North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  One advantage of longevity is the accrual of wealth, and the Roman Church is no exception. Over centuries dying penitents sought to ease their passage through the Gates of Saint Peter by bequeathing their land and assets to the Church, ensuring its position as the largest single landowner. Clearly those with fractions of an acre were unable to feed themselves or their families. To stay in the valley meant taking land in conacre from the Church. Land was rented out to the landless for approximately one third of a ducat per acre, which corresponded to one third of the value of an acre of corn. At first sight the rent was not extortionate, but it should be remembered that yields were far below today’s, between three and five times the amount of grain planted. An old saying, ‘O brigante, o emigrante’ – either be a brigand or emigrate – first appeared at this time.

  Daily life was governed by the exigencies of survival and what was outside these necessities was also under the control of the Church. Here are some of the decisions reached by the Sora Synod in 1714 as they affected the archparish of Gallinaro:

  1 Teachers and lecturers in Arts and Letters had to profess their faith in the Church before they could work.

  2 For any kind of public spectacle, theatre or recitation permission had to be got from the bishop.

  3 Anyone selling books or paintings had first to obtain permission from the bishop.

  4 The sale or preparation of food for oneself or for others was banned during the forty days of Lent.

  5 Doctors were not allowed to visit a patient for a second time until the invalid had made a confession.

  This sample of ecclesiastical law makes it clear how Church and state were inextricably linked both within the Papal States and outside them. Whatever activity could be perceived as relating to faith or morals was subject to Church control. One of Gallinaro’s best-known archpriests, Bartolomeo Baldassari, much of whose writings are still extant, reported some young men to the ducal authorities for smiling at girls in his church, and another time denounced some men for swearing in public. There was almost no aspect of life that was not of concern to the Church.

  The Church’s main weapon of control was debt. In the parish records from 1826 to 1842 an average of 100 people a year appear in the debtors’ ledger. The amounts are not large, up to a maximum of six ducats, but the same names and the same amounts appear annually under such headings as rent, taxes, food and religious expenses. It is clear that for many poor families their continued existence was dependent upon the clemency of the archpriest, since they were never in a position to completely clear their debt from one year to next.

  The demographic breakdown of the area covered by the present-day province of Frosinone was, until recently, unchanged for centuries. By the middle of the nineteenth century the population was about 650,000. The poor and the unskilled made up nearly 30 per cent of this total, while the landed, the professionals and the merchants totalled about a tenth. The majority worked in agriculture and a little industry. Apart from industry, of which Gallinaro had none, the social divisions would have closely mirrored those of the region. The level of literacy was about 10 per cent, and was probably confined to the middle and upper classes, since the numbers closely correspond. Only a quarter of the literate were female.

  For the poor and unskilled the only way out of a life that offered work during all daylight hours was emigration, brigandage or the seminary. The seminary represented a chance to learn, to better oneself. Thus was the Church able to maintain its position: by stick through debt and dependence, by carrot through offering a chance of betterment to the poor. What education was available outside the seminaries was rudimentary. It appears that it was also badly paid. My ancestor Dionisio di Tullio was the schoolmaster in Gallinaro in 1810. His remuneration was twelve ducats a year, equivalent to the yield from twelve acres, a bit less than £3,000 in today’s money.

  A picture emerges of a Church whose influence was almost limitless, until the unification of Italy reduced the Papal States to a few acres of Vatican City and began the division between Church and state. The Church’s dominance as a major landowner began to decline as the state passed laws forcing the sale of Church land. By the turn of the century state education was more freely available. I have heard on several occasions a phrase attributed to Pius IX on signing the Concordat that left him with only the Vatican City: ‘Beware of public education.’ His instincts seem to have been correct, for the rise in literacy and the free dissemination of information has run parallel with a fall in the power of the Church. The fear of untrammelled education was balanced by the obligation on all pupils in state schools to attend religious instruction, which meant only Roman Catholicism. Children of Italy’s religious minorities, although free to practise their own religion, were none the less constrained to learn about Catholicism. This was the law most fiercely defended by the Church, and only very recently has it been removed from the Civil Code. The 1990s began with a total division between Church and state – a situation that has never before existed in Italian history.

  Of the great temporal power only the Vatican City remains. The picturesque Swiss Guards, so beloved of Vatican postcards, are the last visible vestige of papal might. The reason why the Pope’s bodyguards are Swiss is in itself informative. Throughout the Middle Ages the most feared mercenaries were the Swiss. It is no accident that this small, mountainous country has not been invaded for so long. Apart from the fact that most rulers of any possible invading country had their money invested there, no one was too keen to take on the ferocious Swiss soldiers – especially in their own valleys and mountains. It was understood for centuries that if you wanted the best protection, you hired the Swiss. That the Popes did and still do speaks volumes for the temporal power invested in the papacy. Roman emperors unsure of the loyalty of their subjects often hired German mercenaries for personal protection. Perhaps the Popes hired the Swiss for the same reason.

