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sat, on, or rather in, an armchair not quite grand enough to be a throne, a vast plush peacock chair of white silk embroidered into stylized feathers with papal yellow. The other chairs were scaled-down versions of this deco Seat of Peter, so that you looked slightly up when you sat in them at she who sat at the head of the papal round table from any perspective.
    Pope Mary herself wore a white cassock that would have melted her into the white background were it not for the large green cross embroideredacross the chest, the shoulder-length black hair streaked with silver setting off her coppery face, and the green cap set upon it formed with just the suggestion of a miter.
    I dwell on such visual details of my first sight of the Pope in the flesh, not so much because of the awe it inspired, but because it was a different sort of awe than I had expected.
    Mary I, the media icon version, the only aspect with which I was familiar, had turned this room into a stage set for papal glamour, and that Mary, the most public of Popes, had presented herself as the motherly voice of reason, the politically correct Pontiff, the consensus Madonna of contemporary womanhood, a sort of American politician losing no opportunity to charm the voters.
    An image crafted by experts, I had thought, carried forth by a shallow-spirited symbol, a creature of Cardinal Silver and his media-wise ilk, the First Female Pope, the Church’s very own superstar, whose every pronouncement seemed to follow the scripts of the polls.
    One look at this woman’s face, however, disabused me of any such notions. She looked much older than the processed image she chose to present, and those hard black eyes older still, far older than I in some absolute sense. Her raptor’s nose made them seem regally cunning, and there was something about the set of her mouth that left no doubt who was in charge.
    This was no media ingenue, this was no puppet of any inner circle. For better or worse, this was the mind presently at the heart of the Church, a brilliant old woman who had risen to the pinnacle of the world’s most phallocratic pyramid, by hook or by crook, and probably by a good deal of both.
    Whatever my opinions on her opinions, whatever her true beliefs might really be, it felt not at all unnatural to kneel to kiss her papal ring when Cardinal Silver presented me.
    “Sit down, Father De Leone,” the Pontiff said when I had arisen. “John, will you please ask that coffee be sent?”
    Cardinal Silver obviously did not expect this dismissal any more than I. He looked at her for a long moment, the Pope gave him some sort of secret stare, he hesitated, her eyes narrowed, and he reluctantly departed.
    The Pope smiled. “Cardinal Silver is mainly responsible for creating my Papacy, as he will be the first to admit,” she said dryly. “He sometimes has difficulty fathoming that in the end it is the Papacy itself which makes the Pope.”
    “Your Holiness … ?”
    “We Popes are, after all, successor entities of a sort ourselves, are we not, Father De Leone, a long line of human matrices for that which the Original Template passed across another boundary to Peter.”
    “I had certainly never thought of it that way, Your Holiness.”
    “I’m sure you hadn’t, Father De Leone,” the Pope said sharply. “But after all, without a belief in such a continuity of the papal software, as it were, then the Rock upon which Jesus built His Church is no more than sand, and we Popes poseurs every time we issue a bull with the authority of the Holy Spirit.”
    “Nor would I propose to frame the choice thusly,” I stammered, for on the one hand her interpretation of the papal succession had more than a whiff of electronic brimstone about it, and on the other, its negation a whiff of a different sort of blasphemy. If this Pope had summoned me to a theological debate, I was already beginning to feel out of my depth.
    “But
I
have no choice but to frame it thusly, Father De