Of Men and Mary Read online

  Standing there sobbing, I instinctively reached for Lea’s purse. Knowing that every morning after Mass, she had meditated on the Bible or a spiritual book, I wanted to read the last thing she had read. I pulled out a little booklet I had given her at Christmas, The Imitation of Christ, and opened it where she had left the ribbon marker. In a section where the Master speaks to the Disciple, I read, “Do not be overly distressed if I take something of yours; it is mine, I take it back.”

  “Thanks a lot, Lord!” I blurted out.

  Shaking my head, I continued to read further down the page, “And if I take something good from you, it is to give you something better.”

  I closed the book, threw it into her purse, and cried out, “Lord, what can you possibly give me better than my mom, my sister, her baby, and my Lea? . . . Wrong page!” The Master’s words haunted me for some time as I asked myself over and again, “What could the Lord give me better than my loved ones? What could my future be?”

  Eventually, after a bombing raid on another side of the city, my dad came by, having run from the factory where he was working. He saw the mess but passed by the corpses without recognizing the people, now wrapped in sheets. When he found me in the shelter, the first thing he said was, “Where’s your mom?”

  Thinking he had seen her body, I told him abruptly, “She is in heaven.”

  He put his face in his hands and cried out, “No!”

  Realizing he had not seen her, I tried to cover up my words by saying, “I thought you were trying to tell me she was dead. Let’s go look for her.” Stalling and hesitating, I went back outside with him; and lifting the sheets, he found her. I ran back to the shelter to avoid witnessing him in his throes of pain and despair. Shortly afterwards, in great anguish, he came back down to the shelter to look for his remaining children. We all met, hugged one another, and wept.

  With untold sadness, we prepared to bury our loved ones. When Father came to bless the wrapped corpses and saw me standing desolate next to them, he said to me, “You know, Paolo, Lea told me that she had offered her life for the end of the war and for peace in the world.” I cried, knowing her piety would have brought her to such an offering of love.

  In the panic of the aftermath of the bombing, we decided to leave the city and go to a nearby town, Acquasparta, to stay with the family of my friend who lived with me in Milan. They hosted us for a number of weeks until we found a little apartment there and moved into it. When packing up my things, I noticed a picture of myself looking adoringly at Lea. With a lump in my throat, I turned the picture over and saw she had written something on the back, which I had forgotten: “Caro Paolo, ricordati di me che son la ‘Pia’ e in caso di morte dimmi un’ ‘Ave Maria’ oppure ‘L’Eterno Riposo,’” which translated says, “Dear Paul, remember that I am “Pia” [who in Dante’s Divine Comedy asks the poet to remember her after her death], and in case of death, pray a ‘Hail Mary’ or ‘Eternal Rest.’”

  With a lump in my throat, I thought, “How strangely and sadly providential.” Then I did as she had asked, painfully forming the words, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou . . .,” followed by, “Eternal Rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.”

  I spent most of my mornings in the adjacent town church, attending Mass and receiving the Host with a furious passion, sensing that with Jesus in my heart, I could commune with my mom, Lea, and Letizia. And I wept. Tears and prayer were a great relief for my sorrow, suffering, and loneliness.

  After some time, my two brothers, my father, and I began to make visits back to our home city. My father did his best to help us, but we were living a communion of sorrow. Eventually, my mother’s youngest sister, Clotilde, a year or two older than Letizia in age, came to live with us, trying her best to play a mother’s role. A few weeks later, to help us carry on with our lives, I found a job, locally, watching over the huge storage area of a wholesale furniture factory. Meanwhile, a desire to give myself more fully to God was growing within me. Lea and Mamma’s teasing, “Oh, how good you look as a priest!” began to feel like a little hint, and I began to nurture a desire for the priesthood.

  “What else could I be?” I wondered. I will never find someone like Lea.” Then I said to myself with a little more sense, “This is a great emotional upheaval in your life. Don’t make any decisions now.” So I left the choice in Mary’s hands, telling her, “Mother, do whatever you wish with me. You make the decision, and I’ll say yes.”

