by Timothy Egan
I don’t know if I believe in the stigmata. Whether it’s true or not doesn’t change my view of Francis. The silken and scented senior members of the Vatican curia couldn’t wait for Francis to die. He’ll soon be gone, they told themselves, but we’ll still be here—the same thing they say about Pope Francis. But the Little Poor Man endures, the movies and biographies and buses climbing up the La Verna mountainside, because of that life story. At Stanford University’s main library is a huge archive containing nothing but books, PhD theses, ephemera, and original writings from and about him. When I was there, I felt overwhelmed. You would think he was Cicero, Lincoln, or Napoleon. He had no army. He painted no masterpieces. He invented nothing. He ruled over nothing. He owned nothing. He was a waif from a dark and superstitious age.
So why do they need the miracle of the stigmata? Why did he need the open sores of an execution? I understand the desire to feel the pain of Christ, the ultimate way to submissiveness of self. But I also wonder if Francis would have the same hold on the material world had he not been linked to the miraculous—or for that matter, would Jesus? Leo Tolstoy, the mystic and Russian novelist, produced a literary experiment to test this premise. While in the midst of a profound spiritual crisis, Tolstoy tried to translate the four Gospels of the New Testament into a single story—minus the supernatural. His miracle-free gospel is a riveting story of a poor man who upends the planet with a message about loving other people. “In Christ’s teaching,” Tolstoy concluded, “lies the truth.” It is enough for me to know that Francis spent a few nights in this aerie above San Miniato, shunning a bed for the floor.
In the Old World, the Roman Catholic Church is teetering—from secularism, from neglect, from the law, from its many self-inflicted blows, from an armament of secrecy. In the New World, it’s deeply distressed. It grows, rapidly and vigorously and joyously, in places where people are hearing the stories of people like Saint Francis for the first time. As the Little Poor Man and his followers knew, arguments don’t change minds; stories do. In looking for answers to its woes, a place for the church to start is what inspired the creation of this abbey, the lasting hold of one man’s radical humility.
TWENTY-NINE
ALLEGORIES ON THE WALL
Out of a Tuscan dreamscape of cypress and silver-green olive trees, the towers of San Gimignano poke through the haze of autumn. A mere thirteen of the original seventy-two still stand. You see them from the valley, from nearby hill towns, from one-lane roads corkscrewing upward. If you’d been walking since Canterbury, this was the vision on the horizon long dreamed of. The medieval skyscrapers, built with the wealth of saffron dealers, were most welcoming, but also a warning. San G. lost two-thirds of its population to the Black Death, a reminder of how swiftly life could be taken in 1348. The sweep of sudden mortality focused your mind on what was beyond this life, as did the frescoed narratives inside the city.
Near the crest, shadowed by those towers, you would enter the Collegiata and look up. What you saw in the ceiling of that basilica was one of the most graphic depictions of evil anywhere in the Christian world—Taddeo di Bartolo’s Last Judgment. The naked and the damned are stabbed and dismembered by oily-skinned, horn-headed demons. A grotesquely obese devil is literally eating humans. A man labeled a “sodomite” is tortured with a stake running up his ass and through his mouth. At the table of those guilty of gluttony is food that can never be consumed by people bound in chains for eternity around its rim. All is terror and fear, designed to make you tremble. You are doomed. Repent, pilgrim!
Taddeo’s gruesome scenes are rooted in the cryptic words of Christ. The version from Matthew’s Gospel has him separating the good from the bad at the end of the world. How you spent your time on earth determined your sentence—that is, whether you passed the test when Jesus said, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was in prison and you visited me.” The twist in this bedrock homily of the faith is that it wasn’t Jesus in need of those charitable acts. It was “the least of my members,” as he said at the end of his revelation. In his own words, that is the essence of Christianity.
