PARTISAN REVIEW
of the situation. The point was that, being a Jesuit, he couldn't
become excited about current events any longer: the real battle, the
only one about which he could feel passionate, was being fought on
a different level. Then Martelli would start talking about modern
man drifting away from the Church, and the doctrines that were
responsible for it. At that moment I would feel utterly bored and
incapable of arguing: the line was too musty, and too preposterous.
Once, I tried to cut my opponent short by reminding him of
Flaubert's saying,
in
1850, that "our soul is a sealed book to the
clergy." That, I said, had been true for some time before 1850, and
was an irreparable fact, even
if
we had to admit that we didn't know
what consequences would finally follow from it. "That is what I call
drifting," retorted Father
Mar~elli,
"You call it freedom, I suppose.
To me, this kind of freedom, as Plato will tell you, evokes its op–
ponent, tyranny.
If
you don't have spiritual order, you are bound
to get a police state of some sort, because society
has
to be kept to–
gether. The individual might imagine that to follow one's whims
and mean well is a sufficient rule of conduct. But society is dogmatic
by its very nature. Moreover, to take the only people I know, the
Italians-! don't see that their souls are such a sealed book to us
priests. It might appear to be so in the cities, because nobody knows
what is going on in the cities anyway. But I assure you, in the cities
and elsewhere, people keep coming to us, and not just to hear Mass,
but to tell us something about their souls and bodies. Not as many as
one could desire, I grant, but quite a number.
"We may be wretched soul-readers, but we look after things
in the life of the people which nobody else seems to care about. There
is no substitute for the parish priest. All is not well with religion
today. But the fact is that hardly anyone refuses to have his children
baptized, and hardly anyone refuses a religious funeral either. For us
that is not enough, but at least it indicates that the Italians are still
Catholic. We reject the distinction according to which ritual observ–
ance only indicates some kind of vague attachment to tradition, and
the idea that, since people do not always follow the Church in politics,
they have necessarily parted from her. As long as people will come to
us to be married, to have their children baptized, and their dead
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