  A few weeks later, during one of my quick visits to our broken city, I read the newly exposed posters glued on the walls of Terni by the German occupation troops. The German army, broken, but still holding onto Italy, whose government had already fallen, had issued posters calling for immediate draft all the young men who, for any reason, had been exempt from military duty. These men were to show up immediately to the draft centers, penalty for failure to comply: the firing squad.

  Back home, I said to my father, “Ciao, papà. Goodbye.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Did you see the posters?”

  “Oh, it’s okay.”

  “Do you want another grave in the backyard?” I asked him. “They’ll find me if I don’t go. You know these Germans mean what they say. They are desperate. They are losing the war.”

  “Don’t worry,” he answered. “I’m going to hide you.”

  The next day, we were on our way to the neighboring community of Amelia, a small, medieval town with large, stone, Roman walls surrounding it, and a cathedral perched at the peak of its hill. The town’s only entrance—a grand, medieval stone gate, which used to be the drawbridge entrance—still stands, towering over an intimidating ditch, which warded off enemies.

  Two Salesian centers existed in Amelia. One, close to the entrance, was made up of a parish, a school, and an Oratorio boys club. The other, on top of the hill by the cathedral, contained an orphanage and a seminary for aspirants to the Salesian priesthood. This house of formation held a grammar school, a high school, and a novitiate, where aspirants spent their first year of preparation for religious profession. It was built on a medieval penitentiary over ancient, underground prisons, whose tunnels provided a perfect hiding place for the seminarians and a number of high officers of the dismembered Italian army.

  My father and I arrived at the entrance to the building and greeted the Salesian director, who was well-known to us. Instinct drew me into the seminary chapel, where my eyes rose above the main altar to see a beautiful statue of Mary Help of Christians with her baby Jesus in her arms. Struck by what I knew wasn’t coincidence, I knelt, gazing upward, and said in a whisper, “Mamma, tu sei furba e cara. Ecco mi qui. Voglio essere il tuo sacerdote.” (“Mom, you are clever and kind. Here I am. I want to be your priest.”) I had been brought unknowingly to where I had been dreaming of going.

  That day my religious life began. I joined the rhythm of the house of formation and studied in preparation for the priesthood. Sensing Mary’s continued protection, companionship, and love, I didn’t hesitate to ask favors of her. I was to enter the novitiate on the feast of Don Bosco’s birthday, August 16. But I desired to make my religious profession on the celebration of the Blessed Mother’s birthday, September 8. I prayed to her to grant me this grace of moving the date—a little extravagant, I knew. A group of novices-to-be were expected any moment from the eastern side of Italy, and providentially, their train schedule was disrupted by the war. When they arrived, a number of days later, the local superiors decided to begin the novitiate on a later date: September 8. “Grazie, Mamma!”

  Exactly one year later, again, on that same date, I vowed my life to God in the Salesian Order. On that day of profession, the Father provincial pronounced in his homily that we newly professed Salesians would one day be Marian priests, which felt like honey in my soul.

  Being a late vocation at age twenty-four (boys entered into the seminary at a younger age in those day
s), I was asked to fulfill my three years of “tirocinium,” or practical training in priestly formation, as the director of the Oratorio in Terni. Soon I was at home again in the atmosphere in which I grew up. From catechism, to sports, to the drama club, I felt totally absorbed and happy with my apostolic life—my guardian angels being my mom, my sister, and Lea, who were my inspiration and support. By then I could see that God took them to keep them with me intimately, always, wherever I was destined to go.

  During this period, I began to think about missionary life. I wanted to share the Gospel with the poor and with those who did not yet know the love of Jesus. My human attachments were all gone, which made the discernment easier for me. With my father living peacefully with his two other children and my Aunt Clotilde, no one would be distraught if I left. My closest ones would come with me.