  Since the Comino Valley has historically been a remote pocket with little contact beyond its own boundaries, old traditions and cultural mores have survived longer than in other areas of Italy. My great-uncle, the archpriest Ferdinando Tullio, whose house we now live in, was probably the last to run his archparish in the old mould. He supervised all aspects of village life, from arranging marriages to recommending loyal parishioners for jobs. Just as in days gone by, he dispensed largesse to the poor of the parish, building up an account of favours due that perpetuated his position of authority. But even so remote a valley as mine could not withstand the onslaught of twentieth-century information technology. Even here new ideas eventually arrived, wreaking radical changes. Where once the archpriest of Gallinaro had several curates under his dominion, each with his own church, by 1992 Gallinaro did not even have a permanent priest. All churches, with the exception of the main church and the Sanctuary of Saint Gerardo, are now either abandoned, derelict or deconsecrated. The temporal power, once wielded with so large a stick, is gone. With its passing, the fear mingled with respect and awe of the Church’s representatives has been replaced by apathy.

  The change from total domination of daily life to a marginal position, similar to that of the Church of England, has been gradual but accelerating. My earliest memory of the church in Gallinaro is a congregation of women and children, with a few old men who sat at the back or smoked outside, just in earshot of the mass. Even this poorly attended gathering has diminished and the congregation is now made up of a few old women. Italians respect power. They are prepared to make arrangements to deal with the powerful in so far as they affect daily life. The obverse of this is that once an individual no longer has power, there is no further need to accommodate that person in one’s own cosmos. The decline in the influence of the Church is a function of the growing awareness that closeness to the priest and his belief is no longer necessary to one’s advancement in the world.

  What this suggests is that the Church was never a focus of spiritual life, but rather through its secular structures a necessity for personal advancement. Had
the emphasis been more upon the spiritual needs of the population and less upon the material, it is possible that today there would be many more adherents. The largest growing religious group in the Comino Valley is the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is inconceivable that this sect could have made any impact at all even as recently as thirty years ago. Whatever it is that they offer is obviously not something the Catholic Church provides. The majority of the population, in whose life religion plays only the most peripheral part, remain nominally Roman Catholic. This is no more than inertia; it now means so little to so many that making a change is more effort than they care to make.

  What does need an explanation is why such large numbers attend religious feste and miracle sites such as the Baby Jesus of Gallinaro when the churches are so empty. A lot can be explained by the Italian predilection for theatre. Colourful processions and the prospect of witnessing a miracle are a lot more fun than sitting in a church. But it goes deeper than this. Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli described how the inhabitants of that remote town, although nominally Catholic, were fundamentally pagan in their beliefs and superstitions. This paganism is by no means obvious in Gallinaro, but remnants can still be found.

  The focus of Gallinaro’s annual festival honouring San Gerardo is entirely Christian although the central image – the saint carried on his bier in procession – has pagan undertones. Pleas to the saint for intercession are accompanied by gifts of money and jewellery, which bedeck his statue on feast days. Quite what a statue is supposed to do with jewellery and cash is unclear to me, unless the saint in his heaven accepts offerings to his effigy as bribes to grant favours. Some of the money goes to the Church, of course. Each time San Gerardo goes walkabout, the episcopal office in Sora collects one million lire from the festa committee.

  What San Gerardo has in common with many saints in Italy is that the local legends about him have little basis in history. Some years ago the Church tried to clean up a historical legacy of pagan gods masquerading as saints. The early Christian Church contended with strongly held beliefs in local deities. The cry ‘Great is Diana of Ephesus’ was heard with variations all over the Roman Empire. The founding fathers of the Church dealt with this by making the local deity a saint in the Christian cosmos. For example, Naples has San Gennaro, known as Janus in his previous incarnation as the Roman god of doorways and gates. The affection of Neapolitans for their patron saint, he of the liquefying blood, is strong. His statue, with its phial of congealed blood, is venerated, and, if he is slow to perform, he is encouraged with such entreaties as, ‘Hey, yellow-face, get on with the miracles.’ When the Vatican drew up its list of saints with thin claims to actual existence, San Gennaro was included. The idea was to demote from sainthood anyone who had probably never been alive. Saint Peter’s Square was laid siege to by thousands of outraged Neapolitans, who were not slow to point out that Rome’s Saint Lucy had equally slim credentials, but that she was omitted from the list and would remain a saint. The Vatican relented and, despite his pagan roots, San Gennaro is still the patron saint of Naples.

  A further aspect of the Church’s role over the centuries has been the behaviour of its agents, the priests. The enormous power that they once wielded was not always used for the benefit of the poor and the hungry. Priests through the ages amassed money and property. I still have documents belonging to Don Ferdinando, my great-uncle the archpriest, which relate to a loan made by him to a bus company in the 1930s. The amount was 30,000 lire, a huge sum, equivalent to about £70,000 in today’s money. The question is, where did an archpriest of a small village get so large a sum? Although my family was never poor or landless, it never had access to amounts this big, so this was not a family inheritance. The answer appears to be that as archpriest he had the usufruct of the church lands, making him effectively the largest landowner in the village. This would be supplemented by his income from the Sunday plate, so accumulating such a large sum was not impossible. Sadly for Don Ferdinando’s heirs, the money was never repaid.

