat sadly atop a chipped, maroon cabinet in the corner. It was not unlike living in the home furnishing section of a thrift store. Abstract, cheap-hotel-quality paintings were hung up on the walls, mismatched cutlery and dishware populated our kitchen drawers, and random bits and bobs were spread here and there across the entire apartment: a plastic globe, a tin tea pot, a 6-inch porcelain statue of Michelangelo’s David standing naked and proud. It was aggregate décor, added at random over the course of numerous years, and I loved its kitschyness.

Friends sat around our living room sipping three-Euro wine from a large glass jug. Damian passed a soccer ball from the far end of our hallway down to where I stood in the entryway, and I, with my one-year-and-one-year-only of playing in a kiddie soccer (excuse me, fútbol) league when I was seven, missed the return kick. We’d bought the ball together and had plans to venture forth to Rome’s gigantic park, Villa Borghese, which coincidentally was only a fifteen-minute walk from my shared apartment.

Off to my right in the living room one of my roommates, Craig, practiced his Italian for a quiz the following day. He sat on a navy blue ottoman opposite Ariana.

“Oggi io vado in biblioteca,” Craig pronounced with a open book in his lap, his eyes closed and one hand raised with a finger extended.

“You don’t need the io,” Ariana told him.

“Yes, I do,” Craig said, eyes flashing open. “I absolutely do, otherwise I’m just saying ‘today go to the library’.”

“Vado implies that you are the one performing the action.”

“Are you sure?”

“I took four years of Italian, Craig.”

“Four years of Italian, four years of Italian- you know you say that every time we do this, right?”

Ariana pursed her lips. ““Because you keep questioning me, little man.”

“How do I know you’re right?”

“Look at your book and tell me I’m wrong.”

“Play nice,” Maggie intoned from her seated position on one of our plump, navy blue couches. She flipped through her own Italian book, brows furrowed. “Don’t make me come over there.”

“I don’t know if I like studying with you,” Craig continued, ignoring Maggie. “And I’m not that short.”

Ariana raised an eyebrow. “You are miniscule, and I’m trying to help you.”

“Can you be less rude?”

“Good God,” Ariana groaned, covering her face with her hands.

Thomas emerged from our shared room into the hallway, a guitar in hand, just as I managed to pass the ball back to Damian, and as it skittered past Thomas’s feet he triumphantly announced-

“I have a new song!”

“Can we hear it?” I asked, and as my feeble pass reached Damian, he scooped it up expertly with his foot, sending it arching up and over his head, and somehow, majestically, he caught it in the back of his neck, leaning forward and outstretching his arms in a bizarre, frog-like pose while balancing the ball in the crook.

“I did it!” Damian cackled happily. “I am the greatest soccer player for at least thirty feet in every direction!”

“I’ll play it for you later, I think,” Thomas said, squinting down the hallway as Craig and Ariana’s voices continued to rise.

“If you play music, maybe they’ll shut up.” Damian said, bent over with the ball still balanced behind his head.

Kylie poked her head out of the kitchen down the hall.

“Do you guys have any eggs?”

“We had a dozen, didn’t you find them in the fridge?” Thomas responded.

“Yeah, but…do you have any more eggs?”

“That would be all the eggs we have,” I responded.

Ariana came bursting out of the living room, brushing past me and down the hallway into the kitchen to help with the cooking of French toast, muttering angrily the entire way. Craig’s voice raised from the living room after her-

“Show me your transcripts!”

Ariana’s whirled around, shouting back-

“There’s no way in hell you’re getting your grimy hands anywhere near my transcripts-“

“Grimy?!”

“Wait!” came Maggie’s voice from the couch, above the din, and just as both Ariana and Craig were about to enter a true argument, she shouted louder than I’d ever heard her exclaim-

“Shut up and look!”

The rest of us all shuffled into the living room where we found Maggie pointing openmouthed at my laptop on the dining room table. There, as the announcers’ tones suddenly hit a higher pitch and the digital roar of a crowd escalated behind their remarks, an image stood stark on my laptop’s dusty, fingerprint-covered screen of white smoke emerging from the Sistine Chapel.

A new Pope had been chosen.

