Everything in Italian culture, therefore, teaches clergy to regard themselves as omnicompetent. Their opinions on every conceivable issue, from cloning to tomorrow’s soccer matches, are solicited and weighed with great seriousness. In such a context, it requires an act of self-discipline to say, “That’s outside my competence." Italian culture gives clerics every reason to conclude that nothing is outside their purview and that the world is anxious to hear what they have to say. This can be frustrating for lay observers of the Italian political scene. Prominent political scientist and editorialist for Corriere della Sera, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, told me in a 2003 interview that he finds it absurd that Italian clergy are expected to provide judgments on matters of politics and economics when Italian seminaries provide no training in these subjects whatsoever. “They recycle the same banalities, which often hurt more than they help in terms of trying to really penetrate issues," Galli della Loggia said. “Either they should stay out of these matters or have something to say." Yet one can hardly blame clergy for responding in this way, when the broader culture gives them every reason to believe this is their role. If Italy is willing to offer the Church the front page of its newspapers and leading spots on its public affairs programs, why should its representatives say no? At the same time, this aspect of Italian culture does produce a certain fuzziness about the distinction between lay and clerical roles that can frustrate Catholics around the world.
Another way in which the unique situation of the Italian Catholic Church has an influence on Vatican thought patterns is in their appreciation for the nature of the challenge facing the Church today. In Italy, like anywhere else, the Church has its problems. While 97 percent of the population of 57 million is baptized, many Italians are effectively uncatechized, and only 25 percent go to Mass on a weekly basis. That figure disguises regional variations; in the more developed north, the figure can in some places fall below 10 percent, paralleling the situation in Northern Europe. (Italian analysts note, however, that declining participation in the life of the Church is not necessarily linked to modernization. The strongest Catholic organizations in Italy are in Lombardia and the Veneto, the most developed regions of the country.) In the diocese of Rome, the Pope’s own backyard, a recent study commissioned by the Church found that 90 percent of males ages sixteen to twenty-two held hostile attitudes to the institutional church and had shockingly little knowledge of essential points of the Catholic faith. To offer a personal example, my private Italian tutor, a well-educated young woman in her thirties who lives in Rome, once told me she had never seen the papal flag, or known that such a thing existed, until she visited my office.
All that said, the Italian Catholic church still has a vitality and a social profile that reflects two resources few other national churches enjoy: the culture and the state. On the cultural front, Italy is in many ways still an intact Catholic society in which the church’s liturgical seasons still shape the annual calendar and in which Catholic customs and vocabulary are part of the ordinary public consciousness. People in Italy know when it’s Lent, they know when it’s Advent, and they certainly know when it’s Christmas. Cab drivers can explain the difference between Franciscans and Dominicans, and hotel clerks can describe the fine points of major Roman basilicas. There’s a sense in which Catholicism is in the marrow of the place, which gives clergy an enormous pastoral advantage. There are certain concepts they don’t have to explain, certain social manifestations of the faith they don’t have to justify. It can be hard for Italian clergy to appreciate sometimes the reality of ministering to cultures that are not traditionally Catholic, in which this support system doesn’t exist. I have a friend, for example, who is a Dutch priest, and who today serves as pastor of the cathedral parish in a Dutch diocese. For years, however, he split time between Rome and Holland, wearing his Roman collar both in Rome and back home in Amsterdam. In Rome, he was a face in the crowd; in Amsterdam, he’s a curiosity and a conversation piece. Those who know only the cultural world of Rome are thus missing what it’s like to represent the Church outside this peculiar cultural milieu.
That sensibility is also affected by the way the Italian government supports the church, above all through the so-called otto per mille system. In essence, the Italian government allows taxpayers to elect to assign a percentage of their taxes intended for social services to one of the country’s religious organizations or to the state. When Italy’s currency was still the lire, the amount was eight lire for every thousand paid in taxes, thus the phrase otto per mille. The Catholic Church and five other religious bodies, including the Waldensians and the Seventh Day Adventists, are included in the distribution. Since many Italians don’t really trust the government, many choose to assign their otto per mille contributions to the religious groups, and some 87 percent choose the Catholic Church. But the support doesn’t end there. Under the formula applied by the Italian government, the otto per mille contributions of all those taxpayers who leave this section blank, which is the vast majority, 22 out of 36 million in 2002, are apportioned based on the percentages of those who do make a choice. This means the Catholic Church in Italy gets 87 percent of all the unassigned contributions as well. The result is a windfall. In 2002, for the first time, the Italian church received more than 1 billion Euro through the otto per mille system.
That money supports clerical salaries, pastoral expenses, as well as administration costs for the Italian bishops’ conference. These resources allow the Catholic Church in Italy to operate a vast network of endeavors, including a well-respected daily newspaper, L’Avvenire, its own television channel, Sat2000, and a lineup of symposia and congresses and continuing education offerings that would put many Ivy League universities to shame. Ironically, only 18 percent of the otto per mille funds assigned to the Catholic Church are directly spent on charitable purposes, which was the original intent of the law. As a spokesperson for the Italian bishops put it, however: “Charity walks on the legs of human beings, whom the church has to form and sustain, also economically." The result is that the Catholic Church in Italy operates a massive bureaucratic operation that is sustained largely through public funds.
