Read Online No Greater Love by William Kienzle - Free Book Online

cheerless tone. “If you don’t mind my saying it, you could lighten up a little. For one thing, I think you’ve wanted to be a priest for too long.”

    Andrea was correct, Patty mused. She had wanted to be a priest as far back as she could remember.
    Her parents took her with them to Sunday Mass. Not all churches had “cry rooms”; the ones that didn’t expected parents to keep their children at home until the young ones could behave.
    But not Patty. As soon as she was free from the pacifier, she spent, her time in church looking and listening.
    Taking Patty to church was like putting a fish in water. If at that early age, she could’ve phrased anything, she would have paraphrased Paul’s description of heaven. Except that for her, heaven was a church. So Patty’s version would have read: “Eye has not seen, nor has the ear heard, nor has it entered the mind of anyone the joy that God delivers to people in church.”
    She was fortunate in being taken to a church where the priests were dedicated—serious about presenting a participation liturgy and providing a choir that sounded angelic.
    Because Patty became so absorbed in the Church, as the years went by, she read extensively about that subject.
    In one of her research projects, she came across a woman who would become her patron saint—even though nobody ever canonized her.
    Her name was Jeannette Piccard. She was married to Dr. Jean Piccard, a famous scientist and, in his hot air balloon, a space traveler.
    Sharing her husband’s life as totally as possible, Jeannette Piccard learned how to pilot the balloon, and accompanied her husband on his voyages. She felt it wasn’t right for him to be “up there alone.”
    In addition, Dr. Piccard needed someone he could rely on, someone who would not learn the secrets of space flight and then desert him. Of course, he knew he could rely on his wife.
    In a historic 1934 flight over Dearborn, Michigan, Jeannette Piccard set a record when the couple’s balloon rose to an altitude of 57,559 feet. But the record was unofficial; in 1934 there was no category for women. And when that category was established, it wasn’t made retroactive.
    They’d hoped to go to 100,000 feet, but couldn’t get any sponsors for the flight. Nobody wanted to be held responsible for the danger or the possible death of a woman and mother.
    â€œDanger?” Mrs. Piccard snorted. “Once I took our son up for a lovely flight in our balloon. Two weeks later I walked through a doorway and broke my hip. And doors are supposed to be safe.”
    In 1964 Jeannette Piccard was appointed a consultant to the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. In 1970 she was cut from the program, a victim of the Nixon administration’s austerity agenda.
    Clearly, this was a woman who was all too familiar with the fabled glass ceiling.
    But what most endeared her to Patty Donnelly was Jeannette Piccard’s dogged pursuit of the priesthood.
    In 1916, as a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, she wrote a paper on the ordination of women. Nearly sixty years later, in 1974, she received a phone call. Four retired Episcopal bishops were going to ordain women to the priesthood: Did she want in? Indeed she did.
    When she was ordained, the NASA space staff sent her a congratulatory letter.
    And so, after a lifetime of persevering in the face of discrimination, this dedicated woman achieved her “impossible dream.” Asked when Catholic women might expect ordination to the priesthood, she replied, “When they get another Pope like John.”
    Patty Donnelly couldn’t see another Pope John XXIII anywhere on the horizon.
    However, even without a John as Pope, there was another crack in the dike.
    It was by no means probable, but faintly possible, that what had served Jeannette could work for Patty.
    Somewhere, somehow, there might be a Catholic bishop, perhaps retired—as were the four