Truth be told, ours was an entitlement devoid of any specific title, though unmistakable, practically an emblem, a trademark, to such an extent that nearly ten years later, a young woman would notice it, that indelible brand. “Say, by any chance: did you go to a school run by priests?” “How did you know that?” “It’s basically stamped on your forehead.” (But I’ve already told you this story, haven’t I?) In other words, we were young masters, signorini, a little rich, a little bit assholish, a little bigoted, a little bit Fascist, a little spoiled, a little bit blowhards yet at the same time shy, all these characteristics, barely hinted at or accentuated, matched the standard identikit of the former student of a private school: they made such a student easy to spot from a mile away, and apparently, I had them all in spades.
FRANKLY, it doesn’t seem to me that, out of that class, that year’s harvest of students, many great men emerged, outstanding, noteworthy personalities. I ought to reconstruct the class rolls and delve a little deeper, but it strikes me that there’s no one prominent enough to have reached my ears or come before my eyes without making specific, directed searches. Accomplished people, well advanced in their professions, a few doctors, a few accountants, one good and respected writer, Marco Lodoli, mid-ranking public officials . . . So, going on rough recollections, I know that Galeno De Matteis works in Zurich as a software developer, Alessio Giuramento took his father’s place running their packaging factory, Busoni also went into his father’s line of work, and is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, apparently a very good one, and in fact I was once tempted to send my son to him, he’s having problems with his vocal cords, he loses his voice, but then I decided not to, I didn’t feel like striking up old acquaintances just to get an office visit. And then there are certainly some honest engineers and competent lawyers . . . But really, though . . . weren’t we supposed to be the new governing class, isn’t that why our parents paid all that tuition? Or was it really just to keep us out of the turmoil of the strikes and the demonstrations and steer us clear of girls and drugs, to teach us the catechism, to make us good, was that why they sent us there? Or to learn to command? To help others, especially the poor and the helpless, or to gain the necessary rank to crush them underfoot, pressing down on their heads the manhole cover, like in Metropolis, to suppress those who march through the sewers of the underworld?
Perhaps, though, the education provided at SLM wasn’t meant to hit any spectacular heights, wasn’t meant to break away from the average, by preparing the students to make clamorous discoveries or achieve memorable deeds: things that no education of any sort can predict or aim at, things that are owed to an instinct which, in those cases where it is recognized ahead of time—as something already alive and in the process of development in a boy—any modern educator, especially a Catholic educator, would feel duty bound to ward off and suppress, rather than encourage. Why? Because such an instinctive impulse to achieve things out of the ordinary necessarily clashes with all and any regulations and forms of control, leads to conflict with the authorities and with the classmates. And while problems of resistance against authority might perhaps be solved in accordance with classic approaches that the priests knew and were perfectly capable of administering, and had been since time immemorial, because they’d experienced them themselves and tested them out in their own preparatory schools, seminaries, and so on, it is the conflict and detachment from their own classmates that prove unacceptable to modern educators, who look upon the idea of excelling with suspicion and consider it on a par with bullying. Education must tend toward the average, must achieve collective results, woe to those who are too far below this mediocre objective but far greater woe to him who, even without meaning to, driven by his natural gifts, surges even higher! An individual at odds with his peers, because they are not sufficiently similar to him, is eventually either domesticated or abandoned to some marginal role. Is there a way of excelling that does not entail conflict? Individuals who attain outstanding achievements are the ones who emerged victorious from the conflict, that much is obvious, but to an even greater extent, they are the ones who have emerged defeated. In fact, it is often defeat at one level that creates the occasion for triumph and redemption on some other, higher level. Now, it was that very education imparted by the priests that prevented one individual from rising above the others, that offered him Christian protection when he was at risk of sinking below them. There was no other alternative than to slog along at an average level: neither far above or far below. Whether Catholic or non-Catholic, nowadays that is how the Italian school tends to work. As soon as you emerge from its mechanisms, which at least on paper are egalitarian in nature, you plunge into the abysses of the real world.
By the way, speaking of meritocracy: if there ever were such a thing, it would be an implacable system, every bit as just as it would be illiberal, or as liberal as it would be unjust.
WEALTH . . . prosperity . . . yes.
Back then, the possessions of a young man from a well-to-do family consisted of a shelf full of records, a camera. A Vespa. And then . . . nothing else occurs to me. A stereo record player.
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THE OBSERVATIONS that follow are taken from reading official documents from that time period, about the Catholic school in Italy and around the world, its characteristics, its vocations. The interested reader may stop to pore over them. Otherwise, she may feel free to skip a few pages.
Already in those days the great enemy was relativism, that is, the attitude that reduces all values to the setting that produces them: in other words, according to relativism, there is no such thing as an absolute value, there is nothing but an array of discourses concerning the subject of values, periods of values, values subjected to an incessant process of revision, and downgraded to mere points of view, opinions, conventions.
The Catholic school there had the mission of combating relativism with a set of absolute certainties, with perennial and nonnegotiable values.
