My Friend Augusto: A Life Told at a Table

A Note from Michlaude

Before we begin

This book was born at a table in Rome, over coffee that grew cold because no one wanted to interrupt the conversation to reheat it. It is the biography of a man I came to know through his words before I knew him in person, and whom I found, when we finally sat face to face, to be even more than his words had promised.

Cardinal Augusto Ferretti is my friend. I did not expect that. I came to him first as a challenger — a Protestant apologist from Florida with a notebook and a willingness to press hard on the old stones of his tradition. He did not flinch. He engaged me with a spirit so genuinely rooted in Christ that I found, to my own surprise, that I had nothing to fight about. Only things to learn.

This book is told in his voice, at his table, with his oldest friend Father Emmanuel sitting beside him to keep him honest. I asked the questions. Emmanuel provided the corrections. Augusto told the truth.

We have changed a few names to protect the people whose confessions and struggles wander through these pages. Everything else is as it happened, as best three imperfect memories can reconstruct it.

The nom de guerre “Michlaude” belongs to both of us. It seemed right that a book about a friendship should carry two names pressed into one.

We give this story to God, from whom it came.

— Michlaude

Prologue: The Table

Rome, an autumn morning

Caffè della Pace, just off the Piazza Navona. A Tuesday in October. The summer tourists have thinned to a manageable trickle. The morning light comes in at an angle through the old windows, and the espresso machine performs its hissing liturgy in the background. The tables are small and the chairs are close, and the owners have long since stopped caring whether you stay an hour or four.

Emmanuel arrives first.

This is not a surprise. In forty years of friendship, Father Emmanuel Conti has never been late for anything. He is already seated when I arrive, his coat folded over the back of his chair, a copy of something by Balthasar facedown on the table, his hands wrapped around a small cup as though warming them at a fire. He is seventy-one years old, which he wears with considerably more dignity than I wear my own seventy-eight.

He rises when he sees me. This is Emmanuel — he would rise to greet a passing stranger if the occasion seemed to call for it.

“Tardissimo,” he says, though I am exactly on time.

“Tu sei impossibile,” I tell him, and we embrace the way old men do, with more weight and care than young men manage, because we both know how many people we have lost and how precious the ones still standing have become.

We sit. We order. The morning moves around us at Rome's particular pace, which is to say it moves quickly and slowly at the same time, and somehow everything gets done.

Michael arrives seven minutes later, slightly breathless, carrying a notebook that has already seen considerable use. He is an American, which means he apologizes for being late in a way that implies he does not entirely believe he is late. I find this charming.

I have known him through correspondence and conversation for some time before this meeting. I have read his work — nine volumes of Christian apologetics that arrived in my life like a stone thrown into a still pond. The ripples have not stopped. I expected someone more guarded in person. He is, if anything, more direct.

“Coffee?” I offer.

“Always,” he says, and sits down across from us and opens his notebook, and looks at me the way people look at a building they intend to understand, not just to admire.

Good. I have had enough admiration in my life. Understanding is rarer and more valuable.

Emmanuel refills his cup. Michael uncaps his pen. Outside, a pigeon makes its case for the breadcrumbs near the door.

We talk for a while about nothing consequential — the weather, the state of Roman traffic, a small theological argument Emmanuel and I have been conducting for approximately three decades and which neither of us expects to resolve. Michael listens to this with visible amusement.

Then he says: “Where do we begin?”

And Emmanuel, without looking up from his cup, says the thing he has been saying to me in private for years:

Emmanuel: “The Church knows your theology, Augusto. It does not yet know your life. Begin there.”

He is right. He is almost always right, which is one of the great irritations and great gifts of a long friendship.

I look at Michael’s open notebook. I look at Emmanuel’s steady face. I look at the morning light coming in through the old windows of the Caffè della Pace, and I think of Brescia in 1946, which is where everything begins.

“Alright,” I say. “Then I will tell you about my father’s hands.”

The Boy in Brescia

1946 – 1962

My father’s hands were the first theology I ever studied.

Giancarlo Ferretti was a stonemason by trade, which meant that his hands were perpetually scarred, perpetually calloused, and perpetually in motion. He built things. He repaired things. He looked at broken structures and saw, with an instinct I cannot explain and have never managed to replicate, exactly where the weakness was and how it might be made whole.

He was not a talkative man. In our house in the Borgo Trento neighborhood of Brescia — a modest house, two floors, a courtyard where my mother grew tomatoes with a dedication that bordered on the evangelical — silence was not awkward. It was inhabited. My father could sit in a chair by the window for an entire evening, and you would not feel his absence from the conversation because his presence in the room was so complete.

He prayed the same way he worked: quietly, with his whole body engaged, as though prayer were a physical labor he had been hired to perform and intended to do properly. I would see him kneeling in the early mornings before I left for school — not performing devotion but simply doing it, the way he would have set a stone, level and true.

He never talked to me about God. He showed me God in the posture of a man who had decided, somewhere deep inside himself, that God was real and that this fact should organize everything else.

I have met many brilliant theologians in my life. None of them have taught me as much as Giancarlo Ferretti’s morning knees on the kitchen floor.

• • •

My mother Lucia was the theologian of the household, though she never used the word. She used other words: the Liturgical calendar, the feast days, the names of saints spoken with a familiarity that made them feel like neighbors rather than monuments. She knew which saint you prayed to for which affliction, not from superstition but from a kind of accumulated wisdom about how the communion of the saints actually worked in the fabric of daily life.

