A Love Like Ours | Translation

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The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. 

[Daniel Alarcón]: This is Radio Ambulante, I’m Daniel Alarcón.

It was just another afternoon in 1980 and Daniel Genovesi, 15 years old, was in the cathedral of Venado Tuerto, a small city in Argentina. His eyes were fixed on the atrium, lost in though, attentive to a doubt that had just been born.

[Daniel Genovesi]: I was at mass and the question simply came to me: shouldn’t I become a priest?

[Daniel A.]: It was an unexpected question for him, because he hadn’t been going to church for that long. His family wasn’t very religious either—they had baptized him, yes, and he had made his first communion, but no one took him to mass or talked to him about God.

That’s why, at first, his relationship with the Church had been more social: he went to youth groups at the parish in town, made friends, and played guitar.

[Daniel G.]: We were all young, all teenagers, we read the gospel, we wanted to do things that helped others and little by little a religious feeling began to emerge. Maybe what’s curious is that at some point, without realizing it, I started talking to Jesus.

[Daniel A.]: It was an internal, intimate, spontaneous dialogue. The form that first spiritual restlessness took in him.

And when he began to wonder about whether or not to be a priest, he asked Jesus for a sign.

[Daniel G.]: I remember I was walking down the street and there were some kids playing soccer. So, while I’m walking I say to him, well, if you want me to be a priest, give me a pass. And one of those who was playing, I don’t know how, why he kicks and the ball comes to my feet…

[Daniel A.]: It wasn’t the only time. The stronger the question became, the more signs he saw.

[Daniel G.]: Like that, I started seeing a bunch of synchronicities that made me say “No, wait, this seems to be getting serious.”

[Daniel A.]: But he wasn’t completely sure, because he felt more connected to Jesus than to the Church as an institution itself. Anyway, something about that life attracted him: the work for the community, the hours devoted to reading. Two things he had always liked. So he went on a ten-day spiritual retreat to think it through. When he came out, he had already decided.

[Daniel G.]: And at that moment, when I made the decision and said well, if I’m going to follow Jesus on that path. I felt at peace. And I began the path of… the seminary.

[Daniel A.]: Around the same time, Mercedes Tarragona was also waiting for a sign from God. She was 13 years old and lived in Gualeguaychú, another small city on the Argentine coast, about 450 kilometers from Venado Tuerto, about five hours by car.

Sitting in the school yard, while swinging on a swing, she was trying to calm down. She was anguished because lately things at home had become very chaotic: her father was going out with other women, her mother had had her too young and barely managed with raising her, and an older man in the family was approaching her too much, in ways that she, still being a child, already sensed weren’t right.

All of this made her feel in danger.

[Mercedes Tarragona]: I had tremendous anguish and tremendous, tremendous loneliness. And then I say a prayer, like “Oh, my God, help me.” And at that moment I felt something like a strong embrace and the loneliness disappeared.

[Daniel A.]: She felt that God was there for her. A few days later she saw a group of nuns pass near her house and without really knowing why… she simply ran after them.

[Mercedes]: I had never seen nuns in my life except for The Sound of Music in the movie. And suddenly I saw some nuns pass by and I said “I’m becoming a nun. I mean, I’m going with them.” So I approach one of the nuns and I tell her “Take me with you…” And the nun, of course, said “No, we can’t take you, you’re a child.” And I say “Please, take me with you…”

[Daniel A.]: To convince them she told them she had already finished seventh grade and wanted to continue studying.

[Mercedes]: So I go talk to my parents and my father: “No, absolutely not. How are you going to go with the nuns? I’d rather you become a whore.”

[Daniel A.]: Her mother wasn’t convinced either. And maybe she would have opposed the idea too, if it hadn’t been for a memory that suddenly struck her: that of baby Mercedes, burning with fever, and a promise she herself had made to the Virgin of Mercy:

[Mercedes]: My mother said: Look, save her, save her, save her, save her! I’ll raise her until you come to get her. And then my mother remembered. Because she said “Of course, the uniform, the Virgin of Mercy.” And that’s what enabled her to let me go.

[Daniel A.]: The mother convinced her husband and shortly after, Mercedes left with the nuns to Avellaneda, a city next to Buenos Aires where the order of the Mercedarians had a high school. There they accepted her as a student but she had to wait four more years, until she turned 17, to take the habit.

