by John Hooper
Unexpectedly perhaps, Father Giussani also inspired the foundation of a business association, the Compagnia delle Opere, whose growth has been even more remarkable than that of CL’s core fellowships. By its own account,3 some thirty-six thousand firms are now affiliated. In 2012, their combined annual turnover was put at €70 billion.4
In Italy, CL’s ventures include an annual meeting in Rimini that is a national event, widely reported in the media. Past speakers have included Nobel laureates, foreign prime ministers, leading Italian politicians and the late Mother Teresa. But it is in Milan, Italy’s business capital, and Lombardy, the surrounding region, where Comunione e Liberazione was born, that its political impact has been greatest. For years, the key local conflict has been an undeclared, and mostly invisible, rivalry between the conservative CL and Azione Cattolica, which over the years has become representative of a more liberal Catholicism. In 1995, the ciellini, as members of the CL are known, got the upper hand when Roberto Formigoni, one of their number and a member of the Memores Domini, who subsequently joined Silvio Berlusconi’s party, was elected governor of Lombardy. He kept the job for seventeen years, during which time the region became a virtual fiefdom of Comunione e Liberazione. Ciellini were given key jobs and, said the organization’s critics, lucrative contracts were repeatedly steered toward firms belonging to the Compagnia delle Opere. Formigoni’s governorship ended in a welter of scandal. In 2014, the governor, who denied any wrongdoing, was put on trial, charged with corruption and criminal conspiracy.
Catholicism, though, is present in Italy in many less controversial ways. Because of the activities of the charity Caritas, the lives of many a homeless man or woman are a lot less miserable than they would be otherwise. The Church runs about a fifth of the health service, though how long that will remain the case is in doubt. Catholic hospitals rely heavily on the services of nuns. And nuns in Italy, once ubiquitous, are becoming increasingly scarce. By 2010, Italian convents still housed almost a third of all the nuns in Europe. But many of the women were elderly or foreign, and their total number had plunged by more than 10 percent in the previous five years.
The Catholic Church also teaches about 7 percent of the country’s school students, a lower proportion than in many other European countries. But since the public educational system has been obliged to provide religious instruction, devout Italian parents have had less incentive to pay for a specifically Catholic education.
Italian Catholicism has also given rise to one of the most unusual players in international diplomacy: the Rome-based Community of Sant’Egidio. Founded by a group of school students amid the political and ecclesiastical turmoil of 1968,* it takes its name from a church in the Trastevere quarter of Rome alongside the former convent where it is based. Whereas Comunione e Liberazione reacted against the student revolts and much else the sixties represented, the Community of Sant’Egidio set out to put into practice the ideals of the reforming Second Vatican Council, which had closed three years earlier. It began by working among the poor and still runs Rome’s biggest soup kitchen. As the group expanded internationally, however, its members found that in many areas there was little point in attempting to tackle the poverty they encountered unless they tried to end the violence that was at the root of it.
Sant’Egidio’s greatest success was one of its earliest. In 1992, members of the community brokered a peace deal in Mozambique that ended a civil war in which more than a million people had died. Four years later, they played a role in halting the civil war in Guatemala. Since then, it is fair to say the group has found the going tougher. But diplomats will say Sant’Egidio’s peacemakers supply a valuable channel for informal contacts and discussion, and that because of the need for confidentiality some of its achievements go unreported.
Catholicism is woven so thoroughly into the fabric of life in Italy that even the most secular Italians pay lip service to its role—literally so, by employing words and phrases wreathed in incense. Journalists routinely describe any meeting behind closed doors as a conclave and, if it produces a result, tell readers it ended with a fumata bianca (an emission of white smoke). When Italians want to communicate the idea that nobody is indispensable, they say, “Morto un papa, se ne fa un altro,” which translates as “When one pope dies, you choose another.” Tellingly, the equivalent of “to live like a lord” is vivere come un papa: “to live like a pope.” Police and prosecutors refer to mafiosi and terrorists who have turned state’s evidence as pentiti (“penitent ones”). And anyone who has a narrow escape immediately becomes un miracolato. If, on the other hand, he wins the lottery, his friends will say not “Lucky you!” but “Beato te!” (“Blessed you”). If he loses, the response will not be “What a shame!” but “Peccato!,” which translates literally as “Sin!”
The closeness of the relationship between Italians and the Church, however, owes much to factors that have nothing to do with religion. One is gratitude for the services the Church provides. Another is pride in the papacy. For more than 450 years, until 1978, when the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected to be John Paul II, all the popes were Italians. And they not only commanded great respect but wielded immense power.
