Massimo Alberti’s loss of faith is a progressive crisis of religious conviction, intellectual identity, and belonging. What begins as a struggle over the authority and future of the Catholic Church threatens to unsettle his belief in Christ and God; yet the crisis does not leave him untouched by the faith he is losing. His private doubts, public responsibilities, care for the poor, and grief for Benedetto pull in different directions, until the funeral becomes both the sharpest test of his estrangement and the scene of an emotional return.

Origins and Intellectual Conflict

Massimo’s doubts predate his immediate circumstances. In a letter to Donna Fedele, he traces them back to his youth, when questions would arise that he could not always suppress. As a student in Rome, he met Benedetto in a small town in Lazio. Massimo describes the older man’s influence as decisive: while Benedetto lived, Massimo’s doubts did not trouble him, and he could have given his life for his faith and the Church. He could imagine wishing that Church authority had taken a different course in a particular matter, but rebellion against that authority did not yet seem possible.

After Benedetto’s death, conflicting pressures weakened that assurance. Massimo believed that people without authority to judge had accused his teacher in bad faith of departing from Catholic doctrine. He also experienced hostility as Benedetto’s disciple, while encountering a different corrosive influence in hypercritical thinkers and negative innovators whom Benedetto had kept at a distance. The pressure came from both sides: religious opponents treated him as weak for remaining loyal to Church law, while rigorists called him a heretic for thinking and writing as a man of his time. The disputes made his religious position a public identity, one that could sustain and dignify him but also feel like a prison.

His crisis is therefore not presented as a simple distaste for ritual or a dismissal of doctrines he finds difficult. Massimo explicitly distinguishes his doubts from what he considers superficial criticism of Catholic worship or dogma. His deeper fear is historical and theological: that Catholicism, like the religion of Moses before it, might contain a divine element destined to pass into a higher religious form, leaving its outdated structures behind. That possibility raises a personal question he cannot resolve: whether he should become a precursor to such a change, even if doing so means opposing the teaching he has previously proclaimed.

From Institutional Doubt to Religious Uncertainty

The decisive first rupture is his mental separation from Rome and the authority of the Catholic Church. Massimo later recognizes that the apparent speed of his further collapse conceals a longer process. For some time, he says, the religious obligation imposed by the Church had held traditional Christian beliefs together despite the dissolving influence of criticism absorbed through reading and conversation. Once he rejected the Church’s authority, the extent of that erosion became suddenly visible: Christ was no longer divine or risen for him, and he feared that belief in a personal God might be the next certainty to fall.

The possibility of losing even that final belief terrifies him. At times, the fear produces brief, violent reactions. On the night before Benedetto’s funeral, Massimo lights a lamp, kneels before an image of the Savior and Peter on the water, and pleads inwardly for faith. The effort does not endure. He feels mocked by mute things, then mocks himself; he also rebukes himself for calling to mind Lelia, whose image remains in his heart despite his attempts to resist it. The scene makes his crisis both doctrinal and intimate: neither religious fear nor personal longing can be dismissed by an act of will.

In a separate letter to Donna Fedele, Massimo describes his faith as unstable and admits that he wonders whether he will believe in God the next day. He does not claim that this doubt makes him want to die. If religious questions alone were at issue, he says, he would rather live, stop making declarations about belief or unbelief, and devote himself to poor people. He imagines becoming their father, brother, and friend, giving what good he can while living simply. This imagined future makes clear that his religious uncertainty has not erased his desire to serve; it has made him question whether service and love might remain possible without the certainties he once possessed.

Work, Attachment, and the Weight of the Crisis

Massimo’s practical life gives his uncertainty a concrete counterpoint. He applies himself to medicine and tries to relieve suffering among the few patients in his care. At Muzzaglio, he attends a man recovering from pneumonia who has been driven by domestic misfortune into drunkenness and isolation. The man lives among goats and a black sheep in a filthy stable. With help from two women of Dasio, Massimo has him cleaned and moved to an empty stall with a human bed; each morning he brings eggs, broth, and a little wine. He also hopes to persuade the man’s wife to take him back and not sell the black sheep that the man fears losing. The work does not resolve Massimo’s theological questions, but it gives his wish to serve the poor a daily form.

His letter also reveals how thoroughly his remaining attachments complicate the crisis. He tells Donna Fedele that, if he were dying, he would ask for a priest and receive Communion—not as hypocrisy, but from a need for sincerity and humility before death. He distinguishes this from having recovered a stable faith: he believes himself still in unsettled waters, moved by feelings that once carried his beliefs. He cannot tell whether those feelings point toward conviction or are only remnants of the past. At the same time, he admits that his longing for a life of love has become inseparable from Lelia. In the letter, he says that the fever he calls Lelia has grown fiercer and that he no longer fights it. His religious and emotional crises thus converge: he can imagine a life of humble service and love, but feels that this earthly future is closed to him.

Benedetto’s Funeral and the Reversal

Benedetto’s funeral makes Massimo’s loss of faith a public and relational ordeal. He has arranged practical details for the burial and been asked to speak over the coffin, but refuses. Only a Catholic, he tells Don Aurelio, could give the speech, and he no longer considers himself one. The refusal pains Don Aurelio, who had hoped to see him. For Massimo, however, speaking publicly would turn homage to his teacher into apparent assent to beliefs that are no longer his; declining risks making that same act of remembrance seem like an injury.

During the lake procession, Massimo helps carry the coffin and watches the black cloth with silver fringe covering it. He is overwhelmed by tenderness for Benedetto, by memories of the calumnies and insults directed at his teacher, and by remorse at having abandoned the faith that the Roman disciples beside him have kept. Unable to bear the tumult, he withdraws below deck and weeps. In his grief, he inwardly tells Benedetto that he has not abandoned him and is returning to him. The moment does not work through a new theological argument. Instead, the funeral rite, the sight of the coffin, and Massimo’s sense of having deserted a beloved teacher converge to produce an emotional reversal.

At the burial, Don Aurelio’s address sharpens the contrast between the two men’s positions. He presents Benedetto as someone who remained obedient to Church authority and asks the gathered mourners to forgive those who condemned or mocked him, since human beings know too little to judge one another. Massimo kneels through the funeral prayers, as does a veiled woman whose identity remains unknown to the crowd. The closing prayer for Benedetto’s body to rest in peace gives the ceremony a communal resolution, while Massimo’s grief marks the unresolved, deeply personal path by which he approaches faith again. His crisis is not merely a change of doctrine: it is a conflict between intellectual honesty, inherited religious obedience, love for a teacher, and the human need for bonds that survive doubt.