by Tobias Jones
Back outside in the rain, every shop is offering articoli religiosi, from paintings and postcards of the man to statues costing as much as four million lire. With an embarrassed smile, Giovanni tells me that his father built a house here for an old lady – it had a large garden, three storeys and a lift – whose income derived entirely from the sale of these trinkets. I come from a Methodist background, and I’m uneasy with icons and relics, but my objections here are mainly aesthetic: too many semi-naked women releasing a dove to the heavens where, of course, the famous Capuchin priest is sitting.
We walk towards the hospital, the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza, or House for the Alleviation of Suffering, which dominates the town with its massive white façade topped by a statue of St Francis. In 1940 Pio decided that a hospital should be built. Legend has it that he single-handedly sought funding for the building from his visitors, placing donations in his handkerchief every day, and emptying out the coins onto his bed every evening (in fact, the hospital also received 250 million lire from the UNRRA in 1947). A protein used to treat diabetes was discovered in the hospital’s laboratory, adding to its renown, and – peculiarly – visitors are offered guided tours round its theatres and wards. On the anniversary of Pio’s death, tens of thousands of pilgrims gather to walk round the hospital through the night, keeping a candle-lit vigil.
We return to Giovanni’s house in Manfredonia. His father shakes his head when we begin talking about the town: he knew Padre Pio and describes him as scontroso, surly. (Similarly, Rispoli, the TV presenter, says that Padre Pio was burbero, ai limiti della scortesia – ‘gruff, on the verge of discourtesy’.) Everyone seems sure that he would not be pleased with what now goes on in his name. Certainly the town bears very little resemblance to a description of it by another priest in 1915, the year before Padre Pio’s arrival. ‘Only a deep silence is around me,’ he wrote, ‘sometimes interrupted by the sound of a bell hung on the neck of some sheep or goat which shepherds take to graze on the mountain behind the convent.’ Now the Frati Cappuccini have a website, urging exorbitant contributions to the new cathedral and quoting by way of encouragement the implausible last words of Padre Pio: ‘Make it big.’ There’s the constant noise of cranes and cement mixers, and I think of the words of the priest in La Dolce Vita: ‘Miracles are born out of solitude and silence, and not in chaos like this…’
The following day is warm, the sky entirely clear. We are going to visit the sanctuary at Monte Sant’Angelo, the place of the man with the arrow in his forehead. Giovanni, though, refuses to drive there: the village is very dangerous, because of a feud between two families that started fifty years ago when some livestock was stolen, and the two sons of the offending family were killed and dumped in the town. It’s not a place Giovanni wants to leave a smart car, so we take the coach. The scenery, as we rise away from the sea, is spectacular: hairpin bends take us towards whitewashed houses where linen, hung from every balcony, billows in the wind. The town seems older than San Giovanni Rotondo: the streets are narrow and steep, with labyrinthine flights of steps leading to the medieval quarter. The red-tiled roofs you can see from the top of the mountain are huddled together at odd angles. From here you can see clean across the Adriatic to the coasts of Albania and Montenegro. Even the local delicacy reflects the influence of the Catholic church: ostie ripiene, literally ‘stuffed hosts’, are two large, obviously unconsecrated, communion wafers around a filling of almonds and honey. Lining many of the pavements are religious stalls: next to the tiny bottles claiming to contain the Profumo di Padre Pio are ashtrays inscribed with a word of advice to users: Stronzo, smetti di fumare (‘idiot, give up smoking’).
The Santuario di San Michele is carved into the mountain. ‘This,’ it says in Latin above the entrance, ‘is the house of God and the gate of heaven.’ Legend has it that the Archangel Michael left a footprint here, which has prompted thousands of pilgrims to scratch the outlines of their own hands and feet into the stone slabs. Some, those in the prime positions, have become templates into which other people have placed their own hands. And I do have some sense of a gateway, even if it’s not a strictly religious sense – more the feeling that centuries of pilgrims, millions of them, have put their hands in the same spot mine is now, and that their touch has gradually eroded and smoothed and humanised the hard stone. It’s like cathedral steps hollowed in the middle after centuries of use.