She read to us in the evenings. Not always Scripture — sometimes poetry, sometimes the lives of the saints, sometimes the letters of Padre Pio, who was still alive in those years and whose mysticism she approached with a reverence that I, as a child, found both impressive and slightly frightening. She had a gift for inhabiting the stories she read, so that by the time she finished, you felt you had been somewhere rather than heard something.

She also had opinions. Considerable opinions. On the Church, on the priests at Sant’Alessandro, on the proper way to observe the great feasts, on the relative spiritual merits of various approaches to Lent. My father would listen to these opinions with an expression of profound and affectionate patience. He very rarely argued. When he did, he was almost always right, which perhaps explains his caution.

Together they created a home in which faith was not a department of life but its atmosphere. You breathed it. You didn’t decide to be Christian in our house any more than you decided to be Italian. It was simply what you were, and the question was only how fully you would inhabit it.

• • •

Post-war Brescia was a city of recovery and memory. I was born in 1946, so I have no direct memory of the war itself, but its residue was everywhere — in the gaps where buildings had been, in the faces of the older men, in the way adults would sometimes stop in the middle of a sentence as though a door had opened onto something they did not wish you to see.

There was also, simultaneously, an extraordinary energy of reconstruction. People were building — physically, economically, spiritually. The Church was part of that rebuilding in ways that seemed entirely natural to a child growing up inside it. The parish of Sant’Alessandro was the center of our neighborhood’s social and spiritual gravity, and Don Matteo Ricci — our parish priest, no relation to the great missionary, though he would not have been displeased by the comparison — was its beating heart.

Don Matteo was sixty years old when I was seven. He was a small man, compact, with white hair and a face like a benevolent hawk. He smelled of incense and pipe tobacco, which I have always associated with holiness, and he had a manner of looking at you that made you feel simultaneously seen and safe. He was not a great intellectual. He was something rarer: a man of genuine prayer who had allowed that prayer to make him genuinely kind.

I loved him with the straightforward intensity that children bring to the people who seem to them to have found what life is for.

• • •

The first memory that matters happened when I was seven years old.

It was a Sunday in Lent. The church was dim in the way that Lenten churches are — the statues veiled, the flowers absent, the whole building stripped of decoration in a way that felt less like poverty than like honesty. I was sitting between my parents in the pew we always occupied, third from the front on the left side, and I was, in the way of seven-year-olds at Mass, simultaneously present and not entirely present.

Then Don Matteo elevated the Host.

I cannot explain what happened in me at that moment. I have spent sixty years trying and have arrived at the conclusion that explanation is not the right category. Something in the center of my chest went very still and very large at the same time. The world did not stop — I could still hear my mother’s breathing, still smell the incense and the beeswax of the candles — but it rearranged itself around that moment of elevation the way iron filings rearrange around a magnet.

I did not understand the Eucharist at seven years old. I did not understand what I was seeing. But something in me knew that what was happening at that altar was the most important thing that ever happened anywhere, and that my life was somehow connected to it in a way I could not yet articulate.

I have spent my entire priesthood inside that moment. Every Mass I have celebrated, every host I have elevated in sixty years of ministry, has been a return to the third pew from the front on the left side, with my mother’s breathing beside me and the world rearranging itself around something true.

Here Emmanuel clears his throat and looks at Michael.

Emmanuel: “He hasn’t told you about the funeral yet. Tell him about the funeral, Augusto. That’s the other first memory that matters.”

Emmanuel. È impossibile.

He is right, though. The funeral is part of the story.

When I was nine years old, a boy from my school died. His name was Roberto Cattaneo. He was ten years old, and he died of a fever that in any other era or with any other family’s resources might have been treatable. It was the first death that entered my life at close range, and it devastated me in the way that the deaths of peers devastate children — not with the grief of loss, exactly, but with the terror of the category.

If Roberto could die, then anyone could die. If anyone could die, then everyone would. Including my mother. Including my father. Including me.

I could not sleep for a week. I did not tell my parents why. I was nine years old and did not have words for existential dread, so I lay awake with it in the dark and felt it pressing down on my chest.

The Sunday after the funeral, I watched Don Matteo celebrate Mass with Roberto’s empty space in the congregation — the Cattaneo family were in the front pew, the mother’s shoulders curved inward with a grief that seemed to make her physically smaller — and at the elevation, the thing happened again. The stillness. The rearrangement.

And into that stillness came a thought that I can only describe as a gift, because it did not come from anything I had been taught or anything I had worked out. It was simply there, the way a stone is simply there when you look at it:

He is not gone. He is in this.

I do not mean that I heard a voice. I mean that certainty arrived without argument. Roberto was not gone. Whatever Don Matteo was holding above his head at that altar — whatever that thing was — Roberto was somehow part of it. Death was not the last word. There was a Word before and after death, and that Word was what this was about.

I went home and slept.

I was nine years old. I had not yet been confirmed. I had read almost no theology. But the central conviction that has held my faith together for sixty-nine years arrived in a cold church in Brescia while a grieving mother curved inward in the front pew, and it has never left.

The Call That Wouldn’t Leave

1960 – 1964

Let me be clear about something before we go further, because I think honesty requires it: I was not always a particularly holy teenager.

I was reasonably well-behaved by the standards of Brescia in the late 1950s, which is to say I attended Mass faithfully, did not drink to excess, and managed to avoid most of the more spectacular forms of adolescent foolishness. But inside, in the private country of my thoughts and desires, I was navigating the same bewildering terrain that every adolescent navigates, and doing so with no particular grace or special spiritual advantage.

There was a girl named Serena Bianchi, who occupied a disproportionate share of my attention during my fifteenth year. She had dark hair and a way of laughing that made everything she found funny seem, by extension, funny. I did not speak to her directly for approximately eight months, which tells you something about the courage available to me at fifteen.

