The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  According to the Eastern tradition, it is said that Mary never died but instead fell into a deep sleep, and in that state she abandoned earthly life.

  I DON’T KNOW, I still don’t know, I still haven’t figured out what I think of priests. How I feel about them. It’s a deep and lasting controversy. There are a few aspects, indeed a great many, of the priestly way that I find within myself, starting with my shoes, those shiny black lace-ups, slightly elongated, that I’ve always bought, never varying the style, unfailingly prompting this comment—“Once again, you’ve bought yourself a pair of priest shoes”—or else sandals, that’s right, sandals, which are so fashionable these days, albeit in rude and daring styles, and which can be found in all kinds of stores, though I used to go buy them from a shoemaker over near the Roman Ghetto, who made them expressly for monks, with the penitential strips of black leather that crucified your foot, bruised as any martyr in a Mannerist painting, the foot of the month of May when it sticks out, pale and skinny, from beneath a pair of winter socks, courageously exposing itself to view.

  Many years ago, a young woman made me blush by telling me that “you could see from my face” that I’d gone to a school run by priests, and however hard I tried to take it as a joke, wiping my forehead clean of that stain, consisting not of one scarlet letter but actually three, S, L, and M, I was actually cut to the quick. Stabbed in the heart. Indeed, for many years to come, like some young and evasive St. Peter, I concealed the truth that I had attended SLM, had been taught by priests, just as you might conceal a physical defect, avoiding the topic or outright lying, and I was lucky if the question was formulated, “What school did you graduate from?” whereupon I’d promptly reply, “Liceo Giulio Cesare!” a public high school on Corso Trieste. Neglecting to mention that I’d spent the previous twelve years at the Catholic school.

  That was when I understood what it meant to be ashamed of one’s own identity, to the point of hating it. To be so embarrassed that you inwardly admit the right of others to hold you in unjustified contempt. The accusers generally ask for nothing better than to be offered good reasons by those they’ve targeted.

  In time, though, I learned that the only way to avoid shame is not so much to accept oneself (impossible to do!), but rather to boast about it, to show off the very thing you once concealed. Toss out an open challenge of defiance. Like in a gay pride parade, in other words.

  From that point on, the fact that I’d been taught by priests became a jolly joker, a wild card that could be played without warning. A self-accusation, a denunciation of my own education.

  FOR MANY YEARS I have also imitated or worn other elements of priestly attire, more or less consciously, for instance, the black, square-cut overcoat. The rejection of color, mistrust when it comes to variety. Likewise, a vague aspiration to egalitarian garb, the forced brotherhood of the uniform that frees us from the anxious necessity of gauging ourselves, comparing each with the other, and therefore of choosing, judging, and suffering beneath the hammer of other people’s opinions of us. Of course, this aspiration is defensive by nature, it’s a way of protecting oneself. I confess that I am afflicted with a sort of obsession with comparison, but not on serious matters, rather on the most frivolous things, trivialities, a man who plunges endlessly into the abyss of details, and can suffer over a half-inch miscut on the hem of his trouser leg, just as he can rejoice at a brassiere that increases by a full measure the volume of its content. The only way to abolish this incessant turmoil would be not to multiply endlessly the differences, as libertarians insist, until it becomes impossible to compare individuals at all, each one unique in her or his singularity, but rather to eliminate those differences entirely and never give them another thought. One less thing to worry about. For starters, why don’t we all dress alike? A world without judgments and without controls is thus implemented once and for all, in the mornings we dress without reflecting, so that no young man or young woman suffers at the thought that their T-shirt might not be quite right, or feels superior because it is. Everyone in uniform, and not another word on the matter, wouldn’t that be great? A jumpsuit, a kaftan, a tunic, perhaps a hat topped with a feather. Just to make it clear who you’re dealing with, whether it’s a soldier a priest a fireman a factory worker a millionaire or a convict. These days, only gypsies and Carabinieri make it clear who they are . . .

  Hey, this isn’t some regret I’m expressing. I regret nothing at all, because even in my day uniforms no longer existed, they’d all been converted without distinction into the one obligatory uniform of T-shirt and jeans, the straitjacket of casual wear (therefore, they were by no means a marker of grim conformity, uniforms—if anything, they were proud signs of one’s differences . . .), and when I did my required military service, the regulations had just been changed, which meant that off duty we could go out dressed just as we pleased. That meant that, while up until just a few months ago the city of Taranto was overrun at night by thousands of young sailors and air force men, clad in shapeless uniforms but still, somehow, dignified in their shared tawdry squalor, in the brotherhood of that ridiculous obligation, when our turn came (the draft contingent of September 1979), we were a tidal wave of oafish young men from every corner of Italy, but so very oafish . . . so grimly tumbled together and even more anonymous than if we’d all been in uniform.