As we look at the initials and dates, I realise there’s something very reassuring about antiquarian graffiti; about the fact that people over a thousand years ago were making this journey with miracles and the millennium in mind. Two centuries after Otto III, St Francis of Assisi visited the Santuario, but – feeling himself unworthy – didn’t enter it. We, of course, do, and admire the Byzantine Madonna of Constantinople and the filigree, crystal cross (a gift from Frederick II) which is said, like so many others, to contain wood from the True Cross.
We emerge from the cold Santuario and sit on a wall overlooking the sea. There are gulls soaring in the breeze and way below we can just see a fleet of fishing boats setting out from Manfredonia. Eating my ostie ripiene, I feel, if not the piety of the pilgrim, at least the serenity of the pilgrimage.
Catholicism is Italy, and vice versa. Even for a non-believer, being Italian implies absorbing the mores and morality of Roman Catholicism. It doesn’t offer a set of beliefs or liturgies to which a rational adult can chose to adhere; it offers a way of life, and of death. It’s a cradle-to-grave religion that isn’t only devotional, but political and social and aesthetic. It seeps into every corner of the country, into every stage of every life. ‘I know,’ Federico Fellini once said, ‘that I am a prisoner of 2,000 years of the Catholic Church. All Italians are…’ Or, as Hyppolite Taine put it: ‘Italians are entirely accustomed to Catholicism. It is a part of their eyes, their ears, their imagination and their taste.’
The connections between the country and its Catholicism are most obvious in the language. One hardly ever hears the words ‘Christian’ or ‘Christianity’ in Italian. The words, even the concepts, have been almost entirely replaced by ‘Catholic’ and ‘Catholicism’. People talk not about the Christian (let alone Jewish) commandments, but the ‘Catholic commandments’. Even Catholicism sometimes goes unmentioned, and is replaced by ‘The Church’, as if it’s already understood that we’re talking about an indivisible concept: Roman Catholicism.
I used to get irritated by that dogged belief in Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus: that no one outside the (Roman Catholic) church can possibly be saved. Bishops still talk of the Catholic Church as the only true church of Jesus Christ, dismissing all other strands of Christianity as heretical. Many cardinals mention millennia of Judaism or centuries of Protestantism with an acid sentence, and you begin to see why the country is so amazingly homogenous: nothing other than the Church will be tolerated. It’s ‘Catholic or nothing’ in Italy. It’s an argument I’ve had many times, and one which presents a relentless, circular logic: ‘Of course,’ I’m told, ‘Italy’s mono-cultural. Until five years ago there was no religion other than Catholicism.’ Why not? ‘Because Italy is Catholic.’ I know, but why? ‘Because it doesn’t have other religions.’ Why not? ‘Because we’re Catholics!’
What irritated me was the ignorance of, and intolerance towards, anything outside the Church. ‘You’re Protestant?’ people would ask me, nervously, ‘does that mean you can’t eat pork?’ The intolerance not just to other religions, but to other types of Christianity, is unfortunately fostered by the upper echelons of the Church. In August 2000 a Church declaration (called Dominus Jesus and endorsed by the Pope) announced that the Catholic Church represented the only ‘valid’ and ‘genuine’ Christian episcopate. Any other type of ordination – either Anglican or Non-Conformist – was simple heresy. Even to many Catholic onlookers it appeared like something from the Middle Ages. The inspiration for such announcements is invariably Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a man who heads what is called the Congregation for the Doct
rine of Faith (an organisation that acts as the guard dog against pluralism and tolerance).
