Franco Maggiotto is a converted priest. I met him during a recent visit to Italy, and had an opportunity to discuss his past experiences, and the evangelistic work in which he is now engaged. Next month I will D.V. give more details about that work as well as about our own people whom I was glad to see again at Fornaci di Barga. For the present I give the substance of Franco’s spiritual history, as told by himself on a tape which I took back with me some weeks ago. The English is left largely unchanged, for fear of spoiling its freshness.
‘I was born in the Roman Catholic Church, and I was always, since I was a young man, giving myself completely to the Church. I was a vice-president of my section of Catholic Action. I was all the time thinking about God and I was all the time faithful to the Church.
When I was a young student of philosophy I had a religious crisis: I wanted really to know God; I wanted to find out the living and true God in a personal way. So I went to my spiritual father, to my parish priest, and explained to him the situation. They told me that if I wanted to see God, if I wanted to have a more personal relationship with Him, I had to give up everything. I had to kill my sin within myself, which was the obstacle between me and meeting God. So I wondered about a way of life to destroy my sin and I went to a Hermitage. I became a hermit in a Hermitage near Rome. There one lives by oneself, never talking with others. They have just one meal a day, never meat nor milk, and they chastise themselves twice a week. They eat sitting barefoot on the floor. They rise up during the night to sing and they do many other things just to kill every appetite in the soul. and to try to find out God by killing the flesh.
But doing everything I could, I could not get out of my situation. Always I had the feeling that nothing I was able to do could satisfy the perfect God, the living God, and I never met Him. I never had the joy of feeling in my heart and in my mind His love and His mercy toward me. Then I became weak in my health and the doctor told me that I was in danger if I was to live there any longer. So the General Father told me that they were very happy to have me there but it would be better for me to come back when I was much older.
So I went to a seminary in Albenga where I became a prefect of discipline. I was very hard with myself and I was very hard with the others. Then I became a priest and went to a small town under a parish priest who was eighty years old. There I tried to do everything I could to help my people. I was giving away my money and helping the poor. But I came to understand that I was not able really to make people go to God. They were coming to me, they were coming to the Church, but they never became Christians. And I myself did not know God, and my sin was still in myself. One day I thought I would finish with preaching just political things, social things, and I wanted to know in a deep sense what the gospel was. So a group of students, undergraduates of whom I was in charge, met with me, and we started to read the gospels and to translate them. In doing this work I understood that there was a big gap between what the Church was teaching, what I was preaching, and what the gospel was. Basically, I saw immediately that the gospel was throwing men in front of God, and we were attracting men towards the Church, making people concentrate on themselves, on their own efforts to go to God. But God was telling that every power was in his hand — the power of salvation and the power of death. So I saw in that time the attitude of Christ was to throw men on their knees in front of God, begging God to give them salvation in Christ.
But even if I saw this gap, there was a passage in the Scripture which made me very worried. It was Luke 10:16: ‘He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me’. So I said, There is a gap: but if I don’t preach as the hierarchy say I will despise God, because God sent them to interpret the Scripture. So I had to think over these things. One day I understood something more clearly. That was the verse in Matthew 28:20: ‘. . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’. Of course Jesus said to the apostles, ‘He that heareth you heareth me’, but never did Jesus say to the apostles, ‘Go and preach whatever you like, or whatever the people like’. Never did Jesus say, ‘Go and preach what you think the people will enjoy, and who hears you hears me, and who despises you despises me.’ But he said, ‘. . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you’. So, if you teach whatever I have commanded you, and they despise you, they don’t despise you, they despise me, because you are telling what I commanded you.’ So that made me to think very hard, and to understand that God never gave authority to the apostles to say whatever they wanted. Rather, the apostles had authority only when they were saying exactly what Jesus told them to proclaim.
So I went back again to preach the Scripture and many people were coming to me and I was called to preach in big churches and my bishop and others were telling me that I was an effective preacher, but I was doing something very wrong. I was giving much more emphasis to the objective truth than to the traditions. And so I went back to the same preaching, and the people were not very attentive to me when I went back. But I had always in my heart this kind of trouble. What have I to say — what Jesus says, or what the Church says? Where is the truth to be found — in men, in the Church; or in God and in His revelation, that is Jesus Christ? So I was really in trouble at that time.
I went to a very big parish. I became parish priest. I became arch priest afterward, but always I had this trouble in my heart. One day when I was really in trouble the Lord helped me with the Scripture. I was going on with Galatians with my students, and in Galatians 1:8 I saw something which struck me very much. I saw that Paul was saying, ‘. . . though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than ye have received, let him be accursed’. Paul was saying that if even we or an angel, not from hell, but from heaven, preach any other gospel, let him be accursed. So Paul was saying that if even we, who gave up our lives for you, come to you saying something different from what the gospel of God is, throw us out. Because what is important is not me, not the angel from heaven; what is important is the word of God. So here I saw very clearly that the Apostle received light from the word of God, not vice-versa, as it is in the Catholic Church where the gospel receives light from the preachers. It is the preachers who receive light from the gospel. So that became very clear for me. If any come preaching any other gospel I have to throw him away, I have to accuse him, because what we have in our hands is the very word of God. So that really broke me with tradition and gave me the assurance in my heart and mind that truth is not to be found in the hierarchy but in the revelation of God in Christ, the incarnate Word of God.’
The next part of Franco’s experience is unfortunately missing as the tape recorder did not function at this stage. The tape picks up his story at the climax of his experience.
I was in charge of mass and there was a young man, a student, reading from the Bible. The passage that he read was in Hebrews chapter 10. He came on to read, ‘By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices which can never take away sins: But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.’ These words ‘By the which will’ broke me. If it had depended on my own will I would never have been sure of salvation. But there I learned that it depended on the will of God. I said to myself, Everything is finished, now Christ is sitting down. And the young man went on reading till he came to ‘And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin.’ At that moment at the altar I did not know if I had to cry or to rejoice. I was crying and laughing at the same time. I was like a man going out of his mind.
So I said to the two priests that were assisting me during the mass, ‘Christ died really, and Christ resurrected. He died to pay for us. We don’t have to pay any more.’ So I was rejoicing and I couldn’t go on with the mass. I went upstairs and all my life started, a new life, where I knew that God sent His Son, very God and very man, to pay for me. And now a new life started, a life of friendship with God.
Of course I passed through many difficulties, but the joy that I had in my heart was so great that everything that happened to me I looked on as a gift of God: because the happiness was so great that even the worst thing that could happen, it appeared to me as a beautiful thing. Because such is the happiness that I am waiting from God to go and see Him face to face that this happiness will repay every sorrow and every pain that I have to endure in my life. God is doing in my heart and producing in my heart, the will and the doing to transform me slowly into the image of Christ, as it is in His plan. So that is a little bit of my testimony.’
J.T.