5	RORSCHACH TEST

At the Liceo Classico Gioberti, a high school for the humanities, our professor liked history, not philosophy. For a textbook, he had chosen the one with the fewest pages.

I, however, had my own personal master. Apart from school. A Thomist, an ultra-Thomist: Monsignor Pietro Caramello. A man who thought it was too progressive even to call himself a neo-Thomist. He used to protest that he was a Thomist period, forget the “neo.” He edited the works of Saint Thomas for the publisher Marietti, and he was the chaplain of the Sindone (the Shroud of Turin), practically a retainer of the House of Savoy. But I don’t believe the Shroud was very important to him. He certainly respected it as a relic, but he would never have undergone martyrdom for the Shroud. He was a philosopher.

A philosopher. A master. But also a spiritual director, a friend. Maybe the person who did the most to bring me up, who was immensely fond of me and of whom I was immensely fond.

It was my parish priests who first sent me to him, who knows why. Maybe they thought they had stumbled upon the philosopher’s stone.

After I graduated from university we drifted apart, and it is one of my regrets that he died while I was in America. I was moved recently when I recognized him in a television documentary, where he is seen opening the reliquary and spreading out the sacred fabric.

Don Pietro was a really notable personality, one of the men who knew neoscholastic philosophy best, or scholastic tout court, as he would have it.

From high school until the end of university, I went to confession with him twice a week. And we took trips to the mountains alone together more than once, to the Certosa di Pesio for example, weeks divided between spiritual exercises and study. I would study, and he would help me when I asked him. Intense years, years of ardent philosophical debate. I would always bring up the problem of the just war. But above all, even then, I could not accept the idea of an immutable “natural order” (in which, apart from anything else, there would have been no place for me). And I wrestled with the idea of “natural theology,” which drove the Catholic Church straight into the arms of the right, whereas I was on the left. Catholic, but on the left.

I don’t believe I ever told him about my homosexuality. He had me make vows, though. He would say, “You will now make a vow of chastity for a week.” Or he would have me recite the rosary with my hands under my knees. In sum, lots of affection and a little dose of self-mortification.

And I really can’t explain why one day he sent me to a psychiatrist, still an eminent faculty member in the University of Turin, who received me with great solemnity in his study, along with a colleague.

They gave me the Rorschach test and sent me away, promising to get back to me. Never heard from them again. Maybe I was a hopeless case.