What Would You Do In The Vatican Library?

When I was a teenager, my parents and I went to Rome for a week and a half at the end of my summer break. It was a great end to a summer before the school year began again, and it was also a good time to get out of New York (this was during the 2004 Republican National Convention). Like all tourists, we went to the Vatican. My mother made sure to mail a few postcards in order to have them stamped with that Vatican stamp, and of course we toured St. Peter's Basilica. In there, they had set aside a small room for quiet prayer. I went in to take a look around, repeating the mantra "There is no god" under my breath. That was my snotty teenage act of resistance to the violent religious iconography around me. This was Tony Perrottet's:

This revamped library, I discovered, was even Wi-Fi-enabled, so I logged on to my laptop and did a Facebook update, announcing that I had penetrated the Holy See. 

At the age of 9, I was kicked off my home church’s team of altar boys because I couldn’t get the Mass choreography right. Now, something about being in the belly of the Vatican brought out the schoolboy in me. I logged on to youtube.com, and saw that even here in the Holy See, I could start streaming HBO’s raunchy series on the Renaissance Papacy,The Borgias: One scene labeled “hot sex” between Juan Borgia and Sancia looked promising. 

A friend emailed back: “I dare you to log onto youporn.com.”

I looked around furtively. I was sitting in the last row of desks. At the click of a mouse, up sprang an eye-popping scene of acrobatic copulation. 

Luckily, I’d remembered to mute my laptop.