Italian clergy, and especially Italian bishops, can therefore at times be cavalier about the challenges in other parts of the world when it comes to formation of culture or financial support. At times, one hears a rather preemptory attitude of “God will provide" when dismissing proposals brought by clergy from other parts of the world for adaptations that might make their own circumstances more manageable. Of course, that’s an easy thing to say when one realizes that even if God doesn’t come through, the otto per mille will. Even beyond the question of finance, there is an assumption in the Italian clerical world that the state can, and should, support the institutional dimensions of the Church. During the American sexual abuse crisis, for example, Italian clergy more than once expressed puzzlement at why American bishops couldn’t simply “work something out" in quiet with the judges or the police. This was not necessarily a matter of wishing to evade justice, but it reflects a culture in which Church and state are assumed to be partners and collaborators. Clergy formed in the Italian ecclesiastical milieu, in other words, can sometimes be a bit insulated psychologically from the real challenges of running the Catholic Church in places where it does not enjoy the same safety net of cultural and political support.
SECULAR ITALY
Among the first things an ex-patriate notices about life in Italy is the suffocating bureaucracy, which makes everything more complicated than it ought to be. Obtaining one’s permesso di soggiorno, a living permit, is a rite of passage for new arrivals. Many an innocent foreigner has waited hours in line at the questura, the Italian police station, only to be informed that they needed two state-issued stamps to complete their application rather than one. These cannot be obtained at the questura, but must be purchased at a tobacco shop, and the hapless applicant must start the process all over again. So it goes. Getting a phone line installed, arranging a
uto insurance, and subscribing to the satellite TV service are equally infamous quagmires. (It should be noted, however, that true veterans say that all these systems are better than they once were. The last time my wife and I renewed our permessi di soggiorno, for example, it took us an hour. We were seated next to a British woman who works for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, who told us that “this used to be a day’s business.")
Italians, and people shaped by Italian culture, are used to bureaucracies not making a lot of sense. They’re used to things not working, to even simple matters taking far longer than they should. One American veteran of Rome said this was revealed to him the first time he went back to the United States after a couple of years abroad. He had set a full day aside to run errands, got in his car at 9:00 A.M., and was done by 10:30. Paying a couple of bills and renewing his driver’s license, which would have taken all day in Rome, had required all of ninety minutes in his mid-sized California city. People who live in Italy are accustomed to strikes suddenly leading to canceled flights or demonstrations in the middle of town meaning that it takes an hour to cover a route that should take fifteen minutes. Tell an American that it will take two weeks to fix a problem in their bathroom, and he’ll call another plumber; tell an Italian, and he’ll shrug. All this shapes the cultural context of the Roman Curia. The men and women of the Curia learn from life experience not to become impatient when things take longer than they would like. They more easily accept irrational and burdensome bureaucratic requirements, because that is part of the world in which they live. Life teaches them that fulminating and complaining are of limited value, and not to expect that any of the proposed solutions are really going to make things better.
The flip side of bureaucratic indifference, however, is the importance of human contact. Italians may struggle to make their bureaucratic systems work, but they shine at interpersonal relationships. One sees this reality in every social context. Everything changes in Roman restaurants, for example, when one becomes a regular. Menus become irrelevant because waiters know what you like, and the service becomes an occasion for catching up among old friends. In banks, in post offices, in grocery stores and barbershops, the quality of service one gets is heavily dependent upon what level of personal connection the person delivering the service feels. A quick anecdote makes the point. I once went to the Gregorian University to look up a doctoral dissertation by a man who had just been named to an important curial post. I presented myself and was told I needed to wait for authorization from the rector of the library, who was busy. A half-hour went by, and no one seemed the least bit concerned. Finally I got out my cell phone and dialed Jesuit Fr. Gerry O’Collins, an eminent Australian theologian who teaches at the Gregorian, and who is a friend. He happened to be in his office, and I asked him if he could come down and wave me through. O’Collins arrived within seconds, and instead of simply getting me past the door, he took me down to the library offices and introduced me to the rector. He told her I was “an eminent Vatican writer." Thus I entered her realm of personal contacts, and she was effusive—insisting, for example, that if I needed to make photocopies that I use her personal machine. She thrust her card into my hands and told me to return any time. That, in a nutshell, is the importance of connections in Italian culture.
This ethos of personal contacts is replicated inside the Vatican. Officials might be unresponsive, even hostile, to strangers in a way that Americans would find rude. But once you have met the person in a social context—an embassy party, perhaps, or a book presentation—they feel an obligation that goes beyond what Americans would feel toward a casual acquaintance. In such a context, even when Vatican officials may not be able to satisfy your particular request or to respond directly to the question you have asked, they will search for some other way to be helpful. One curial undersecretary put it this way: “Even something as simple as getting a book printed by the Vatican printers can be a very different experience depending upon whether they know you or not. When I first started taking things over there, they would just give me a standard answer of ‘two months,’ and I could tell they were thinking, ‘Who is this guy? Is he going to stick around?’ Now they know me, and if I need something in a hurry, they’ll make it happen." For Americans, building an adequate network of personal contacts can be a special challenge, because the typical American in the Curia will rotate back to the United States after five years. In the Vatican, five years can feel like the blink of an eye. Having forged those ties, however, it is often remarkable what people can accomplish, regardless of their job title or official level of importance.