  Being so much a part of the Salesian family since I was a little boy, I’d always known that the Salesians were spreading throughout the world as the third largest religious order in the Church. The largest was the Jesuit order, the second largest, the Franciscans, and less than a hundred years after Don Bosco started the Salesian order, it became the third largest. Due to the war, less men were leaving for the missions, so the Salesian rector major sent exhortations, inviting us to go to the missions in order to replace the vacancies. That convinced me. My desire for missionary work materialized into a formal letter to headquarters, applying for missionary life.

  Three years later, when I had almost forgotten about my application, I received a letter of obedience declaring that, in the name of the Lord and by authority of the superiors, I was to go as a missionary to the United States West—to the nation that had been my enemy, to the people who had taken everything from me. I quickly went to the Salesian directory to see where this United States mission was, out of 20,000 Salesian churches in the world. Looking at a map, I narrowed the location down to . . . “Los Angeles! Oh no, Lord! Mamma mia! Los Angeles is Hollywood!” I bewailed. “Mary! Mamma! I wanted to go to the missions to help save my soul, not lose it!”

  But obedience is obedience, so I received a ticket for a voyage from Naples for the United States, and I boarded the Luisa Costa, a cargo ship with twenty-one passengers, six Salesian clerics included, who paid for the ship’s fuel. Accommodations were rudimental “roomettes,” which had been used for soldiers. It took twenty-four days to cross the ocean, and during a rather miserable, wavy trip, everyone got seasick except me and a Rabbi, who slept in the cot above mine. I passed the days walking up and down the deck with the Rabbi in good friendship and helping take care of a little girl on board when her mom felt ill.

  After we navigated through the Straits of Gibraltar, our uncomfortable trip became terrifying. The ocean whipped and churned more than the Mediterranean Sea had, and the waves grew increasingly rough and frightening. During the last three days of our trip, a terrible storm tossed the ship violently, and in a critical moment, when the waves rose so high, they looked like they would overtake us, I cried out, “Mamma, if you want me to be your priest, you’d better keep me out of the water!” Eventually, the seas calmed, and we finally viewed with tremendous relief the big lady with the torch in the New York harbor. That day in 1950 was December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

  When I stepped off the boat plank onto American soil, I announced, “Here I am, Mamma. Do what you want with me.” I felt that Mary’s hand and God’s providence had guided me to my new home. I had just left the little three-thousand-person town of Amelia, whose ancient Roman arched gateway reads, Civitas Maria Virginis in Nomine Jesu a Terraemotu Liberata A.D. MDCCIII (City of the Virgin Mary, Freed in the Name of Jesus from the Earthquake of 1703 A.D.). And I was on my way to La Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, la Reina de Los Angeles (The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels)—the original title the Franciscan missionaries had given the city so often called simply Los Angeles (The Angels), but mistakenly so. It was Mary’s city! From the smallest Marian city in the world, where I began my religious life, I had been transported to the largest Marian city in the world. Coincidence?

  A year before I was ordained a priest, I began to ask Mary about the purpose of my past. “Mother,” I prayed, “I understand how my having been engaged might be useful for me in helping young people with their relationships and problems; but why did I have to spend four years in college studying metallurgy if I was going to become a priest?” Having worked in Milan at a weapons factory, and having seen firsthand what those weapons could do, I had long since decided that I would never be involved in metallurgy—ever.

  A few weeks later, a priest named Father Felix J. Penna came to me and said, “Paul, you are a metallurgical engineer.”

  I responded, “I was. But I’m not anymore.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I talked to Cardinal McIntyre and the leaders of industry in Los Angeles, and we have to build a school, and you are going to teach metallurgy.”

  “No, I am not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I am not!”

  “Yes, you are.”

  And the vow of obedience slapped me down. Fr. Penna did not take no for an answer, pointing out that I was sent to Los Angeles to help him with this endeavor. “So that is why I’m here,” I realized. I had expected to be sent to Africa, Asia, or any other missionary land to work with the poor and to spread the Gospel of Jesus; and now, here I was, next to Hollywood, joining Father Penna at meetings with top industrial leaders. Eventually, the Don Bosco Technical Institute came to be, and there I taught metallurgy for many years.

