Massimo’s religious crisis and return to the Church

Massimo Alberti’s religious crisis is both an intellectual struggle over the future of Catholicism and a test of what faith means in practice. He fears that the Church may be a historical form destined to be surpassed, yet cannot separate that doubt from his love for his dead teacher, Benedetto, or from the habits of worship that have shaped his life. On the night of Benedetto’s funeral, the sight of the coffin and the devotion of those accompanying it bring the conflict to a turning point: Massimo tells Don Aurelio that he has returned to Christ and the Church.

Origins of the Crisis

Massimo’s doubts have been developing for years, though he recognizes their full depth only gradually. As a student in Rome, he had already been troubled by questions he could not silence. Meeting Benedetto in a small town in Lazio gave his faith a firm personal center: while his teacher lived, Massimo says, doubt did not disturb him, and he would gladly 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 seem possible to him.

After Benedetto’s death, the conflict around his legacy began to corrode this assurance. Massimo saw his teacher accused in bad faith of dissent from Catholic doctrine by people he considered unqualified to judge him. As Benedetto’s disciple, Massimo also faced hostility from religious opponents, while encountering a different pressure from hypercritical thinkers and negative innovators. The result, as he confesses to Donna Fedele Vayla, is not simply anger at church practice or rejection of doctrines that strike others as obscure. He fears something larger: that Catholicism might undergo a transformation like the one through which Christianity emerged from Judaism, leaving behind what has become obsolete and making way for a higher religious form. He wonders whether such a change needs its own precursors, and whether he himself might be called to proclaim it.

Faith Under Pressure

This possibility makes Massimo’s crisis painful rather than liberating. He worries that breaking with Catholicism would leave him without any positive religious certainty and asks, in effect, how life could be lived in that condition. His doubts are also entangled with his public identity. He has written for reviews, lectured, and published polemics on philosophical and religious questions; the moral position he has built through that work supports and dignifies him, but at moments feels like a prison. In Milan he longs to escape the hostility of both free-thinking critics who treat his loyalty to church law as weakness and religious traditionalists who regard his modern thinking as heresy. He imagines withdrawing from religious work to live for beauty, love, and pleasure, but the narrative presents these thoughts as bitter release rather than a settled intention to abandon his work.

His letter to Donna Fedele makes clear that the crisis concerns both belief and belonging. Benedetto had believed unwaveringly in the Church’s permanence and in the duty of obedience; Massimo fears that speaking at his teacher’s grave while doubting those convictions would be hypocritical. He does not confide in Don Aurelio, though he knows that his friend’s own life seems to him a powerful argument for the Church. That example cannot settle the question, because Massimo knows that noble, sincere people exist in other churches and outside any church. His struggle is therefore not resolved by a simple contrast between good believers and bad critics: it concerns the claims of authority, the possibility of religious change, and the loss of certainty.

The Funeral Crossing

Benedetto’s funeral makes this private conflict visible. Massimo waits at Porto Ceresio for the train carrying Don Aurelio and the visitors from Rome, and initially feels almost relieved when they do not arrive on time. As he waits by the lake, three figures occupy his thoughts: Lelia Camin, Donna Fedele, and Benedetto, at once beloved and feared. He recalls Benedetto’s final religious injunctions and realizes that the previous day, a Sunday, he had failed to attend Mass for the first time. It had been easier to break with the Church in thought than in outward worship, where habit and the memory of the dead still held him.

The funeral party approaches by a special boat carrying Benedetto’s body. More than a hundred people from Albogasio, who regarded Piero Maironi as a benefactor, have paid for the boat and travelled with their parish priest to meet the dead man. The coffin rests at the bow under a black cloth fringed with silver. Candle-bearers line the deck, the priest leads the rosary, and the congregation’s responses mingle with the heavy, regular noise of the boat’s engines and wheels. The procession’s solemnity gives Massimo’s inner conflict a public setting: the teacher whose memory has been contested is being accompanied by a community that has chosen to honor him.

Watching the coffin, Massimo feels tenderness for the man who had lived within it, grief for the accusations and insults directed at teacher and body alike, and remorse at having deserted a memory that the visitors from Rome had remained faithful to despite ridicule and hatred. Unable to bear the turmoil, he goes below deck and weeps. His anguished inward appeal is a promise not to abandon Benedetto and to return to him. Yet he does not immediately assume the public role expected of a favored disciple. When a woman asks whether anyone will speak at the cemetery, Massimo says no. Only afterward does he feel fresh pain at realizing that the women had expected the words of farewell from him, while he had believed himself unable to find words worthy of the occasion.

Return to the Church

The decisive declaration comes aboard the boat, before the funeral address on shore. Massimo draws Don Aurelio aside and, trembling, tells him that he has returned to Christ and the Church. Don Aurelio embraces him and expresses his joy and relief. The moment resolves the immediate crisis not by demonstrating that Massimo’s theological question about religious change has been intellectually disproved, but through his renewed commitment to faith and church belonging at the moment when grief makes that commitment urgent.

The funeral’s religious setting helps distinguish Massimo’s inward doubts from his relationship to worship. He has been able to question the Church in his thoughts, but missing Mass exposes the force of inherited practice and the memories attached to it. At Benedetto’s funeral, collective prayer, the coffin, and the presence of the teacher’s remaining disciples converge with Massimo’s remorse. The return is expressed first as a decision spoken to Don Aurelio, not as a speech to the crowd: even as the favored disciple, Massimo had declined the public farewell.

Benedetto’s Memory and the Limits of Reconciliation

The funeral address Don Aurelio later gives supplies a public account of Benedetto’s religious life, but it should be distinguished from the moment of Massimo’s return, which has already occurred aboard the boat. Don Aurelio presents Benedetto as a man whose central work was to call believers back to the spirit of the Gospel as embodied in life, feeling, and action, rather than to agitate theological controversies in which he might have erred. He affirms Benedetto’s professed obedience to church authority and says that Benedetto abhorred the errors for which private accusers had condemned him. The address also calls for forgiveness and cautions against judging those whose ignorance cannot be fully known.

That defense clarifies the moral and religious inheritance Massimo is recovering: fidelity to Benedetto’s memory need not mean defending every theological proposition, but it does require resisting the unjust treatment of the dead teacher and reckoning with the faith he lived. Massimo’s crisis has brought him close to withdrawing from religious action; the funeral instead binds belief to grief, loyalty, worship, and the example of a community still gathered around Benedetto. His return marks a change of allegiance and practice, while the doubts that produced the crisis remain part of the conflict the narrative has exposed.