Kylie left the stovetop burners on full blast as she sprinted out of the apartment. Maggie spilled her wine on the tablecloth and mopped it up haphazardly, spreading the stain more than absorbing it, and then darted out after Kylie. Ariana and Craig threw Italian language notes into the air and left together, screeching. Shawn, another roommate of mine, emerged from his room at the back of the apartment tucking his shirt into his pants, his girlfriend right behind putting her shirt back on with flushed cheeks, and as they passed the kitchen Shawn cursed and ran back to turn the burners off. Thomas sprinted back to our shared room, laid the guitar down delicately upon the bed, and careened back, his eyes wide like two marbles about to pop out of his skull. I remember shouting “Andiamo!” as I careened out of the door in a rush of excitement.

We joined a whole city of people abandoning their tasks, cars left parked haphazardly and doors left open wide, tourists and locals alike pouring out in a mad rush towards the Vatican. It wasn’t a mob: people were actually helping each other out of vehicles, holding hands and running together, as if we were all in some giant Toyota Superbowl halftime commercial. We were all very aware that what we made our way towards that night would prove to be something truly momentous- an unabridged piece of history.

It’s one thing to read about moments of historical resonance, and it’s another to be present. History is written by the victors, they say, but I would contend this censorship is not unique to history textbooks or newspapers, either, whether from media outlets, social media posts, blogs, or even friends and family. The individual experience is filtered and nuanced, a product of how we individually ingest information, and two eyewitnesses to any event could have entirely different accounts based on the prior makeup of their brains.

That night in Rome I came to understand the electric mundaneness of such a momentous occasion: the French toast burning on the stove, a cramp occurring in my lower abdomen, the stink of decaying garbage by our dumpster as we sprinted past…the small details were ever present, only the context was suddenly of the macro. Every corner turned revealed streets awash with people. In the glow of yellow streetlamps dozens of flags rippled, waving up and down the avenues like the banners of an army. I briefly caught a glimpse of Thomas’s goldilocks, but by the time I moved towards him he had been swallowed by the crowd. The only way forward was to channel my high school track and field training, and so I bolted down the Via della Conciliazione.

People had similar ideas all around me, and soon I found myself in a race with men and women of all ages and from all over the world. We surged forward towards the piazza directly in front of the Vatican, Piazza San Pietro, spilling into a gigantic collective mass undulating under the towering dome of the Vatican like water pouring copiously out of a delta.

St. Peter’s Basilica, the enormous and intimidating structure standing at the head of Piazza San Pietro, was previously a Roman necropolis, the Constantinian Basilica, and many believe it was built upon the tomb of St. Peter on Vatican hill. Emperor Nero, a controversial figure in Roman history (who reportedly murdered not only his mother but his first and second wife), blamed the Christians for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE, and leaders of the burgeoning religion were burned at the stake, crucified and torn apart by animals. Though there is no concrete evidence, many ancient critics believed Nero to have started the fire in order to rebuild the center of Rome by his own vision, and Roman Catholic tradition has maintained that St. Peter was crucified upside-down in what stood there then: an enormous, oblong circus of Nero’s making. St. Peter is said to have been buried outside its walls in a shallow grave.

Tourists with proper permissions can descend down 33 feet below the floor of the modern basilica to a glass door which opens unto a low and narrow arch through a wall from the 16th Century. After a bit of walking in the musty and damp passageway, Christian and pagan tombs lining a dimly lit path and the very ground they walk upon is the sloping surface of a Vatican Hill 1,900 years prior, visitors approach another wall and can see the remains of the Trophy of Gaius, the OG monument above St. Peter’s grave constructed sometime around 150 CE. The wall displays a few Greek letters for “Peter” and the start of a second word (unclear what it said, exactly), and through a small hole in the wall visitors can see two small plastic boxes containing 18 of the 19 bones found on the site. The 19th is kept by the Pope, because the Pope gets perks like that.