Another sense in which the Italian sociological reality has consequences for the Vatican is the impact of Italian journalism. Because the Vatican is in their backyard, Italian news organizations invest tremendous resources on the beat. Each of the major Italian newspapers—Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa, II Messagero, II Giornale, II Manifesto —has a full-time Vatican correspondent, what the Italians call a Vaticanista, and it is among the more prestigious and high-profile assignments. Their coverage of the Vatican thus reflects the best and worst characteristics of Italian journalism. The best is that Italian media encourage subjectivity, they allow journalists to bring their passions and their convictions to their work, so that each correspondent develops a unique perspective. When one reads Orazio Petrosillo in Il Messagero, one gets a very different point of view than Marco Politi in La Repubblica . Petrosillo is generally Vatican-friendly, while Politi is often more critical. Reading the major Vaticanisti is always a fascinating, thought-provoking exercise. The disadvantage of this approach, however, is that concern for factual accuracy is not the highest value. Sometimes journalists will publish rumors or hypotheses—perhaps flagged as such by use of the conditional tense, perhaps not—without much effort to determine if they’re true. In part, this is because Italian journalism is often seen as an extension of politics. Papers allied with the center-left parties publish articles hostile to the center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for example, often without great concern for the details. This is all considered more or less fair game.
This reality has two consequences. First, it means the coverage of the Vatican in the entire world press is often dreadful, because it is heavily dependent upon the Italians. Reporters in Rome for the London Times, or German television, or O Globo in Brazil, who are not full-time Vatican specialists, tend to take their cues from what’s in the Italian press. Even when they realize that it’s not always reliable, under the pressure of deadlines they will simply take an account from Il Messagero or La Stampa, rewrite it with a couple of fresh quotes, and file it for their own news outlet. In May 2003, for example, Il Messagero published an article claiming, falsely as it turned out, that the major schismatic movement of Latin Mass traditionalists was about to be reconciled with Rome. The London Times rewrote the story the next day, propelling it into the English-speaking realm. The result is that poor reporting is multiplied around the world. How many times did you see stories about Pope John Paul’s alleged retirement, for example, or his alleged use of some new miracle drug like papaya extract, only to have the story fall apart? That’s the “Italian effect." To be fair, many Italian reporters are careful, serious professionals who are themselves mortified by this sort of sloppiness or indifference to the facts.
Second, the nature of Italian journalism exacerbates the reluctance of many in the Vatican to deal with the press. “They’re just going to make it up anyway" is the attitude one often hears from curial officials who feel that there’s little to be gained from greater openness. Understandably, Vatican officials who have had bad experiences of being misrepresented, or being the objects of unfounded speculation, will be reluctant to engage the media. In truth, most Vatican officials just laugh when they see the more outlandish instances of this sort of thing and are capable of distinguishing between journalists who are serious and those who are not. Yet the cumulative effect of the way the Italian p
ress covers the Vatican is to deepen a sense that the media is unreliable, which is the last thing likely to be helpful for an institution struggling to emerge from its historical shell.
A final example of the impact of Italian culture on the Vatican concerns attitudes toward criminal justice. This point played an important role in Vatican reactions to the American sexual abuse crisis, especially in the way curial officials reacted to proposals to require bishops to report allegations of sexual abuse against priests to the police. Most Americans regard this as a “no-brainer." Sexual abuse of a minor is a crime, so when a bishop receives an accusation against a priest, he should turn it over. Yet some in the Vatican blink at such a requirement. In part, the concern is to protect a zone of intimacy in a bishop’s relationship with his priests, so a priest does not have to worry that every time he discusses a problem with his bishop, the police will be involved. This reflects the traditional theology of the bishop’s office, in which a bishop is understood as a paterfamilias, a head of the family, and his priests are both his brothers and his sons. But there’s another factor, more sociological than theological, which is Italian skepticism about the impartiality of secular justice.
An episode from 2002 makes the point. On November 17, a bombshell verdict was delivered against seven-time former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison by an appeals court for allegedly instigating the murder of a muckraking journalist in 1979. Andreotti was first charged in the slaying in 1995 on the basis of testimony from a turncoat mob member and, after a long legal process, was exonerated in September 1999. Under Italian law, however, prosecutors as well as the defense can appeal a verdict, so the case went before an appeals court. Against all expectations, that panel found Andreotti guilty, even though it acquitted the men who were supposed to have actually done the killing. Andreotti is an avatar of the old Christian Democratic political order linked to the Church. He directs the influential Catholic journal 30 Giorni and is a daily communicant at the church of San Giovanni Battista dei Fiorentini. His supporters believed that leftist magistrates were engaged in a campaign of political persecution using trumped-up allegations.
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