Bruce Caslow says I was “running for pope”, and in a sense I was! There was only one voter, but I was hoping He would work some great miracle and elevate me to that high office. As I was walking back to the Vatican from Roma Termini, I was crying, and crying out to God, saying that even if He did, I would have no idea what to do with it. I soon realized that was not true. I knew I’d need to be guided by prayer every step of the way.
I hadn’t really considered the Papacy for years, even through the months of Pope Francis’ illness. As soon as he died, however, I immediately thought of going to Rome. What if God would now make me Pope? I was smoking a marijuana joint. Maybe it was just my drug-fueled imagination. Sure would be nice to take mom for a ride around St. Peter’s Square in the Popemobile for Mother’s Day. Still, what if it was from God?
After a few days, I realized that not going was unthinkable. That would lead to another bout of suicidal depression, for sure. Go to Rome, do it right this time, see if God works a miracle. If not, just make it a pilgrimage to Rome.
The last pilgrimage didn’t go so well. Two years ago, I was asked on the train ride into Rome if I was an actor, because of the way I was dressed, and by the end of that week I concluded that I was. All those poor people in Rome, and I made sure I had a youth hostel or a room in a religious house every night. My last full day in Rome, I took the robe off and didn’t put it back on for two years. I was ashamed of my conduct, and ashamed to wear the white robe.
The day of the Pope Francis’s funeral, Our Daily Bread Ministries, whose devotional I read regularly, choose the first book of Joshua for the reading. In it, God commands Joshua three times, “be brave and courageous”, “be brave and very courageous”, “only be brave and very courageous”.
On April 28th, my income tax refund appear in my bank account on the same day that the opening date of the conclave was announced. Was it coincidence? A sign? There was no question at that point but that I was going. I checked tickets in the morning, waited until I had lunch with Bruce before buying a round trip with a return flight two weeks later, then chastised myself for not being braver and more courageous by buying the ticket in the morning. It would have saved me $150.
My flight left Dulles at 5:10 pm on April 7, connected through Dublin at 6 am the next morning, and landed in Rome at 11 am, where I ate an hamburger at Eataly for breakfast, then found a chaotic scene at the airport train station due to a train worker’s strike. Another half hour was wasted finding the airport bus terminal, where I discovered long lines and a forty minute wait for a bus to the Vatican. I took the bus, walked the remaining blocks to St. Peter’s Square, went through the security check (metal detectors and X-ray machines), and entered the Basilica.
There are confessionals at St. Peter’s in several languages, but only Italian was available when I arrived. I waited for about an hour, until two English speaking priests were available. I had tried the door of the first confessional because the light was green and not red, but the door was locked, so I waited. Somebody else made the same mistake, which brought the priest out with an angry rebuke that we should wait in line. I explained to him that the red light was not lit, and he snapped back at me that the light was not working and I should pay attention to who else was waiting. I went to the other confessional..
I confessed as well as a Protestant can. I advised the priest right away that I was Protestant, and he advised me right away that he therefore could not administer the sacrament, but we could still speak. The sin I confessed had been heavy on my heart for some days. Years ago, after the collapse of Occupy, I had prayed for Pope Benedict to die so that I could become pope. I had the sense that the prayer would be answered, and Pope Benedict resigned within the next month! Yet I felt that I had failed as a prophet, since I had “discerned” that the pope would die, when in fact he resigned. I didn’t even consider going to Rome for the conclave that elected Pope Francis.
Now I see what an outrageous, inconsiderate, arrogant prayer that really was. All it showed, really, was how unqualified I was to be pope. If God ever sees fit to award me the papacy, I hope my opponents will be kinder than I was, and pray only for my resignation. Yet I was determined to confess that sin before Mass that day, which I did. There’s a saying in A.A. that you’re only as sick as your secrets, and that’s one I’m ashamed to air out, but there it is.
The priest didn’t even assign me a Hail Mary. Instead, he asked why not become Catholic?
Why not? Well, I don’t really accept all of the dogma, and you don’t believe in the theology, well, then, how can you be Catholic? Especially when so much is made of the differences.
I then attended the 5 pm Mass, without actually taking communion, since Protestants are not welcome to receive the Eucharist in Roman Catholic churches. I would have liked to walk up to the dome of St. Peter’s, one of my favorite places, but it was late (the dome might have already have closed), so I decided to walk to the train station and give my money away as planned. This was a bit more stressful than I had figured, since after a two hour walk to Roma Termini (the train station), I found that I couldn’t use the WiFi there without a working phone number, so I couldn’t check my bank balance, or use Google Maps to find an ATM machine. I finally found a bank ATM machine, took out a hundred euros, and handed out five twenty euro notes to various beggars there at the station. I walked back to the Vatican, crying to God and crying to St. Francis (I hope he would approve), and ended up near St. Peter’s, at the passenger underpass at the Piazza del Sant’uffizio, where I remembered that homeless people sleep. Sure enough, there were homeless there, and in my broken Italian, I asked if I could sleep there, and I they said that I could, so I took off my robe, used it as a blanket, and laid down on the concrete to try and get some sleep.