It doesn’t take long to realise that Roman Catholicism is excruciatingly conservative and – like Italy itself – acutely hierarchical. An obvious consequence of that is a visceral anticlericalism. In Emilia-Romagna there’s even a shape of pasta called the ‘priest-strangler’. I’m frequently asked by the army of anticlericals what my most creative British blasphemy is. The disappointment, not to say disbelief, when I’m unable to produce a decent blasphemy is tangible. ‘Our priests,’ I always have to explain, ‘simply aren’t powerful enough to make us want to blaspheme. You would have to go to Ireland for that…’ Because of that power of the priesthood, the role of intermediaries and go-betweens is especially important. Nowhere else had I seen a congregation so distant from the deity. There are so many Madonnas (‘Dolorific Mary’ from one parish, ‘Honoured Mary’ in another), there are so many saints, that something as democratic as a direct relationship with God is unthinkable. The priest always gets in the way. The actual business of the Bible, and what it says, seems left behind. When the Bible is involved, excerpts are read by priests: for example the entire Passion story is read for 45 minutes each Palm Sunday. The congregation in Catholicism is entirely recipient rather than participant. Particularly so since the vernacular liturgy was adopted very late by the Church (masses are still said in Latin in some churches). The one thing that really got me thinking was the fact that entering a Catholic church is the only place in Italy I’m guaranteed not to hear singing. Or I might hear singing, but not the joyful, uplifting arias you can hear just walking along the street. It’s more timid, doleful. The Church is the only place, other than the post offices or the banks, where everyone is suddenly submissive, fretting quietly until their turn comes.
The other thing that strikes you is the fudging of right and wrong. In part it’s the result of the Church’s noble and unbending beliefs. Certain things are right, others wrong, and the man who decides is infallible. But after centuries of theological and catechismal accretion, its teachings are so specific that everyone inevitably falls short. The trouble is that the very strictness of the Church means that there’s a yawning gap between what’s preached and what’s practised. The fact that Italy has the lowest birth rate in Europe is simply the crudest example. Divorce, like contraception, isn’t allowed by the Church; therefore marriages, tens of thousands of them, are simply annulled each year as if they had never happened.
Once my initial irritation began to subside, however, I started to appreciate how wrong I had been about certain things. When you start talking to believers about what Catholicism really means to them, it appears – like all religions – beautiful and bizarre. The sacrament of ‘confession’ I had always understood simply as a way to keep sheep in the Catholic fold after (probably Protestant) apostasy; but I began to see that it wasn’t a substitute for punishment, but rather the result of a different notion of ‘grace’. It might be true that the dark confessional is in some ways responsible for the habitual impunity of Italian society, but it’s also, I thought, true that it contains an admirable sincerity. As for the iconography of the mother of the son of God, I began to admire it the more I saw of it. Not artistically, but symbolically: the kneeling, meek, mourning, very virtuous Madonnas, never glimpsed in any church I had ever worshipped in, seemed to express the epic suffering of centuries of mothers. And as indignant young girls started telling me about what their village Madonna meant to them, I began to see the first cracks of light to suggest the existence of feminism in Italy. It’s completely unquantifiable, of course, but the Madonna is probably the reason that some notion of the family as a ‘sacred unit’, having evaporated elsewhere, still exists in Italy. It’s certainly the reason that maternity has such an exalted status.
As for other sacraments, I finally understood why eating has such an important place in the country’s ceremonial set-up: the Mass. In church it’s called ‘communion’ or ‘eucharist’, but also the ‘holy dinner’. ‘Do Protestants have holy dinners?’ someone once asked me, as if convinced that a combination of northern European food and Protestantism precluded the possibility. And the saints, all those saints who I had never heard of and who are so high on the heavenly pecking list, I began to warm to them because devotion in their name invariably coincided with culinary delight. In Emilia-Romagna, for example, San Giovanni is remembered in July by the eating of tortelli, wraps of pasta containing pumpkin or potato or ricotta and herbs. Then, once you’ve eaten, it’s traditional to sit with friends in a garden or in a field until the dew arrives the following morning. Eating is, I realised with pleasure, Italian Catholics’ answer to the ‘work ethic’.
