But an even more decisive factor is that, seen from the Roman perspective, the movements are not predominantly conservative. Historically, the most visible movement throughout Italy has been Catholic Action, whose guiding spirit has always been centrist, which politically allied it with the old Christian Democratic party, placing it equidistant from the extreme right (neofascism or monarchism) and from the extreme left (communism). Today the complex world of lay Catholic movements in Italy, such as Pax Christi, Beati i Costruttori di Pace, Tempi di fraternità, Cipax, ACLI, and the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, tend to be identified with the political left. The more moderate are considered by political analysts as a reliable base of support for center-left candidates such as Romano Prodi, who governed Italy as prime minister in the mid-1990s and then became president of the European Commission. Those further to the left may have links to the no-global movement and Italy’s Refounded Communist Party.
In recent times, the highest profile movement in Rome itself has been the Community of Sant’Egidio, the only one of the new movements born in the Eternal City. It was founded in 1968 by a group of young Catholic leftists who did not want to drift off into secular radicalism, but wanted to stay anchored to the gospel. Initially they set up schools for the poor around Rome’s periphery. Eventually they needed a meeting place in the middle of town, and took up residence in the Piazza di Sant’Egidio in Trastevere, from where the community takes its name. Today Sant’Egidio is active across a wide range of issues, from conflict resolution in Mozambique to abolition of the death penalty to ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. Sociologically and politically, the center of gravity in Sant’Egidio is on the left, yet it has terrific contacts in the Vatican. Founder Andrea Riccardi is sometimes dubbed un cardinale laico by the Italian press, because despite being a layman, he has the Pope’s ear and moves in all the right ecclesiastical company. Rarely is there a high-profile conference or symposium in Rome that Riccardi is not on the panel. Occasionally Riccardi publishes an essay on some cultural debate on the front page of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most respected daily newspaper. This is not to say that Sant’Egidio lacks detractors—respected Italian journalist Sandro Magister, for example, has published critical commentaries about their recruiting tactics and the cult of personality around Riccardi. Even that sort of negative public commentary, however, has increased Sant’Egidio’s profile on the Roman scene.
Hence when officials in the Vatican think about the “new movements," they are not thinking of a cluster of right-wing groups. They do not have the impression that the movements are an ideologically identifiable phenomenon, and therefore tend not to think of them as divisive or polarizing. In short, the negative images that some English-speaking Catholics have of the movements simply are not in the air in Rome. Of course, this does not mean that Vatican officials are unaware of the debate surrounding the movements in other parts of the world. They realize that some have developed a reputation as being elitist, secretive, and hard to reconcile with the pastoral agenda of local parishes and dioceses. But their sense of the urgency of these problems, and what context to put such complaints in versus the good that the movements do, is likely to be quite different when one sees the issue from the Roman vantage point.
SECULAR ROME
Rome, like many urban centers in Europe, tilts to the left politically. In most elections, the city will reliably come in for the center-left coalition, with a good chunk of votes for the Refounded Communist party, while the wealthier communities in the hills outside vote center-right. This means that living and working in urban Rome, as most Vatican officials do, one’s sense of “popular opinion" may sometimes be distorted. For example, hanging out in Roman cafes one would be astonished that conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was ever elected in Italy, because you’d struggle to find anyone who admits voting for him. Polls at the time of this writing show, however, that Berlusconi has the support of some 60 percent of Italians. It’s not that those people are figments of pollsters’ imaginations, but they simply don’t spend much time in wine bars in the capital city. Thus when Vatican officials take stock of what’s going on by opening their eyes in the middle of Rome, what they see is real, but not always representative.
One example came in late 2002 and 2003, during the long and diplomatically fractious buildup to the U.S.-led war in Iraq. John Paul II and the Holy See emerged as a leading global center of opposition to the war. This opposition was in the first place a principled moral stand that the proposed action did not meet the tests of a just war, and furthermore that it risked damaging the rule of international law and triggering a “clash of civilizations." It was also a realpolitik calculation that a war would not be in the interests of the 14 million Christians living in the Arab world, and that by visibly opposing the war, the Pope could help the Islamic street distinguish between the Bush administration and “the West." As the diplomatic wrangling became more intense, the Vatican took comfort from what officials perceived as near-unanimous public support for the Pope’s antiwar stance. This perception was easy to understand if one took as the barometer of public opinion what was visible in the streets of Rome, where antiwar sentiment was nearly unanimous. Virtually every building in town had at least one, and often dozens, of the rainbow-colored peace flags that became the symbol of the antiwar movement hanging out its windows. Newspapers were full of antiwar commentary, alarmist analyses about the growing isolation of the Bush White House, and warm praise for the Pope’s stance. On February 17, 2003, organizers claimed some 3 million people clogged the center of Rome for an antiwar rally. Even though police estimates knocked the number down to roughly 1 million, it was still an enormous turnout. For weeks, smaller groups of young protestors disrupted crosstown traffic by sitting or lying down in the middle of roads in the center of the city.