She knew that becoming a nun meant giving up having her own family, something she had always wanted. But she felt she was doing it for a good reason.

[Mercedes]: At that moment, I said well, I will give myself to save my father.

[Daniel A.]: So he would stop being such a womanizer and so her family would be better.

Besides, she had already been living with the nuns for years, she felt like one of them, and she liked life there. Working in the garden, studying, cooking, meditating, praying.

The convent was her place in the world, an orderly, predictable world that contrasted with the chaos of her home. A world she didn’t think she would ever want to leave.

And it wasn’t until she met Daniel’s gaze… Father Daniel’s, that this certainty began to tremble.

A pause and we’ll be back…

[Daniel A.]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Our producer Emilia Erbetta tells us the story.

[Emilia Erbetta]: After being ordained as a priest in the late 1980s, Daniel was assigned to work as secretary to the bishop of Venado Tuerto. It wasn’t something he could choose. Being a priest, like being a nun, means there are many things in your life that are imposed on you: that’s what the vow of obedience is about, doing what your superiors say and not asking why.

Still, he liked the work. In the morning he said mass, then had breakfast and then took care of administrative matters. In the afternoon he could spend several hours reading or preparing the classes he taught at the seminary. Sometimes he went out with the bishop to visit parishes in the area.

One afternoon in 1991, for example, the bishop asked him to accompany him to a parish festival in Firmat, a town an hour from Venado Tuerto. When they arrived, a couple of young nuns were playing with a group of children. Dressed in light-colored habits with their hair covered by a veil, they moved between the tables like children’s entertainers. One of them was Mercedes.

They barely looked at each other that day. But some time later they crossed paths again.

[Mercedes]: A few weeks pass and we see each other again at another parish festival. Instead of club to club. From parish festival to parish festival…

[Emilia]: They started chatting. Daniel immediately liked Mercedes. She was nice, cheerful, and he also saw her full of energy.

[Daniel G.]: She was very beautiful. She was very interesting. Thoughtful. She was pleasant. She was well-educated. She worked with young people. She had many elements to say, well, we can work together on a broader project.

[Emilia]: So he proposed that she work with him on some projects he had with young people in the parish.

Mercedes was tempted by the idea…

[Mercedes]: I liked him. I thought, we can work, we were young, you know? You don’t always have to be working with old priests…

[Emilia]: And besides… he was handsome.

[Mercedes]: Blue eyes, beautiful, slender, all dressed in black, impeccable, neat, tender, loving, sweet. He had life in his gaze, in what he said…

[Emilia]: So different from other priests she had known. So she accepted and they started organizing meetings with young people from the parish, outings, gatherings…

At first, the treatment between them was formal, somewhat distant, as the norm dictates: relationships between priests and nuns must maintain a certain distance.

[Daniel G.]:I didn’t address her informally, sister. I mean, I addressed her formally. “Sister, how have you been? What do you need?” And the sister also addressed me formally. I mean, one would say it’s appropriate, I don’t say as God commands, but as is at least politically appropriate.

[Emilia]: But the truth is that every time they saw each other, they had a great time. They would stay talking late into the night at the curia or at the convent, and only stopped when someone else came looking for them. Both noticed there was something special about the other.

[Mercedes]: What began was a beautiful friendship.

[Emilia]: One day, Daniel asked her why she didn’t look him in the eyes. Another, why she didn’t use informal address with him. And at first, Mercedes didn’t really know what to say. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the answer. If she didn’t look him in the eyes, if she didn’t use an informal address, it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. Simply, the rules didn’t allow it, it was a lack of modesty.

But little by little and motivated by him, she began to break some of those rules.

[Mercedes]: So then I was calling him Daniel, we started addressing each other informally, I was looking him in the eyes without realizing it, I was forming an alliance with someone beyond myself, beyond my vows, beyond my rules.

[Emilia]: Sometimes she felt that with very little, Daniel showed her an unknown world.

[Mercedes]: It’s like I had lived my whole life in a little house with the windows closed. And when I met Daniel. Daniel started opening the windows for me. He said “Hey, look, there’s sun and look there’s a garden.” Because very gently he started questioning me or asking me, or making me see things beyond, you know?

