The Italians (21 page)

For the first time since the Muslim invasions of the ninth century, however, the Catholic Church has to contend with the fact that not everyone who lives in Italy and believes in God is a Catholic. The dramatic increase in immigration in recent years
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has brought in hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Christians, Pentecostals and Evangelicals, along with more than a million Muslims.

In several respects, then, Italy is less Catholic than it once was. But it is nevertheless more Catholic than other countries where the Church has traditionally been strong. The most recent edition of the World Values Survey found that 88 percent of Italians identified themselves as Catholic, compared with 80 percent of Spaniards. Proportionately, they were more observant too. In Italy, 31 percent of the total said they attended a religious service at least once a week. That may be low by contrast with the United States, where the figure was 47 percent. But it was a lot higher than for Spain, where it was a mere 22 percent—1 percentage point lower than in Britain.

The small farmers’ organization Coldiretti no longer wields the vast influence it once did, for the same reasons that Italian agriculture has lost ground to, first, manufacturing and then service industries. But it continues to play a prominent role in Italian life, as do the other mass organizations created by the Church or the DC. The CISL remains Italy’s second-biggest trade union federation. The CCI—nowadays sporting the modish appellation Confcooperative—is still the country’s largest cooperative movement by turnover and affiliated enterprises (though not when gauged by the number of its members).

Famiglia Cristiana,
a weekly with a distinctly progressive bias owned by the Society of Saint Paul, is the fifth-bestselling periodical. It has a bigger readership than all but one of the paparazzi gossip magazines and reaches far more Italians than the internationally better-known newsweeklies
Panorama
and
L’Espresso
. The daily newspaper of the Catholic bishops,
Avvenire,
is the seventh-bestselling newspaper, and just about the only one to have increased its circulation in the face of competition from the Internet. When
Avvenire
or
Famiglia Cristiana
takes a clear stance on any political issue, the fact is widely reported in other media. There is an almost ubiquitous—and, to some extent, self-fulfilling—perception that the Church will have a powerful effect on the course of events.

That goes hand in hand with a high level of tolerance for interference by the hierarchy in public life. By and large, Italians also accept with remarkable equanimity the involvement of religious fellowships in politics, finance and business. In Spain, Opus Dei and its members have been a source of unending controversy since the dictatorship of General Franco. But until very recently the power of Comunione e Liberazione (CL) went, if not unremarked, then generally unquestioned in Italy.

Inspired by the works of Luigi Giussani, a Catholic priest from Lombardy, CL coalesced in reaction to the student uprisings of 1968. As with Opus Dei, its structure can be seen as a pattern of concentric circles, each reflecting a different level of commitment. In Comunione e Liberazione, the outermost circle comprises lay Catholics who attend a weekly meeting known as the School of Community, where prayers are said, songs or hymns are sung and a text is discussed—often an extract from the works of Father Giussani. Those who seek a closer involvement can join the so-called Fraternity. CL’s innermost rings are the Fraternity of Saint Joseph, a group of laypeople who take vows of obedience, poverty and chastity but follow otherwise normal lives, and the Memores Domini (often referred to within CL as the
gruppo adulto
), who make the same undertakings but live in community. The women who did the housework and cooking for Pope Benedict XVI, a keen admirer of Comunione e Liberazione, all belonged to Memores Domini. CL also encompasses a fellowship of diocesan priests and an order of nuns. Since it does not keep a register of its members, it is impossible to know the true number of its adherents. But according to the group’s Web site, the Fraternity alone has around sixty thousand members. The organization as a whole is present in about eighty countries.

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,
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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,
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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 channel 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?