Damnation meant being cast “away to the eternal fire.” And though Taddeo’s depiction leaves little to the imagination, the words of Christ invite a broad range of interpretations. Among them: Allegory or fate? Pope Francis tried to clarify this before an audience of children. A tearful little boy named Emanuele asked the pontiff if his deceased father, an atheist, was in heaven. The pope turned to the other kids to see if they thought God would abandon the child’s father. “No!” came the shouted return. “There, Emanuele—that is the answer.” He hugged the boy and whispered into his ear: “God has the heart of a father.” Another time, as he sat with fifteen hundred homeless who’d been invited into the Vatican for a surprise meal, Francis offered this guidance on the hereafter: “In the poor, we find the presence of Jesus,” he said. “They are our passport to paradise.”
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SAN GIMIGNANO NEVER FAILS to light a few candles of fresh insight, even though the town is overrun by selfie-stick-thick platoons in all seasons. When we lived in Italy, on the first warm day of spring, we pulled our kids out of school early and came to San G. I bought a cardboard half liter of wine, a loaf of rustic Tuscan bread, some cheese, prosciutto, and blood oranges from Sicily. I found a grassy seat with a view, just outside the city walls, took my shirt off, and reveled in the sun’s warmth. A few weeks earlier, we had shivered through a rare snowstorm. Now, little yellow violets bloomed from notches in the towers. Noting the bread crumbs on my chest, my wife looked at me with a mix of disgust and bemusement.
“You’re just one irrigation ditch short of a full Spokane.”
We kept our kids from seeing the Last Judgment that day. It would have scared them, requiring an explanation that might prompt nightmares. We never did give them a tutorial on heaven and hell—two exclusive clubs, with too many requirements for membership. Living a good life is its own reward. You shouldn’t have to be frightened into doing the right thing, or incentivized by a hereafter of bliss. Still, you never stop wondering about the tomorrow after death. In my mother’s last hour, she faded in and out, wheezed a final gasp of incomprehension, and showed no sign that she was crossing over to a new realm. “I’m not afraid to die,” she had said. “I have no regrets.” Up until she got sick, the most important thing on her schedule was charity work at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, taking food and clothes to those who lived at the margins. I know how she treated the least among us, and so I have no worries for her soul passing the threshold set by Christ. And I know she did it because her heart compelled her to service, not because of any calculation about the afterlife.
This time around, passing through San G. as a Via Francigena traveler, I feel lighter than I did at the start of this pilgrimage. I don’t expect a miracle cure for my wife’s cancer-tortured sister, but I’ve found that wishing for one is the most humbling form of prayer. I may never understand the randomness of cruelty, but it’s futile to expect an ordered design to events. Not everything has a rational explanation. I may not get a moment with the pope. I may never forgive his church, and his church may never be mine again. Still, the closer I get to Rome, the less cluttered my thinking.
In town, I notice something encouraging. The contrast to the grim end-times fresco is a little side chapel in the Collegiata devoted to a sickly girl who died at the age of fifteen, in the year 1253—Saint Fina. Through the pain of what was likely a form of tuberculosis, through the loss of both parents, she remained remarkably cheerful, choosing to lie on a rough wood board rather than a bed. Upon her death, a profusion of yellow blossoms appeared, sprouting from nooks on the gray exterior walls of San Gimignano. What I saw on that spring day many years ago still blooms every March—the golden gillyflowers of Saint Fina. The oak plank,
big pieces of which are preserved in the chapel, is a prompt for much giving to hospitals in the area. The chapel walls are plaster palettes for the emotional depth of Fina’s story as painted by Ghirlandaio, the man who mentored Michelangelo. She lives—in those charitable acts in her name, in the two frescoes, in the explanation for why a riot of yellow flowers appears every year around the day she died, on March 12. Her little corner of the basilica is far more crowded with people than the floor beneath the Last Judgment ceiling. We’re drawn to Fina.
