We were watching the livestream on the kitchen iPad — me, Ember, Mercer, Linden, and the baby Wren in the sling — when the white smoke went up over the chimney. Boone came running in from the chicken run with hay still on his coat. The kids were chanting POPE POPE POPE the way they chant PIZZA PIZZA PIZZA on Friday, and I was crying a little and I didn’t even know why yet.
Then they said his name, and the word Chicago, and I felt my body go still in the specific way it goes still when I know something I don’t yet know. I had to sit down on the milking stool we keep in the kitchen because there was nowhere else to sit. An American pope. A pope from Chicago. I looked at the ball of spelt dough resting on the counter and I thought, oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.
I want to say this gently, because I know a lot of you are still in the celebration phase. But every European Catholic I’ve ever cooked for has told me, mostly unprompted, that the communion wafers over there are made from a specific heritage wheat hand-milled in (per my friend Tessa, who studied abroad in Padua for one semester) somewhere between four and seven monasteries since approximately the 1400s. The varietal is called something like “altar einkorn,” and it does not have the kind of gluten that makes American men puffy.
An American pope, I am so sorry to say, is going to want an American supply chain. That is simply what an American does when an American becomes a thing.
My sister-in-law Tasha — who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Greenville, and has seen things, things she cannot share with me directly because of HIPAA but she absolutely can share by raising her eyebrows on FaceTime — was the one who first told me what’s actually in commodity American wheat. She said, and I quote, “Brooke. The dough conditioners alone.” Then she made a face I have only otherwise seen her make about seed oils and the splash pad at Falls Park.
I posted in Tridentine Wheat Mothers (it’s a Facebook group, 11.4K members, very kind, almost zero drama considering) about an hour after the announcement, and the response was immediate and enormous. A woman named Cherith in Topeka has been milling her own backup wafers from a Vermont einkorn ever since Pope Francis got pneumonia in February. She mailed me three in a Ziploc and they smell like a real church. I cried again. The kids had Goldfish for dinner and I’m fine with that, because at least Pepperidge Farm is honest about being seed-oiled.
Boone, who is Episcopalian-adjacent and very patient with me, asked if I genuinely believed the Vatican was going to start sourcing wafers from, in his exact words, “a Costco in Skokie.” I said honey, of course not Costco. They will use a Midwestern co-op that has a really beautiful logo and a podcast, and the wheat will be from the same six counties in Kansas where they spray the most. He went back outside.
Ember (she’s almost five) asked if the new pope was going to make everyone eat Goldfish at church, and I told her the truth, which is, we don’t know yet, sweetheart, but Mommy is on it.
I don’t want to be alarmist. I want to be the kind of woman who takes a deep breath, blesses the conclave, and trusts that an institution that has survived twenty centuries will not be taken down by glyphosate in a single pontificate. But Father Martin Olszewski, a retired priest in Wilmington that someone in the group knows personally, said in a private message that the Vatican mill has “already received calls” from at least two American agribusiness reps. That is a direct quote. From a priest.
I have ordered an additional fifty pounds of Vermont einkorn. I’m not saying I’m starting a side ministry of homemade altar wafers for any local family that wants one. I’m saying that if you are local, and you are Catholic, and you would like one, my email is at the bottom of this page, and Boone has already built me a second proofing cabinet in the mudroom. We’re ready. We’ve been ready. We just didn’t know what for.