Father Ferretti (1 of 2)

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.