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.