“The Catholic school intends to shape the future Christian, allowing him to take part in the construction of the kingdom of God,” and it is a precise and specific duty of all believers to “entrust their children to schools that will see to their Catholic education.”
The Catholic school has an unmistakable identity and historic vocation all its own in Italy, the bearer of a vision of man as at once the fruit of reason and the gift of revelation. As a consequence, the school must be independently and authentically a school, but it must also, at the same time, achieve a synthesis between faith and culture, between faith and life. It is not easy to understand how this synthesis is attained, it’s not a simple matter of addition. The Catholic school (hereinafter CS) is either identical to the public school (hereinafter PS)—but then what good is it?—or else it’s different. Different how? See above. Which means that it’s the same and yet different. But does the curriculum, do the subjects, Latin, physics, phys ed, taught in a Catholic school have anything special about them, anything specific? Is there a Catholic art class, a Catholic chemistry class? Of course not. And in that case, do the differences consist solely of the extracurricular activities, such as hearing mass or saying a rosary or going on a spiritual retreat? Which would mean, in the final analysis, that the CS is nothing more than a PS, plus prayers?
The priests knew all this perfectly well, and they had anticipated the objections, always treading the razor’s edge of paradox. On the one hand they required that the CS be and remain faithful to the Gospel (and God only knows how much of a challenge that can be, both because the evangelical precepts are unnatural, starting with that “turn the other cheek,” to such an extent that one can almost detect a provocative intent, a piece of sophistry, on Christ’s part, by preaching them while well aware of their impracticability, and on the other hand because it is not easy to deduce from general principles what might be the specific rules to follow, to apply: are we certain, for example, that the precept “love thy neighbor as thyself” is truly positive and binding, ar
e we in other words sure that all individuals are so in love with themselves that they will love all others to the same extent? Doesn’t this equation run the risk, then, of encouraging those who hate themselves, who feel only contempt for themselves—and I’m afraid that’s quite a few people—to behave toward others with the same scorn they feel toward themselves? Why should someone who has no care for his own life respect the lives of others?
For that matter, once they’ve established the Gospel as a prerequisite, they say that in order to be a genuine school in every way equal to the others, and therefore able to secure for those who attend it the same educational credentials offered at the PS, the CS must therefore observe “the rigor of its cultural research and a strong scientific foundation,” recognizing “the legitimate autonomy of the laws and methods of research in the individual disciplines.”
The CS offers its service “both to young people and to families who have made a clear choice of faith and to people who are willing to declare themselves open to the evangelical message.”
So let’s take the parents and forget about the child who, at age six, can hardly say how open he might or might not be to the evangelical message, let’s take my parents: we can safely rule out the idea that they ever made “a clear choice of faith,” since they never attended church in their lives except for marriages and funerals, nor did they request the comfort of religious assistance on the point of death, there is nothing we can think of them except that, in any case, given that they were reasonable people and, I believe, deeply good and kind, they fit into the category of those who do not reject out of hand the principles of the evangelical message and who show themselves through their actions to be willing to follow them: almost as if these principles already exist in the human soul, aside from any issues of faith.
It’s the great unsolved issue of people who are good but not religious. Is it possible, then, to be good without faith? If it isn’t, those who do not believe in God are necessarily wicked. If it is, then what difference does it make whether or not you believe?
I’ve never managed to find my way out of this impasse. Perhaps it’s just a problem that’s been posed incorrectly, but would that mean that the most important thing is not to be good? What more could we ask of human beings? Would we prefer a good but faithless man or a bad man who fosters an ardent faith? There may be some priests who will hasten to tell me that the latter combination is simply not possible, you can’t believe ardently in God and still be evil, those two elements are simply irreconcilable. Therefore one of the two things must necessarily be false: those who claim that they believe in God and yet still commit evil acts are lying. I wouldn’t be at all sure of that, in fact, I could produce a wide array of examples of people I’ve known who are deeply religious, and basically evil, some of them very evil.
THE CS, moreover, means to create an integrated community among its members: students, teachers, parents, and that community must have regular opportunities for meetings. The meeting is one of those myths of modern Catholicism, one of the keywords, together with “journey,” “growth,” “listening,” and of course, “dialogue.”
Already back in the day when I attended it, the CS complained about the fact that it received no public funding, “with the understandable result that it was viewed as a privileged venue, accessible only to those with the resources to secure for themselves select and costly educational resources,” and in fact that’s the way it was: the CS was for people with money, with a certain amount of money, not necessarily wealthy, but certainly not poor.
(Parenthesis: society was more unjust but novels were easier to write when it was possible to use terms such as “rich” and “poor” without any further commentary.)
ALL THE SAME . . . priestly education, instead of reinforcing our sense of morality, I’m not sure why, only mongrelized it, watering it down, muddling it; salting it with contradictory human case studies, and as a result the exemplary, elevated words of the Gospels seemed overblown in comparison with respect to those who served up those words to us from dawn to dusk of every day; so that it would have done no one any harm if the mouths had been stitched a little smaller while the message had been unfurled to a more substantial size.
IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, here there is only one lesson, repeated unchanged every single day: “How should a young man behave?” He should behave like this and like that. The teachers might even be dead and their dead lips would continue to repeat: “Like this and like that, like this and like that . . .”
MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, they were worried that we might get some half-baked ideas in our heads; to prevent that, they filled our heads with an abundance of such ideas of their own, just reasonable and convincing enough, taking care not to leave any empty spaces in our consciousness where something unorthodox might sprout. A decorous absence of originality was then considered to be a distinctive feature of the respectable people the priests hoped we’d turn into, since that, after all, was their educational mission and the reason our parents had placed us in their hands. But it’s no easy matter to place limits on a young boy’s imagination. How I understand them, the priests! Their dialectic consisted of anticipating them, the weirdest arguments, and assimilating them preemptively, and in that way, Christianity supplied them with a formidable and versatile weapon, because it internally contemplates nearly any possible attitude and has an answer for everything: both conservation and revolution, the sweet and the bitter, the gentle and the horrifying, young people and old people, sorrow and happiness and hope and death. A doctrine unequaled in its flexibility and adaptability. Whatever the uneasiness and aspiration, whatever the context, Christ had an answer. It was as if He were incarnated continuously, in some proteiform manner, taking the appearance variously of good Son, rebel and revolutionary, alternatively capable of saving the weak, or else weak and in need of rescue Himself, on varying occasions conservative or liberal or moderate, poor as depicted in the Gospels but also ready to spring to the defense of the rich if they are threatened by the violence of the poor. The priests used Him in the manner of an encyclopedia or a superhero capable of pulling anyone out of trouble or doubt, handling Him like some immense racket capable of unfailingly smashing the ball over the net. There wasn’t a corner that He couldn’t reach on the double to rectify a compromised situation, righting it with a miraculous swoop. Perhaps the only subject, the only area that the priests were truly unable to cover up with their flexible interpretative and persuasive abilities, with their conciliatory method of sanding down all asperities, was sex. In that realm, there is very little that can be called reasonable, education has little if any grip, and however much times might have changed, it still remained a taboo, to be treated with incomprehensible allegories, like the old chestnut of the “sacred mystery of life.” It is no accident that it was by way of sex, that unguarded corner, that several of our schoolmates passed, going on later to become grimly notorious in the pulps and popular press.
IT WAS INEVITABLE: no matter how you stuff a boy’s daily schedule with activities and disciplines and exercises, filling in all the boxes with various colors from eight in the morning until eight in the evening, there are still too many gaps, too many blank spaces that might be invisible to the naked eye. And then, it’s a sensation strange to describe, but even though the teaching at SLM really was serious and intense, and the teachers showed up in class in rapid and punctual succession, and there was no such thing as what in the PS (and there are more and more of them all the time these days, with the school staff cut to bare bones) is called the “hour off,” when the teacher is home sick and no substitute is called, but I had the feeling that we SLM students, and perhaps with us all the other students in all the schools in Italy and around the world, were destined to lengthy periods of doing nothing. Condemned to idleness, crammed in our desks, sitting on the benches in the locker room, leaning against the walls, sprawled out in our single beds, talking about nonsense or ruminating on the theorems of mathematics and the sciences
or the exact formulations of religion or lists of the great French authors and the salient facts of the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, dit Molière, which culminated in a spectacular onstage death, there was still a constant and disconcerting condition of waiting, of expectation.
Yes, of expectation . . .
IN WORDS and deeds, the priests of SLM rejected the authoritarianism that had been the ruling law until just a few years ago in every school, every family, and every workplace, and therefore certainly not a prerogative unique to the priests; indeed, perhaps, among the priests the principle of authority (which in given conditions, and accepting its high costs, well, a family a factory a state an army an orchestra a team or a school has to be commanded and run with discipline, forget about these criticisms, if you’re in charge you have to be in charge and if you’re there to obey then you have to obey, and there’s not much more to be said about it), perhaps it was precisely among the priests that this principle, so long standing and well established and tested and retested over the centuries, actually found fertile soil for revision, mitigation, softening, critiquing, or even abolition, drawing upon the abundant repertoire of maxims and concrete deeds and examples provided by the revolutionary founder of the church, Jesus: who had called into question any authority other than Our Father who art in heaven (and, in a certain sense, even that authority . . .).
THE PONDEROUS yet rigid and for that very reason creaky authoritarian control had been switched out by the priests of SLM for a bland paternalism, easier to manage, more flexible, and better suited to the times. The legitimation of those who command by means of paternalism ought in theory to derive from the fact that its subjects comply with it, relying upon it and obeying it without restrictions, indeed, almost willingly. The reasonable attitude that steers it should theoretically extend to those who are steered by it. A mild, judicious application of power is thought to be more willingly accepted by those who are subjected to it.
The Catholic School Page 13