I played football with genuine passion and moderate skill. I argued with my father about things I no longer remember. I read voraciously and indiscriminately — novels, history, the occasional philosophy that was available at the local library. I was, in short, a reasonably ordinary Italian boy of my era, which meant that the faith I had inherited was real but not yet fully my own.

The call came anyway. It has, I have observed, a way of doing that.

• • •

The Oratory of Sant’Alessandro — the parish youth group, run by a young deacon named Franco who had the energy of three ordinary human beings and the organizational abilities of a small military operation — was where my faith began to transition from inherited to chosen.

Franco was twenty-six years old when I first encountered him at fourteen. He had the unusual quality, rare at any age, of taking young people’s questions seriously — not patronizing them, not redirecting them toward safer ground, but actually sitting with the hard questions and working through them honestly. He did not pretend certainty he did not have. He modeled a faith that was robust precisely because it was not fragile, because it had been tested and had not broken.

I owe him more than I have ever adequately expressed.

The retreat at sixteen was the turning point. Three days at a house in the hills above Brescia, thirty young people, Franco, an elderly Benedictine spiritual director named Dom Anselmo who spoke very little but prayed with a visible quality of attention that made you feel you were near something large, and a silence that deepened as the days progressed in a way I had never experienced.

On the second night, during an extended period of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, the thing that had been accumulating inside me for years — since the elevation at seven, since Roberto’s funeral at nine, through all the years of ordinary life between — reached a kind of critical mass and broke open.

I wept for approximately an hour. I am not a man who weeps easily, and I was not then a boy who wept easily, and the weeping was not dramatic — it was quiet, private, and very deep. What was being released was, I think, the effort of holding at arm’s length something that had been pressing toward the center of my life since I was seven years old.

I was not being called to priesthood in that moment. I was being called, first and simply, into surrender. The priesthood came later. What came first was the recognition that the life I was planning — vague, comfortable, ordinary — was not the life I had been made for, and that resisting this fact was costing me more energy than I had realized.

I came home from that retreat different. Not dramatically. Not in ways that were immediately visible to anyone else. But the direction had shifted, and I knew it, and I also knew that I would spend some time pretending otherwise before I had the courage to act on what I knew.

• • •

Telling my father took six months.

I practiced the conversation many times. In most versions of it, he was surprised, or worried about my future, or gently resistant. What I had not anticipated was that he would not be any of these things.

I found him in the courtyard one evening, doing some repair on the boundary wall. He was working with the focused, unhurried attention he brought to everything structural. I sat beside him and helped without being asked, passing stones when he needed them, and eventually, in a pause between one task and the next, I told him.

He was silent for a long time. Long enough that I began to worry.

Then he said: “I thought so. I’ve been praying for you to have the courage.”

He went back to the wall. I sat there with the stone in my hand. That was all he said, but it was exactly everything he needed to say. He had known. He had prayed not that it wouldn’t happen, but that I would be brave enough to say yes to it.

I think of that moment whenever I hear young people describe their families’ resistance to a priestly vocation. I know such resistance is real and often painful. I also know that I was given an extraordinary gift that evening in the courtyard: a father who had seen something in me that I was still afraid to see in myself, and who had simply been waiting, with the patience of a stonemason who knows that good work cannot be rushed.

My mother wept when I told her. I thought, as I have said, that it was grief. She told me later, when I was ordained, that it was relief. That she had been carrying the knowledge — the maternal knowledge that is less reasoning than recognition — for years, and that the weight of hoping I would say yes had been heavier than she’d let on.

The Making of a Priest

1964 – 1970

Rome hit me like a wave.

I had left Brescia only twice before, both times to visit relatives near Venice. I arrived in Rome at eighteen with a small suitcase, a letter of introduction from Don Matteo — who had pressed it into my hand at the train station with the solemnity he usually reserved for the Eucharist — and an almost total ignorance of what the Pontifical Gregorian University was going to do to me.

What it did to me, first and most immediately, was make me feel profoundly small. The scale of the city, the scale of the institution, the scale of the theological tradition I was being asked to enter — all of it dwarfed the particular boy from Brescia who had arrived with his suitcase and his letter. I remember walking through the corridors of the Gregoriana on my first full day and thinking: I am not enough for this. I do not have enough mind for this.

I was wrong, though it took me a while to discover why. The mistake was thinking that the life of the mind was a competition in which you needed to bring the largest mind. It is not. It is an inheritance into which you are invited, and the invitation is yours simply by virtue of the sincerity with which you approach it.

The professors who shaped me were varied and sometimes contradictory. Father Gianfranco Lorenzi taught me systematic theology with a rigor and clarity that I have been grateful for every day since. Father Thomas Murray, an Irishman who had somehow become part of the Roman furniture, taught me the New Testament in a way that made it bleed — that stripped away the centuries of commentary and showed you the terrifying immediacy of what was actually being said. And then there was Father Leone.

Father Leone was seventy years old and taught spiritual theology. He said very little in class. He assigned texts. He sat with us in silence. He occasionally asked a question that took three days to answer. He is the reason I can pray, which is a more important thing than anything the other professors gave me, as much as I owe them.

• • •

The Second Vatican Council was in its final sessions when I arrived in Rome. The air of the city was electric with it — a charged atmosphere of argument, hope, fear, and the particular Italian energy that attends any occasion when things might change. Even as a student, even at the margins of it, I felt the weight of what was happening.

