by Francesco Mario Agnoli
Among the younger generations, from the age of 14 (but even earlier) to 20, the “Teen drama”, television series, which deal with issues closely related to the world of adolescence and youth, are very successful. The narrative sometimes has very raw tones and aims to portray the most problematic part of this universe, where “bullying and eating disorders go hand in hand with drug addiction and rape”. Thus, in fact, we read in the presentation made by Sky for the airing on its network of the series “Euphoria”, produced by Hbo, one of the most famous ones together with “Thirteen” of Netflix, now in its fourth season. Others, such as the Italian “Skam” and “Summertime”, describe similar realities, but lighten them with lighter tones in order to make them acceptable as simple portraits of what normally happens among teenagers. A normality that does not however exclude, indeed includes (sometimes with some pseudo-moralistic hint, which however confirms the fact as ineluctable) night clubs, alcohol, free sex, drugs, the passion for the complexes of Death Metal.
This representation of the current youth universe is not denied as to its sad and destructive reality by the books that make up the tetralogy “The secret ways of the heart” by Massimo Lapponi. The author, a Benedictine priest of the Abbey of Farfa, while opposing to it from the first pages the opposite reality, morally sound, but today numerically marginal, of Christian Scouting, makes it not only the background, but the presupposition and the engine of a plot, simple as an inspiring idea, complex for the many, compelling episodes in which it involves numerous protagonists in constant movement between Italy (in particular Rome and Tuscany), England (especially Wales) and Scotland. Not without a final, short episode in the America of US universities.
The story starts from a meeting between Roman and English scouts (the latter guests of the former in the Roman parish of Sant’Anna) and has as the ideal center of the entire narrative the unusual oath of the two main protagonists: the Italian Vittoria Castelli, Catholic, and the English Margaret Temple, Anglican, both from the world of Scouting. An oath that commits them to work throughout their lives “to save young people from the dangers of this world and to make them discover more and more the beauty of healthy life, respect for parents, pure love, fidelity and service fraternal towards all “.
Of the four volumes, the first two, “Il manoscritto del dottor Bonich”, “Doctor Bonich’s manuscript”, and “Di generazione in generazione”, “From generation to generation”, not for the author, who wrote and published them in a logical and temporal order (respectively, as for the publication, September 2017 – second edition; first edition 1995 – and April 2019 – second edition; first edition 2000), but for many readers, who will probably be induced to retrieve them at a later time, they constitute a sort of prequel. In fact, despite having their own raison d’etre and an autonomous vitality, which in any case suggests their reading, however, for the very fewer number of pages, the not many protagonists and the reference period (respectively the end of the 40s and the end of the 70s of the last century), constitute the background, the preparation of the almost nine hundred pages dedicated to the complex and diversified events of the last two volumes, precisely “The secret ways of the heart”, which give the title to the entire tetralogy . These “Youth Stories” – as the subtitle identifies them – are set in our days (not many years before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic), involving a great variety of characters, in whose daily existence the school and related activities have a decisive weight. In fact, the vast majority of young people are just under or just over twenty years of age, therefore students of the last years of high school or university courses just started, and it is precisely in the context of the school that, despite some positive figures of teachers (but there is no lack of the negative one), many of them are attracted almost inadvertently (only because this is the dominant culture: so do everyone and, if not now that you are young and free, when?) into the world of night entertainment, of discos, alcohol and drugs.
It is in this adolescent and youthful reality, almost all negative, that both the “Teen Drama” and the books of Massimo Lapponi are interested. However, despite the almost identity of the starting point of the narrative, it is difficult to imagine anything more different from “Euphoria” and “Thirteen” of this tetralogy, which soon to the scout camps (not by chance organized in England by an Anglican pastor, William, and in Italy by a Catholic parish priest, Don Franco, who are also at the head of their respective departments) adds other communities and other places, real islands that practice a type of existence governed by completely different principles and customs from those commonly accepted as “normal” or nearly so.
In the foreground, for its spiritual importance and the light it radiates, in the locality of Acquafredda, among the woods of the Tuscan hills, a cloistered monastery dating back to the Middle Ages, brought back to life, after a period of neglect, by a group of Benedictine nuns, who, having taken over from the original Poor Clares, have made it a center of spirituality, where the young protagonists often go to spiritually restore themselves and strengthen their faith (at the end of the story, two girls – Francesca and Serena – will enter as postulants ).
