Children of The Sun

by Jonathan Green

  When the Bishop’s nephew happens to be a banker who pays insurance money to the Communist Party, or an employer who pays sweatshop wages and refuses the right of the worker to organise, the guilt of the one tends to stain the presumptive virtue of the other.

  When the Mayor of Naples builds a new square instead of a school and the Cardinal of Naples doesn’t preach a sermon about the anomaly, even the most long-suffering faithful want to know why. When a local cavaliere, who is known to have worked a loan from the Cassa del Mezzogiorno and diverted it to his enterprise in the North, appears at the Easter ceremonies wearing a Papal decoration or is received as a guest of the Cardinal, the scandal is inevitable.

  When the brown Capuccini or the little Black Sisters beg in the streets of Naples, the people accept it without question. They know that there are half a dozen works of charity being supported by these mendicant funds—orphanages, foundling homes, a refuge for old people. But they ask why it is always the poor who give, and why they don’t hear the sermon of the rich man and Lazarus preached from the Sunday pulpit.

  It is preached, but not often enough and not in every church. The most frequent criticism I heard about the Church of the Mezzogiorno was: ‘it accommodates itself to the situation’. The Italian phrase is expressive. It connotes acceptance, tolerance. It hints at participation.

  I, myself, have sat, Sunday after Sunday, at early and late Masses and have not heard one word of social justice or criticism of social evils. I have heard pious clichés and well-worn annotations, but passionate condemnation of known and widespread evils, no! There is no Fulton Sheen in the South of Italy, though God knows there is need of men like him.

  The work of men like Borrelli is the more remarkable for the difficult climate in which it is performed.

  There are good men, earnest men, enlightened men, but too often they are not heard because of the vacillation or conservatism of the hierarchy.

  If all this sounds too general and one-sided, think for a moment of this point. Naples is a city of two million people. All but a minute fraction belong, at least in name, to the Church. They are baptised Catholics. A Catholic may reject his faith, but he never quite loses the mark of it. Few, even of those who do not practise their faith, will commit themselves to open disrespect for the clergy or open rebellion against a clear precept. Certainly not here in the Mezzogiorno. The most cynical politician makes certain of showing up in Church round election time. The least devout mayor will not risk an open breach with the Bishop.

  Therefore the Church has power. It has spiritual power over the devout and practising. It has the power of public opinion to wield against those who profess but do not practise. If it does not use this power, it is because too many of its clergy have accommodated themselves to the situation and too few have the courage or enlightenment to challenge it.

  * * *

  If you would like it brought a little closer to home, let me tell you the tale of Greta’s housemaid.

  Greta is a good friend of ours. She is a Swede, married to an Italian, who is the nephew of a bishop. She is a Catholic, so she, too, is part of the family.

  Greta’s maid was a mountain girl, engaged to a lad from the coast. Her fidanzato became impatient in the warm spring weather, and the maid became scared that she might lose him.

  So, two months later Greta was faced with a problem, a maid who was a maid no longer, a weeping girl who was afraid to go home because her father would beat her and call her harsh names and turn her out of the house. What was she to do? Her fidanzato wasn’t sure he wanted to marry a ruined girl. She had no money to pay what the midwife would ask for an abortion. She lacked the courage to throw herself over the cliff.

  Greta, being a wise and gentle woman, pointed out that none of these things was really necessary. She, herself, would explain matters to the family. If they didn’t want the girl at home, well, she had a room in Greta’s house. If the fidanzato didn’t want to marry her, then she should have the baby. Greta and her husband would pay the expenses. The child would be welcomed and cared for. After a while the girl was calmed and Greta set off on stage one of the peace-making operations.

  The family was adamant. The father, a peasant farmer, shut his door and his heart against the erring daughter. The girl had made herself a puttana! Let her go and join the others on the streets of Naples.

  Whereat, Greta got angry—and her anger is something to see. It has a rich and bawdy quality which awed the simple family and bent their stubbornness to a modest compromise. They would not disown the daughter. If she persuaded the fidanzato to marry her, the mother would come to the wedding, but none of the others. They would not receive her back into the house. That was too much!

  Stage two was the fidanzato. He was a stolid, loutish fellow who hummed and ha’d and mumbled in dialect and refused to give a definite answer. He might marry the girl. He might not. He would have to see. His family might not like the idea of his marrying a pregnant woman. On him, too, Greta turned her anger, and, though he still made no promises, she sensed that he was frightened of what the signora might be able to do to him.

  So far, so good. The sky was beginning to clear, when lo! a new cloud on the horizon. The parroco—the parish priest! The parroco was an elderly man with grey hair and a kindly face. He had come, he said, to counsel the signora.

  Greta folded her hands in her lap and smiled sweetly and waited for the counsel. It was blunt and simple. The presence of a ruined girl in the signora’s house was a scandal in the town, a scandal that would become more apparent as the months drew on. He would counsel the signora to get rid of the girl as soon as possible.

  Greta smiled blandly and asked if the parroco had any suggestions. He was a little vague about it. He thought that there was a house for such unfortunates in Naples. Greta mentioned with some acerbity the possibility that she might never reach Naples. The girl was distraught, lost and unhappy. She might very well throw herself over a cliff.