By 380 CE, the spiritual tables had been turned, and Christianity was recognized as the official religion of Rome after having been something of a religion non-grata (hell, Jesus was executed by Roman authorities in Jerusalem). As the Empire grew and religions developed and were incorporated within its ever-expanding borders, certain ones weren’t tolerated (the cult of Bacchus for its supposed orgies, the Celtic Druics for their supposed human sacrifices, and Jews during and after the conquest of Judea). With help from St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, Christianity spread and was more and more accepted post Jesus’-death. In 313 CE, Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, which gave Christianity and other religions legal status, and began construction of the Constantinian Basilica, which was expanded in the 1500s into the Vatican City I ran towards in 2013.

As soon as I crossed into the great stone embrace of Piazza San Pietro’s two semicircular arms, I had entered into the smallest and richest country in the world. Vatican City is technically an independent nation-state, composed of just over one hundred acres, with another 160 acres in remote locations around Italy. Within its tiny independent statehood, it houses six hundred citizens, most of them being members of the Swiss Guard (the Pope’s security detail), and it has its own bank, currency, radio and even television station.

That night, a small city of camera crews from all over the world occupied the end of the Via della Conciliazione, and scaffolding had been built four levels high to accommodate all the cameras and their quest for the money shot- the High Balcony of the front of the Vatican where the new Pope would be presented to the world. I ran fast enough to make it into the Piazza before it became too overcrowded and moved as far forward as I could within the great mass of humanity (I learned at a later time that there were over 100,000 people in and around the piazza that night).

A joyfully apprehensive energy filled the air, and I miraculously ended up next to Thomas, having spotted his golden hair a mere forty people away. We basked together in the excitement in the air, people all around us waiting singing, laughing, some even crying. As time wore on and tension grew for the announcement, the general rumbling died down, and Vatican City became oddly quiet.

A collective breath was being held.

The light rain seemed to dissipate before it reached us, as if the heat of so many bodies was enough to evaporate it. More and more people cascaded into the square, some climbing on top of shoulders and statues, filling the space to the very brim and then some. Men and women were perched halfway up pillars, sitting on the edges of fountains, and even attempting to scale the great obelisk at the center of the square, all to get a better view of the pronouncement of Catholicism’s new papa. I’d never seen so many humans in the same place at the same time.

When the doors finally opened on the balcony high above us, a cannon fire of cheering erupted round the square, rattling me to my core: it was like Piazza San Pietro had become a gigantic subwoofer. The Cardinal Protodeacon walked out onto the balcony, and the roar of the crowd rose to near-fervor, shouts and yells turning into screeching and screaming. The Cardinal Protodeacon raised his right hand, quivering with age, and in a voice amplified across tens of thousands of waiting ears, he pronounced-

“Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: Habemus Papam!”

A thunder shook the very foundations of the Vatican. I found myself caught up in it all and cheered wildly along with everyone else, pack mentality overriding personal belief. The words he spoke were the ones spoken at every Pope inauguration: “I announce to you a great joy. We have a Pope!”

The Protodeacon continued, in Latin-

“The Most Eminent and Reverend Lord, Lord Jorge, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Bergoglio, who takes to himself the name Francis!”

As soon as the word ‘Jorge’ escaped the Protodeacon’s lips, there was an enormous collective gasp of a hundred thousand mouths suctioning air into lungs, and then, a millisecond later, it was all released in a shockwave like a jet engine roaring across the square.

A South American Pope! The first in history!

The longtime Archbishop of Buenos Aires had been elected to the highest seat possible in the Catholic Church, and people were going mad and rightly so! The first Latin American Pope? Shortly following an already-historic resignation of Pope Benedict XVI? It was nuts.

In the moment, I was simply taking it all in, a fish out of water, staring bewildered at the roiling ocean surface around me…but in the years since, I’ve gone back and watched news clips from the many international television stations that were present, and noticed that, consistently, there was a surprised tone when whatever news anchor announced- “Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, of Argentina, will now lead the Catholic faith”. Everybody was surprised.

The first Pope of the “New World” in two thousand years of Catholicism, and I somehow got to be there for it.

A few minutes later, Pope Francis took the balcony and gave his first blessing to the mass of people gathered at his feet. Staring back at him was a galaxy of glassy eyes, a maelstrom of cheering and crying, flags and banners cupped in the breeze and roiling over the square while hands stretched upwards, waving like seaweed. He spoke in a quiet tone, calm and collected, and while I had no idea what he was saying in Latin/Italian, I felt an odd sort of comfort descend upon me in his grandfatherly tone.