[Emilia]: But it’s not like she felt so guilty either. It’s that deep down, Mercedes didn’t feel she was doing anything wrong… Yes, it’s true she was used to obeying, but she didn’t always think all those rules made sense. Besides, Daniel was nothing more than a friend. For a girl like her, who had grown up in the convent, surrounded by other nuns, a friendship like this was something new… and she liked it.

[Mercedes]: There was mutual admiration. So it was an explosion, because you weren’t measuring yourself, you weren’t being less in front of the other. So everything that came out was good.

[Emilia]: On Christmas morning 1991, about six months after meeting her, Daniel woke up with a sudden desire to talk to Mercedes. So without thinking too much about it, he took the phone from the curia and dialed the convent number. While listening to the tone, he thought of excuses to justify the call.

[Daniel G.]: Without any plan… I simply dialed the phone and she answered. Because anyone could have answered. And I greeted her. I said Merry Christmas to her: “Father, what are you calling for?” I didn’t want to greet Mother Superior. I wanted to talk to the Mother Superior. Ah, well, let me put her on. No, but wait, sister. Well, there we chatted for a while, nothing more.

[Emilia]: Nothing more, an inconsequential chat. They knew they were going to meet a few days later, because both would participate in a mission trip in the first days of January.

On that trip, whenever they had a free moment they looked for each other to share some time. One night, when they had finished with the day’s tasks, they stayed with a group of young people to pray.

[Daniel G.]: We were maybe no more than four or five people praying. We put our hands on the table and some on top of others.

[Mercedes]: And Daniel’s ended up on top of mine. And Daniel only moved his little finger caressing me: And I felt it and I allowed it. I mean, I didn’t reject it, I didn’t move my hand, nothing, it stayed.

[Daniel G.]: It was a caress. It was contact. And it’s not that I said now I’ll do it. It came naturally to me and having come naturally, I simply accepted it. And well, she didn’t withdraw her hand either or get bothered by it. That was a first gesture of combined, or accepted tenderness.

[Emilia]: It was the first time they touched each other.

[Emilia]: The mission lasted several more days, but Mercedes had to leave early. She had to travel to Córdoba with other nuns from her congregation.

Daniel took her to the bus station.

While they waited, they had ice cream and then he accompanied her to the door.

[Mercedes]: There I hug him. Before getting on the bus. And I told him, my love, for you it’s very pure.

[Emilia]: Daniel liked her saying that. But he didn’t quite know how to react. Mercedes didn’t really understand what she had just done either.

[Mercedes]: I don’t know what I meant to tell him, like I was feeling things, but they were good, healthy. Who knows. What I wanted to tell him was what came out and I got on with my heart racing. I think everyone who saw that realized. I didn’t realize.

[Emilia]: It’s just that it’s hard to name what you don’t know. And she didn’t know love. At least, not that kind of love. Not only had she never experienced it, but she had been educated not to feel it.

[Mercedes]: For many years, you work your head and here not everything… what’s here you deny.

[Emilia]: Here, says Mercedes, touching her chest at heart level.

[Mercedes]: There’s no space for emotion, there’s no. So you live emotionally illiterate, that’s why you encounter these things and you don’t know what to do.

[Emilia]: What they were slowly beginning to discover was nothing other than their own feelings: an inner world that neither of them had looked into before.

[Mercedes]: It was like something natural, like something you don’t question. Something that grows. It’s like dough when it ferments, it doesn’t make noise. You’ll find it like that later. But during the process, that… you don’t realize. And yet, it grows tremendously.

[Emilia]: But all that was growing and they didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, was beginning to be evident to those around them.

[Daniel A.]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[Daniel A.]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Emilia continues the story.

[Emilia]: The first to notice that something more was happening between them was a friend of Daniel’s. She was a girl their age, who used to collaborate with the church and had been on the mission. One afternoon, when they returned from the trip, she told him straight out.

[Daniel G.]: “But don’t you realize you’re in love with the nun?” No. “What are you saying?” No, this isn’t like that, she says. And she’s also in love with you, because when you looked at her she looked down. I mean she could perceive it, which I didn’t perceive.

[Daniel G.]: No, no, I didn’t have it incorporated in my language… Maybe I’m in love, no… no.