  The parroco shrugged. The girl was ruined anyway. What was more important was to preserve the innocence of the rest of the population. Greta, who had little faith in the innocence and a wide acquaintance with the primitive morals of the township, was unimpressed. She gave the parroco the rough edge of her tongue. He went away a very unhappy man.

  Came next the Mother Superior of the local convent for a woman-to-woman talk on the same theme: scandal in the village. Greta suggested she might care to give the girl a home in the convent and hide the scandal in the most effective way of all. The Mother Superior hid her face in horror at the thought.

  Finally Greta’s husband was called for a cup of coffee and a quiet chat with his uncle, the Bishop. The exact substance of the talk was not revealed to me, but ever since relations between uncle and nephew have been somewhat strained.

  Later, before the scandal got too great, the housemaid married her fidanzato and the storm in the tea cup abated.

  The point of the story is not the comedy, but the fact that this primitive puritanism is still widespread among the clergy of the South.

  It is not Christianity. It is not Catholicism. It is not to be accepted as a display of village ignorance. The ignorance exists, surely, but the parroco is appointed to dispel it and teach charity and kindness. In this case, as in so many others, he had accommodated himself to the situation, and the Bishop was prepared to back him.

  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? I wouldn’t know, but they certainly need looking after here in the South.

  * * *

  The root of it again is education. You can’t expect a fledgling priest, raw and uncertain of himself, to fight the evil unless he has been trained to see it, and unless he knows that his bishop will back him to the last frightening consequence of the Gospel truth. You can’t expect the bishop to back him, if the bishop has, by weakness or indiscretion, accepted a gift for his Church or his charities from a source which is known to be tainted.

  The charities of Naples need funds desperately. The House of the Ur
chins is only one case in point. But funds should be rejected—and publicly rejected—if they are known to be the price of silence or ‘accommodation’ at election time.

  If family relationships are involved, then they must not be allowed to influence the preaching of the truth.

  Look at it another way. Think how many churches there are in Naples. I can’t tell you the number. I doubt if there are many who can. But in Sorrento, a town of ten to twelve thousand inhabitants, there are twenty-eight! If, in every church of Naples and the Peninsula, there were preached, on the same day, a vital, compelling sermon on the evils of the South, their causes and their remedies, with names, dates and places, how many people would it reach and what would be its effect? The Cardinal of Naples has the power to order it to be done. He has facts and figures and names enough to make a hundred sermons. He has priests to preach them twenty times over. Why isn’t it done?

  Sometimes it is a question of political expediency: the Italian Church is backing the Christian Democrats, who, like any other party, have their share of promoters and place-hunters. Sometimes it is administrative caution inside the bureaucracy of the Church. Sometimes it is fear that certain sources of charitable funds may dry up if personalities are aired from the pulpit.

  I state it now, bluntly and without equivocation, that some of the clergy of the South have used the confessional to win votes—especially the women’s votes—for the Christian Democratic Party. To claim that is part of the fight against Communism is an evil folly. To claim that the end justifies or even condones the means, is a denial of Christian faith.

  Confession is a sacrament of the Catholic Church, a private tribunal secret to God and the individual soul, a place of shriving, a channel of grace.

  To pervert it to a political weapon is to destroy it, and the faith of the people as well.

  It is all wrong, dangerously wrong. The Church was founded on twelve poor fishermen and the gospel truth. I have yet to hear it pronounced from the chair of Peter that party funds and accommodation to a situation, even Vatican diplomacy, will do more for the world than truth, justice and the grace of God.

  There is another side to the argument, of course.

  You can’t lay all the sins of its members at the door of the Church. The Church’s function is to preach the truth and open the channels of grace. The individual is still free to accept or reject them. That is true. The Church’s function is spiritual; it can be negated by the free will of the member.

  But here, in Italy, the Church is already committed to the temporal order. It is committed historically by the nature of its growth, economically by its possessions, politically by its open championship of a given political party. Therefore it lays itself open to free criticism on fields of activity.

  If its political actions and associations are not free of taint, then they must be made so. If its economic situation involves it with people who want to use its influence for their own ends, then it must disengage itself at whatever cost. If no such involvement exists, then this fact should be preached—and clearly—because there are many honest people who believe that it does exist.

  The winter of 1956 was a brutal one for the peasant farmers of Italy. American Catholic organisations donated thousands of bushels of grain-seed for free distribution in the most distressed areas.

  This grain was distributed under the direction of executives and officials of the Confederazione dei Coltivatori Diretti, a political organisation said to represent the rural interests. On the voting figures only forty-six per cent of the farmers are members of the Confederazione.

  There were complaints that the grain had been distributed only to registered members of the Party who then had to pay a part of its value in cold cash.

  I cannot say whether the accusation is true or not. Certainly I heard no denials of it. The important thing, for the purposes of this argument, is the involvement of the Church. The gift was made by American Catholics to a distressed peasantry who were all co-religionists. If the accusation was true, it is the duty of the Church authorities to expose the scandal. If it was not true, the Church should dissociate itself from the accusation. In neither case can it remain silent. So for as I have been able to discover, it has not said a word.