The Catholic Church in Italy also benefits from a fair amount of inertia. Many Italians are Catholic in the way that many Britons are monarchists: it is part of the accepted order of things, and since the affairs of Italy have always been so thoroughly entwined with those of the Church, it can seem vaguely unpatriotic and rather un-Italian to challenge it. Parents, for example, are free to have their children opt out of the religious studies classes provided in Italian schools (which, of course, deal only with Catholicism). Yet relatively few do so. In the school year 2011–2012, the overall participation was above 89 percent, which is clearly far higher than the percentage of parents who are practicing Catholics. Unsurprisingly, the highest dropout rates were in the big cities of the north. The Mezzogiorno returned the sort of figures you would otherwise expect to see in a Central Asian referendum: the average participation rate was 97.9 percent. The figure for Italy as a whole had dropped steadily in the nineteen years since a reliable poll was first conducted, but by barely more than 4 percentage points. That could be explained almost entirely by the increase in non-Catholic immigrants.
The reflexive or unthinking element in the relationship of many Italians with the Church often prompts Catholic intellectuals to fret about the quality of their compatriots’ faith. In 2006, Famiglia Cristiana commissioned a poll of practicing Catholics. They were asked if they had ever sought heavenly intercession (71 percent said that they had) and, if so, from whom. Which is where the surprises came in. Only 2 percent said they had asked Jesus to intercede with his father, while just 9 percent had invoked the help of the Virgin Mary. Far and away the most popular choice—of nearly a third of those questioned—was Padre Pio, the Capuchin friar who died in 1968 and whose purportedly supernatural powers remain controversial.
Father Tonino Lasconi, an authority on Catholic education, was appalled by the results of the poll. “The fact that Jesus and Our Lady are so little invoked, that the saints are preferred and that people don’t understand that the two concepts are different is a sign our Christians are extremely ignorant, even after years of catechesis and religious study classes,” he said.
Padre Pio was said to have levitated, wrestled physically with the devil, experienced visions and borne the stigmata, the wounds inflicted on Jesus during his crucifixion. What is certain is that for years he had gaping holes in his hands and feet. But he has been accused of mutilating himself, perhaps with acid. For a long time, the Vatican refused to accept his injuries as evidence of saintliness, and even at one point stopped him from saying Mass in public. But in 2002 Padre Pio was made a saint at the behest of Pope John Paul II, and the friary in which he lived at San Giovanni Rotondo in the southeast is today the world’s second-most-visited Catholic shrine. The Capuchin Friars also run a Padre Pio TV chann
el available via satellite.
You come across the friar’s bearded countenance on cards tucked away on the shelves of bars and the dashboards of taxis. You glimpse it unexpectedly on medallions in the wallets and handbags of people you would have thought would shrink from the kind of devotion he inspires. And you wonder why Padre Pio has such an appeal to Italians, many of whom have not been near a church in years. Is it because they identify with his humble origins as the son of a peasant farmer? Or because he embodied a tradition of mysticism in Italy that stretches back to Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena? Is it merely that he offered a simple message of reassurance that is more welcome to Italians than the severe and complex injunctions emanating from Rome? His most famous saying—Prega e spera, non agitarti (“Pray and hope. Don’t get upset.”)—is certainly one with great appeal to a fundamentally optimistic people. Or could it be that Padre Pio’s special appeal was—and is—more pagan? This is a man, after all, who was said to be able to read minds, foretell the future and be present in two places at once. Could it be that people see him, perhaps unconsciously, as more of a wizard than a saint? And that those cards and medallions are not so much objects of devotion as amulets?
At all events, it is highly likely that somewhere nearby you will also find a cornicello or cornetto—a hornlike charm, often made of red coral or plastic and employed throughout Italy to ward off the evil eye. Italy’s Catholicism coexists with a remarkable amount of superstition. Tarot reading is hugely popular.* Near the main square of most Italian cities you will usually find a lane in which figures are sitting hunched on foldaway stools as they turn the cards for their anxious clients. Several minor TV channels show nothing but tarot readings for hours on end. Naturally enough, since it is constantly at risk of a volcanic eruption, the capital of superstition is Naples. The city is home to a unique race of ghosts, known as munacielli or monacielli, and probably the birthplace of the smorfia (which means “grimace,” though the word may derive from the name of Morpheus, the classical god of dreams). The smorfia is a table of numbers from one to ninety, each of which is assigned to a variety of objects, creatures, body parts, actions, concepts and types of person. It is widely used in Naples to place lottery bets according to what crops up in real life or the punter’s dreams. Corresponding to eighty-eight, for example, are “ebony,” “revenue stamp,” “a dance with children” and “the testicles of His Holiness.”
Some members of the clergy may agonize over the disparity between Catholicism as it is taught from the catechism and the beliefs of a nation that overwhelmingly defines itself as Catholic. But there would seem also to be a considerable gap between official Church teaching and its interpretation by the pope’s representatives on the ground in Italy. In 2007, L’Espresso sent reporters to twenty-four churches around the country with instructions to confess to what the Vatican would doubtless consider sins. A journalist posing as a researcher who had received an offer to work abroad on embryonic stem cells was told that “of course” he should take the job. And when another claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept her father alive, the response was “Don’t think any more about it.” The only issue on which the confessors toed the Vatican’s line was abortion.