  On both my father’s and my mother’s side of the family, priests abounded. Don Francesco, known as Don Cicco, was a great-uncle to my mother. He lived in San Nazario in the Fusco family house. That he should be treated with kid gloves was never questioned. He was served meat daily, while the family ate the gravy on their pasta; he got the best wine, the choicest fruit. He was a big man, and proud of his physical strength, which far outstripped his intellectual gifts. Even my father, aged ten, was moved to remark after serving mass for him that his Latin was abysmal. He is best known in family lore for the time the Bishop of Sora came to visit him with his Monsignor. Unable to follow the theological conversation over lunch, Don Cicco insisted on taking his two visitors out into the garden afterwards. Bending down, he picked up a huge tree-trunk and lifted it over his head. ‘There,’ he exclaimed proudly, ‘I bet neither of you two smart-arses can do that.’

  There have been priests in the valley who have built apartment blocks at seaside resorts and in the valley itself. It appears to have been normal for priests to amass wealth. If they still do, it is not reflected in the state of the churches themselves, which would probably have been in total disrepair by now had it not been for the earthquake rebuilding funds.

  On a personal level priests have always been seen primarily as men and secondarily as celibate priests. The prevailing ethos was that celibacy meant a prohibition on marriage, rather than abstinence from sex. The spiritual, but above all the economic, power that these men held meant that their carnal desires could be easily accommodated in a poor, peasant society.

  I have no doubt that there have been, and still are, good men who are priests. It is none the less true that today’s legacy from the past is represented more by the deeds of the venal than of the benign. The speed at which the edifice is crumbling must be worrying to Rome. It is not just the dwindling congregations, but also the catastrophic decline in the numbers of applicants for the priesthood. The Curia’s only hope must be for some kind of economic disaster, because as long as Italy basks in prosperity its people have less and less time for the Church. It is possible that economic adversity will drive Italians back to the churches – a survey in late 1993 suggests that this is the case.

  Scandals involving the Vatican and the Banco Ambrosiano, its connections with infamous Masonic lodge P2, and the imbroglio surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I made it clear to millions of Italians that, despite pretensions to piety, Vatican bureaucracy was no different from that found in town halls. Its connections with the corruption pervading the state were unbounded. This, too, has contributed to a change in perception that has led to the complete separation of Church and state. Constitutionally, the Church no longer has a say in governing the country. Despite opposition from the pulpit, both abortion and divorce are available to Italian citizens.

  The physical evidence of the Church’s decline is easy to find – empty, unkempt churches, tiny congregations, a lack of priests. What remains, and is harder to quantify, is the moral and ethical legacy of Catholicism. Social order and harmony exist around the globe even where Christianity is unheard of. Close family ties and love of children can be found to an identical degree in China. The staples of morality are universal and cannot be claimed to be exclusively Christian. There is no doubt that for many centuries the Church served as a unifying force between the disparate, independent city-states of Italy. Their common religion was a strong bond which ensured that, despite differences, a sense of Italianness was kept alive, transcending local loyalties. It could be argued that by keeping an overall sense of Italy living in the minds of Italians, the Church made unification a reality, thus creating a state that ultimately contributed to the Church’s own decline.

  Living in Ireland, I cannot help but be struck by the different attitude to the Vatican of Irish Catholics. Distance alters perception, and in the early years of Christianity it also made control difficult. The Celtic Church was largely autonomous and to some degree heterodox in its beliefs. No
t until the Synod of Whitby in 664 did the Celtic Church come under Roman rule. Never being physically close to the Vatican, the Irish faithful were never privy to the worst excesses of medieval popes and cardinals. Only recently have scandals such as that of the Banco Ambrosiano found their way into print. The story of Bishop Eamonn Casey and Annie Murphy created shock waves in Ireland, whereas in Italy it would hardly have rated a mention. Proximity to the Church and the foibles of its officials has forged the Italian view – mostly apathy, with perhaps a little lingering respect. I would suspect that in Ireland, where a less accurate picture has been painted and promulgated for years, there will be more rage and less understanding when press self-censorship on the affairs of the Church is finally lifted.

  It’s tempting to draw parallels with the British monarchy, whose authority and patronage have also been pervasive. Both the Roman Church and the British monarchy have a long history of great power and extensive influence. Neither is adept at coming to terms with changed circumstance, both are obsessed with the grandeur of their respective inheritances. Blinded by a conviction that rigid conformity with tradition is the only path, both are staring oblivion in the eyes.

  For the moment the Church commands respect because it has some power to wield; when its power goes, the respect will evaporate like the early morning mists. For the first time in many centuries it is possible to make a living in Italy without subscribing to the Catholic Church. Secularism, hand in hand with extreme consumerism, is the Zeitgeist of late-twentieth-century Italy.