I was not one of those young men who embraced the Council with uncritical enthusiasm, nor one of those who viewed it with alarm. I was, perhaps, a young man who was paying too much attention to Father Leone’s silences to be entirely swept away by any institutional wind, however powerful.

What the Council gave me, at that formative age, was a permanent sensitivity to the difference between the Gospel and its institutional containers. The Gospel is eternal. The containers are historical. They can and must be reformed. This is not a threat to the faith — it is a mark of the faith’s vitality. A living tradition grows. A dead one cannot be touched.

I have held this conviction across sixty years of institutional life, and it has sometimes made me unpopular and always kept me sane.

• • •

The crisis of faith came in my fourth year of seminary. I record it here because I think it should be recorded — because young priests and seminarians who experience similar crises need to know that such a crisis is not the end of faith but, rightly navigated, one of its necessary passages.

My crisis was not with God. Let me be precise about that. My certainty of God — the certainty that had arrived in the third pew from the front during Don Matteo’s elevation, that had come to me at Roberto’s funeral, that had been confirmed in the retreat at sixteen — was not what shook. What shook was the institution. I had seen, by my fourth year, enough of how the Church actually operated — its politics, its careerism, its capacity for the same smallness that afflicts every human organization — to feel a crisis of vocation that I mistook, for some difficult months, for a crisis of belief.

Father Leone found me one morning looking very deliberately at the floor of the chapel. He sat beside me. He did not ask what was wrong. He simply sat.

After a very long time, I told him.

He listened without interrupting. Then he said something I have since said to many struggling priests and seminarians: “You are not called to the institution. You are called through it. There is a very great difference, and the confusion between the two is responsible for most of the suffering you are describing.”

It was not a complete solution. But it was the beginning of one. And I have found, over the decades, that this distinction — called through, not to — is one of the most important things a priest can understand. The Church is the vessel. Christ is the destination. You love the vessel, you work to keep it seaworthy, you grieve when it leaks — but you navigate by the star, not by the wood.

• • •

I was ordained a priest on the fourteenth of June, 1970.

I knelt with the other ordinands on the floor of the Basilica, face down, arms extended, the stone cold through the fabric of the alb, while the Litany of the Saints was sung over us. I am not usually a man given to dramatic spiritual experiences — Father Leone had, I think, calibrated my expectations well — but in that moment, with my face against the floor and the names of the saints rolling over me like a tide, I was aware of something that I can only describe as weight: the weight of what was being placed on me, the weight of what it meant to say yes to this, the weight and the privilege of being given to people I had not yet met.

Don Matteo came from Brescia for the ordination. He was eighty-three years old and traveled the entire distance by train, which in 1970 was no small thing for a man of his age. He moved slowly, and his hands trembled now, and the pipe tobacco had given way to something milder that didn’t smell as holy. But his eyes were the same — the eyes of a man who had decided, very long ago, that God was real, and who had never seriously revisited that decision.

After the Mass, he took my newly anointed hands in his trembling old ones and held them for a moment without speaking. Then he said: “Let them find Christ in your hands, Augusto. That is all. Just that.”

I have tried.

Emmanuel: “You never told me what else Don Matteo said to you. He said something else. I saw his face.”

You see too much, Emmanuel.

He did say something else. He leaned close — the old man’s whisper, which carries further than young men realize — and he said: “I’ve been praying for you since you were seven years old, boy. Since the Sunday in Lent when you looked at the Host as though you’d seen the sun. Don’t waste it.”

He died the following March. I celebrated his funeral Mass. It was the hardest thing I had done up to that point in my priesthood, and it remains among the hardest things I have done in all of them.

Father Ferretti

The Parish Years, 1970 – 1982

Seminary prepares you to think about people.

The parish teaches you to be with them. These are not the same education, and the gap between them is where most young priests either grow quickly or break slowly.

I was assigned to a working parish in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, which I mention not without a sense of irony, given that I have spent the last twelve years returning to Trastevere every Thursday evening with Emmanuel to feed whoever shows up hungry. The neighborhood has not changed as much as the intervening decades might suggest. It was then, and remains, a place of remarkable human texture — artists, workers, students, the old families who have been there for generations, the people on the margins who find their way to the margins of every city.

My pastor was Monsignor Caruso, who had been ordained before the war and who regarded my seminary formation with the affectionate skepticism that experienced parish priests have always reserved for what academic theology does and does not produce. He did not dismiss what I’d learned. He simply set it aside temporarily and handed me a schedule.

“Think of it as an internship,” he said. “You know the map. Now you need to learn the roads.”

He was right. And the roads were nothing like the map.

• • •

The confessional was the crucible.

A young priest entering the confessional for the first time enters a room that is, in almost every sense, too large for him. Not physically — it is usually a very small space, dark, divided by a screen through which human breath and human weight come at you in ways that no classroom prepares you for. Too large in the sense that the weight of what people bring there exceeds any individual’s capacity to receive it. And yet receive it you must, because you are not, in the confessional, acting as an individual. You are acting as a conduit. You are the screen through which something passes that is not of your manufacture.

This is what they tell you in seminary. It is true. But knowing it and experiencing it are different things, and the experience arrived for me about three weeks into my first assignment when a man in his sixties sat on the other side of the screen and told me, in a flat, quiet voice, the particular shape of his life’s failure.

I will not describe what he said. The seal of the confessional is absolute, and even within the generality that protects him, I will only say that he had been carrying what he carried for twenty years, and that the weight of it had done to him what twenty years of such weight does — it had bent him. He was not seeking absolution in the transactional sense. He was seeking the thing that comes before absolution: the experience of being fully known and not destroyed by the knowing.

