My Last Pope (Probably): Part One of an Unusual and Very Catholic Travelogue

A few days after Pope Francis died, I drove from Alabama to Wyoming.

The ostensible reason for the journey was not to sit mobile shiva for the dead pontiff, but simply the delivery of my 2019 Mazda 3 to the college student son. He gets a vehicle; I would then “need to” purchase a new one: everyone wins.

So it began: a mid-morning in late April as I headed north from Birmingham on I-65. Usually, I road warrior this trip. My preferred time frame: a day and a half. Oh, yes, it can be done, even for a late middle-aged gal like me.

This would be different, though. It would probably be the last time I’d make this particular drive, so I decided I should carpe diem, meander, and see things. The Atlas Obscura and Roadside America sites gave me enough reasons to pull off onto side roads and countryside corners, far more than the five days I was allowing myself. Some were quirky: Buddy Holly’s crash site, and a church where Dvorak played organ for Mass one summer. Some were tourist givens: the Corn Palace, the Devil’s Tower. Others were simply necessary for life, with no notes: Flannery O’Connor’s ghost in Iowa City.

I don’t mind driving long distances, and might even be a little weird about it, as my introverted, solitary self can move along in that wheeled tube for hours, taking in the world alone, with no conversation, podcasts, audiobooks, or even music, content with her own thoughts. Which are, frankly, the best thoughts.

Thoughts which, on those days, were quite a bit about popes. Dead popes, possible popes, new popes. That first day was a Sunday, and I had left Mass at my own parish, where I’d entered through a portal that told a story of both death and life in a glance that morning, in a single step: Doors decked out with wreaths of bright Easter blooms—draped in solemn black. Inside, amid the explosion of white and gold, lilies and Alleluias, the long face of the dead pope gazed at us from a framed photo standing on a black pall, a candle burning in front.

As I’d prepped for this journey, I noted something most normal people probably–definitely—wouldn’t: how many diocesan sees I could hit on the way. Counting my own (Birmingham), I could conceivably pass through at least ten: Nashville, Louisville, Springfield and Peoria (Illinois), Davenport, Cedar Rapids and Dubuque (Iowa), then Sioux Falls and finally Rapid City (South Dakota). With some extra driving–a couple of hours here, an hour there—I could probably work in Evansville and Des Moines, too (I didn’t).

And so the Catholic side quest emerged: See every one of those cathedrals. Then, in the wake of that Sunday Mass in my own cathedral, a secondary quest developed somewhere between Huntsville and the always insanely, screamingly busy Buc-ee’s right before the Tennessee state line: speaking of a dead pope, let’s see, just to see, what everyone’s doing about that.

—————

Traveling as a Catholic can be a pain if you’re even half serious about the faith stuff. Make all the excuses you like, but in the end, there’s no avoiding a particular kind of Sunday scaries: Got to find a Mass.

You search Masstimes.org, rearrange your itinerary, argue with the family and your worst, lazy self about it, figure out distances, check the parish website for your personal definition of craziness: rainbow flag or priest in a biretta? Comic Sans or densely spaced Gothic? Oh, you’ll go no matter what because, well, you have to, but at least you’ll have been warned.

Rushing everyone out to the car, you spy the agnostics, the Nones, and the Protestants enjoying their hotel waffles, unbothered by such hassle, such ridiculous scrambling to go sit somewhere new and strange for an hour on vacation. Are you envious? Maybe. Resentful that you have this thing called an obligation, and they don’t?

And it’s true. They don’t have that obligation, but as you keep mulling this, as you move on down the road, you see the other side—you see that they don’t have the next part, either. The part where you arrive, walk into a place that could be anywhere in the world, and you find yourself at home.

Maybe you’re in the back, sliding in late because you made some wrong turns, or you started in Arizona, and here you are in Utah, and there’s a time difference, who knew? But you’re there. The faces are different, and maybe the language isn’t yours, and the music isn’t to your taste or isn’t familiar.

Everything else is, though. Mary’s there. Joseph. An altar. Holy water on the tips of your fingers. A priest floating down the aisle in the same colors that priests are wearing all over the world today. There’s bread. There’s wine.

And over there: a black-draped pope.

—————

The cathedrals I popped into over those days were solid, as a cathedral should be, and varied—as they also should be, as they are. In Peoria, a soaring Gothic vaulted ceiling glowed blue and glittered with stars. Springfield’s cathedral is not-so colorful Greek Revival, evoking not just Greeks but a classical American, monumental spirit, appropriate for the Land of Lincoln. The stained glass windows told tales of the Church and civil society—including Lincoln commissioning Archbishop Hughes of New York to visit Napoleon III of France, to convince him to not recognize the Confederacy. Politics and religion, indeed.

Dubuque was locked—the only one that was on the whole trip. But the Methodists there had their famed Tiffany windows downtown locked up, too, so that was just the ecumenical theme of that morning, I supposed. Down the Mississippi River, Davenport stood high on a hill above the city, unlocked, but quiet, almost eerily so. Prayer cards for the conclave and pamphlets about “What happens when a Pope Dies” were stacked on a table outside the sanctuary. In the enormous, gleaming Renaissance Revival edifice in Sioux Falls, I made it to a May 1 Mass in honor of the cathedral’s patron, St. Joseph (on one of his feast days) and listened to schoolchildren sing Bruckner—and sing it very well. Across the state in Rapid City, I found daily Mass, along with a few dozen other gray-hairs, in the chapel of the mid-century space, a rectangular block softened by the slightest curves and lightened by cubes of jewel-like glass.