  I hadn’t known what to expect when I landed on American soil. In a spiritual sense, Hollywood and its culture felt threatening, and America had a reputation for being a country of world-controlling people. But I found American people to be cordial, benevolent, and generally tolerant—a conglomerate of all kinds and nationalities that could not be generalized. In a moment of intimacy with the Lord, I wrote:

  Jesus,

  When on that tremendous day, you surrounded me with pain, emptiness and death, I did not rebel. The dear creatures that you took from me were yours. You had given them to me, and I wept and was silenced.

  While walking along a different way, you called me, and I answered. I had repeated many times, “Jesus, you are everything to me.” And you wanted to prove the truth of my words. And thanks to your grace, you saw that I did not lie.

  The words that I first pronounced by the lifeless bodies of the innocent victims were an invocation of forgiveness for the killers. And you wanted to also test those sentiments by sending me to live in their midst. You see, Jesus, that not only did I not consider them forgiven enemies, but brethren; and I love them.

  I have kept my promises; you have kept yours.

  Thank you, beloved friend, Jesus!

  One of Jesus’s promises was to carry me into the priesthood by placing me in the gentle arms of his Mother. I was ordained at the age of thirty-one, in the month of Mary, on the thirty-first day—the day Pope Pius II named the “Queenship of Mary” in the year 1954 (now celebrated on August 22). Mamma was making herself obvious. It was also the first Marian year in the history of the Church, just pronounced by Pope Pius XII, who wanted to commemorate the centenary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

  After my ordination in Watsonville, California, I overheard the other newly ordained priests speak of ordination presents from their friends and family in America, so I decided to ask the Blessed Mother in great intimacy, “Mother, I would like to go to Lourdes, France, your holy place, to thank you for all you have done for me up to this point. Would you grant me this present?”

  Two weeks after my ordination, I traveled home to Italy, eager to see my family and friends. When I arrived, I noticed posters on the town walls, announcing a diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes, France—a not uncommon sight, this being the first Marian year. I rejoiced and said to myself, “Yippee-! Mamma heard my request.” But, as
I read the very large sum on the poster, I mumbled to myself, “A good try, Mom. Thank you, anyway.”

  With a sweet sense of nostalgia, I celebrated my first Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Church, the parish where I was baptized, received my First Communion, performed plays, and attended Mass, all my life up to the tragedy of the bombing. Half of the townspeople packed themselves into the church, even the communist/socialist mayor of the city, and after the Mass, they flooded the sacristy and filled my hands with envelopes of cash—traditional gifts for newly ordained priests. When I counted the money, I ended up with just a little more than the cost of the pilgrimage. “Thank you!” I whispered, gazing heavenward. Soon I was on my way to Lourdes with a large crowd of my friends, including Lea’s father.

  Long before my ordination, Lea’s mother, Mrs. Giusti, had said to me in earnest, “I would like to attend your first Mass in Italy, and then I would like to die in your arms. I have prayed to my daughter for this.” Mrs. Giusti was present at my first Mass in Italy, and then she fell ill. I was expected back in the United States immediately because the Don Bosco Technical Institute was to be started. Passport trouble kept me in Italy for a long time, while Fr. Penna waited, thinking I was prolonging my trip in order to stay longer with family. I still have letters from an irritated Fr. Penna, insisting that I return. After almost nine months had passed, Lea’s mom was dying, and I was called to her bedside, where I anointed her, and she expired peacefully in my arms. My sweet Lea had responded to her mother’s plea. The very next day, I received my passport, finally stamped by the American consulate, and was on a plane back to Los Angeles.

  With my dearest ones always with me and interceding for me, I was able to travel to Italy every four or five years after my ordination, and in each visit, somebody would come by and say, “We’re going on a pilgrimage. Oh, Fr. Paul, do you want to join us?” And I was off to give glory to God in Mamma’s shrines—Lourdes, Fatima, Loreto, Garabandal, and more. Mary saw to it that I presided at Mass in these holiest of places—a gift that left me euphoric.