We wanted to go to Paris. One last hurrah before travel became much more difficult. It’s called a babymoon. (People do it. Look it up—I swear I did not invent this.) 

We got there after some rescheduling. Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, and the conclave, which I got to cover for America, would take place squarely in the middle of our previously planned trip to Paris, when the weather was cooler and Amanda was a little less pregnant. My work trip to Rome in sede vacante meant the babymoon would be pushed back at least another month. (Trust me, I already hear the sound of those tiny violins.) 

But that conclave, despite the excitement and once-in-a-career nature of it, was unsettling for me. Amanda was six months pregnant, and I was far away without her and the baby. I felt an unmooring of my center of gravity. I cherished the opportunity to cover a piece of history and to pray and wait with the church for a new pontiff. But I also walked around cobblestone streets in Borgo Pio that I had walked a million times, this time with a knot in my stomach, lost, worrying about my family. This, I suppose, was the first profound effect that our daughter had on my spirituality. In a place where I ought to have been confident and sure of myself and vocation, I found my foundations shaken and my ego displaced. There would be more of that to come. 

Pope Leo XIV is elected. I write and podcast about the great shock of it all with my colleagues, and fly back to New York, ready to rebook tickets to head back across the pond, this time with my family.

Our hope for an April in Paris turned into May, but we did get there. On our agenda: not much. A bit of flâneuring around town. But also, picking a name. We opted not to discover our unborn child’s gender ahead of time. (I cannot recommend this enough: Besides the added shock involved in the birth experience, if you can take it, it adds a layer of friction to people buying you things you may not want or need for your baby.) But that meant we needed to brainstorm two names. I won’t share the male name we came up with, as it is on ice for the potential next baby. 

We had both long liked the idea of naming a future child of ours after Mary Magdalene. One of Jesus’ best friends and closest followers, my wife and I agree that she has historically not been given the attention or devotion she deserves. She is brave, loyal and devoted. She remains with Jesus while he gasps his final breaths and is the first to announce his resurrection after Jesus calls her by her own name while she weeps for him. That name, if our baby were a girl, would say something to our daughter about who her parents wanted her to be. 

But we were hung up on the “g-d” sound in the middle of the Magdalene and wondered whether our Midwestern-accented family would struggle through pronouncing her name her entire life. Then, looking at a map of Paris, we realized that the Place de la Madeleine was named for the Church of the Madeleine, the French way of saying the name of the woman who first encountered the resurrected Jesus in the garden. We went to the church on a bright afternoon and took a slow clockwise lap through the sanctuary. We lit a candle near the end, said a prayer for our child and wondered whether it was our son or daughter on the inside.

A few months later, I handed a slippery, wriggling baby to my wife and said, “This is Madeleine.”  

•••

How has becoming a father affected my prayer life? 

This is a difficult question to answer. In some ways, it has made prayer much more difficult. Previously, I relied on the liturgy to carry my prayer. I was never very good at following any other plan or format, except for showing up to Mass on Sundays and the occasional weekday. This would ensure at least a few good, honest minutes of prayer each week. I have tried to pray my morning and evening prayer with Give Us This Day with Madeleine, but she is much more interested in tearing out the pages and tasting them. “When I found your words, I devoured them,” the prophet Jeremiah says. My daughter will be able to say the same. 

If nap time aligns with Mass time, we’re able to fall back into a liturgical rhythm and steal a few moments of contemplative prayer. But more often than not, we are bouncing in the pew or pacing in the nave or changing a diaper while the liturgy carries on. And so we all three have entered a phase of Christian life where simply getting out the door for Mass on time, or sometimes 20 or 30 minutes late, is our main act of devotion.

Lucky for me, God does not require great competence in particular forms of prayer or long hours spent in contemplation to get to know him. Sometimes, just paying attention to life as it comes at you brings you closer to the reality of divine love. Babies require very little in some ways: food, clean diapers, snuggles. But what they require above all to thrive is a level of undivided attention that asks you to put aside screen time, leisure, sleep, all of it. And to pay attention is to love, as Sister Sarah Joan explained to Ladybird. 

I am absolutely confident that I know God more intimately than I possibly could have before becoming a father. The way I have wondered and awed and basked at the most beautiful sunset is but a modicum of what I feel watching Madeleine sleep. To think of life without her or before her is now impossible. And to think that she did not exist and now she does exist, born out of and into love, says more to me about the mystery of creation than the words ex nihilo ever did. 

•••

There are a few ways to get close to the pope. Like, really close. One of them is to be particularly holy or talented. Another is to be Italian. Both of these might get you a private audience at some point in your life. I am neither of those things. But I was a newlywed at one point, and another way the church allows you to get close to the Holy Father is through the “Sposi Novelli” program at his Wednesday audiences. Shortly after getting married, Amanda and I booked plane tickets to Rome and were Googling the best way to pack a wedding dress for an international flight. The only problem? The tickets were scheduled for April 2020. 

