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Pope Benedict XVI departing St. Peter's Square in a helicopter on Thursday, leaving behind questions about how the church might evolve.
COLM TOIBIN has plenty of experience getting inside women's heads.
The lyrical Irish author wrote "Brooklyn" about the aching loneliness of a young Irish woman who emigrates to New York in the '50s to find work.
In a short story called "A Priest in the Family," part of a collection called "Mothers and Sons," Toibin conjures a proud, elderly Irish mother who learns that her son, a priest, is pleading guilty to sex abuse charges.
In a short story in the current New Yorker, his protagonist is an older Spanish woman who rejects a request to meet once more with an old lover who got her pregnant, one of Franco's officers during the Spanish Civil War.
Still, I ask the writer, how did this former altar boy from County Wexford have the nerve to climb inside the head of the most revered woman in history?
"It took a lot out of me emotionally," the 57-year-old Toibin conceded, calling from his apartment on Riverside Drive, where he stays when he is teaching English literature at Columbia University.
In "The Testament of Mary," a one-woman show with Fiona Shaw previewing later this month on Broadway, Toibin imagines his own version of how the Virgin Mary felt about crucifixion — "the most foul and frightening image that had ever been conjured up by men" — and whether she really had not known Joseph in a biblical sense.
To borrow a phrase that nuns once applied to naughty children in my school, the play is a bold, brazen piece. Toibin wrote it first as a stage monologue, then turned it into a novel and has recast it again for Broadway. His illiterate but intelligent Mary, with echoes of Antigone and Electra, is no idealized, asexual, docile Madonna, tenderly cradling her son's bleeding body, Pietà-style.
This Mary runs away from the crucifixion to save herself ("the pain was his and not mine") leaving others to watch Jesus die, wash his body and bury him. This Mary misses sleeping with her husband. This Mary disdains the "misfits" who flocked around her son.
She resents his two disciples — "the men who come to oversee my final years" as protectors or guards — for pressuring her to help mythologize Jesus as the son of God. She notes wearily that one scowls at her "when the story I tell him does not stretch to whatever limits he has ordained." The men patiently explain to her "what had happened to me at my son's conception" and rewrite her story about fleeing the crucifixion to be more nurturing.
"All my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty," she says of the disciples, "but it is foolishness that I have noticed first."
She disdains their drive for power, which calls for hiding the truth to protect the institution they are building — a story line that echoes this week as the male enclave in the Vatican roils with old rituals, new scandals and the cascading shame of even more sulfurous sexual abuse revelations.
Toibin, who describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, said he was inspired when he went to Venice and saw Titian's radiant "Assumption of the Virgin," and then "up the road" saw Tintoretto's chaotic crucifixion painting.
"The idea that we were somehow saved and redeemed by a crucifixion seems strange to me," he said. "The idea of human sacrifice is something we really have to think about, even people who are practicing Catholics, the idea of taking a single individual for the sake of any cause."
He has written about visiting Catholic shrines in Europe and about his shame growing up gay in a church where homosexuality could not be mentioned. He talks about how strange it is to see the church recede in Ireland to the point that Dubliners seem more obsessed with shopping than Mass on Sundays.
He was relieved when his play opened in Dublin and church leaders there reacted calmly.
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