The priest thought for a moment. ‘No, you misunderstand me. I am not refusing to help you. I mean that I cannot tell you anything. He confessed nothing.’

‘He refused to confess?’ Brother Peter was surprised at the defiance.

‘No! No! He confessed nothing.’ The priest looked up and met Brother Peter’s amazed face. ‘Exactly. I am breaking no confessional secrets for there was no confession. I have nothing to hint at, nothing that I have to hold in silence, as a sinful secret. Johann came to me and made a full confession: and there was nothing. He lives a life without major sin. I set him no penance for he had no sins to atone.’

‘No man is without sin,’ Brother Peter said flatly.

The priest shrugged. ‘I questioned him, and there was nothing.’

‘Pride,’ Brother Peter said, thinking of Johann’s sermon and the hundreds of people listening, and how he himself would feel if he could preach like that and call people out of their homes to walk across Christendom. ‘He sees himself as a vehicle of God,’ he said, thinking that would be how the boy felt.

‘He takes no pride in himself,’ replied the priest. ‘I tested him, and this is true. He takes no credit for himself. He has no pride, though he is a leader of hundreds. He says God leads them and he walks alongside.’

‘Greed.’ Brother Peter thought of the young man who ate a good breakfast.

‘He fasts or eats as God commands him, it depends on whether God sends them food or not. Frequently he fasts because he believes that God wants him to hunger as the poor. Mostly he just goes hungry because there is little food to be had, and all that there is, they share. I am not surprised if he ate well at your table. He would believe that God had brought the food to him, and it was his duty to eat. Did he say grace?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he thank you for your hospitality?’

‘He did,’ Brother Peter grudgingly allowed.

‘Then what more do you ask of him?’

Brother Peter shrugged.

‘If God commands him to eat, he does so. If God commands him to thirst, he does so. Then God releases him and he is free to do His work.’

‘Does he take the children? Does he call them away from their parents when they should stay at home? Could we call him a thief? Does he covet followers?’

‘He says he does the will of God. I asked him about the children. He says that since he was called by God his sins have emptied out of him so he is a vessel, not a man. He holds only God’s will, not the sins of man. I asked him specifically, and he answered with conviction. He convinced me. I think that he may be a saint in the making. In all my years of hearing confessions I have never spoken to a young man who opened his life to me and it was a clean page. I never would have expected this. It is beyond the dreams of a priest.’