He raised both hands at the end of his speech and bid everyone be good humans, and to go with God, then disappeared from the high balcony of the Vatican, and the roar continued for long after he left, spilling outwards from Vatican City through the veins of Rome like a dye in the city’s bloodstream.

Many thousands stayed to gaze upon the balcony doors where the now-Pope Francis disappeared, hoping for an encore. A great number had traveled vast distances to be in that very place on that very night, and so it only made sense for them to bask in the moment as long as they could. I saw dozens of Argentinian flags waving a bit higher post-announcement, and couldn’t help but feel like it was not unlike a World Cup aftermath.

Thomas and I, along with other friends we eventually found, decided to head back half an hour after the event. The rain was falling with increasing gusto.

Thomas and I agreed that it had been a magnificent thing to witness, quite literally a once in a lifetime event, though we couldn’t help but make comparisons between the address from the Vatican’s high balcony and Saruman’s address to the Uruk Hai prior to the battle of Helm’s Deep in the Two Towers: “TO WARRRRR”. Francis uttered a more peaceful command, but mimicked Saruman with raised hands and an earth-shaking roar from the flag-bearing crowd below.

All across the city there was a wonderful electricity: families and lovers, locals and foreigners, the old and the young walked hand in hand and arm in arm, hugging and celebrating. Fireworks went off on side streets as songs and cheers were belted out high and low from park benches and second floor balconies. The television crews nabbed folks, getting interviews with those who had been there and continuing their coverage long into the night, trying to transmit that same electricity to people around the globe (Craig’s longtime fantasy of meeting Anderson Cooper came true that night). It felt less like a movie set, and more like life amped up to a new degree, wherein the city wasn’t just buildings and faceless strangers, but an honest-to-goodness community of thousands, who could share in the bigness of the event.

Sports suddenly made a lot more sense.

We returned to an empty apartment, and a sense of gravitas filled the space. I think we all were thinking the same thing: what the hell just happened? A few of us gathered there were Catholic, and I watched their faces positively glow for the rest of the evening. To them, I realized, it might’ve been a life-defining moment. The historical magnitude brought with it a gravity I had never experienced, and in a place of such history on display all round, our witnessing of a brand-new piece of it left me happily shocked.

In the earlier years of my life, the largeness and complexity of the world terrified me, and I would shrink inwards and pursue my little meditations in the woods. Stick to what you know, tend to your garden. When you spend all your time in one place, your understanding of the world is small, yet focused. This is not a negative thing at all, not inherently. To focus on your inner circle, your faiths and beliefs, your friends and family, is to build yourself a fortress out of the sand you’re sitting in. It’s what’s led the human race to constructing a planet’s-worth of diverse and complex cultures: people planted themselves in a place and learned to thrive.

But it’s also important to understand that one is subconsciously tied to the culture surrounding their sandcastle, and that there are other sandcastle-builders down the beach who have developed different strategies and philosophies about how to go about things. We all have place and culture wrapped up tightly in our identities, but to travel outside of those places and culture is to see other effective ways of existence. A Pope’s inauguration was not something I thought I would ever see, nor something I was even that curious about, yet it’s one of the most memorable and impacting nights of my life, and completely altered how I saw religion, having grown up outside of it. It was inspiring, joyful, exuberant, holy. I watched my new friends laugh and joke and glow, filled with…what the hell, let’s call it the Holy Spirit.

We had our French toast, finally, accompanied with some more wine, and we sat around a dinner table talking.

“You guys have no idea,” Craig was saying, pacing around the living room with an unsettled energy. “I always knew Anderson Cooper was like the perfect human being, and now I’ve seen him up close. And I was right!”

“He interviewed you?” Thomas asked.

“I’m probably on CNN like now.”

“What did you say?”

“Like I just…I was just-“ He shook his hands like he was trying to dry them. “It was Anderson Cooper!”

“Who’s Anderson Cooper?” Damian asked, pushing excess syrup around his plate with a spoon, French toast demolished long ago.

