This probably isn’t the right time for Catholics to talk about feeling vulnerable. We feel vulnerable now for all the wrong reasons. There are virtues of vulnerability (the way we respond with tenderness and openness to each other), but now isn’t the right time to talk about that, either.
I was walking one morning in New York City a couple years ago when I first imagined a Pope meeting a cat on the streets of Rome. I turned a corner and saw a stray cat sitting in the doorway of the church where I was headed. Her paws were resting on bones of what looked like a fish she’d been eating. “Hello there,” I said. I like cats. She looked up at me, as if to return my greeting. So, I kept walking toward her. She darted away.
I continued to mass, and when I came back out, I immediately thought again of that cat. Only the fish bones lay in the empty doorway. It was a few days later, back at home in my office, when I began to jot notes for a story about a Pope meeting a stray cat on the streets of Rome early one morning.
In that first story, , my fictional Pontiff adopts the cat he meets, and he carries her back into the Vatican. He names her Margaret. I didn’t realize it then, but I must have been motivated to create this part of the story because my wife and I were in the process of adopting a teenage girl. It was only when I sent the manuscript to my mother a month later, asking her to give it a read, that this became clear. Mom wrote back saying, “Margaret is Ana!” For whatever reason, that connection wasn’t known to me until my mother mentioned it.
Now, of course, I realize that my fictional Margaret and my very real Ana have some things in common. And the more that I talk with my real daughter, and my fictional character, the more I realize we all share experiences and feelings of vulnerability.
The second book in The Pope’s Cat series is about to publish. will be available on October 1. A vulnerable cat is just the right sort of character to reflect the meaning of Christmas for kids, and that is what we try to do in Margaret’s Night in St. Peter’s.
Margaret still feels vulnerable, a year after leaving the streets of Rome. She hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be hungry and scared. In the story, the Pope decides to show her around St. Peter’s Basilica but soon after their tour begins he is called away. The Pope leaves Margaret in the care of a friend, but Margaret doesn’t know him, and she runs away frightened.
She’s unable to leave the Basilica, however. Doors are blocked by tourists and pilgrims waiting to come in. Margaret hides behind Michelangelo’s Pieta, and ponders what she sees, and what’s happening around her. By the end of the day, and the end of the book, she realizes that Midnight Mass is about to begin in the Basilica and there she is reunited with the Pope.
Kids feel vulnerable; parents worry about kids’ vulnerability; and Jesus says in the Beatitudes, essentially, “Blessed are the vulnerable.” What do we make of all of that? How can we live with such vulnerability?
As kids who read Margaret’s Night in St. Peter’s will discover, the Christ child is born in vulnerability, and as Margaret understands by pondering the Pieta, that same Christ child later died as an adult feeling vulnerable again.
JON M. SWEENEY is the author of The Pope’s Cat series, illustrated by Roy DeLeon and published by Paraclete Press. Book two in that series, Margaret’s Night in St. Peter’s (A Christmas Story), was published on October 1st, 2018. You can reach him at jonmsweeney@gmail.com.
ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Roy DeLeon