Free Relic of Time by Ralph McInerny

married to Ray, Nate had mixed feelings about her continuing at Empedocles. A married woman should stay home, that was his conviction, held all the more firmly by a single man.
    â€œWhat would I do at home?”
    â€œOnce you have a family, you’re fired.”
    â€œOnce I have a family, I’ll quit.”
    But so far, they’d had no luck. Sometimes she had the superstitious fear that she and Ray were being punished for the affair that had preceded their marriage. The religious atmosphere of Empedocles would have made such thoughts inevitable, even if there hadn’t been her brother, Father John Burke, now part of the bureaucracy of the Vatican. He had finished his dissertation and Nate had insisted that they all attend the defense. Nate had been impressed by the concerned cardinals in the audience. John had written an expanded, annotated, and massive development of the rationale with which the then-cardinal Ratzinger had accompanied the publication of the third secret of Fatima. John’s dissertation defense had been more a celebration than an ordeal, with all those dignitaries gathered in the Palazzo della Segnatura for the occasion. There had been a standing ovation after the unanimous vote of acceptance was announced. Summa cum laude. Nate had wanted to give John a huge dinner afterward, but that had to wait until the following day, as John was taken off by the cardinal who hoped the promising young priest would be named as his successor as acting prefect of the Vatican Library.
    â€œWhat would be an appropriate gift?” Nate had asked.
    â€œWhy don’t we ask John?”
    The gift had been a magnificent chalice, which Laura helped him pick out in one of the church goods stores along the Via della Conciliazione. John had been reconciled to the extravagance by the thought that the vessel would be used at Mass, and thus was more an honor to Our Lord than to himself.
    â€œWill you be here forever, John?”
    She meant the Vatican.
    â€œThat’s not up to me.”
    Several times, he had confided his hope that, his degree won, he could go home and teach in the diocesan seminary or, even better, be assigned to some obscure parish where he could do the work of a priest. Did he imagine becoming an assistant to someone like Father Krucek, the priest with whom he had stayed when he came home during the flap over the missing third secret of Fatima? Laura could imagine her brother made a bishop, then a cardinal, and then . . . But that was absurd.
    All such thoughts were pushed away now in the aftermath of the outrage that had been committed at the basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

    On the flight out, Laura tried unsuccessfully to reach Crosby. Nate wanted him to direct his full attention to the missing Don Ibanez now. Laura was almost impressed by the fact that her boss ranked a missing person above the missing sacred portrait. Ray had commented on the seeming paradox of these two enormously wealthy men, Don Ibanez and Nate Hannan, striving for the simple piety of the peasant.
    â€œCan you buy your way through the Needle’s Eye?”
    Laura knew the reference was to a gate into Jerusalem, but still the metaphor suggested the literal needle. Imagine that sewing had gone on way back then. She herself had taken up knitting, causing a surge of expectation in Ray.
    â€œWhat are you knitting?” he asked, his eyes aglitter with potential fatherhood.
    â€œSocks.”
    â€œFor whom?”
    â€œMy husband.”
    â€œOh.”
    They had stopped talking about her seeming inability to get pregnant. Nate had suggested a novena. That was all right with Ray. “But I want to become a father the old-fashioned way.”
    Below her the piebald Midwest was visible through fluffy clouds, a quilt of fertility, breadbasket of the nation, and more and more of the world, and it had other labels besides. Flyover country. How easily one became used to flitting about the world in a private