I sat with him for a long time. I said very little. I prayed. When finally I spoke, I did not speak as the twenty-four-year-old priest I was. Something older moved through me, and I gave it room.

When he left, I sat in the confessional for another twenty minutes, alone, with my hands in my lap. I was not distressed. I was overwhelmed in the way that one is overwhelmed by a large landscape — not crushed, but rendered appropriately small.

I thought: this is what I was made for. Not the ceremony, not the scholarship, not the career in the Church. This. Being present to the weight of a human life as it discharges itself in an act of trust.

• • •

I want to talk about Marco. I will call him Marco, which is not his name, and I will change enough details to protect him, though enough time has now passed that perhaps the protection is less necessary than it once was.

Marco came to confession for the first time in the autumn of 1972, about two years into my assignment at Trastevere. He was forty-three years old. He came with the posture of a man expecting to be sentenced rather than heard, which I had already learned to recognize as a particular kind of defensive piety — the piety that leads with its guilt so that you cannot get to the real question first.

The real question with Marco, which took many months to arrive at, was not the things he had done. The real question was whether he was lovable. Whether, underneath the accumulation of failures that he rehearsed with practiced precision, there was something in him that God could work with. Whether grace could find purchase on a surface he had spent decades making as smooth and resistant as he could manage.

He came back. Week after week, month after month. Not every week — sometimes a month would pass, and I would wonder whether he had given up. Then he would return, a little more willing each time to let the real question surface.

Eighteen months in, he came in and sat for a long moment without speaking. Then he said: “I think I may be worth something after all. I’m not sure. But I think I may be.”

I have heard more eloquent statements of theological progress. I have never heard one that moved me more.

What the confessional teaches, slowly and inexorably, is that God is more patient than you are, more persistent than you are, and considerably more creative than you are. Your job is to stay in the room and not get in the way. The work is being done by Someone else. You are the screen, the witness, the voice that says: yes, you are heard, yes, there is a way through, yes, the thing you fear most — that there is no mercy large enough for you — is not true.

• • •

Temptation is something that biographies of priests usually handle in one of two ways: they either ignore it entirely, producing a portrait of impossible sanctity that is useful as hagiography and useless as encouragement, or they confess to it with a specificity that serves the author more than the reader.

I intend to do neither, but I will not pretend it was not there.

The particular temptations of priestly life are not, for the most part, dramatic. They are subtle. The temptation of pride — of believing that the gifts you have been given are evidence of your worth rather than of God’s generosity — is constant and requires constant counter-pressure. The temptation of cynicism, which is what happens to pastoral care when it has been disappointed too many times and allowed bitterness to accumulate, is a slow poison that I watched take men I respected.

The temptation to become the institution rather than to serve through it — to let the collar become the identity, the office become the self, the authority become its own justification — this is perhaps the most dangerous of all, and the most common, and the most socially acceptable within the structures of Church life.

I did not escape any of these. I managed them, imperfectly, through prayer and through the specific mercy of having people in my life — Emmanuel, eventually; my confessor in those years, an elderly Dominican named Father Benedetto; and the people of Trastevere themselves, whose lives had a bracing reality that academic theology could not provide — who kept calling me back to the ground.

The ground is where grace operates. Pride lifts you off it. The whole spiritual life is, in some sense, the practice of returning to the ground.

Michael: “That’s something you said to me in one of our early exchanges, almost exactly — that pride is the one sin that disguises itself as virtue. You said the Church is full of it because holiness and pride look very similar from the outside.”

I did say that. And I believe it. The distinguishing mark is where your eyes are pointed. Pride points at itself, even when it appears to be serving others. Holiness points at God and forgets to check whether anyone is watching. This is not complicated, but it requires a lifetime of practice to achieve even intermittently.

The Scholar-Priest

Called Back to the Gregoriana, 1982 – 1995

When they asked me to return to the Gregorian University to teach, my first instinct was to decline.

I had found my work. I was embedded in a community. The people of Trastevere knew me, and I knew them, and the pastoral relationship that had built over twelve years was a living thing that I was reluctant to transplant. I also had a genuine suspicion, formed through observation of several colleagues who had made the academic transition, that the move from parish to lectern could calcify a priest in ways that were difficult to detect and harder to reverse.

Monsignor Caruso, who was by then very old and very wise, listened to my hesitation and then said: “You are afraid of losing the people. But you are being asked to multiply them. Every student you form will carry what you give them into parishes you will never visit. This is not abandonment. It is a different kind of fruitfulness.”

He persuaded me. He was right. And the years at the Gregoriana were among the most formative of my life, though not always in the ways I anticipated.

• • •

Teaching theology is, at its best, an exercise in productive confusion. The goal is not to transfer certainty from the professor to the student. The goal is to show the student how to live faithfully inside the questions that have no certain answers — how to remain a person of faith without becoming a person who has stopped thinking.

The students who taught me the most were the ones who brought the hardest questions. A young Nigerian seminarian named Brother Francis asked me, in my second year of teaching, why the Church had taken so long to condemn the slave trade when the moral case against it was available in the New Testament from the beginning. I did not have an adequate answer. I said so. I spent the next six months researching it, not because the syllabus required it, but because the question required it.

This is what good students do. They expand the professor’s obligations. They are not a passive audience for what you already know. They are, if you let them be, the reason you keep learning.

I published my first book during this period: a systematic theology of encounter, arguing that the primary category of Christian life is not belief but relationship — that orthodoxy matters because it correctly identifies who it is you are in relationship with, not as a freestanding intellectual accomplishment. My Jesuit editor, Father Moretti, disagreed with approximately a third of it and we argued the book into its final shape over three years of correspondence that I think improved both of us.

