“Yes, it was and it wasn’t, and I don’t know that it differed from anything else in the world, in that respect. It is true that there is a great distrust of the priests amongst the Italians. The young men hate them—or think they do—or say they do. Most educated men in middle life are materialists, and of course unfriendly to the priests. There are even women who are skeptical about religion. But I suspect that the largest number of all those who talk loudest against the priests are really subject to them. You must consider how very intimately they are bound up with every family in the most solemn relations of life.”
“Do you think the priests are generally bad men?” asked the young girl shyly.
“I don’t, indeed. I don’t see how things could hang together if it were so. There must be a great basis of sincerity and goodness in them, when all is said and done. It seems to me that at the worst they’re merely professional people—poor fellows who have gone into the church for a living. You know it isn’t often now that the sons of noble families take orders; the priests are mostly of humble origin; not that they’re necessarily the worse for that; the patricians used to be just as bad in another way.”
“I wonder,” said Florida, with her head on one side, considering her seam, “why there is always something so dreadful to us in the idea of a priest.”
“They do seem a kind of alien creature to us Protestants. I can’t make out whether they seem so to Catholics, or not. But we have a repugnance to all doomed people, haven’t we? And a priest is a man under sentence of death to the natural ties between himself and the human race. He is dead to us. That makes him dreadful. The spectre of our dearest friend, father or mother, would be terrible. And yet,” added Ferris, musingly, “a nun isn’t terrible.”
“No,” answered the girl, “that’s because a woman’s life even in the world seems to be a constant giving up. No, a nun isn’t unnatural, but a priest is.”
She was silent for a time, in which she sewed swiftly; then she suddenly dropped her work into her lap, and pressing it down with both hands, she asked, “Do you believe that priests themselves are ever skeptical about religion?”
“I suppose it must happen now and then. In the best days of the church it was a fashion to doubt, you know. I’ve often wanted to ask our friend Don Ippolito something about these matters, but I didn’t see how it could be managed.” Ferris did not note the change that passed over Florida’s face, and he continued. “Our acquaintance hasn’t become so intimate as I hoped it might. But you only get to a certain point with Italians. They like to meet you on the street; maybe they haven’t any indoors.”
“Yes, it must sometimes happen, as you say,” replied Florida, with a quick sigh, reverting to the beginning of Ferris’s answer. “But is it any worse for a false priest than for a hypocritical minister?”
“It’s bad enough for either, but it’s worse for the priest. You see Miss Vervain, a minister doesn’t set up for so much. He doesn’t pretend to forgive us our sins, and he doesn’t ask us to confess them; he doesn’t offer us the veritable body and blood in the sacrament, and he doesn’t bear allegiance to the visible and tangible vicegerent of Christ upon earth. A hypocritical parson may be absurd; but a skeptical priest is tragical.”