  A PRIEST’S TUNIC is an article of clothing that inspires respect in me, and by respect, I mean a recognition of diversity. Not a way of bridging this distance; if anything, of preserving it. Diversity is a factor of both attraction and repulsion. These days it is not generally tolerated. People say that in a faceless crowd no one pays attention to anyone else, but that’s not true, a priest, for instance, or even more so, a nun, is noticed, people pay attention to their clothing, which expresses a specific choice—and this choice, since it’s exclusive by nature, makes others feel uncomfortable. You’re tempted to tell the priest, Hey you, why are you showing off the fact that you’ve dedicated your life to God, huh? Do you realize that you’re offending me by making a show of how good and holy you are, or rather, claim to be? What are you trying to do, preach me a sermon? Well, listen up, you’re worse than me, or maybe I should say, you’re exactly like me, so why do you act like you’re so special?

  In this Western world we live in, an environment totally dominated by and devoted to sex, where sex sprays out of the wrinkles of every topic and image, in private phone calls and public billboards, clothing, politics, exercise, sports, TV programs, comedy, and so on, the prominent presence of men who don’t have sex is inexplicable; or perhaps they do have sex, but only in secret, which makes hypocrites of them, or else they have no sex at all, which means they’re insane. Normally, people assume the former, and in fact, in all my life I’ve never heard anyone denounced as damned hypocrites the way I’ve heard priests being condemned. But at least, if that is the case, priests would be proving that deep down they’re no different from anyone else, and their alleged diversity is therefore nothing but a trick, a piece of buffoonery.

  But what’s really intolerable is the thought of another individual’s actual chastity. First and foremost, I cannot bring myself to imagine it as anything more than a mutilation. And so, what moral authority ought I to acknowledge, for what reason on earth should I allow myself to be guided aided instructed or even just advised by a man who has so horribly mutilated himself? By giving up the only thing that makes this beastly life worth living at all, namely, love? Let’s not beat around the bush here: physical love, that’s right, carnal love, which includes within its domain celestial love. I don’t want to waste my time listening to refined theological arguments aimed at proving that even the renunciation of love is a form of love, indeed, is an even greater form of love, as one papal encyclical claims. You can’t renounce wife and children and then say: I am renouncing nothing. This is not a renunciation, ceci n’est pas une pipe: there are times when Catholicism appears to be a forerunner and subsequently an epigone of Surrealism. It ta
kes any ordinary thing and then claims that that thing is the exact opposite of what it clearly and unmistakably actually is. Go to a funeral, you’re feeling sad because someone you care about has died, at least this seems like a point that’s beyond discussion, you just want to be left alone to mourn your loss in peace and quiet, and instead there’s always a priest at the pulpit—and when I say always, I mean always, like a recurring curse!—assuring you that your friend or your close relative, whose loss is a burden of sadness, isn’t actually dead at all. No, he’s not dead. Or she’s not dead. Enzo isn’t dead. Silvana isn’t dead. Cesare isn’t dead. Rocco is still alive. Wait, what, aren’t they dead?! Then what are we even doing here? No, he’s not dead, he lives on, and you should all put away your sadness, you should exult with him . . . for him . . . about him . . . rejoice with him . . . Certainly, he is in paradise, where he is now happier than before, and I see what they’re doing, I’m not as simple as all that: all the same, I feel that this philosophy is a mockery, a way of pulling the wool over our eyes. It triggers a boundless rage in me, I have to go outside, leave the church, I haven’t been able to sit through an entire funeral service in years, I’d rather just wait around on the street for the coffin to be brought out, on the shoulders of the pallbearers, a couple of red-faced relatives and friends and the people from the funeral parlor, with bulging biceps beneath their misshapen jackets. All it seems necessary to do is take the obvious facts and turn them on their heads, and boom, you have the solution. If you’re poor, then actually you’re rich; diseases are gifts of God; when someone dies it’s a benediction because now they’re rejoicing with the angels, the first will be last, the blasphemer unbeknownst to himself praises the Lord, if you turn your back on God that means you’re searching for Him, if there is no God then that surely means that He’s there . . .

  Could it be that in this life there’s not a single thing laid down straight from the outset, that you don’t absolutely feel the urge to turn upside down? In the midst of all the, shall we say, active virtues, that push us to be more and better than what we are, those on the other hand that are based on renunciation remain enigmatic. From the respect that we feel for those who commit acts of self-sacrifice to repugnance and ridicule is often only a short step. The typical life of a saint, of the sort frequently narrated in hagiographies, with the customary succession of mortifications and suppurating wounds, would, if replicated nowadays, be the object of universal disgust and censure. But a priest ought to bring at least a crumb of holiness with him, in a corner of his heart, or of his mind, or of his clothing, otherwise what makes him different from the rest of us? If he doesn’t possess that speck of sanctity at all, then he’s just bluffing, and if instead he does, then we’re so unaccustomed to holiness that it frightens us or else it just bores us. The sacred is in fact a form of diversity. Those who are forty years younger than us and have yet to experience their first sexual relationship or get married are sacred, those whose skin is a different color than ours or who go barefoot are sacred, if we are male then women are sacred, if we are female then it is men who are sacred, anyone who wears a fez is sacred, or a turban or a bowler hat or a Bersagliere’s plumed hat, while even a top hat rented for a wedding confers the aura of a sacred vestment for the space of an evening upon the head of whoever wears it. The unpronounceable surname of a Sinhalese housecleaner is sacred. Yesterday evening it was sacred for me to glide silently in a boat down the canals of Castello, in Venice. And it is these crumbs of the sacred, these particles of the sacred, that annoy others, unleashing tides of resentment.