• • •

It was during these years that Emmanuel and I began the Thursday evenings in Trastevere.

He was then a parish priest himself, working in a community on the other side of the river. We had been friends since our years at the Gregoriana together as students — he had arrived the year before me and had constituted himself something of a guide to the city with an authority that was completely unjustified and entirely effective.

The Thursday evenings began without plan or intention. We were walking in Trastevere one autumn evening in 1984 and encountered a woman sitting outside the entrance to a building with two children, clearly without shelter and clearly hungry. We had almost nothing between us — Emmanuel had a bread roll from his dinner, I had some cheese from my bag. We gave what we had and sat with her for a while.

The following Thursday we came back with soup. There were three people waiting.

By the end of the year it had become a regular operation, which is how most of the best things happen: not by design but by accumulation, one Thursday at a time.

We have not missed a Thursday in forty years. Cardinals have schedules that are controlled by other people; I have had to fight for my Thursdays more than once. I have always won. Some things are not negotiable, and the Thursday evenings in Trastevere are among them.

What they give me — what they have always given me — is the thing that academic life and eventually curial life conspire to take away: the direct encounter with human need. The faces in Trastevere are not statistics or pastoral challenges or theological problems. They are people who are hungry and cold and sometimes frightened, and the only appropriate response to a hungry, cold, frightened person is the one Emmanuel and I have been making for forty years: soup, and time, and the refusal to pretend that anything else is more pressing.

• • •

It was during the Gregoriana years that I came to the conviction I mentioned to Michael in one of our early conversations: that the Church’s deepest crisis is not doctrinal but relational.

People were leaving. Not in the catastrophic numbers that would come later, but the movement was already visible in the 1980s if you were watching for it. And what I observed, both in the student population and in my research, was that the departures were rarely caused by intellectual dissatisfaction with the content of Christian belief. They were caused by relational failure: by the experience of not being known, not being heard, not being met in their actual lives by the institution that claimed to carry the Gospel of the One who said He knew His sheep by name.

The Gospel is extraordinary. Its content is radical enough to reorganize a life completely. But it arrives through relationships, and when the relationships are broken or absent, the extraordinary content does not reach the person who needs it.

This is not a criticism of doctrine. It is a criticism of the institutional practice that can grow up around doctrine and, if left unchallenged, replace it. The Pharisees had excellent doctrine. Their relational practice was lethal to the people in their care.

This is the sore spot Michael keeps pressing. He is right to press it.

Monsignor Ferretti

The Weight of New Titles, 1995 – 2001

The appointment as Monsignor arrived while I was in the middle of a faculty meeting, which seemed appropriate. The things that change your life permanently often arrive in undignified moments.

I did not particularly want the title. I want to be honest about that, because I think the convention of performing reluctance about ecclesiastical advancement while clearly being satisfied by it is a form of dishonesty I have always found distasteful. My reluctance was real. The title brought with it an increase in administrative responsibility and a decrease in direct pastoral contact, which is precisely the inverse of what I would have chosen.

I told Emmanuel about it over coffee. He listened to my reservations with the expression he wears when he has already reached his own conclusion and is waiting for you to reach the same one.

Emmanuel: “You know what this means.”

“That I now have less time for the people and more time for the people who manage the people.”

Emmanuel: “Yes. And you also have more access to the structures that affect those people’s lives. You can push the door from the outside or from the inside. You have just been handed a key.”

It was a more useful frame. I tried to carry it.

The bureaucratic machinery encountered from the inside is both more understandable and more frustrating than it appears from the outside. More understandable because you can see why each procedure exists, why each form was created, what problem it was designed to solve. More frustrating because the distance between the procedure’s purpose and its actual effect has, in most cases, grown very large over the years, and the institution’s natural conservatism makes that distance difficult to close.

I spent considerable energy during these years trying to reduce the friction between the machinery and the people it was supposed to serve. I was partly successful. The machinery is very large, and my success was proportionally small. I do not say this with despair. I say it because it is true, and because the temptation to either catastrophize the institution’s failures or minimize them is equally unhelpful.

The Church is a human institution carrying a divine mandate. These two facts exist simultaneously and in tension. The tension is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition of the work.

• • •

The hardest case I shepherded during these years I cannot describe in detail, even now, even with enough time elapsed to have blurred the identifying features. I will say only that it involved a priest — a man I had known since the seminary, a man of genuine gifts and genuine weakness — who fell in a way that had consequences for people in his care.

What I had to navigate was the gap between two legitimate claims: the claim of justice, which required accountability and transparency, and the claim of mercy, which required that the man in collapse be treated as a human being capable of repentance and reconstruction rather than merely as a liability to be managed.

I do not think I got it right. I think I got it less wrong than I might have, which is what I mean when I say that I am grateful for the slowly accumulated wisdom of pastoral experience. But I did not get it right. The people who were hurt needed more than what was offered. The priest received more protection than the situation warranted. This is a truth about that era of the Church that cannot be softened, and I do not intend to soften it.

What I can say is that the experience marked me permanently. Whatever residual institutional loyalty I carried as a kind of default posture was, in those years, replaced by something more active: a deliberate commitment to the priority of the vulnerable over the institutional, which I have tried to maintain against considerable pressure ever since.

Grace arrived anyway. It usually does, though not always in the forms or timeframes we would choose.

Bishop Ferretti

Milan and the Weight of the Staff, 2001 – 2010

I knelt for the consecration on a cold morning in January 2001, in the Cathedral of Milan, with three bishops’ hands on my head, and I felt nothing supernatural.