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YOU TAKE SIENA on its terms. Siena, by legend, is nearly as old as Rome. There’s always someone else to come along. Residents couldn’t care one way or the other, unless it concerns the greatest horse race on earth, the Palio. Having exhausted all clues about the afterlife from the ghastly depiction of it in San Gimignano, I need a whiff of secular stimulation to close out a long day. Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, off Siena’s oddly shaped Campo, is a lesson in fourteenth-century color. In the hall where municipal rulers met, the walls are frescoed with a vast tale of two cities: The Allegory of Good Government and Bad, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti circa 1337. Good Government depicts prosperous and healthy citizens, shiny homes, and clean animals—a well-built and well-run city. Bad Government, on an opposite wall, is a nightmare of graft and grifters, the vile and the vainglorious. The city is in ruins, scorched of its vegetation and beauty, brutes roaming the street. At the center is a figure labeled Tyranny, with horns sprouting from his head, fangs protruding over his lips, his eyes narrowed in a stare not unlike the laser-hard gaze of Vladimir Putin. The Black Death swept through Siena not long after this brilliant fresco cycle was completed. It killed the artist in 1348 and dealt a staggering blow to Siena. The city would not regain its population until the twentieth century.
A former convent, Alma Domus, now run by the local archdiocese, will put me up for the night. After a brief interrogation—yes, I’m married, but traveling alone, on the old trail to Rome—I get a room with a view of Lorenzetti’s city. How lucky am I to be seeing Siena fresh, through a pilgrim’s-eye view. With a quick ceremony, I say goodbye to the shower shoes. My figura will now be bella. And, using the Wi-Fi of the old convent’s common room, I fire off a nag note to the pope. I don’t phrase it that way. More like an update: I’m getting closer, I’ve learned much, but the questions loom. From the pope’s published schedule, I know he’ll be home when I’m in Rome. Francis, dear Francis—a pilgrim with a pen needs some clarity. I’m beginning to wonder, with sadness of heart, if the pontiff has gone dark on me.
The next day, it’s a two-minute walk to the residence of Catherine of Siena, the saint born during the plague, one of the most influential female diplomats of an age when women were treated like domestic servants. She is one of the few women Doctors of the Church, recognized for her theological insight. She was instrumental in bringing the papal seat back to Rome, from its relocation in Avignon during a prolonged dispute. Beginning in 1309, more than half a dozen popes, all of them French, cocooned in a palace in southern France while Rome fell apart. The cause of the breakup was a familiar one—to me, at least, after picking up so many nuggets of history left along the V.F. The church wanted more secular control, and secular potentates wanted more spiritual control. In Avignon, under a church-state marriage of convenience, medieval forces combined. Catherine’s letters persuaded the papacy to return to Rome after sixty-seven years in Avignon. The source of her power was like that of Francis’s: she was a mystic, not quite of this world, fasting to the point of starvation, while devoting her hours to helping the ravaged, the poor, and the dying. The city will never forget Catherine, not for a thousand years. How do I know this? Because it hasn’t forgotten her yet. Italy is nothing if not loyal to its patron saints.
Five minutes the other way is the Campo. I’ve attended a Super Bowl, Game Seven of the World Series, an NBA final, but none of those came close to the blood rush of witnessing the Palio—the most adrenaline-filled seventy seconds in Europe. We saw it when we lived nearby. The main piazza, the racecourse, is wildly uneven, with wicked turns. I can still feel the rumble of horse hooves on dirt-covered stones, taking those narrow bends in a gallop, three laps guided by jockeys on barebacks. A horse does not need a rider to win; it just has to cross the finish line. Some are drugged. Some tumble and have to be put down. I knew that the Palio’s origins dated to the thirteenth century, that it was a challenge between wards for bragging rights over the city, that the horses from the different contrade were paraded through churches and blessed, and that bribery was more responsible for victory than the speed of the mounted beast. But what I didn’t know until I could understand Italian was what the cherubic-faced children in the stands shouted to rivals from other neighborhoods.
“Your mothers are whores!”
“Your sisters are sluts!”
“You sleep with dogs!”
“You eat shit for breakfast!”
And the Palio, of course, is held in honor of the Virgin Mary.