It is a moot point, though, whether the magazine’s findings were evidence of insubordination, doctrinal illiteracy or the simple humanity of men faced with moral dilemmas that they themselves would never have to confront in person. By and large, Catholicism makes greater allowance than Protestantism for human frailty, and it has doubtless contributed toward much that is commendable in Italy: compassion, a reluctance to judge and a readiness to forgive—all themes that will recur in later chapters of this book.
But Catholicism also infantalizes (and not just in Italy). One of the bones of contention at the origin of Reformation was whether the faithful had a right to seek their own salvation through direct access to the Scriptures or whether, as the Catholic Church insisted, they needed the mediation of priests. The man who is ultimately responsible for telling you how to live your life is God’s personal representative on earth. And in Italian the pope is known as il Papa, which is a mere accent and a capital letter away from being il papà, “the father.” His bishops talk of their flocks, with the implication that the faithful are sheep. And priests address parishioners who may well be older than them as “my son” or “my daughter.”
Italy has been exposed to Catholicism more than any other country, so it is hardly surprising that, for example, Italian has no word for “accountability,” or that the phrase in Italian that equates most closely to “something will turn up” is qualche santo provvederà: “some saint or other will take care of it.” Nor is it surprising that relations between the sexes in Italy still bear the imprint of a religion that has long held strong views on the roles that are suitable for men and women.
CHAPTER 10
Le Italiane—Attitudes Change
Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man.
E. M. Forster in Where Angels Fear to Tread
When she was seven or eight years of age, a young girl was taken by her parents to a pretty mountain village east of the city of Trento, near to the blurred line that separates Italian speakers from German speakers in that part of the far north of the country. The girl’s family still owned the house in which her great-grandparents had lived, though by then it was unoccupied. In a corridor hung the photograph of a young woman. Her father explained to the girl that it was Clorinda, her great-aunt who “had been killed in the war.” As the years went by, the girl often thought back to that fleeting encounter with the past until one day, when she was at school and by then in her midteens, she put the name of her grandmother’s sister into an Internet search engine. It was only then that she discovered that Clorinda Menguzzato had been a heroine, posthumously awarded her country’s highest award for valor.1
Clorinda’s story would make a Hollywood movie. A farm girl from the picturesque village of Castello Tesino, she joined the Gherlenda partisans’ battalion and was given the nom de guerre of Veglia. Whereas most of the women who joined the Italian resistance made their contribution as nurses or messengers, Clorinda actually fought alongside the men, including the man she loved, Gastone Velo. When he was wounded, she and Velo decided to make for a hamlet where Clorinda’s family owned a house. But they were stopped on the way and arrested. What happened then would not make for the sort of happy ending beloved by Hollywood producers.
The Germans and their Italian Fascist associates tortured the nineteen-year-old girl for four nights straight. But nothing they did would get her to reveal the whereabouts of her comrades in arms. According to the citation that accompanied her Medaglia d’oro al valore militare, toward the end of her ordeal Clorinda told her tormentors: “When I can no longer bear your torture, I’ll sever my tongue with my teeth so as not to speak.” The commandant even unleashed his German shepherd on her. But Clorinda—“the lioness of the partisans,” as the citation called her—never broke. In the end she was taken out of the village, more dead than alive, and shot. Her body was tossed over a cliff, where it landed in the branches of a tree. It was recovered by the parish priest of Castello Tesino, who had Clorinda dressed for burial in the sumptuous traditional garb of her village.
The contribution of those such as Clorinda Menguzzato* to the partisan campaign on which the new Italian Republic claimed to have been founded, together with the influence of the Communist Party in the period immediately after the war, meant Italian women could not be sidelined quite as rapidly and comprehensively as some would no doubt have liked.
Historically, the condition of women in Italy has varied enormously from one part of the peninsula to another, over time and between social classes. The seventeenth—and, even more, the eighteenth—centuries offer plenty of evidence for believing that the freedom available to upper-class women in Italy was at least as great as that enjoye
d by their peers in other parts of Europe, and perhaps even greater. A highborn Venetian, Elena Cornaro Piscopia, is held to be the first woman ever to be given a PhD—by the University of Padua in 1678. The first woman to be offered an official teaching position in a European university was also an Italian: Laura Bassi, who became a professor at the University of Bologna in 1732 while still only twenty-one years of age. The eighteenth century in Italy also produced the poet, philosopher and physicist Cristina Roccati as well as another polymath, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, whose name lives on in that of the “witch of Agnesi,” a geometric curve.* Agnesi also shares with Laura Bassi the distinction of having a crater named after her on Venus.