Epilogue: Emmanuel Speaks Last

At the table, after many weeks

The notebooks are full. The autumn has turned toward winter, and the morning light in the Caffè della Pace has changed — lower, more angular, warming the old stone walls in a different way. We have been at this table, with breaks of days and sometimes weeks between, for long enough that the owners now bring our coffee without being asked.

Emmanuel has said less than either of us and listened more than both of us combined. He has corrected Augusto twice, added detail a dozen times, and maintained throughout a quality of quiet attention that has given the conversations a kind of ballast. Now, on the last morning, Michael’s notebooks closed beside him, Augusto’s hands flat on the table, Emmanuel sets down his cup and speaks.

I have known Augusto Ferretti since 1963. He was sitting in the front row of a New Testament lecture at the Gregoriana — he will tell you it was the second row, but it was the front row, he was always in the front row — and he had already underlined half the assigned reading and written questions in the margins that the lecturer would spend the next forty minutes trying to answer.

I thought: either this man will become a great theologian or a great nuisance. I was not certain these were different things.

What I know now, after sixty-two years, is that he is neither one. He is a priest. In the fullest sense of that word: a man who has given his life as a bridge between God and the people God loves, who has taken seriously the weight of what was placed on him, who has failed at it imperfectly and repented of the failures honestly, and who has gotten up every morning and gone back to the work.

The theology is real. The scholarship is genuine. The institutional career is what it is — red hat and all, which I still find faintly amusing, though I have never told him so.

But what has not changed in sixty-two years is the thing I saw in that front row in 1963: a man for whom the question of God is not academic. A man who sits before that question with the posture of someone who has staked everything on the answer and found the answer to be true.

He has told you his stories. He has told you about his father’s hands and his mother’s reading, about Don Matteo and Father Leone, about Marco and the confessional, about Milan and the failures and the graces. He has told you about Michael and the manuscripts and the mirror.

What he will not tell you about himself is the thing I will tell you instead:

He is kind in the bone. Not in the professional, pastoral, performed sense. In the kind that comes from having genuinely decided — long ago, probably in a church in Brescia when he was seven years old — that other people’s souls matter more than his own comfort. I have watched him over sixty years navigate enormous institutional pressure, personal loss, professional frustration, and the accumulated weight of a shepherd’s grief for the sheep he could not reach. And the kindness has not been squeezed out of him. It is still there, in the same place it always was.

That is not a natural thing. I do not know any naturally kind person who has remained kind under that kind of pressure for that many decades. This is the work of Someone else in a man who has stayed willing. This is what a life given to God looks like from the outside, at close range, over time.

He picks up his cup. Takes the last sip.

There is one more thing.

On the Thursday evenings in Trastevere, when the soup is almost gone and the cold is coming in and people are beginning to move on — there is a moment, usually toward the end, when Augusto goes quiet. He is still present. He is still engaged with whoever is in front of him. But he goes inside somewhere. I have watched it happen a hundred times.

I think he goes back to the third pew from the front, on the left side, in a cold church in Brescia, where a seven-year-old boy watched an old priest elevate the Host and felt the world rearrange itself around something true.

I think he is still there, in some important sense. I think that is where all the rest of it comes from.

And I think the world could use more men who are still, after everything, standing in that pew.

A long silence at the table. The espresso machine performs its hissing liturgy in the background. Outside, the piazza is beginning to fill with the sounds of the morning. No one rushes to fill the silence.

After a while, Augusto orders one more coffee. Michael picks up his pen, then sets it down. Emmanuel opens his book.

The table holds them all.

It is enough.

— Finis —

Soli Deo Gloria

To God alone be the glory.