Sacred Steps
I had every intention of going to Pentecost Mass with Pope Leo XIV on Pentecost Sunday. After a week of non-stop pilgrimage — walking 20,000+ steps every day in 90-degree heat — this was going to be a highlight.
But as much as Rome was the same since I’d last been there in 2014 and studied there in 2005, it had changed. St. Peter's Basilica, once freely accessible, now required ticketed entries and security checkpoints. St. Peter’s Square, where I used to sit with a panini and study while listening to the basilica’s dramatic bells drone the time, was now channeled into one-way traffic patterns behind barricades. Even the Trevi Fountain and Pantheon were corralled with lines and crowd control.
Liz in a barricade-free St. Peter’s Square on April 18, 2005, the day before Pope Benedict XVI was elected.
I understood the necessity of these measures, but as one of Catholicism's holiest sites, St. Peter’s new barriers felt all too symbolic of the Church’s less-than-inclusive approach to so many things. I was angry, frustrated, and just plain annoyed at them. Not really what I expected to feel on a pilgrimage, but the feelings were there, front and center.
On Pentecost Sunday, our professor leading the pilgrimage encouraged anyone wanting to see the Pope to arrive at 7:30am to get through security. With the Jubilee year, the lines were extra — and I mean extra — long. The Pope would visit the square around 10am and then celebrate mass at 11am.
Four and a half hours in that heat with tens of thousands of people? Ugh. Not my idea of a sacred Sunday. I decided to scope out the situation first.
Walking Beyond the Barricades
Wanting a slower morning that Sunday, I made my way down Via Gregorio VII at 8:30am, a main street that runs parallel to the Vatican Walls and the synodal hall. The crowds were already overwhelming. When I got to the Vatican’s security checkpoint, I took one look at the line and something inside me rebelled. "Nope," I said to myself. "I'm done with pilgrimage as spectacle, with spirituality as spectacle."
On Via Gregorio VII next to St. Peter’s.
So instead of turning left toward the Vatican, I said to my feet, “Ok, feet. Let’s get lost.” My feet and I know that wandering around in Rome is one of our favorite activities. As the crowds split left to get into the Vatican security lines, my feet and I went straight for the bridge over the Tiber River.
There, the crowds dwindled. The Rome I knew and loved returned. Quiet streets, locals going about their Sunday business, bells chiming in the distance, the occasional waft of cigarette smoke mingling with fresh honeysuckle.
“This is home,” I thought to myself with a smile.
Wandering around Rome near Piazza Farnese on Via di Monserrato.
Following My Feet Instead of the Crowds
As I walked, I remembered that I wanted to visit San Giovanni dei Fiorentini where a relic of St. Mary Magdalene's foot is housed. The church was closed for Sunday morning mass, so I kept walking. Eventually, I found myself in Piazza Farnese where St. Ignatius once preached on street corners. I continued down a small side street I hadn’t ever been before and found myself at Santa Maria in Montserrato degli Spagnoli, the National Church of Spain, Ignatius’s home country.
I paused. I looked down and saw a bronze marker commemorating that St. Ignatius had been here, too. I chuckled to myself. Here I was, roaming around in Rome on a Holy Day. While my feet searched for Mary Magdalene’s foot, they found St. Ignatius. My feet were walking the same streets he walked.
Home.
Then I remembered a conversation I had with my spiritual director eight years earlier. At that time, I was doing St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, a nine-month retreat called the 19th Annotation. In the first weeks, I had balked at its main purpose: getting to know Jesus better.
"I don't want to get to know Jesus," I told my spiritual director. "Sixteen years of Catholic education is enough. Besides, people have used him against me and my queer friends, so he's not someone I want to spend nine months with."
I felt shame and guilt for saying it, but it was true. To me, Jesus is someone who achieved a level of divinity we're all capable of. It doesn’t sit well with me when people use him as a litmus test for salvation.
My spiritual director listened, then asked quietly, "Who do you want to get to know?"
Without hesitation, I answered: "Mary Magdalene."
He smiled. "Then we'll adapt the Exercises so you can get to know her."
Eight years later, wandering through Rome after choosing to trust my deeper instincts, I found myself exactly where I needed to be. Not in a crowded square performing pilgrimage, but in quiet spaces connecting with the two figures who had taught me to trust my interior life, St. Ignatius and St. Mary Magdalene.
Meeting Mary (Again)
Eventually that morning, I made my way to Mary Magdalene's relic. Whether it was actually her foot mattered less than the connection itself. Remembering that she was the first person at Jesus’s tomb, the Apostle to the Apostles, is what mattered.
The first person who stepped foot in his tomb was not a man. It was not someone people expected to bear such news. It was Mary, a figure largely written out of history, who likely has a gospel that was kept out of the New Testament.
As I sat next to her relic, I remembered what it had been like to complete the 19th Annotation getting know Mary Magdalene instead of Jesus. Over those nine months, I reflected on the Jesus story from her perspective. As I did, I started to shed the external shoulds from life. My inner life grew clearer, stronger, and more active.
With my inner life coming more fully online, I began to explore my spirituality and sexuality at a deeper level. That exploration led me to become a spiritual director and come into my lesbian identity. Both of those brought me to this pilgrimage with my partner. They brought me to Mary Magdalene’s relic, hidden away in a church off the main path.
When I returned to our larger group later that day, my fellow pilgrims shared their stories about Pope Leo at Mass that morning. Sure, I had FOMO. I even second guessed my decision to skip mass. But I had to trust where my feet and resistance led me earlier, just like I trusted where I was being led eight years earlier while completing the 19th Annotation.
Sometimes spiritual encounters happen when we’re not where we think we should be.