[Emilia]: She wasn’t the only one to see the signs. For the nuns who lived with Mercedes, their relationship hadn’t gone unnoticed either. When she returned to the convent after the holidays, they made it known to her.

[Mercedes]: When I arrive I feel there’s like… like little looks toward me, there are things kind of strange.

[Emilia]: One day, they called her for a meeting. It didn’t seem strange to her because sometimes they met to talk about how everything was going in the convent. The mother general, the highest authority of the congregation, who happened to be visiting, also joined that time.

It took Mercedes a few minutes to understand that this meeting was different. That they weren’t there to talk about the convent, but about her. One by one she saw how her sisters reprimanded her for her attitudes, her way of being, her friendships.

That afternoon, they criticized her for many reasons: because one day she wore a red jacket, too flashy for a nun. Because one night, during a summer camp, she had removed her veil to sleep in one of the tents. Because she sang secular songs with the teenage girls at school, and especially for her relationship with Father Daniel.

Mercedes listened to them somewhere between surprised and hurt. They talked to her about the way she looked at the priest, about the time they had shared a beer and she had taken the can as a souvenir to her room, about how they saw her mood change when they talked.

[Mercedes]: And that was the first thing that started hurting me because they started breaking me. Because that criticism, just like that out of nowhere, broke me. That accusation.

[Emilia]: Daniel didn’t take too long to find out what had happened in the convent.

[Daniel G.]: I got indignant, I got angry, what I said. I’m not going to leave her. I became even closer.

[Emilia]: He couldn’t defend her without making the situation worse, but he could not leave her alone. So they continued seeing each other, although more carefully. They kept working together, but now they avoided walking alone or being seen talking too much in public.

One day they managed to meet in a little house at the parish. A somewhat remote place, by the river. There, when they were alone, Daniel asked Mercedes about a meditation she had given him the last time they met. They used to share that kind of religious texts and this one was a kind of imagination exercise about love and marriage.

[Mercedes]: And in that meditation you imagined first, the man you would have married, the children you would have had. When I imagined my husband, Daniel appeared. That helped me for the first time. I started imagining him in a different way.

[Emilia]: And the same thing had happened to Daniel. When he had to imagine a wife, Mercedes appeared in his mind.

They could no longer deny what they felt. But the vows of chastity they had made were forever. The life they had chosen… was forever.

[Daniel G.]: The only way out was like a poetic, spiritual or mystical subterfuge…

[Mercedes]: There what we started talking about and we said well, look, in this life we choose to live this way. You, a nun, me a priest. So the promise was:

[Daniel G.]: Let’s stay in the atrium, we said, before entering heaven. And there let’s make the life we couldn’t have.

[Mercedes]: We felt we could form a family together. But we choose this.

[Emilia]: With that promise something new, different began for them. They couldn’t be together in this life, or form a family, but they could be there for each other, take care of each other and accompany each other even if platonically.

Daniel gave her gifts that Mercedes hid in her room: a medal, a ring, cassettes with recorded songs and even a teddy bear…

[Mercedes]: I kept the teddy bear hidden between the blankets. At night I would take out the teddy bear and lie down with the teddy bear. During the morning, quickly, I would put it back, hide it so no one would find the teddy bear, because if they enter the nun’s rooms, they can be searched…

[Emilia]: But although they were careful, they remained in the sights of the other nuns. Especially Mercedes. In mid-1992, she traveled to the central convent in Córdoba to participate in a retreat, and when she arrived, she again felt the accusatory looks on her. But it wasn’t just the looks…

[Mercedes]: No one talks to me. A tremendous silence. I’m totally isolated.

[Emilia]: In a short time, that world she had always felt was so much her own had transformed into a hostile place. She decided to discuss it in confession. Partially, of course. Kneeling, she told the priest what was happening. She didn’t talk to him about her love for Daniel, or about the promise to be together in another life. She only told him she knew her friendship with him wasn’t well regarded. She wasn’t interested in accusing anyone, she just wanted to unburden herself.

An hour later, the mother general called her to her office. She told her that from that moment on, she would have to answer to her. And she designated another sister to whom Mercedes should direct herself if she had any requests. Finally, she told her she could no longer see or work with Father Daniel anymore.