“Who’s — WHAT!?” Craig’s eyebrows somehow shot up beyond his receding hairline.

“Seriously, I don’t know who that is. Who’s this Anderson Scooper guy?”

“ANDERSON COOPER IS THE MOST PERFECT HUMAN NEWSCASTER…JESUS!” Craig spluttered. “How the fuck do you not know who Anderson Cooper is?!”

Damian shrugged, licking syrup off of his spoon.

“I don’t really watch Fox News,” he said.

Craig let out a shriek and stormed down the hall, shouting something about looking for himself on the Internet as he went.

The buzz of the evening wasn’t wearing off quickly, and it was wonderful to sit and bask in it. Fireworks went off every now and again, a distinct booming in the distance. The night sky was hidden by a low fog permeating much of the nearby streets, a wonderfully drizzly Rome evening, and the mist pulsed with a golden glow of a thousand streetlamps. Cars drove around late into the night, sounding off their mechanical exaltations, and I’d never felt more involved with such a mass of people in my life, nor so comfortable being a small part of something much larger than myself.

Religion suddenly made a lot more sense.

“What’s it like in Cali, Jimmy?” Maggie asked, and then frowned. “Am I allowed to call it that since I’m not from there?”

“No worries, brah,” I said. “California is nice. Good hiking. Lots of surfing and longboarding and mountain biking. Weed is an abundant, as are aging-hippies,” I said.

“Also, there’s trolleys.”

“Sounds lovely,” Ariana said dreamily.

“West coast, best coast,” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s what a dirty California hippie would say,” Damian piped in. “Well, Texas is the bestest and y’all can deal.”

“Bull shit,” Thomas said, and hiccupped. “Chicago is the best. It doesn’t need a rhyme, either, it just is and that’s the end of it.”

“Does anyone ride the trolleys in San Francisco?” Ariana asked, extending her glass to me in an effort to get me to fill it. “Also, New York has you all beat.”

“Better than Rome?” Maggie gasped. “No, no, no, I disagree. I disagree wholeheartedly. Rome is the greatest city to ever happen ever.”

“How many cities have you been to?” Damian asked her pointedly.

“I think…three.”

Thomas shook his head sagely. “Guys, let me just put the record straight. It goes Chicago and then Rome and then I don’t really care.”

“Tourists ride the trolleys, I think?” I responded. “I suppose at one point in history, though, they were like, the thing. But now you it’s just tourists.”

“Chicago has an elevated train system. So, super trolleys.”

Kylie entered the living room, having been down the hallway in the room that Craig shared with Tony, another roommate of mine. He had heavy Italian heritage, a love of everything soccer (whoops, futbol), eyebrows like a Greek god and thighs as big as tree trunks. She came and sat down next to Damian with a frustrated groan.

“Craig is annoying,” she grumbled, kicking her feet around in her usual venting ritual. “I’m just trying to hang out with Paolo.”

“Is hang out code for bang out?” Damian asked, and Kylie kicked him in the shin.

“Ow!”

“Did he find himself on the Internet?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. He’s calling his mom to tell her he met Anderson Cooper.”

“Well, dude does have pretty dope hair,” Damian said, nodding. “I mean, how does he get it so sleek and perfect?”

“Wait,” I said, “so you do know who Anderson Cooper is?”

“Who doesn’t?” Damian grinned wickedly.

“Should we study?” Ariana asked. “I mean, I don’t need to, but you all should. Because you’re terrible.”

“Mi chiamo Thomas!” Thomas exclaimed. “Abito a Roma!”

“Great.”

A roar of cheering emerged from the street outside, followed by a car honking, followed by further cheering, and Rome continued its historic celebration. Someone seemed to be banging on our dumpster with a stick, cheering along to the rhythm.

“Man, this is amazing, isn’t it?” Maggie said, suddenly. “What a fucking day.”

I grinned, as did everyone else, because Maggie never swore, and any time that she did was considered a special occasion.

Truly historic.

[1] The percentage of unplanned pregnancies in America has fluctuated between 40 and 60 percent since 1981, but we can assume that on average, somewhere around 50% of pregnancies are unplanned in the United States, with the rate being much higher amongst low-income women.