I didn’t sleep very well, in part due to the snoring of the other people sleeping there, although the jet lag certainly didn’t help. The next morning I walked the short distance back to St. Peter’s, planning to attend the 9 am Mass at the Alter of the Cathedra in the back of the church, but that Mass was cancelled because it was the first day of the conclave. So instead, I attended the big Mass at the Papal Alter with a couple thousand other people. Watched all of the cardinals process past a sea of cell phones lifted in the air and could even follow along because we all got the Order of the Mass in both English and Italian:
After church, I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting by the Colonnades in St. Peter’s square, fasting and praying for the cardinals. I left around 6 pm, since I didn’t expect an election that first evening anyway.
At some point the previous evening, I had met two Estonians camped out a block from the Vatican. Alex was flying a cardboard sign that read “Message from God: Give me throne or I will make the world suffer.” While I didn’t completely agree with it (I think we make ourselves suffer, and God just allows it), none of the beggars at the train station had any such message, but I had already given all of my money away. Then I started thinking that maybe I should have given the money to the poor around the Vatican, instead of going to Roma Termini (I should have). Then I remembered that my mother was saving $50 for me, so that second evening I called Bruce from the McDonald’s WiFi, asked him to send me the fifty dollars, and happily withdrew 40 euros and gave twenty each to Alex and Petros.
The next day I did attend the 9 am Mass, and spent the rest of the day sitting in St. Peter’s Square, fasting and praying for the cardinals. My prayer was not for myself, but rather that God would guide the cardinals to select whomever He would have them select. Wearing a white robe and a wooden cross, I attracted a small bit of attention, and was photographed and interviewed by several members of the media. I saw the black smoke at noon and then, around 6 pm, the smoke was white! A new pope had been elected!
I felt no bitterness or depression. I had come, confessed, fasted and prayed. There was nothing else I can see that I could have done, it was out of my hands, and the Lord saw fit to assign the office to Pope Leo. Let’s all pray for him to be strengthened and filled with the Holy Spirit. Let him be brave and very courageous, as well!
Everyone now began crowding into St. Peter’s Square, both those of us who were already there and those who came running. The Swiss Guard paraded in with a marching band and lined up at attention before the facade of the Basilica, where the papal standard was soon to be displayed. They stood at attention for probably half and hour, and then the cardinal protodeacon announced Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV, who soon appeared before us. He addressed the crowd in Italian, most of which was incomprehensible to me. After the ceremony was finished, I filtered out of the square along with the thousands of other people, probably visited Alex and Petros, picked up some discarded cardboard from dumpsters on the Via dei Penitenzieri, as I had been advised by one the other men sleeping in the underpass, and returned there to rest for the night.
The next morning, I was walking through St. Peter’s Square, and who did I see but the “pope” posing for selfies, and I just had to get one!
Somewhat surprisingly, he didn’t speak English.
I spent the next hour and a half walking around the perimeter of the Vatican until I found an Italian non-profit I been told about, WeCare. Here they offered some nice services for the homeless, coffee and crackers for breakfast, an ample lunch, and the chance to charge my cellphone, which by now was completely dead.
That evening, I met a doctor who worked at L’Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, the oldest hospital in Europe, which is only a short walk from the Vatican. He explained to me that unwanted infants were often thrown into the Tiber, where their tiny corpses would often wash ashore. The hospital established a policy of accepting unwanted infants anonymously, and built a rotating compartment where they could be deposited. Here he is, posing next to the “baby hatch”:
Since the conclave was finished, I decided to hitchhike to Assisi, the hometown of St. Francis of Assisi, and visit the Franciscan sites there – San Damiano, where Francis experienced his famous vision, and Portiuncula, the ruined chapel where Francis established a camp that would become the first home of the Franciscan Order. I had visited Assisi with my parents when I was 14, but it made no impression on me because at that time I knew nothing of St. Francis.
Monday morning, I went to WeCare for coffee and a shower, stayed for lunch, then set out hiking to the north of the city in search of a good hitchhiking spot. I finally stumbled upon the bike trail that runs along the right bank of the Tiber all the way to the Raccordo, Rome’s beltway.