Mercedes listened without questioning her. In her head, the pain of that prohibition mixed with a deeper disappointment. The betrayal, she now understood, was total: the priest had violated the seal of confession.

When the superior finished, Mercedes only managed to ask for one thing: that they let her return to Venado Tuerto one last time. She had a responsibility to the bishop and to Daniel, with the work they did around the parish, she couldn’t disappear without explanations. The superior agreed and a few days later she traveled there.

She arrived in the city with a decision made.

[Mercedes]: I wanted to comply with what they were asking me, even if it destroyed my heart…

[Emilia]: What they were asking implied breaking the promise they had made just a few weeks earlier. When they were finally alone, she told him they could no longer see each other.

[Mercedes]: And he said to me: Are you not going to see me anymore because they’re asking you to or because you don’t want to see me?

[Emilia]: And there, standing in front of him, she lied to him.

[Mercedes]: I say no, I don’t want to see you.

[Emilia]: I don’t want to see you. She wanted to honor her vows. And for that, she had to obey.

It wasn’t the answer Daniel expected. He tried to hide it, but he was devastated.

[Daniel G.]: Of the difficult moments in my life, that was the first. Difficult and with a sensation of a life meaning crisis and desire to… not live.

[Emilia]: But he had to accept Mercedes’ decision. He had no choice.

A few days after that encounter, Mercedes found out that another punishment was added to hers: transfer to a convent in Gualeguaychú, the city where she was born, about 5 hours from Venado Tuerto.

With this news, she wanted to see Daniel one more time. A goodbye after the goodbye. A friend of his, also a priest, offered them his private apartment in another parish.

It was a long afternoon, in which they talked, held hands…

[Mercedes]: We said goodbye, we talked, we cried and when we’re leaving Daniel grabs me and gives me a kiss that was the first kiss, kiss.

[Daniel G.]: Today I would say… a simple, tender, prolonged kiss. Not the best kiss… but the first. It was beautiful.

[Emilia]: And although they knew they were breaking all the rules, nothing that had just happened felt like a sin.

[Daniel G.]: I think the sin would have been not kissing, not having kissed…

[Mercedes]: There’s too much light to feel there was something wrong.

[Emilia]: On the contrary: the kiss gave her strength to face what was coming. And she knew it wasn’t little.

A few days later she left alone for Gualeguaychú to live in another convent. But she was no longer so sure she wanted to continue obeying.

[Daniel A.]: A pause and we’ll be back.

[Daniel A.]: We’re back on Radio Ambulante. Here’s Emilia.

[Emilia]: Although they were forbidden to see each other and talk, Daniel and Mercedes still managed. There were almost 500 kilometers between them, and to let her know she wasn’t alone, he would call the convent and when the superior answered, he would hang up. They had agreed on this the last time they saw each other.

When Mercedes heard the phone ring echoing through the convent corridors, she knew he was thinking of her.

[Mercedes]: I remember the nun would say: Something must be happening with the phone. Because they call and hang up, call and hang up at any hour. You know? But it was like: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

[Emilia]: When they told me this, I couldn’t help but ask them why, if it was already obvious they were in love, they didn’t decide to go further, to leave the church…

[Mercedes]: Because we couldn’t see it. At that moment the struggle wasn’t “today I can’t be with the love of my life,” because we were, we had our spiritual alliance made, we had our commitment to each other.

[Daniel G.]: We were so convinced in the role we had, that we couldn’t think of ourselves as anything different from that.

[Emilia]: But the truth is that, deep down, Mercedes did think about leaving the Church. Her confidence in the order, in the life she had chosen, had begun to break a few months earlier, in that meeting where her companions accused her of her friendship with Daniel.

In Gualeguaychú they assigned her administrative work in the convent. She, who had always worked with people, was now always alone in an office. And the order was clear: she couldn’t have contact with anyone… It was another way of punishing her.

Even before arriving, the superior gave her a warning.

[Mercedes]: She tells me: Look, we’re all doing very well here. I hope you don’t come to me with problems.

[Emilia]: The rumors had reached there.

The only good thing about that place was that it was closer to her family. She saw her mother frequently because she worked cleaning the convent. She was the first to realize that Mercedes wasn’t well. She saw that she was very thin and discouraged.