In Wales Oak Farm, which at the beginning of the story hosts a scout camp in which a Roman girl from Don Franco’s department also participates, is an old farm owned by the last descendants of a lineage of Anglican pastors. Young couples practice organic farming there who, despite coming from a problematic world, characterized by sexual freedom, excess of alcohol and drugs, have agreed to marry regularly, have children and live of their farm work. Erika House, in London, was instead built in an old patrician building by the initiative of a very young social worker, Edith, who, in memory of her sister Erika, who died of drugs during a party in a nightclub, welcomes young people that go to London for study or work in order to save them from the wild nightlife of the English capital. At the beginning, at Oak Farm and Erika House the religious element, although present, is not as evident and decisive as it will become later, also due to some conversions to Catholicism. Instead, in immediate and direct relationship with the shining light of faith in the convent of Acquafredda are some of the scouts, both Italian and English, and, above all, the association of the “New Ecumenical Benedictine Oblates”, set up on the initiative of Edith, almost as a development and completion of the initial oath of Margaret and Vittoria, with the decisive contribution of a small group of young women friends, who, having lived more or less painful experiences in the degraded world of youth, undertake, even without taking vows, “to spread among the young and among families the observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict adapted to today’s life ”.
Massimo Lapponi, a Benedictine priest, cannot fail to know Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option” and inevitably the reader who has had the opportunity to read this book is led to identify, not only the cloistered monastery of Acquafredda, but also Oak Farm and Erika House with those oases of preservation of faith and refuge from the noises of a depraved world that the American writer proposes as the only possible alternative for those who do not want to adapt to the galloping de-Christianization of contemporary society. In fact, even if the terms and causes are historically different, the current crisis is considered by both Rod Dreher and Massimo Lapponi to be as devastating as that which, at the end of the Roman Empire, induced the disgusted young Benedict of Nursia to leave Rome, where he had gone, full of enthusiasm, to enrich his soul with the study of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and the other great authors and thinkers of the past. In reality, Lapponi does not explicitly mention Dreher’s book, but, several times Sanit Benedict and his Rule, especially in the final part of the last volume of the “Secret ways of the heart”. Here the monastery of Acquafredda assumes an even more central role, described as a school of life, which, precisely for this reason “must be enclosed, in order to correct, purify, enrich what in the world would be dispersed”, and as such opposed to the typical contemporary university (in this case it is Columbia University in New York), a temple of “science and the superior culture of the spirit”, but also “at the same time a place of election for the sexual and moral depravity of youth”. Consequently, in the eyes of the protagonists (students and teachers), the need for a school capable of teaching to live well above all. So a school that takes up, updating them, the essential characteristics of the one created in his time by the Saint of Nursia, who had however intended it only for monks and nuns, as “founded on absolute dedication to God, and therefore on the renunciation of the most precious goods of life “, which, unfortunately, today as then, “are also the most overwhelming temptations for men”. In their youthful enthusiasm and strengthened by the light that radiates from the monastery of Acquafredda, the Ecumenical Benedictine Oblates do not want to delay and intend to get to work as soon as possible to create this school, which they define “of the service of God”, and propose it since immediately, in implementation of the provisions of their statute, to all young people.
Massimo Lapponi does not mention him, but, at the end of the reading, his tetralogy reminded the author of this review of the saying of another great Christian of the early centuries (not included among the Fathers of the Church due to the suspicion of some closeness to Montanist heresy), Tertullian: “Christians are not born, they are made”. A saying no longer corresponding, at least in the literal meaning, to reality during the many centuries (those of Christianity) in which, in Europe and in the entire West, all were born, at least formally, Christians, so much so that the term had assumed – traces still remain in the language of some regions – the meaning of human being. Today, again, as in the time of Tertullian and also – two centuries later – of Saint Benedict, this is no longer the case. Now, in many cases, “Christians” become (or re-become), alone or with the help of others, but in any case through their own choice, through an effort of will, through sacrifices and sometimes painful tears, which have the same value as the long catechumenates of past times. Almost all the characters of Don Massino Lapponi, with a few exceptions (in the forefront Margaret, Vittoria and the Scottish twins of the island of Barra, Peter and Paul Mac Lean, who will marry them) belong to this category of new catechumens.
In this way, immediately before the readers’ leave, accompanied by the wedding of Margaret and Vittoria with the Scottish twins, which, together with the entry of Francesca and Serena into the cloister, mark for some protagonists the passage to another phase of life, the tetralogy proposes the hope that the message of Saint Benedict will spread far beyond the walls of the monasteries, in order to realize first of all, as a prelude to the transformation of the entire youth universe, the utopia of a university capable of speaking to the hearts of young people and to enlighten them on their destiny. “Since immediately “, because the sometimes adventurous, sometimes reflective and introspective events they go through, making them, in spite of their size, quick and intriguing reading, the thirteen hundred pages of the literary saga show that there is no room for further delay since today the death metal times and rhythms of the crisis are infinitely faster than in the century of Saint Benedict.
https://www.edizionitabulafati.it/ilmanoscrittobonich.htm
https://www.edizionitabulafati.it/digenerazioneingenerazione.htm
Massimo Lapponi O.S.B. 