Once at the Raccordo, I hiked to the next interchange north on the SS3 road and found a decent spot to wait for rides. It was a curved on-ramp when the traffic had to slow down a bit for the curve, there was a place to pull over, and a fair number of cars going by. I adopted what has become my standard hitchhiking practice since Alaska: stand by the side of the road and pray for rides. It worked very well when I felt led to travel from Anchorage to Fairbanks after three days of fasting and prayer. This day, however, it was not to be. I waiting about an hour, until nearly sunset, and saw many cars go by, but none stopped.
I walked back to the trail and found a quiet place off to the side to sleep for the night. It was cattle grazing land, and I was able to sleep as late as I wanted with nobody to bother me. I was back on the trail around 9 am, and made it WeCare in time for lunch at noon.
Since I wasn’t going to Assisi, I set about finding something else useful to do. I googled for high schools, and found a public school nearby that looked interesting – the Liceo Scientifico Statale Talete. I walked in the door and was soon talking to a teacher who was stepping out to smoke a cigarette (something very common in Italy). He suggested that I send an email to the principal asking to visit the school, which sounded like a fine idea.
That afternoon, somebody suggested to me that I ask for a spot in a dormitory run by the Vatican for the homeless, but I decided to return to San Piedro train station, where I had been sleeping for several nights because it was quieter than the underpass (no snoring). That’s also why I decided against the dormitory. I’d had bad luck with them in the United States, often being kept awake for hours by snoring. The next morning, my phone was stolen.
I woke up around 6 am and checked the time on the telephone before replacing it in the shoe next to my head, since I had been told by the police that I could sleep there until 7 am. I dozed off, and when I got up at 6:50, the phone was gone.
I struggled for a while, and am still struggling, to forgive that thief. The phone was my only communication device, my map and my translator. He crippled me.
For instance, I was unable to email the principal of the high school. I returned to the school the next day, explained to the staff at the front door what had happened, and asked to make an appointment to see the principal. I could not! Email was the only way to obtain an appointment. There was no possibility of making an appointment in person, and no exception could be made because I had no access to email. No visit.
The worst part of living homeless wasn’t the modest food or the sleeping conditions. It was the feeling of being useful. Some of those students might have really enjoyed hearing something about my math research, or my history of calculus lecture. Between the thief and the unyielding school policies, that was lost.
Sunday was Pope Leo’s installation. I went to a 9 am English language Mass that morning at the Chiesa di Santo Spirito in Sassia, next to the L’Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia. The installation Mass then started at ten, with a huge crowd and a security operation to match. I spent over an hour skirting around the security, since I didn’t want to discard the cap of my water bottle as they required, and finally watched the end of the Mass from the Piazza del Risorgimento. Afterwards, I was walking around the area with one of the homeless men from WeCare, and he pointed out to me a pile of food bags for the poor and encouraged me to take one. It contained two sandwiches and two bottles of water, and that was my lunch!
My flight back to the United States was on Tuesday morning at 11 am, so I decided to walk to the airport on Monday afternoon. I borrowed a tablet at WeCare and wrote out the walking directions to the airport given by Google Maps:
The day before I had gone to “confession”, meaning that I entered a confessional and knelt before the priest, even though I advised him that I was a Protestant, and I knew that I therefore could not receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I told him that I was struggling to forgive the thief who stole my phone, and he advised me to read Luke 6:27, which I did.
That lasted one day, until I was lost in the middle of my airport walk, asking people in my broken Italian if I could look at a map and then wondering where the heck I was when I finally saw one, then backtracking ten minutes on a road with no sidewalk and no shoulder, calling out to God against that no-good m—– f—– that stole my phone. The f— word is in my vocabulary, I hate to admit it.
To me, the most disturbing aspect of the theft was that I felt so much hatred for the thief, while I hardly feel any animosity towards the murderer who shot and killed one of my best friends two years ago. Perhaps because John was living four thousand miles away and we talked once a month or so, while I missed the cell phone every time I wanted to look at a map, or read my email, or translate something into Italian, or talk to my mom. My mom – she’s the one now buying me another phone. I’d just put up with not having one for a while, but of course she wants to be able to call her son…
I walked about three or four hours Monday afternoon, about half the way to the airport, and had just crossed the Raccordo when I met a woman who talked to me for a few minutes in Spanish and finally pulled two tickets out her purse and pressed them into my hand, telling me to take the bus and the train to get to the airport, which I did.
That evening, I hid my backpack under a bunch and followed the bike trail from the end of the airport bus terminal into the town of Fiumicino, where I walked to the end of the jetty, gazed out over the Mediterranean Sea, then walked back to the airport.
The next day was spent in airports and jetliners, and I was back home in bed by 9 pm.