  The Church, Holy, Roman Catholic and Apostolic, demands from all its members obedience to a rigorous moral law. It must apply the same law to the administration of its Southern Italian Province.

  * * *

  Now, there’s another story to tell, about the author.

  The story begins with our hiring our first maid, by name, Angela. We hired her with the aid of an American friend of twenty years standing in Italy. We were assured that she came of a good, peasant family, that she was strong, healthy, willing, intelligent and, above all, honest. She had been educated to third grade and she spoke Italian and dialect. I don’t speak dialect, so the Italian was a necessary accomplishment.

  We hired her. We thought that, as she was a local and honest, she would probably save us money at the market. We thought that, if she were going to cook, she’d better do her own marketing. The Sorrentines have a way of hoisting the price the moment a stranger gets within bargaining distance. So we gave her 5000 lire and sent her off to do the shopping.

  There was no change from the 5000, but in our innocence we thought that was fair enough. We were starting housekeeping. There were cupboards to be stocked, staple condiments to be bought, and besides it’s bad policy for the master or the mistress to be too interfering in the kitchen, especially in the first week.

  So we gave Angela her head, for one week, during which time she went through 25,000 lire without a blink. I wouldn’t have minded the expense if I could have seen the results of it at the table. But I didn’t. The meat was poor, the cooking was worse, even the wine was sour and watered. When we went thunderously, to make our accounting in the kitchen, the cupboards were stacked with tins and tins of food, which we’d never eat in a hundred years—even if we liked it, which we didn’t!

  There were jars of anchovies and tins of artichokes, pickled peppers and bottles of olives. There were tins of sockeye salmon and jars of English jam; but no flour, no sugar, no pepper, no salt.

  We looked at one another. We laughed our heads off. Why not? We had paid 25,000 lire for the privilege! Angela was honest all right. All the items tallied. But she had no more idea of shopping or spending money economically and advantageously than she had of flying to the moon. Every day she had gone down to Sorrento with her purse full of money and her little heart full of pride. She was the cameriera of the gran’ scrittore australiano. If anybody doubted it, just let them watch her splurge to prove it!

  The moral of my little tale? Caveat America!

  America is involved as much as the Church and the industrialists and the old families in this question of social reform. She is involved, because she is pouring money into the country. She has a duty and a right to ask where this money goes. So has the taxpayer, who believes that the funds mulcted from him each year are being used to build a strong economy and a bulwark against Communism.

  That’s the principle. The effect in the South is entirely the opposite. The constant unemployment, the hunger and the hopelessness, the atmosphere of mistrust and corruption, the frightening inertia in the face of more frightening misery, all these things are sharp weapons in the hands of the Communist Party. They are weapons forged in America with taxpayers’ money.

  What’s to do about it? Here are a few suggestions.

  Under the United Nations Charter America has no right to interfere in the affairs of a partner nation. But when she is the banker for that nation, she has a banker’s right to ask for an accounting. I say again the accounting she gets in Rome is not a true one. Why? Because as I have shown, figures about Italy are misleading. The facts have to be seen to be understood.

  A rural bank manager takes an occasional trip out to his client’s farm to see how he runs it. Why not send a few experts down to the South, officially or
unofficially, to measure the progress of land reform and the needs of peasant communities? Let them ask why whole villages have been cleaned out by emigration while productive areas lie useless. Let them see how much money has been wasted on election-time projects that have never been brought to completion. Let them ask, as Dayton did, why bank money costs so much when cheap money is needed for agricultural and industrial development.

  Education is the beginning of progress and reform. Have a few educators come down here to the South and report on what they find. Let some of the research foundations send out economists and sociologists to look in on the skin game. And make sure that their reports are publicised and tabled in Congress before the next loans are approved!

  And keep the investigators out of the deceptively congenial atmosphere of Rome and Florence and Venice! The Italians can better the British in the gentle art of ‘duchessing’. Rome is a city of diplomats and contact men. It is far, far away from the harsh realities of the Mezzogiorno. But the truth is down here, the real truth about this seductive and devious country. And America and its citizens, like all the rest of the Western world, have great need to know it.

  To put it more bluntly, there is in the Italian character, especially in the Southern character, a wide streak of irresponsibility and a vanity that makes them unwilling to admit it.

  A young blood of Naples will scrimp and save and put himself in hock to buy a Vespa or a Fiat runabout. Then he will tear the tripes out of the engine and strip the brakes down to the shoe metal and rip tyres down to the thread by driving it like a maniac.

  If he’s doing it on his own money, it’s his own business. But if he’s doing it on yours or mine, it’s better to teach him sense before he wrecks the outfit.

  * * *

  All this, of course, is only the beginning. It rests with the Church to prepare a state of mind receptive to the principles of social justice. It rests with America to demand responsible control in the allocation and use of dollar funds. But unless the money-holders of Italy—landowners, industrialists, investors—undertake their own house-cleaning, there will be no reform. Unless they realise that their only hope of a permanent, peaceful economy lies in a healthy balanced industrial system, they will not set themselves to achieve it.