Patricia Lockwood Meets the Pope

This entire article is a delight from start to finish, full of laugh-out-loud moments. I couldn’t decide which part to quote for you, so here are more than a few particularly delightful paragraphs.

The flight to Rome is sentient; it knows exactly where I’m going and what to provide. At my gate, I find myself sitting next to a guy eating a massive perfect panini. He smells like ten men, perhaps because of the additional paninis he is smuggling on his person. On the phone to his mother, he utters the immortal words: ‘And my sanweeches’.

Hope and I have, we have calculated, exactly 72 hours to be tourists. But the elements are against us — it’s 35°C, it’ll be 38°C tomorrow, and I forgot to bring deodorant to meet the pope. So we head to the farmacia, first things first, and buy me an Italian one that somehow makes me wetter than I have ever been in my life.

From there, we head to the Capuchin crypt. My Tyrolean mountain climbing outfit is judged too revealing, so I am asked to tie a sort of barber’s cape around my waist. ‘Just the waist!’ the man yelps, when I try to put it around my whole body; I’m not going to cheat him out of an arm view. Downstairs, I start my period immediately while looking at an illumination of Christ as a sausage, coming violently uncased. I contemplate the bloodstained sheets of the stigmatic Padre Pio.

Those six words every girl wants to hear: an Irish bishop is sponsoring me. He finds us at the welcome party on the second night at the Vatican Museums. Afterwards he takes us out to dinner, where I somehow, and to his grave disappointment (he had recommended the pasta), order the deepest salad in the world. There is literally no bottom to it, like mercy.

Before leaving that morning, we stuffed my bag with all sorts of objects, reasoning that if the pope blessed me, anything on my person would be blessed as well. It now has to go through the metal detector, a tense moment. I wonder what security will make of it — a jumble of legs, jaws, little girls, torsos and precious stones, all awaiting the gesture. How far does the principle of a blessing extend? Because there’s a tampon in there that going forward I will hesitate to use.

See also Highlights from Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This.

• Patricia Lockwood
• Pope Francis
• religion