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.