Heretics Anonymous

by Katie Henry

“It’s October ninth, the feast day of Saint Denis, patron saint of Paris, France, and rabies victims.

“Nuns are great,” Lucy says. “But nuns aren’t priests. Nuns can’t celebrate Mass. They can’t hear confession or consecrate the Eucharist. They can’t become bishops or cardinals or popes, they can’t become the people who make the big decisions. How do you change a church that doesn’t listen to you?”

“Heretics are usually true believers,” she says. “Martin Luther was a priest. Galileo was very devout. The only thing more dangerous than someone who doesn’t care about the rules is someone who does—and wants to break them anyway.”

THE BEST FEELING in the world is popping bubble wrap.

“You don’t have to talk about it. But you also don’t have to pretend you’re fine when you’re not.” “How do you know I’m not?” “You threw a tantrum in theology. You called God a dick. You’re not fine.”

Lucy can’t like me either, at least not the way I want her to. I know that. She’s waiting for someone, someone as smart as she is, as kind as she is, someone who talks to God and hears something back. I have to tell someone about this. If I don’t, I’ll explode and do something really stupid. Like kiss Lucy. Or commit arson.

Aww.

Before Father Peter’s even finished with the introduction, Purity Paul bursts through the center of the curtains, carrying a mic in his hand and wearing a smile that could only be caused by Jesus or LSD.

“Don’t forget,” he reminds us, “God invented sex. Like everything else on this earth, it’s one of His creations.” Yeah, well, then so is genocide. And mosquitoes. And tangled headphone cords.

I wonder what the Catholic Church does to people who get turned on at chastity assemblies. They probably castrate them.

I pretend to but don’t. Who turns their phone all the way off, ever? Or leaves messages? Old people.

“As far as my brothers are concerned, it’s not really the Christmas season until they can light something on fire.

“Mary was a peasant. A poor, female, Jewish peasant. She gave birth to a son who preached all people were equal in God’s eyes, and she saw that son tortured and executed by the Roman Empire. She had a lot to revolt against.” “She didn’t revolt, though.” “But other people did. In Argentina in the 1970s, the mothers of people killed by the military used the Magnificat as their anthem, so it was banned. Francisco Franco banned it in Spain in the 1930s. It’s dangerous, a song about the poor and lowly being raised up and the rich and powerful falling.”

I don’t care about Britain’s good intentions. Good intentions don’t excuse destroying somebody’s culture. Good intentions don’t excuse anything. We can’t judge dead men by our standards, fine, but we choose who we canonize, and we can do better. Shouldn’t we want to do better?”

“Saint Clare of Assisi herself said, ‘We become what we love. Who we love shapes what we become,’” Avi writes in the closing paragraph. “And I would add something else: The way we treat others proves who we’ve become. Who are we, St. Clare’s? What do we want to become?”

“But I’ll have to learn Dutch,” she sobs. “And it has a very complicated system of compound nouns and I don’t want to!”

That statue of Saint Francis surrounded by birds and animals on the second floor, for instance. He looks so smug for a man who’s probably covered in bird shit.