[Mercedes]: So my mother at one point in a gallery said to me “What’s happening?” I say “nothing, ma. Why?” She says “Because your gaze,” she says, “is distant, it’s sad. No, you don’t have light,” she told me. Well, some problems here. She told me “Well, either you talk or I talk,” and mom means business…

[Emilia]: Mercedes decided it had to be her who talked.

[Mercedes]: So, two or three days later I said to the superior: Look, what do I have to do to leave? She said “What’s wrong?” I tell her “it’s just that I’m not happy here anymore.”

[Emilia]: They tried to convince her, they called her many times from the congregation. But there was no way: a month later, she left the convent.

[Mercedes]: The exit is very sad, you know? Because first no one talks to you anymore, they ignore you. It’s a silence. They apply like a tremendous freeze. They took me to a little place in the center of Gualeguaychú where there was an office and they told me: you enter through this door. There you’ll find a skirt, a shirt and shoes. You leave your habit, leave all your things and exit through that door. I mean no one gave me a hug, no one said goodbye, the only thing the superior told me was “Remember you still have your vows, watch what you do.” I said “Mother, do you think I’m going to a brothel?”

[Emilia]: And so after ten years of being a sister, from one moment to the next she became simply Mercedes Tarragona again.

During the first month she stayed at her parents’ house. She felt lost, like without foundations…

[Mercedes]: I mean, everything I had done up to that point, nothing served me. I didn’t know how to move in the world, I didn’t know how to look for a job. Everything that has sustained you doesn’t make sense there. The noise of my parents’ house stunned me, the TV being on overwhelmed me.

[Emilia]: During all that time outside the convent, she never stopped talking to Daniel on the phone. She notified him as soon as she left and they agreed she would travel to Venado Tuerto to work with him in the diocese, like before. But now, as a civilian.

On the trip there, she could only think about one thing.

[Mercedes]: I was very nervous, very nervous because I had very short hair, because under the veil you wear your hair very short. I had still had a slightly better cut done when I left. But the whole trip I thought “will he still want me now?” Because by not having the habit I didn’t know if he would like me in that other way…

[Emilia]: When she arrived, Daniel went to pick her up at the terminal. That place where they had already had several goodbyes, now reunited them.

When he saw her get off he noticed she was different, but, at the same time… she was the same as always.

[Daniel G.]: She had pants. She had a… a denim jacket. I saw her hair. I saw her hair loose, which was always covered. I liked her before and I liked her there, of course…

[Emilia]: Now settled in Venado Tuerto, in a small apartment he got for her, Mercedes began working at the parish.

With Daniel the relationship was increasingly intimate. He, as a priest, wasn’t controlled by anyone, and they could spend many hours together, working, chatting… Kissing. But nothing more. Neither of them dared to go further.

And although everything seemed to be going well, Mercedes began to feel it wasn’t enough. Now that she had stopped being a nun, the promise of spending a life together in heaven wasn’t enough for her, she wanted a relationship here, on earth.

But she couldn’t ask Daniel to leave the clergy. She more than anyone knew what it meant to do something like that. But she couldn’t continue either.

[Mercedes]: I made the decision to leave because I was already suffering at that point.

[Emilia]: Daniel was traveling, so she told him over the phone that same day.

[Mercedes]: And I tell him look, I’m leaving like this, I can’t. I’m in love and like this no, no, I can’t continue this, this isn’t enough, this hurts me.

[Daniel G.]: So what I tell her is: Look, don’t leave. Wait for me to arrive, for me to return to the city. And there. And there we’ll see.

[Emilia]: When he arrived, a few hours later, he went straight to Mercedes’ house.

[Mercedes]: And he tells me “Don’t leave. I want to share a life with you.”

And I said look, we’re already sharing life. There the woman was born inside me. No, no he says, but I want to form a family.

[Daniel G.]: Don’t you want us to be a family, for us to get married, to be together?

[Emilia]: After so much resistance, he was finally prepared to let go.

[Daniel G.]: I didn’t want a life without her. Until now, everything I had had was very good. But when I met her and that affective world opened up. Ah, well, I didn’t want to miss that.

[Emilia]: Mercedes said yes. So that same afternoon he gave his last mass and then spoke with the bishop. When he returned that night to meet her, he was no longer Father Daniel.