But there is one more way to get close to the pope: either be, or have with you, a small baby.

You’ve probably seen photos and videos of popes blessing and kissing babies. We thought, why not ours? So we packed up our stuff (there is so much more of it now), took a few grandparents with us and booked flights to Rome for Easter. Roughly one year after I stood on top of the colonnades of St. Peter’s Square, watching Cardinal Robert Prevost emerge for the first time as Pope Leo XIV, I was again standing in a crowd, this time in the square, watching the first American pope celebrate his first Easter morning Mass. 

We spent close to five hours in that square, some of it participating in the liturgy, some of it listening to the pope deliver his “urbi et orbi” but most of it trying to keep a baby entertained and shaded (for which my wife deserves most of the credit). Eventually, though, we dangled her out in front of the passing popemobile. And, well, the rest is best shown in photo and video. 

(Zac Davis)

We got her back and turned around to see our parents crying. All of them had lost their own parents, all devoted Catholics, in the last couple of years. What would they have thought about their great-granddaughter being held by the vicar of Christ, for just a few moments? 

Screenshot

We joked over pizza a few hours later about how, while this would be a lifelong memory for us, Madeleine would have no recollection of what happened. I imagine her using “I was blessed by the pope as a baby” as a truth in a “Two Truths and a Lie” icebreaker at her college orientation. But I hope she sees the photos and listens to our stories about the day and feels the devotion of her family that would bring her to Rome to be close to the pope, like I hope that she will look back on photos of her baptism and recall her dignity as one of the church’s beloved daughters. 

•••

Like most good things, fatherhood is difficult. Not all the time or even most of the time. But I’ve felt like learning to be a parent has called me deeper into conversion. Which is a pious way of saying that it has forced me to be less selfish and more patient than I ever thought I needed to be. “For in fire gold and silver are tested, and worthy people in the crucible of humiliation,” says the book of Sirach. Clearly written by someone who has survived the newborn stage. 

Ron Rolheiser, O.M.I., is right when he says the home is a monastery, a place to “learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God’s.” Madeleine, a powerless baby, has broken my conception of self-mastery or power. 

You are faced with a million decisions, small and big, about whether to put your child’s needs before your own. Often these are easy choices, or at least choices that biological instinct alone can will into happening: Baby cries, sacrifice sleep, get up at night and either feed her or bring her to mom. Check. 

But others aren’t as clear cut: Am I letting her fuss a little extra to teach her patience or because I am at the end of mine? What is the right balance of parenting, working and socializing? Do I go on that trip with my dear childhood friends because it’s important for my daughter to have a father with friendships, or am I going on it as an escape from the demands of domestic life for a few days? (For the record, I went because of the first reason, but I did appreciate those couple of nights of uninterrupted sleep.)

And there is shame. Shame for the way you react when you are frustrated and sleep-deprived. I sighed deeply, with real anger in my voice, “Urghhh…Madeleine!” sometime in the middle of another sleepless night during that first sleep regression. Really? I’m mad at a 4-month-old? My 4-month-old?

I want so badly to be everything for Madeleine. To never lose my patience and always make the best decision for her development. To be a perfect father. And it is a humiliation to realize that I am not and cannot be. But I can be a better father, husband and Christian than I am today. 

•••

The most consistent parenting adage that gets passed around has been: “You won’t believe how fast it goes.” I previously imagined this would manifest primarily in “big” life transition moments: birthdays, graduations, first days of camp, a father-daughter dance. I would arrive at times like these and become overwhelmed by the temporality of it all, with nostalgia and gratitude all mixing together in my soul. I did not expect this to happen every single day of the rest of my life. The difference between a newborn, a 3-month-old and a 9-month-old is immense. They are different species entirely, in many ways. 

But Madeleine is different in smaller, subtler ways with each passing day. Right now, as I write this, she is nearly 10 months old. We joke that she thinks she is the mayor of New York because she practices waving at everyone we walk by. It really delights people. She is trying solid foods with no teeth. She desperately wants to walk and run but settles for a one-legged crawl, dragging her left leg behind her. She howls and yells with joy. She does not sleep through the night most nights. She softly giggles until she breaks into uncontrollable hysterics and smiles when her parents walk into the room. 

But these things will all change. The writer Derek Thompson, who is also a young father, put it this way: 

In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure…. When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.

Besides helping to care for my grandmother in her final days, this is the closest I have come to living the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Every day I grieve for the Madeleine of yesterday, and stand ready to encounter the Madeleine of today, and hope and pray for the Madeleine of tomorrow. 

I pray that the Madeleine of tomorrow knows she is so, so loved by her parents and her God. I hope that she feels at home in the church. And that she comes to know Jesus like the Madeleine of Galilee for whom she is named. 

And Madeleine, when you read this, I hope you know how much I love being your dad.