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.