She was supposed to be outlining the needs of the Special Committee for the First Communion breakfast, but she was finding it impossible to concentrate on how many dozen bagels should be plain and how many should be raisin. The whole idea of the First Communion breakfast made her sick to her stomach, and especially so since she had lost this round of the policy war to Sister Scholastica and her traditionalist nuns. The idea of sending tiny girls down a church aisle dressed in white veils and white gloves as if they were brides appalled her almost as much as the execution of Anne Marie Hannaford did—because it was an execution of its own in a way. What the Church was trying to murder was self-respect, and a sense of empowerment. It wanted those things for boys, but what it wanted for girls was only docility and acquiescence. Pray, pay, and obey—that was the old formula, for all Catholic laypersons and for all Catholic nuns. There was a war going on, just the way those Christian idiots said there was, a war for the soul of the country and a war for the soul of the Church. Harriet Garrity had enlisted on the side of Truth, Justice, and the Legitimate Aspirations of Women.
She took the Action Alert and the Urgent Memo and pushed them out of the way. She turned to her computer and looked at the First Communion schedule sitting there on the screen, with the major events highlighted in red. She rubbed her head and wished it didn’t ache so much. It had been aching since early this morning, and not even four ibuprofen taken less than an hour apart had done anything to make it better. That was because Father Healy’s deadline was coming up on her as fast as a freight train, and she still didn’t know what to do about it. She had no intention of getting into a habit. None of the women in her order wore habits anymore. She had no intention of leaving St. Anselm’s, either, if only because she didn’t have the faintest idea where she could go. Five or six years ago, there were plenty of jobs in parishes and chanceries for nuns with professional training and management skills, but since the appointment of this Cardinal Archbishop, those things were drying up, at least in this archdiocese. She thought of herself being transferred to some college somewhere, or stuck off in a backwater where her only influence on the course of events would come from journal articles in little magazines and the letters she would write to the newspapers, which wouldn’t bother to print them. She would be no better off than she had been when the nuns in her order had worn habits, and been held to a rule that forbade them to “singularize” themselves. If Harriet had been truthful about herself, she would have had to admit that she was a very ambitious woman. She knew she would have made at least as good a priest as Father Robert Healy. She would have made a better one than half the priests she’d served under in her career, whose only real qualification for the priesthood had often seemed to be that bit of flesh they had hanging between their legs. If she had been a man, she would have been a bishop before she was forty. She would have been a Cardinal very soon after that. She might even have been Pope. As it was, she often felt so stifled she could barely breathe, and then she wanted to blow up at somebody, smash something, do something, anything, to get out of this box without air that she’d lived in for so long she couldn’t remember what any other kind of life was like. Maybe, she thought, that was because there was no other kind of life for a woman. All women lived in boxes, and all women died before they could get completely out. If they didn’t die of exhaustion from the struggle, then the system killed them, the way it was about to kill Anne Marie Hannaford, the way it murdered the countless women who fought against helplessness for birth control and abortion and reproductive rights. Harriet looked guiltily at her computer monitor, but it still showed nothing but the First Communion schedule: rosary before Mass; Mass; scapular enrollment ceremony; breakfast. She rubbed her temples and sighed. She left the Action Alert about the execution openly on her desk, but she never left anything about Catholics for a Free Choice anywhere anyone could find it. She didn’t even go to their website without erasing the cookies they sent and making sure the Web address wasn’t left for somebody to see it on her Internet travel history. The Seamless Garment Network would annoy the hell out of the Cardinal Archbishop and drive Father Healy to distraction, but they couldn’t do anything about it. The Cardinal Archbishop was one of the most vocal opponents of capital punishment in the American Church. The Gay and Lesbian
Support Advisory was more problematic, but since there were so many people in it who had been on the innocent victim side of The Scandal, the Cardinal Archbishop wasn’t likely to use it against her. Catholics for a Free Choice, on the other hand, could get her bounced—not only out of St. Anselm’s Church and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, but out of her order, and maybe out of the Church as well. Harriet wasn’t really entirely clear about the sort of thing that made it possible for the Church to pronounce a formal anathema.