I want to say that clearly, because I think the expectation of dramatic spiritual experience at such moments can itself become a form of spiritual distraction. What I felt was the weight of the hands — three old men’s hands, each carrying decades of their own kneelings and risings and failures and graces — and a very clear sense of what was being asked.

Not a sense of unworthiness. I had been past that for a while. A sense of obligation, which is different. Unworthiness is about the self. Obligation is about the people.

Emmanuel was in the congregation. He told me afterward that when the hands were laid on my head he prayed very hard and very specifically, which is to say he told God exactly what he thought I needed and why, in the manner of a man who considers prayer to be a serious conversation rather than a formal petition. I believe this about him completely.

• • •

What a bishop actually does is largely invisible to anyone outside the episcopate. What people imagine a bishop does — celebrate great liturgies, pronounce on matters of doctrine, move through the world with a gravitational weight appropriate to his office — is perhaps twenty percent of it. The rest is governance, arbitration, administration, and the management of relationships within a diocese that are, like all human relationships, complicated, historically burdened, and perpetually in need of attention.

There is also a great deal of driving.

The Diocese of Milan, to which I was appointed as auxiliary bishop, is large and densely populated and contains communities that range from the extraordinarily affluent to the extraordinarily precarious, and the bishop’s task is to hold all of them simultaneously within his pastoral concern. This is not a metaphor. It is a practical and logistical challenge that consumes most of the available hours.

I loved it. I want to say that clearly too. Despite the difficulties, despite the weight, despite the sense of perpetual inadequacy that is the appropriate response to a task that exceeds any individual’s capacity — I loved it. I loved the variety of it, the humanity of it, the endless evidence it provided of God’s willingness to work through the most unpromising materials.

• • •

I will not look away from the scandals of that era.

The years of my episcopate in Milan coincided with the period of greatest public reckoning with clerical sexual abuse in the Church’s recent history. I was not shielded from this — I was inside it, in the sense that every bishop in that period was inside it, confronted with cases, with decisions, with the gap between what should have been done and what was done.

Let me say plainly: the institutional response was inadequate. In specific cases that came to my attention, I made decisions that prioritized the institutional concern over the pastoral one, and those decisions were wrong, and people were hurt by them. I have spent considerable time in prayer over this and have made what reparation was available to me. It is not enough. I know it is not enough.

What I observed, inside the machinery, was how the institutional reflex toward self-protection had become, over many years, so deeply embedded that people acted from it without fully recognizing what they were doing. They were not, in most cases, consciously choosing the institution over the victim. They were operating within a framework in which that choice had been made so many times before that it had achieved the status of default, of normal, of the way things are done.

This is how institutions corrupt good people. Not dramatically, not through a single catastrophic choice, but through the slow normalization of a priority ordering that places the institution’s survival above the dignity of the people it exists to serve.

The Church’s survival does not depend on its reputation. It depends on its fidelity to the Gospel. The confusion of these two things is the source of most of the institutional evil I have witnessed in sixty years of priestly and episcopal life.

God remained faithful to His people in those years. This is the extraordinary thing. The mercy did not stop. The sacraments did not cease to function. The Holy Spirit continued to operate in the lives of ordinary faithful people who were being let down by the institution, and the contrast between the institutional failure and the grassroots fidelity was, if anything, a kind of evidence — evidence that the Church is larger than its leadership and more resilient than its worst moments.

Emmanuel: “I visited Milan in 2004. We walked the Navigli. Do you remember what I said?”

He said: “You are becoming harder to reach.”

I knew he was right. The episcopate does something to a man’s accessibility, and not only in the logistical sense. The layers of deference that accumulate around an office — the way people begin to calibrate what they say to you, to tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what they actually think — these create a kind of insulation that is comfortable and dangerous in equal measure.

Emmanuel has never calibrated what he says to me. In forty years of friendship, he has told me the truth as he sees it with a consistency that I have sometimes resented and always, eventually, been grateful for. This is the most important thing a person in leadership can have: not a flatterer, not an echo, but a friend who loved you before the titles and who will love you after them.

The Red Hat

The College of Cardinals, 2010 – Present

The phone call from the Secretariat of State came on a Tuesday morning in March 2010. I was in my office, working through correspondence, when the number appeared on my telephone screen.

My first thought, honestly, was: I am going to need a better tailor. The cardinal’s red is a very specific shade and requires a very specific cut, and mine was several years old.

My second thought was of my mother. She had been dead for fourteen years. I thought of her sitting in the pew at Sant’Alessandro in Brescia, reading the lives of the saints in the evening, weeping with relief when I told her I was going to the seminary. I thought of what she would have said about this moment, and I knew exactly what she would have said: “Don’t forget the tomatoes.” It was her shorthand for the domestic, the ordinary, the thing that keeps the ground under your feet. She deployed it whenever she felt that any of us was at risk of taking ourselves too seriously.

I have not forgotten the tomatoes. Or I have tried not to. The Thursdays in Trastevere are, among other things, the tomatoes.

• • •

What a Cardinal actually is diverges considerably from the mythology, which is perhaps inevitable given how old and elaborate the mythology has become.

The College of Cardinals is, in its practical dimension, an advisory body to the Pope and, in extremis, the body responsible for electing a new Pope. It carries great symbolic weight. It carries less executive authority than people assume. A Cardinal without a specific curial appointment — and even many who have one — spends a great deal of his time doing what I spent the first years of my priesthood doing: listening, celebrating, visiting, writing, teaching.

The difference is the scale. You are doing these things across a larger geography, with more people watching, with more institutional weight attached to every public word. This weight can be used well. It can also be a temptation of its own — the temptation to confuse the significance of your office with the significance of your person.