A more serious, social side of the Church is the amazing work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who, through Catholic organisations, dedicate entire weekends, or entire summer holidays, to helping immigrants or the ill or the aged. Their work is the flipside of the hierarchy’s intolerance. Whenever I spoke to those volunteers, they would always urge me to read not encyclicals from the Vatican, but the liberation theology from the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). That theology, they said, talked about a social rather than authoritarian religion and represented the true Church. The Second Vatican Council was an attempt at a modern Magna Carta, an attempt to involve bishops, even the laity, in the decisions of the Church. Many would say that its objectives have by now been entirely defeated by the Church’s extraordinary conservatism, but the documents from Vatican II stand out for their lyricism and tolerance. In Nostra Aetate, for example, the Church announced its ‘sincere respect for those ways of acting and living, those moral and doctrinal teachings which may differ in many respects from what she holds and teaches, but which none the less often reflect the brightness of that Truth, which is the light of all men’.1
In fact, I began to enjoy precisely what, for centuries, had been the butt of jokes by northern Europeans and Americans: the ritualism. From Henry James to Charles Dickens, there’s one word that always seems on the tip of their Protestant tongues: paganism. James described one Pope as ‘that flaccid old woman waving his ridiculous fingers over the prostrate multitude’; he eventually ‘turned away sickened by its absolute obscenity…’2 Charles Dickens was no less scathing. Churches, he said, looked like a ‘Goldsmith’s shop’ or a ‘lavish pantomime’; ‘I have been infinitely more affected in many English cathedrals when the organ has been playing.’ For their tastes, Catholicism was all too visual, tactile, the air was too thick with incense. Dickens couldn’t stand the ‘perfect army of cardinals and priests, in red, gold, purple, violet, white, and fine linen.’3 But that folkloric side, the blood-and-earth atmosphere, the glint of gold and the clicking on and off of electric candles, is exactly what I began to enjoy. It’s a religion that is felt rather than thought. Seeing and touching and smelling has become integral to believing, which is why churches are museums, houses of both high-art and the desperately kitsch. Their centrepieces are often relics which can be glimpsed through narrow grates: a fist of earth from Calvary containing Christ’s blood (in Mantova), San Gennaro’s blood which occasionally liquefies (in Naples), the remains of St Nicholas (at Bari). Relics, if you’re imaginative, are just morbid, meditational prompts in the Church’s sensuous assault on its believers.
There’s also a belief – as with the misteri of the Italian state – in the intervention of unseen, inexplicable powers. A miracle happens every time mass is celebrated. The communion isn’t a metaphor of a united church, it’s actually the literal flesh and blood of the deity ‘transubstantiated’ by the interventionist miracle of the presiding priest. And people really do believe in the direct power of the Madonna, or various saints, to alter earthly reality. Even I, having been sceptical about weekly news reports about miracles, began to listen to the stories (you don’t, I suppose, have to believe in the miracles to believe in other people’s belief). And when, every Easter, a local monk would ring my doorbell and ask to bless my flat
with his holy water, I would always ask him to come in. I was supposed to read a prayer (which mentioned loyalty to the local bishop, of course, before God even entered the equation), and then he started blessing the flat. I even found myself ushering him towards certain objects – computer, football boots – that need all the holy water they can get.
The bullet that, on 13 May 1981, was fired at Pope John Paul II is now lodged in the crown of the Madonna of Fatima in Portugal. The Pope’s desire to place the bullet there was the denouement to the story of Catholicism in the twentieth century. For someone used to the whitewashed walls of Methodist chapels, where religion appears simple, cerebral, occasionally austere and sometimes dull, the story of Catholicism and the Vatican in recent years appears completely the opposite: colourful, confusing, gripping and always mysterious.
Fatima, like Lourdes or San Giovanni Rotondo, is an important place of pilgrimage for modern Catholics. On 13 May 1917 (exactly 64 years before the shooting of John Paul II) three young peasants in Fatima in Portugal received visions from the Madonna. The revelations were in three parts. The first warned of the condition of hell for transgressors against God. A few months later, the second revelation was more temporal: ‘If my requests are not granted,’ the godhead revealed to the children, ‘Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions against the Church.’ The political message, on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, was understood and widely publicised. Strange, specific observances were apparently required of true believers: the necessity of the Rosary, the wearing of the brown scapular. On 13 October, just days before Lenin took power in Russia, 70,000 believers gathered in the small Portuguese village, where the children had promised a miracle to testify to the truth of the message. Observers described a moment in which the sun seemed to ‘dance’ and change colour in the sky (an event now classified by the Church as ‘a veritable miracle’).