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I STOP FOR CASH at the ATM of Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the oldest continuously operating bank in the world, founded in 1472. This institution practically invented banking. It was the pride of Siena, funding the Palio, and providing a way for pilgrims to use credit as they moved through a foreign land, a deterrence to robbers, offering loans to “poor or miserable or needy persons,” as the charter read. Many thousands could never have made the spiritual trek to Rome without it. The Via Francigena owes a huge debt to the bank’s early sense of duty. In this century, it gave out reckless loans, overpaid for rivals, splurged on hidden derivatives. It grew fat and corrupt, making money in the unregulated shadows of banking. The collapse was inevitable, the result of pride, greed, and scandal. Too big to fail, the bank had to be bailed out by the European Union, arousing the anger of populists, a voting mob that turned on those who governed them. For the cause of the crackup, look back inside the Palazzo Pubblico: they didn’t heed their frescoes.
* * *
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AT LEAST SIENA never went mad, unlike Florence, its longtime enemy. The best frescoes there are in San Marco, where you can see the Renaissance taking flight—its color and movement, its depth of field and appreciation for the human form, in the wall art of Fra Angelico. He painted scenes of miracles and wonder, with luminous Tuscan landscapes in the background, in forty-four of the dormitory cells of San Marco. Like Dom Pérignon, Fra Angelico was a monk who devoted his life to creating something beautiful and lasting in homage to God.
Not long after the brother of the brush died, Girolamo Savonarola settled in at San Marco as abbot. In just a few years, he turned his fellow friars into warriors, and the most cultured city in Europe into delirium. In profile, the best-known portrait of Savonarola shows a hooded, severe-looking man with a hawk’s beak. If people start to look like their personalities as they age, that image is accurate. Savonarola first arrived in Florence in 1482, having denounced his family after taking vows as a Dominican monk—“You should consider me dead,” he told them. He fasted and slept on a hard surface in a cold room. But his self-righteous sobriety would not be contained within the peaceful confines of San Marco.
He abhorred lusty art and literature at a time when Florence was enjoying both. Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus were sensual and exuberant, without any religious overtones, heralding the end of Gothic gloom. Here were half-clothed mythic figures in the prime of their lives, exuding joy. To Savonarola, it was “pagan art.” He was obsessed with the darkest parts of the Book of Revelation: punishment for sinners on this earth, an even more barbarian torture after death. His world was apocalyptic. In his preaching at the Florence cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—under Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, the largest dome in the world at the time—he ranted against free expression. The people were wicked; God would soon punish them. “I am the hailstorm that shall
smash the head of those who do not take cover,” he thundered. He predicted deaths of public figures, movements of armies, Florence under siege. All came true in short time, giving power to a new prophet.
The church in Rome was at peak corruption, as Martin Luther proclaimed just a few years later. One pope, Innocent VIII, encouraged Torquemada’s Inquisition and fathered sixteen children through several women. A second pope, Alexander VI, amassed an enormous personal fortune while cavorting with courtesans. It is said that Alexander, the most debauched of the Borgia pontiffs, even had an affair with one of his own daughters. Another pope contracted syphilis during his reign—a “disease very fond of priests, especially rich priests,” as the Renaissance saying had it. That was Julius II, known as Il Papa Terribile. Simony, the selling of church positions, was rampant. All of this roused the justifiable ire of Savonarola. And when Alexander tried to buy off the monk with a cardinal’s position, Savonarola said, “A red hat? I want a hat of blood.”
At home, the violence was brutal and swift. Libertines were jailed, tortured, and executed. “The time for mercy is past,” said Savonarola, urging his followers to “cut off the head” of those who opposed him. He denounced sodomites, gamblers, and blasphemers, as well as the Medici family, the wealthiest in Europe, enriched by a monopoly on the material used to dye clothes granted them by an earlier pope. After the Medici were forced to flee, the cleric from San Marco became de facto ruler. He wanted a “City of God” for the Republic of Florence. And in this city, at his request, a law was passed imposing the death penalty for sex between men. His youthful followers, thugs in service to a theocracy, went house to house, looking for perfume, art, poetry, chessboards, playing cards, mirrors, tapestries, musical instruments, books of poetry by Dante and Petrarch, statues, vases, portraits, fine clothes—anything of material beauty, anything that brought pleasure. Savonarola preached hatred and a vision of hell in Tuscany. “O, Italy, because of your lust, your avarice, your pride, your envy, your thieving, your extortion, you will suffer all manner of affliction and scourges.”
