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to him as it was to me, and I wondered sometimes if, as he’d grown older without a wife and children, a nagging loneliness had taken hold of him and that loneliness was unconsciously leading him to make me out to be something I was not. I sometimes even wondered—I’m not proud of this—if our friendship might be a substitute for not having lovers in our life. I didn’t feel any particular physical attraction to him, and I doubt he felt any for me. I don’t mean it that way. I mean only that I worried about the temptations of the solitary life, the places it might lead us in our thoughts.
    AT SOME POINT AFTER I finished my next-to-last year of college and was thinking about where I’d end up working, Father Alberto started to tell me he was getting into more and more “hot water” for his sermons, that the pastor of St. Anthony’s, Monsignor Zanelli, who’d always been a friend and supporter, was about to retire and finding it harder to protect him. He said he was receiving phone calls calling him “the Satan Priest,” and worse. “It won’t keep me from speaking the truth, Cynthia,” he’d say. “It won’t stop me. I have my own understanding of God, and the older I get, the surer I am of it. I’m a priest. It’s my job, precisely my job, to pass on that understanding. I’m not going to keep quiet about it.”
    Calls came to his room in the rectory late at night, and when he answered he knew someone was on the other end of the line, taunting him with silence. He started to talk openly with me about an organization called Lamb of God, which was gaining popularity in the parishes around Boston in those difficult years. The Lamb of God people covered a spectrum from ordinary good Catholics with conservative social opinions to absolute fanatics who would violently disrupt school board meetings when the issue of birth control and sex education was being discussed, and they’d sometimes be seen on the television news making hateful comments about “the deterioration of the American moral fiber,” spoiled children, lazy workers, lenient priests. More and more often in those years the radical factions were speaking for all of Lamb of God, and I worried, even then, where it would lead. Obviously, the kinds of things Father Alberto said in his sermons were not pleasing to those people. “I’m on their radar now,” he told me, and he suspected that some of the more irrational members of the movement were the ones who were calling him up and sending him the hateful letters.
    I’ve never been a very political person. My father, a fairly typical parishioner at St. Anthony’s, wasn’t political either, certainly not about matters of the Church. When Father Alberto asked him to sit silently for five minutes and contemplate this or that question, he tried to do that. When a priest said the Church was being unfair to society’s outcasts, my father probably agreed in theory, but he had no comment and made no move to do anything about it. Issues like that were simply not a matter for discussion in our home. He went to Mass, did what he was told, and didn’t seem to think about it much, and so in that way—and in others—we had very little in common with Lamb of God Catholics. There was a kind of cushion between us and them. Father Alberto was the antithesis of their mentality, a man of love, not rules, a man who tried to unify, not divide, to sow understanding and compassion, not hatred and harsh judgment.
    But like a lot of men and women of love—Jesus and Mary come to mind; Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln—that desire to unify, not divide, was exactly the trait that would eventually bring him trouble.

CHAPTER THREE
    Near the beginning of my last year of college—it was September 24, about eight p.m.—Matilda called from the church, hysterical with grief, and said that Father Alberto had been in a terrible accident. He’d gone to someone’s house for dinner, she said, probably had a few