On the Death of the Pope Emeritus

I woke up to find that Pope Emeritus Benedict had passed away, and I didn’t know what to say.

I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I kept thinking I ought to feel a certain way. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know how I DID feel– a jumble of emotions, none of them with names.  So many feelings they began to cancel one another out. The opposite of numbness.

At this point in my life, here in Steubenville, after the several years we’ve had, I felt everything at once.

When Pope John Paul the Second passed away, I knew just how I felt. I was gutted. I was devastated. Everyone I knew felt the same. We really did feel like our father had died. When the crowds at Saint Peter’s chanted “Santo Subito,” we approved. When he was canonized with breakneck haste, we cheered and called him John Paul the Great. It was harder to warm up to intellectual Benedict than to the crowd-pleaser John Paul, though we tried. He was our father, after all. And we did love him. We loved how strict he was on issues that we thought we should care about.

When he resigned, I was confused. But I was determined to love his successor as well. And I did.

It’s been a long time since 2013.

I’ve been through a lot. I’ve learned so much I wish I didn’t know, about the Chair of Peter and the Church in general.  I’ve discovered that so many people I once admired were monsters. I’ve eaten my words on so many different topics. My religious trauma is very bad. I don’t know where I stand on a lot of things.

And now, Pope Emeritus Benedict has passed away.

I saw people talking about how beautiful it was that his last words were “Jesus, I love you,” and I agree it was beautiful. I hope my own death is similarly pious.

I hope the next thing he saw really was Jesus. I hope that for everyone and I pray it’s true.

Of course, the thing about Jesus is that I don’t think you ever just see Jesus. You see the least of His Brethren, when you see Jesus.

So I wonder if Pope Emeritus Benedict saw his beloved Jesus, with His arms around all the queer kids like me, who grew up thinking we were intrinsically disordered if we felt the wrong feeling or loved the wrong person. All the people who ended up shunned by friends and family who believed they were doing God’s work by shunning. All the people who heard their devout Catholic relatives parroting ugly, bigoted lies about queer people and took it to heart that that’s what we were. All the people living with AIDS who were blamed for catching a virus. The people who were informed that it was their fault that they were victims of violence because they shouldn’t have agitated for basic human rights in the first place. The people who went their whole lives in terror that they were going to hell for something they couldn’t help.

And I wonder if he saw Jesus tending to and suffering with victims of sexual abuse who were silenced and not believed. Those who watched their abusers go on to hurt other people because they weren’t stopped. Those who lost their faith entirely because the evil they witnessed at the  heart of the Church was too horrendous– because they saw that the pope cared more about the public image of the Church than about the image of God reflected in human beings. A pope who would do anything to blame other people instead of take responsibility. Not as much or as severely as his predecessor, the ineptly named John Paul the Great, but plenty.

I wonder if he now has to walk through all of those multitudes of people before he even gets to Jesus.  I suppose that all of us have a similar obstacle course on our way to the pearly gates. We’ll all see the people we hurt because we counted them as nothing standing with Christ, and we’ll have to make peace. That’s one of the things I  believe purgatory to be.  But he harmed a great many people from his glorious position, and to whom much was given, much will be required.

Again, I feel that jumble of feelings that doesn’t have a name, and it hurts.

That’s all I have today.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.