[Emilia]: The news about the nun and priest in love spread quickly through the city. Their love story was perfect raw material for gossip and rumors.

Mercedes even remembers they talked about them in the local newspaper, although we couldn’t find the article.

[Mercedes]: When Daniel announces he’s leaving the church, they attacked me…

[Emilia]: It was the perfect narrative: the bad woman who had tempted the good priest.

The bishop called her on the phone and asked her to leave the city. When she refused, he summoned her to a bar to talk personally.

[Mercedes]: Literally, he said to me “How much do you want?” And I say “how much do I want for what?” To leave Daniel… and I couldn’t believe it…

[Emilia]: She got up and left. Maybe it was at that instant that the last thread that tied her to the Catholic Church finished breaking.

Shortly after they moved to Buenos Aires. They wanted to start over in a place where they wouldn’t be the ex-nun and the ex-priest. Exiled from the world they knew, they had to look for a new one.

A friend helped them settle in. He got them work and an apartment. But that wasn’t enough: somehow, Mercedes and Daniel had to learn to live in society.

[Mercedes]: He helped Daniel dress appropriately for occasions. He taught me to dress appropriately for occasions. He took me to the hairdresser. He took me to a place where they taught me to put on makeup. He took us to restaurants like in a short time the guy advanced us ten years. Because we had no idea.

[Emilia]: They also didn’t know how to be together. At 29 and 25 years old, for Daniel and Mercedes, sex was another unknown world. Something else in life they had to learn. And in that, they were alone. Or, well, together.

[Daniel G.]: I remember that maybe it had been a month since we were living together and nothing, nothing was happening, we would go there and… there was no excitement.

[Mercedes]: And we had to go experimenting, right? It was very fun anyway between us, because we were two children playing and we had a lot of trust, we had like three years of knowing each other, we could talk about any topic between us.

[Emilia]: A few months later they got married in a civil ceremony. The church hadn’t released Daniel from his vows with the argument that he could change his mind. So when he got married, he was technically still a priest.

During the following years, they built a family life like any other. They had a son who died at birth and then two more daughters. They studied, worked, and bought a house. They made friends, created a new world of their own, away from the Catholic Church and its rules. They even joined the Anglican Church, a branch of Protestantism in which priests can have families.

Daniel became a parish priest and eventually became a bishop.

Today, Mercedes considers herself a spiritual person, who has a direct and intimate relationship with God. She told me that the nun she was, Sister Mercedes, remained inside her for a long time, especially in the way she assumed her responsibilities. But she doesn’t miss her. For her, leaving the Church was also a way of getting closer to the world.

[Mercedes]: When you’re a priest or nun, somehow you feel you’re better than others because you’re formed that way. When you leave that it’s like you can really touch the other, because now you’re one of the crowd.

[Emilia]: Somehow, that’s what took them so long to do: dare to live their love like so many other ordinary couples.

[Heidi]: Hello, listeners. I’m Heidi Yorkshire from Portland, Oregon, and I’m part of Deambulantes, Radio Ambulante Estudios’ membership program. I support their journalism because it tells beautiful stories that I would never have heard otherwise.  If you want to help them continue telling stories from Latin America, visit Radio Ambulante dot  org slash donate. 

Here are the credits for today’s episode. 

Emilia Erbetta is a producer at Radio Ambulante and lives in Buenos Aires. This story was edited by Camila Segura and Luis Fernando Vargas. Bruno Scelza did the fact checking. The sound design is by Andrés Azpiri with music by Ana Tuirán, Rémy Lozano, and Andrés. 

The rest of the Radio Ambulante team includes Daniel Alarcón, Paola Alean, Adriana Bernal, Aneris Casassus, Diego Corzo, Camilo Jiménez Santofimio, Germán Montoya, Samantha Proaño, Natalia Ramírez, Lina Rincón, Sara Selva Ortiz, David Trujillo, Elsa Liliana Ulloa, and Mariana Zúñiga. 

Carolina Guerrero is the CEO. 

Radio Ambulante is a podcast from Radio Ambulante Estudios, produced and mixed in Hindenburg PRO.

Radio Ambulante tells the stories of Latin America. I’m Heidi Yorkshire. Thank you for listening.