How to delegate like your life depended on it.

 (Because that is totally possible.)

God cannot seriously believe that Mr. Ferraro needs to put more individual effort into his life. That would be ridiculous. If Mr. Ferraro did not delegate, he would be left with no time to enjoy those death-duty-alleviating paintings that hang in his living room. They are gorgeously expensive and just so practical too, and since God made man in his image, it is really quite generous to say that, “it was not unreasonable for [Mr. Ferraro] to return the compliment and to regard God as the director of some supreme business which yet depended for certain of its operations on Ferraro & Smith” (24).  The projection of God as businessman seems only natural, and this ideology revolves around efficiency, where clean accounting books equal clean souls. Well…all I can say to that is, “Mr. Ferraro, you’re daffy, and I don’t mean the funny duck.” Permit me a moment to explain my irreverence of this character. He’s a profoundly misguided Catholic that seriously needs spiritual direction, but he’s far too arrogant to ask for help even when it’s a living room door away! Graham Greene so effectively skewers Mr. Ferraro by using this business-driven mentality in the short story Special Duties to make the man’s failures so ironic as to merit an anti-epiphany.

While first a businessman and always a businessman, Mr. Ferraro religious views take an incarnational twist by believing quite firmly that he and God share the same businessman mindset. While a more humble individual would have pondered upon the awesomeness of being made in God’s image, Mr. Ferraro is not that humble man. He is quite comfortable as he—thank you very much. Everything, from the running of his business to the practice of his religion, is carefully delegated, and from the delegation, Mr. Ferraro can spend more time on becoming more efficient. He focuses on efficiency to such an extent that he loses sense of what it means to be a faithful participant in life and Catholicism. He can never quite let the workplace go. He is married, but his wife lives on the other side of the house. Neither makes the effort to speak to one another beyond a telephone call by proxy. Mr. Ferraro gives the minimum amount of attention to her, and this attitude of giving the least of one’s self echoes in his spirituality. When asked if he would like to have anything additional done for his faith and his wife’s faith, his answer comes out colder than a London winter, “We are taught…to pay first attention to our own souls. My wife should be looking after her own indulgences” (27).  While he may not have abandoned his religion, his own words demonstrate that he has no interest in pursuing a course that would interfere with his own interests. He has no traces of the communal spirit about him as evidenced by his vocal rejection of his wife. Therefore, he opposes the communal nature of Catholicism and breaks down the religious traditions into a systematic, distant enterprise, which he then can outsource to his secretary.

After a case of double pneumonia three years ago, instead of reaching out to his wife or a priest for comfort, Mr. Ferraro hires a new and very particular kind of secretary. How he found her is not revealed by Greene explicitly, but her rather unusual list of credentials is perhaps more revealing of Mr. Ferraro’s lack of sacramentality than of the secretary. He thinks that he knows what holiness is, and his “assistant confidential secretary” Miss Saunders fits the good-little-Catholic-girl stereotype. She has won awards for piety. She has volunteered for the poor. She provides all of her references with bits of religious kitsch like “a little triptych of Our Lady with a background of blue silk” (25). And not only does she have the icons, but she has that special, unassuming look of humility about her with “indeterminate hair and eyes of a startling clear blue” (25). She looked like one of the “holy statue[s]” that she carries about as evidence of her goodness (25). However, despite all of her emissions of piety, there is a hole in her story. The convent school where she was head girl is called “St. Latitudinaria” (25). There are many obscure saints with funny names, and to an outsider to Catholicism, they may seem practically weird, but let me assure you that there has never been a St. Latitudinaria. For all of her pious appearances, Miss Saunders lacks substance, and the fact that the fictional St. Latitudinaria escapes Mr. Ferraro’s notice confirms that while Mr. Ferraro attempts to follow Catholic Church teaching, his minimalistic style hinders him from seeing truth. He has the knowledge but not the understanding to see past his own stereotypes. The holiness that Miss Saunders portrays is like a trick of the light when exposed in the light of day, it is revealed to be a nothing.  Essentially, Miss Saunders’ shallowness mirrors Mr. Ferraro’s own lack of spiritual depth. A façade of holiness revealed to be empty of what could have actually made them half-way decent people. Mr. Ferraro would have done well to learn his saints but that would have meant his own participation, which would have cut into his oh-so-efficient-business.