In such a climate, it was indeed tempting for Vatican officials to conclude that virtually everyone was with the Pope. In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter on February 4, then-Archbishop Renato Martino, now a cardinal, an Italian who serves as president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said as much: “Everybody is against the war." Several Vatican commentators referred to the massive social movements in favor of peace as one of the great positives of the Iraq crisis, reflecting this sense that the world was almost speaking as one, with only the Bush administration holding out against it. John Paul himself, on March 24, 2003, referred to the “vast contemporary movement in favor of peace." In fact, that perception was exaggerated, even if it is true that the solid majority of Western European opinion was antiwar. Polls showed that the proposed action had the support of a majority of Americans. In much of Eastern Europe there was widespread agreement with the Bush position. After the fact, of course, the world discovered that the Iraqis themselves were divided, but many seemed grateful for the American intervention. The notion that “everybody is against the war" was not fully correct, but it was an understandable surmise given the Roman vantage point.
Another instance in which the streets of Rome became a window onto the world for Vatican officials came in the summer of 2000, with the two great mass events of that year: the World Gay Pride festival in July and the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day in August. The first event brought some 1 million people to Rome for a march in favor of gay liberation; the second brought some 2 million Catholic youth to the streets of the city center, and eventually to the Mass site of Tor Vergata, for an encounter with the Pope.
While Vatican officials were preoccupied with the growing social acceptance of homosexuality prior to 2000, there’s little question that the Gay Pride festival of that summer, especially landing in the middle of a papally decreed Jubilee Year, brought the concern home. As things turned out, it could have been much worse. Sensationalist news reports before the event predicted that gays would copulate in the streets of Rome, storm St. Peter’s Basilica, or accost several thousand Polish pilgrims who were in town at the same moment. Far-ri
ght forces had threatened a showdown; in the days leading up to the march, they paraded through the streets with banners reading, “Gays at the Colosseum? With lions inside!" None of this came to pass. At the same time, however, pictures in local papers and on TV of scantily clad homosexuals bumping and grinding as they moved down the streets of the Eternal City created an alarm over the homosexual issue in Vatican offices that had previously not existed. It is one thing to read about Act-Up demonstrators in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. It’s another to witness in person the familiar flamboyant touches of Gay Pride events—men dressed up as women, men and women hardly dressed at all, and enough spiked collars, feathers, leather, and bizarre mascara to cast a Rocky Horror Picture Show remake. Given the proximity of the Vatican, there were also a few special twists—a Swiss man sporting a Roman collar and ultratight shorts blowing kisses and an overweight Italian in a tight T-shirt wearing a bishop’s mitre reading “God loves me too." Some of the alarm in the Holy See over homosexuality, which led in summer 2003 to the issuance of a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on gay marriage, can perhaps be traced to lingering sense-memories of the 2000 march.
World Youth Day, on the other hand, made converts of a number of Vatican officials who had previously not been sold on youth ministry. For a solid week, Catholic youth from every part of the globe filled the city of Rome. At times the crowds were so thick one literally could not cross the Piazza Navonna or the Piazza della Rotonda in front of the Pantheon. The papa-boys, as the Italian press dubbed them, stuffed themselves into buses and trams, filled pizzerie and trattorie, and otherwise occupied the city. Italian television carried the culminating events live, including an evening prayer vigil with the Pope and the Mass the next morning. It was a massive logistical operation, but it filled Rome with life during the traditional ferragosto break. Vatican officials who were in Rome, and who had only seen a World Youth Day on television or read about it in the papers, were dazed at the vitality of these young people and by their love for the Church and for the Pope. To be sure, journalists reported that many of the papa-boys did not necessarily agree with the moral stands of the Church on a range of issues. It caused a brief flurry when some newspapers claimed that used condoms were found among the garbage collected afterward. This is probably an urban myth, but in any event it misses the point. The young people were not coming to make a political statement in favor or against a particular set of Church teachings, but for something much deeper—a sense of connection to the divine, and to a person, the Pope, who calls forward the best in themselves. They wanted to be affirmed in their quest to be spiritual and moral persons, regardless of what specific conclusions they might draw about what that means. Many Vatican officials afterward said they had once entertained doubts about the value of these papal megaevents, but not anymore.
The point is that if you want to get the attention of the Roman Curia, for good or ill, the best way to do it is to come to Rome. Books can be in circulation for years, but until they are translated into Italian and presented at a launch in Rome, many people in the Curia will be unaware of their existence. If something is in the streets in Rome, if it’s in the papers and on the TV, you can be sure it will penetrate the consciousness of most of the men and women who serve in the Vatican. That can at times produce an idiosyncratic way of construing the world, but then every location comes with its own perspective. If the Vatican were in Manhattan, there would be a similar skew, though with its own peculiar characteristics. One cannot lift the Vatican out of space and time and give it a purely objective view of reality. The next best thing is to understand what being in Rome means for the way the Vatican sees things, and translate accordingly.