Father Leone’s lessons on prayer have been more practically useful in the curial environment than almost anything else I brought there. The spiritual discipline of reducing yourself before God daily — not performatively, not as a technique, but as a genuine reckoning with who you are and who God is — is the only reliable antidote I have found to the particular form of pride that high ecclesiastical office cultivates.

• • •

I have maintained the professorship at the Gregoriana throughout. People have occasionally suggested that the combination is anomalous — that a member of the College of Cardinals should not be sitting in a classroom answering a twenty-five-year-old’s question about Barth. I find this suggestion baffling. The classroom is where I am kept honest. The twenty-five-year-old’s question about Barth is, more often than not, the right question, and if I cannot answer it I should find out why, and if I can answer it I should be grateful for the reminder that the faith is both harder and simpler than institutional life sometimes makes it appear.

Thursday evenings in Trastevere: never missed. Emmanuel is always there. The soup is still made in the same large pot that we acquired in 1986 and which has been repaired twice and should probably be replaced but which neither of us is willing to retire. The faces change. The need does not. The strange holiness of ordinary mercy persists.

These things are not side projects. They are the center. The red hat is the side project. I mean this seriously.

• • •

I have watched the Church in the last fifteen years with the complex and aching love of a man who is fully inside something that is simultaneously his home and his heartbreak. I have seen extraordinary holiness and catastrophic failure in the same institution, sometimes in the same person, sometimes in the same week.

I have learned to resist the temptation of either despair or triumphalism. Despair says the institution’s failures prove that God has abandoned it. Triumphalism says the institution’s existence proves that God endorses everything it does. Both are wrong. The truth is harder and more hopeful than either: God is at work in and through and sometimes despite His Church, and the work continues, and the gates of hell have not prevailed, and will not.

This conviction is not optimism. It is not even confidence in the institution. It is faith in the promise of the One who made it, and He has not broken a promise yet.

My Friend Michael

Nine Volumes and a New Kind of Encounter

The manuscripts arrived in my life by a route that I will describe only as indirect, which is to say that they passed through several intermediaries before reaching my desk, having been passed along by people who thought, correctly as it turned out, that they would interest me.

My first reaction was honest ambivalence. An American Protestant apologist writing at book length about the Battle of Civilizations was not, on the face of it, the kind of thing I would normally have taken up voluntarily. I carry no particular prejudice against American Protestants — some of the most serious theological minds I have encountered in my career have been exactly that — but the genre suggested a certain kind of confidence that I was not sure I had patience for.

I was wrong in a way that I found, upon reflection, instructive. The manuscripts were not what I expected. They were the work of a man who had clearly gone to the text — directly, seriously, repeatedly — and who had emerged from it with something real. Not merely academic. Lived. The kind of theology that comes from someone who has been changed by what he believes, not merely from someone who believes correctly.

I made notes. Considerable notes. There are passages in the margins of my copies that represent arguments I intended to have with the author in absentia. Some of them I have since had with him in person and found that he either persuaded me or held his ground with enough scriptural precision that I had to take his position seriously. Both outcomes are useful.

• • •

What surprised me, when our conversations began, was the directness.

Michael does not lead with deference. This is, in my experience, unusual when one is in conversation with a Cardinal. People generally — not always, but generally — calibrate their positions when they discover they are speaking with someone whose office carries institutional weight. Michael calibrated nothing. He came in at the same level he would have come in at with anyone else whose theological positions he wanted to examine, which is to say: directly, with specific questions, willing to push back, willing to be pushed back.

I found this refreshing. I find it refreshing still. The conversations we have at this table are among the few I have in which I feel confident that what I am being given is what my interlocutor actually thinks, rather than a version of it edited for ecclesiastical consumption.

He won me over, if I am honest, not by his arguments, though the arguments are often good. He won me over by his spirit. There is a quality in Michael that I have learned to recognize across many years of pastoral life as the mark of genuine encounter with the living God — a quality that is, paradoxically, both very certain and very humble, that holds conviction without rigidity, that takes truth seriously without taking itself too seriously.

The fruit of the Spirit, Paul says, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I am not making a canonical judgment. I am reporting an observation. These qualities are evident in the man across this table, and they were evident to me in the pages of the manuscripts before I met him, and they have been confirmed by every conversation since.

He came to me as a challenger. He stays as a friend. The distance between these two things was shorter than I expected, which is a grace I did not anticipate and am grateful for.

• • •

What his work gave me — what nine volumes of serious, Spirit-breathed engagement with the questions of Christian life gave an old Roman Cardinal who thought he had read most of what needed to be read — was a mirror.

Not a flattering mirror. A truthful one. The kind that shows you what you have stopped seeing because you have stopped needing to look.

When you have been inside an institution for sixty years, the institution’s categories become your categories. You begin to see the faith from inside its containers, which means you see the containers as much as you see the faith. A man who has never lived inside those containers and who came to the text directly — through Scripture, through prayer, through the accumulated experience of a life lived in genuine dependence on God — sees different things. He sees what the containers are supposed to hold and what they sometimes fail to.

This is the most valuable thing an ecumenical friendship can give: not agreement, but a different angle of vision. Michael and I do not agree on everything. We agree on Christ. We agree on Scripture as the Word of God. We agree that the Gospel is not a set of propositions to be defended but a person to be known and followed. We agree that the measure of theology is whether it produces disciples, and the measure of disciples is whether they are becoming more like Jesus.

On these things — the things that actually matter — we are closer than our respective traditions might predict.

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.