Holy See

The Holy See stands in the novel as the focal authority of the Roman Catholic Church and as the object of a contested but enduring religious allegiance. Its significance emerges less through institutional action than through the choices and public words of believers: Massimo Alberti’s doubts make obedience difficult, while Don Aurelio’s account of Benedetto Maironi’s life presents fidelity to the Holy See as an expression of love for the Church and a hope for Christian unity.

Authority and Allegiance

For Massimo, loyalty to Church authority once formed part of his religious and public identity. After studying in Rome, he followed a revered teacher and believed he could desire a different course in particular matters without contemplating rebellion against the Church. He entered religious debate as an advocate of fidelity to Church law, a position that brought him attacks from opposing camps: some regarded him as weak for his obedience, while others condemned him as a heretic for engaging with modern thought.

That allegiance did not protect Massimo from doubt. In a letter to Donna Fedele, he traced his crisis to the years after his teacher’s death, when accusations against the teacher and Massimo’s own encounters with hostile critics and radical skeptics gradually unsettled his beliefs. His fear was not simply that he might reject particular doctrines. He wondered whether Catholicism might be a historical religious form destined to be surpassed, and whether someone should sacrifice himself to preach what would oppose the religious teaching he had previously defended. The question placed obedience to inherited authority against the possibility of religious transformation.

Benedetto and the Holy See

Don Aurelio’s funeral address gives the Holy See its clearest public and institutional significance. He represented Benedetto as a man who had professed faithful submission to Church authority and to the Holy See of the Roman Pontiff. In Don Aurelio’s account, Benedetto regarded obedience as an act of religious courage, even when the world disparaged it, and loved the Church above all earthly things. He imagined himself as a small stone within a vast temple, glad to belong to and be pressed by the greater structure.

The sermon also distinguishes Benedetto’s religious purpose from the disputed theological propositions attributed to him. Don Aurelio acknowledged that Benedetto might have erred in discussing theology, but described his principal work as calling believers of every rank and condition back to the spirit of the Gospel as embodied in human life, feeling, and action. He said Benedetto had approached the Supreme Pontiff in supplication, moved by filial love and grief for the Church. The Holy See thus appears not merely as an abstract authority but as the destination of a plea made on behalf of a wounded religious community.

Accusation, Obedience, and Forgiveness

Don Aurelio’s defense of Benedetto directly addresses accusations that he was a theosophist, a pantheist, or estranged from the sacraments. He presented Benedetto as rejecting those errors and conforming to the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church from his turn away from worldly life until his death. The sermon therefore makes institutional fidelity central to the public remembrance of a man whose religious language had been contested.

At the same time, Don Aurelio did not claim authority to pronounce on Benedetto’s sanctity. He emphasized the Church’s prayer for the dead and its awareness of universal human frailty, leaving divine judgment beyond human knowledge. He asked listeners to forgive both those who had falsely accused Benedetto and those who had mocked him for his faith. In this account, defense of the Holy See and obedience to the Church do not license private condemnation: believers are called to pray, forgive, and refrain from judging what they cannot fully know.

Unity as a Future Hope

Don Aurelio attributed to Benedetto a final hope that the forces troubling the Church would eventually be driven back and that all baptized people who invoked Christ would gather as one religious people around the Holy See of the Roman Pontiff. He presented this as a purpose for which Benedetto’s friends should pray, linking institutional unity with a wider reconciliation among Christians.

The funeral scene gives that hope a communal setting. The crowd carries Benedetto’s coffin by torchlight, answers the priest in prayer, and listens as Don Aurelio interprets the dead man’s allegiance. Massimo, who had been unable to speak at Benedetto’s grave without fearing hypocrisy because his own belief had become uncertain, is moved by the funeral and by the contrast between his doubts and the faith maintained by Benedetto’s companions. His inward resolve to return to his teacher accompanies the sermon’s appeal to unity. The Holy See consequently functions both as the center of Benedetto’s religious loyalty and as the point toward which Massimo’s disrupted faith begins to turn.