Layer Three: Italy
Despite the internationalization of the Roman Curia launched by Pope Paul VI and extended under John Paul II, the Italian influence in the Vatican remains enormously consequential. Taking into consideration the Secretariat of State and the all-important nine congregations, as of September 2003 there were three Italians in a top-level prefect’s job (including Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state), but seven Italians at the level of secretary and nine Italians at the level of undersecretary. Even allowing for the fact that a few congregations have two secretaries, and others have two or more undersecretaries, that remains an overwhelming Italian presence in the key decision-making positions. No other national group could claim more than one official at each of these three superior levels. The result is that the rhythms and assumptions of Italian culture tend to be crucial in shaping the worldview of those who set Vatican policy.
We have already noted in chapter 3, discussing the value of the bella figura in Vatican psychology, the difference between an Italian-Mediterranean view of law and the Anglo-Saxon concept. If one took a poll of Anglo-Saxon Catholic clergy who have spent time in Italy, that conceptual gap might well emerge as the most important way in which Italian culture conditions the mind of the Holy See. But it is the tip of the iceberg. The Vatican is an institution that has been rooted in Italian culture for two thousand years, and cannot help but bear its imprint in manifold ways. Here we’ll take two examples from Italian ecclesiastical life and two from the secular realm to illustrate this impact.
ECCLESIASTICAL ITALY
When American Catholic intellectual Michael Novak came to Rome during the buildup to the Iraq conflict in spring 2003, one of the points he made was that according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is the role of the civil authority to make prudential judgments about war. Gently implied was that it is not the role of the clergy. Some in the Vatican felt Novak was deliberately missing the point, since one of their differences with the Bush administration was precisely over which civil authority had that authority. The Vatican felt that only the United Nations could authorize a preventive use of force, not the White House. But setting that dispute aside, Novak had indeed struck a nerve. Many critics in the United States and elsewhere were puzzled by what they saw as the explicitly political line coming from Rome, and the fact that organs of the Holy See such as the Jesuit-run journal Civiltà Cattolica and Vatican Radio seemed to be issuing weekly jeremiads against U.S. policy. This was especially galling for some American Catholic families whose sons and daughters were risking their lives in Iraq, and who wanted to turn to the Church for comfort, not scolding. To hear what sounded like partisan political commentary in such a moment was, for these Catholics, discouraging and painful.
In truth, however, for anyone who lives in Italy, there was nothing new to the daily drumbeat of political commentary from the Vatican. The only novelty was that this time the whole world was listening. In overwhelmingly Catholic Italy, clergy are by definition also politicians. The Vatican is a critical point of reference not just on religious questions, but on everything. If a proposal for a new highway were to arise, journalists would beat a path to the Vatican’s door for an opinion. Every year when the annual Italian budget moves through the system, observers wait for L’Osservatore Romano to deliver a judgment. Every Thursday, the director of Vatican Radio goes on the air to deliver observations about current political, social, and diplomatic events that are often surprising for the sharpness of his judgments.
Of course, this does not mean the Vatican’s view always prevails. As early as May 1974, when 59.3 percent of Italians voted against the Church in order to uphold the country’s divorce law, it was clear that the Church could no longer single-handedly impose its will. Some political analysts believe the Church remains in a position to move votes, and even if it’s only 5 percent, in a tight election that could make the difference. Others say the Church has no political impact in this sense, but that does not stop politicians from eagerly seeking to cultivate the impression that the Church supports them, or at least does not oppose them. There isn’t a candidate in Italy who would say no to a picture with the Pope.
Beyond the Church’s capacity to tip the electoral balance, however, there is a deeper reality at work. Italy, des
pite proud assertions of its identity as uno stato laico, a lay Republic, has really never separated Church and State. During the Holy Year of 2000, the Vatican sponsored a “jubilee of politicians" and virtually every political figure of note in the country’s power structure attended. When John Paul II spoke at the Italian parliament in November 2002, leaders of all parties fell over themselves to applaud his leadership. The site itself was a symbol of the inevitable intertwining of Church and State here: Montecitorio, the site where the parliament meets, once housed the ecclesiastical tribunals of the Papal States. This is a country where Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna could propose in 2000 that Catholics, such as Filipinos and Latin Americans, be given preference in immigration because they are more compatible with the national identity, and the proposal was taken seriously. Newspapers spent days dissecting it, and the idea sparked wide national debate.
For every issue that comes up in Italian national life, one of the first things journalists will do is seek out the opinion of a member of the College of Cardinals. That opinion will often get more prominent play than any other views except those of the prime minister and top opposition figures. As I write these words, Italy is debating whether Adrian Sofri, a leftist radical convicted and sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kill an Italian policeman in May 1972, but who has become a widely respected author who no longer espouses violence, should be given a pardon. As soon as the debate broke out, Corriere della Sera, the country’s leading daily newspaper, prominently featured an interview with eighty-nine-year-old Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, who is sort of the David Brinkley of Italian culture, a man whose distinctive voice and opinions help set the tone for public discussion. Tonini favored the pardon. Anytime the public debate is over a matter of sexual morality, Bishop Elio Sgreccia, the vice-president of the Pontifical Academy of the Family, is a staple of Italian talk shows. A small, pudgy, balding figure, Sgreccia looks a bit like Yoda from Star Wars, and on Italian TV his wisdom is sought out just about as often.
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