As little children and then as boys and young men, we were full of doubts of a legalistic nature. Do we or don’t we? Are we allowed to? And under what conditions? What were the terms established, the oaths sworn? Isn’t this a bizarre miracle—that something prohibited should suddenly become licit? Why? Isn’t it perhaps unjust that that which is unjust should suddenly become just? Schedules, quantities, measurements, very precise calculations, boundaries not to be transgressed. As far as the gate, only up to the sign that says DANGER, no later than eight o’clock, not before meals, be back in an hour. Even games are made up of prohibitions. The observance of every commandment ends up giving more importance to the rules as such, than to the reasons those rules were established. The prohibition against going swimming after a meal is an obvious and generic precaution, but if you give it an exact duration (when I was a kid, no less than three hours! You couldn’t go swimming for three hours after eating, which in our imagination meant that if you dove into the water two hours and fifty-nine minutes after polishing off a panino, you’d die the minute you hit the water…), when you draw an exact line, then all the forces are marshaled on one side and the other, like two armies lined up in battle, the forces of good and evil. Children are the most inflexible custodians of the given promise, of the geometry of prohibitions, and when they break their word or a prohibition, it’s out of either extreme courage or desperation, never out of solid good sense, they never think, “Oh, come on, how much will it really matter…” the way adults do. There’s no adjustment possible in the mind of a child. Home before dark, is that clear? All right, Mamma, but dark, exactly … when does dark begin?

With holy mass, the same thing happened. I had more scruples than an elderly Pharisee, and if I had been born an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Muslim or any other of those many faiths brimming over with rules and prescriptions telling you that you must take care how you walk, when you breathe, what you drink, watch, and eat, which hand you use and which hat you wear and how many times you wash, painstakingly attentive to the smallest actions that are all regulated from the very outset, I think I would have been perfectly at my ease, ahhh, life would have been prescribed and guided minute by minute according to the observance of the laws, like a ticking clock, calmly, ineluctably, and once you’ve respected those rules you’re all good, no one can say a thing to you. You’re safe. You’ve paid in advance. The sternest law works this way, so that the very fact that you’ve observed it constitutes punishment enough. You punish yourself by obeying it.

The problem, though, is that little by little the moral core of the law begins to escape you, and you limit yourself to doing the basic minimum necessary to respect it, not a gram, not a lira, not a second, not a genuflection more than is strictly required. The rule is reduced to bone, worn shiny from being gnawed. Done! you can say to yourself once you’ve observed the precept. Done with that, now, too!

When I found out that a mass was valid once you reached the Our Father, then there was no way I was going to attend the whole service. Never. I split the second to make sure I got there just in time for the eucharistic liturgy after I discovered that that was all it took. (The Catholic School)