Father Ferretti (2 of 2)

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.