And in every one of those places, Francis gazed from the sanctuary, framed by black bunting, fronted by flowers, possibly a candle. Everywhere I went to Mass, he was there; he was in our prayers.

What a thing, I marveled on the road between these beautiful churches, built through the sweat and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary Catholics, strangers in this strange American land, over decades, over a century: I could jet to Mumbai or Kyoto, Bogata, London or Abuja today and there was absolutely no doubt that if I walked into a Catholic church in any of them, I’d see and hear the same thing: a picture of a dead pope and prayers for his soul. We all knew him—he was on our mind, and we were praying.

All of this, everywhere, no matter what—and here’s the tricky part, here’s the part where we set aside the warm vagaries: we pass over the inspirational memes—all of this, prayer and memorial, this black, these candles—everyone had them, everyone honored the moment, no matter what they might have thought of the man.

For if the thousands of parishioners and scores of priests of those parishes and maybe even the bishops sitting in those cathedras reflect the general Catholic demographic, which I’m sure they did, their views on the papacy of Pope Francis would be, well, varied. Any single congregation would have its share of superfans, as well as those irritated, confused, or angered by his papacy, with the rest—most of them—probably affectionate as to a kindly-seeming elder, a touch sad, curious about what comes next, but largely indifferent.

Which is probably close to the Catholic demographic. On anything and everything.

But in the wake of the death of the Holy Father, the Vicar of Christ, Peter’s successor, differences are set aside, and everyone gets it. It’s time to pray.

And wait.

—————

It was the end of the week, 1600 miles later. The car was parked at the dorm, and the dorm room was re-provisioned from a Wal-Mart run. It was Sunday morning in smalltown, Wyoming, with my flight leaving in the early afternoon, arriving back in Alabama that evening. I checked the news. The conclave to elect the new pope would begin that same week. I scrolled through the feeds, the socials. A lot of folks I knew to varying degrees from the world of Catholic journalism, commentary, and just Catholic Life were apparently on the way to Rome. A lot of them.

Wait. Why not me?

I looked at airfare. Not bad, especially since I had a New York City trip already planned for the next weekend (long story involving a year-old and long, deeply regretted commitment to listen to a Hilton time share sales pitch). I looked at accommodations. Totally doable, and with a cute balcony.

It was a gamble, for sure. I couldn’t stay past Saturday, and the cardinals, much less the Holy Spirit, would not agree to operate on my schedule. I could spend all this money…for what?

Well, I’d be in Rome, which is never a bad thing. I’d meet up with friends, and even if I didn’t see white smoke, I’d see some black, and I’d never even seen that. History, of a sort, no matter what.

It was something I probably wouldn’t ever see again. And it occurred to me while sitting in the Pronghorn Inn that morning, that no matter what the color of the smoke. I’d be turning 65 in a couple of months. And even if the new pope reigned for, say, fifteen years, chances were good that 80-year old me, if she still existed on earth, wouldn’t be up for road-tripping to Conclave 2040. I’d never been present for one, and I’d probably never be able to again.

This might be… my last pope.

So I pushed “purchase” and “reserve,” emailed both my surprised (but also not all that surprised) kids, got back to Birmingham around nine that night, was flying to New York by six the next morning, and was in Rome on Tuesday morning.

You know the rest of that part of the story. The whole thing didn’t take very long after all. The cardinals cooperated. It only took two days. On the first day, Wednesday, thousands of us stood in the square until evening after that first ballot, only to see black smoke, with the same happening on Thursday, in the early afternoon, after the morning votes.

And then, after lunch, which means very late afternoon, in fact early evening in Rome, it happened. And standing there in the crowd, surrounded by Koreans and Mexicans, Poles and Italians, after having a few very Catholic, very weird experiences of running into people from across the world right there in the middle of St. Peter’s Square, I saw it. And for a moment, it didn’t seem real, that trail of smoke. And then we couldn’t figure out the color. It didn’t seem black, but it also seemed kind of darkish, not quite white.

But then, the bells.

They started moving, just a little. The enormous bells hanging high on St. Peter’s façade inched, then swung so slightly, and then more, and then it was unmistakable. The smoke poured out, it was white as a cloud, and those great bells rang and rang and rang.

At the sight of what was certainly white smoke and the pealing bells, tens of thousands of people cheered. The bells rang, smoke poured, and they laughed. They wept. They hugged, they told each other how wonderful it was, and they cried to God: Gracias and thank you and grazie.

But here’s the thing about those several minutes of grateful joy: We didn’t even know who this new pope was.

We had absolutely no idea. In earthly terms, the form in Peter’s chair was a shadow to us. And we wouldn’t know for a few minutes more, not until the cardinal stepped out on the balcony and we strained and listened and picked through the Latin for a name as his voice rolled over us:

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam: (cheers and more cheers) Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum Robertum Franciscum
Sanctae Romane Ecclesiae Cardinalem Prevost qui sibi nomen imposuit Leo XIV

He came out in his mozetta, the cheering surged again, people clung to each other and waved at the man on the balcony who was waving to them. Tears flowed, even down the cheeks of a jaded, spiritually fatigued cynic or two.

But even then, when we knew his name, that was all. We knew nothing, but we were still so very glad.

—————

A week or so later, I was back in the USA. I’d returned through New York City, survived the stupid Hilton time share pitch, seen my two sons who were living in the city, and then on my way to the airport, stopped in a bakery in Astoria my friend had told me about and bought a couple of cookies decorated with images of the new pope.

He was not such an absolute mystery to us anymore, that American from Chicago: Pope Leo

(Editor’s note: Part Two of this essay will be posted on May 14th.)