For the reader, the made-up saint signals that the trusted assistant confidential secretary has been lying since the beginning of her employment. The Convent of St. Latitudinaria was part of her resume after all. Worse though, Mr. Ferraro entrusted this supposedly holy individual with the care of his spiritual business, but unfortunately, spirituality cannot be parlayed out, but he fails to understand this. Interestingly, he genuinely believes in God and has a distinct fear of Him. Otherwise, he would not go to such trouble having indulgences fulfilled in his name. But his understanding of Him is such that he is like God, and God is like him.

So he makes a very private, personal file, which only his assistant confidential secretary Miss Saunders knows the details. The contents of this file are rather unique to a practical businessman like Mr. Ferraro, but at the same time fit him all the more perfectly because in his mind, he and God understand one another. Within the file lies three years’ data of indulgences. Through the help of secretary Miss Saunders, Mr. Ferraro has taken 36,892 days out of his stay in purgatory (28). Miss Saunders goes to the church in a “state of grace”, prays, and leaves, and those prayers at those specific churches are the indulgences that will get Mr. Ferraro out of purgatory more efficiently. Or so he believes. His warped vision of God as a businessman has God keeping a careful log of His children and their activities. For Mr. Ferraro, this means that God is keeping the books as closely as he is, matching him with every column and checking every note. For this businessman, the clarity and upkeep of such personal files as his “indulgence” records are as important as the everyday workings of Ferraro & Smith. More importantly, since God is such a respectable businessman (like Mr. Ferraro), he would recognize the need for delegation through an assistant confidential secretary.

Sadly, Mr. Ferraro cannot escape irony. Those “local” churches, which Miss Saunders traveled to, do not and never have existed. She scribbles in the fantastical St. Praxted in the second column and takes a paid holiday with her lover. The cold realization, “that not even the requirements of the indulgence were met,” washes over Mr. Ferraro when he sees an ill-clad Miss Saunders gently pulled from the window by the familiar arm of a man (29). Mr. Ferraro had invested in Miss Saunders like he had invested in his death-duty paintings. They were meant to help alleviate his anxieties about death. But in the end, they won’t get him through purgatory any faster because he does not realize that indulgences were meant to be performed as a genuine and personal act of faith and love towards God.  Those 36,892 days were intended to make his stay in purgatory short, but now, they mean nothing because all of his calculated precautions have been exposed as just little numbers and notes in a worthless paper file.

Yet here is the joke: Mr. Ferraro does not change. When he sees Miss Saunders in the window, and his reality is shattered, instead of reaching out for advice or comfort from his wife or a priest or even stepping into a Catholic church himself, his end decision, “is to find a really reliable secretary” (29).   Graham Greene teases the reader describing how Mr. Ferraro slips quietly home and sits with his fingers intertwined in “the shape some people use for prayer,” but then the metaphorical door is slammed in the reader’s face by that damning remark for a reliable secretary (29). Considering that Mr. Ferraro seriously thought that Miss Saunders was the epitome of holiness, this anti-epiphany, this realization that Mr. Ferraro has not changed falls somewhere between the comical and the tragic. How on earth does he plan to check for holiness? Look for a halo? Peek for wings? He learned nothing from his experience with Miss Saunders, which makes him a fool, but his own self-deceit is so chilling in that it keeps himself from learning and growing.

A true epiphany would have involved him stepping into a confessional and offering his confusion to a priest, but the reality remains that if Mr. Ferraro would have gone to a confessional in that moment of deciding the next step (between firing and hiring), he would not have known what to say. Words would have escaped him because he firmly believes that he has been done nothing wrong. He does not need to change. Clearly for him, the only right thing to do is to get a better secretary. However, from the reader’s perspective this is just so hopelessly the wrong answer to Mr. Ferraro’s problem because there is no test for devotion other than perhaps martyrdom, which I don’t think that Mr. Ferraro would be up to since it would distract him from his daily tasks of going to work and coming home from work. All in all, at the end of the day Mr. Ferraro is still the same businessman, and tomorrow, he shall have a new secretary.