The Third Revelation by Ralph McInerny Read Free Book Online Page A

priest sat behind a little Dutch door and penitents knelt on either side. His head was tipped toward the person confessing. Above his little box was a sign indicating the languages in which he heard confessions. It seemed odd to think of sins as Spanish or Italian or English.
    Laura lingered in fascination, imagining what it would be like to wait her turn, to kneel there, and when the grill was opened, to pour out the sins of her life. The thought exercised a powerful attraction. Confession, absolution, pardon, and peace. But what was the point? She would have to have a firm purpose of amendment.
    She would have to change her sinful ways.
    She had no intention of doing so today.
    She went slowly down the nave and out the great doors, across the piazza, to the Hotel Columbus and Ray Sinclair.

IV
    To pray is to put oneself in the presence of God.
    Heather Adams had known Laura when they were students at Boston College. Not well, but better than she knew most of her fellow students.
    â€œNebraska?” Laura had sounded as if Heather had come from the farside of the moon.
    â€œRed Cloud, Nebraska. It’s where Willa Cather grew up.” Then she added, “The novelist.”
    â€œSo why did you come to Boston?”
    â€œI wanted to come east. Willa Cather came to Pittsburgh. The city, not the university.”
    â€œHeather, I haven’t the faintest idea who Willa Cather is.”
    Heather told her, even though it was clear that Laura had little interest in fiction. Heather herself was a math major and not a great reader, but she had read all of Willa Cather, first as a matter of local pride and then because Death Comes for the Archbishop had been the beginning of what she supposed was her secret life. Shadows on the Rock was even more important to her. Those novels had brought her eventually to Catholicism, and it was a puzzle to her that Willa Cather herself had not made the same journey. Mathematics is abstract, but life is concrete, and Heather wasn’t the first mathematician who had found that the ethereal world of quantity opened her to something that changed her view of the concrete. Once she had thought that Pascal was simply a computer program; now she had a special devotion to the saintly mathematician.
    She was not yet a Catholic when she left Boston College—her timid overtures to a Jesuit on the subject had not been encouraged—to pursue her MBA in New Haven. The Yale drinking song had spoken to her almost as directly as the novels of Willa Cather. “God have mercy on such as we, damned from here to eternity, bah, bah, bah.” The plangent lyrics had the impact of a hymn. When she made up her mind to take instruction in Catholicism and had gone off campus to a city parish in Manchester, she felt like an imposter among the working-class parishioners. Not that they paid any attention to her as she stood and knelt and sat and looked around her and realized that Catholicism was all about the Mass. Others in her pew had to push past her into the aisle at Communion time, and she longed to go forward with them but knew that wouldn’t be right.
    The pastor’s name was Krucek. He was in his sixties and was very matter-of-fact when she showed up at the rectory and told him she wanted to become a Catholic.
    â€œWhat are you now?”
    â€œProtestant, I guess.”
    â€œDon’t you know?”
    â€œI was raised a Lutheran.”
    He was silent for a moment when she told him she was a graduate student at Yale. “What do you know about the Church?”
    â€œThat I want to receive Holy Communion.”
    He gave her books to read, he met with her for half an hour every week for several months, and then said he would give her conditional baptism.
    â€œConditional?”
    â€œChances are you’re already validly baptized.” He quoted the creed to her. One baptism, for the forgiveness of sins.
    She made her First Communion at a weekday Mass, seven thirty in