  SO I SUPPOSE you’re someone who talks to God on a daily basis? we’re tempted to say to a priest. Show me this God of yours, then, let’s have a look at Him, do a miracle for me, here and now, on the spot. I realize that I often use, mentally, the same language that was used in the interrogations the earliest Christians were subjected to, to which Christ Himself was subjected, before He was nailed up on the cross. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. From every religious credo we demand, and not entirely without reason, that it prove itself immediately redemptive and healing: instead they all promise things far away and in the distant future, rewards that will come later, far too late, at the end of times, so that in the meantime we find ourselves settling for the lesser and propitiatory, semi-magical aspects, a smidgen of consolation from the harshness that we are forced to tolerate in the here and now, some miracle small or great, the chilly caress of the statue of a saint that protected you in some catastrophe, an airbag inflated with prayers.

  One day when I happened to be in Padua, I left the hotel early in the morning and, turning the corner, realized that I was a hundred yards from the Basilica of St. Anthony (the night before, arriving half crocked in the taxi, I hadn’t noticed it). I entered the church, walked toward the urn that contained the saint’s remains, and I have to admit that as I got closer and closer, I could feel a powerful and inexplicable emotion growing inside me. It wasn’t as if the wave of this new sentiment in any way erased my prior skepticism, since I can’t even call myself a skeptic, nonbeliever, or atheist, as I’m not even any of those: I’m nothing. Personal convictions had little to do with it: perhaps it was just a kind of current, the magnetic ring formed of the vows that had been circulating around that stone structure for centuries. When I was close enough to the sepulcher that I could reach out and touch it, and did so, caressing one of its walls, I realized that the multicolored tiles that covered it were not marble inlay, as I had thought, but photographs stuck on with adhesive tape, dozens and dozens of photographs, and they were all pictures of crushed or gutted or burnt car wrecks, the kind of pictures you take after a car crash to send to the insurance company for a payout. Though, to judge from the seriousness of those wrecks, none of the cars would ever be repaired. There were cars whose entire hood had been shoved back into the passenger compartment as a result of a headon collision, others with the roof smashed down all the way to the level of the backrests of the seats, leaving little room to the imagination of what must have become of the occupants of the vehicle. Instead, however, to my surprise, next to the photographs taken by the highway police, there were other, smaller and more recent, pictures, this time Polaroids, depicting a smiling man or woman, and a note thanking the saint for having saved them. I learned that by deciphering some of those messages, written in English or Spanish with the sort of childishly clear and rounded handwriting that, for instance, Filipinos tend to have, and in fact nearly all of the votive photographs belonged to immigrants, Asian or Hispanic, as if car crashes only befell them or else they alone, by now, in a country that is so unaccustomed to showing gratitude, felt the obligation to thank someone up there for having spared their lives. I was sorry not to have the photographs of the Honda 125 motorbike my daughter Adelaide had been riding just a few weeks earlier when she’d hit a car one morning speeding to school, and the accompanying photograph of her, smile on her face, and safe and sound. I was sorry, but I thought I might still do some good by saying a prayer, “I thank you . . . I thank you . . . for having saved her,” but I didn’t know exactly whom to thank, who the you was that I was thanking. God is far away, the saint is too busy, and in anything he’s more likely to listen to those who truly believe in him. So I kept it vague, just like in one of those poems where you’re certain the poet is speaking to a woman he loves, but you don’t know who.

  TAKING JESUS as your model doesn’t help. Jesus has always been the opposite of everything. Perhaps it is in fact from Him that issues this obsessive fixation on overturning everything, always turning everything upside down, reversing appearances, overturning fixed hierarchies, overturning the money changers’ tables, overturning customary ways. Overturning every instinct, beginning with the simplest of them all: if they smite you, turn the other cheek. And then Jesus overturned the final and only certainty in men’s lives, that of death, by bringing Lazarus back from the dead, probably the greatest injustice ever committed. Go explain that to all the other dead who were left undergro
und, to their families, who I doubt shed tears any less salty than those of Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters . . . This is a quality common to all great masters, that of overturning all at once a vision of the world after leaving it to steep for a while in the minds of their gullible disciples. They’re always coming up late, the disciples, struggling in their effort to grasp and execute; when they try to apply His precepts rigidly, they come off like fools, because in the meantime the Master has chopped those precepts into bits and tossed them over His shoulders, for Him those are last week’s news. He’s always ten times more rigorous and a hundred times more elastic, the Master. Any priest who tried to follow Christ’s example in its entirety would be paralyzed by the task.