Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [168]
This unedifying tale offers yet another illustration of how the practical experience of dealing with the bureaucracy of institutionalized religion provides a model for secular action. The original owner buys an accelerated path through Purgatory with the bequest (lascito~; the new owners profess the kindliest and friendliest of intentions, only to reveal, with appropriate expressions of regret, their intention of taking full advantage of the tenants' predicament as well as the fruits of their labors. Fear is produced at two levels: first the fear of eternal damnation; then the fear of encroaching debt and a death far from anything resembling home.
I do not wish to challenge the piety of those who decide to leave their property to the church. Nor do I wish to argue that there is a centralized church authority that relentlessly pursues every attractive piece of real estate in the historic center. On the contrary, the principle of subsidiarity means that such actions and the morality of the way in which they are car ried out are entirely the responsibility of a particular priest, prelate, or confraternity. But whereas subsidiarity actually serves the financial interests of the encompassing organization, which thereby acquires property of considerable and increasing value, the temporal fragmentation of local interests and identities places rent-paying residents at a great disadvantage. They have few and inconstant allies; their support often comes at the price of alienating other groups of potential supporters; and their legal position is terrifyingly weak, especially at a time when their erstwhile supporters in the traditional Left have themselves been seduced by the attractions of the market. Moreover, church representatives who are deeply convinced of the rightness of their cause come equipped with the keys of Paradise and a complacent acceptance that poverty and suffering on this earth is one of the most hallowed means of access to eternal bliss.
One of the tenants in this building has been facing eviction during the current papacy. She moved in some twelve years earlier under conditions that were described in a press release as "very uncomfortable," and for which she agreed to undertake the necessary repairs and construction. She had accepted this arrangement after receiving assurances that she would never be evicted from the building. In commenting on the church's perfidy in changing its mind, the author of the press release offers one sentence that is especially revealing: "It is clear [that] times are changing and the market for rental rooms in a quarter like that of the historic center attracts the desire even of those who with so much zeal spread [the doctrine of] Christian charity." The bitterness is clear; the claims of supporting the charitable work of the church rings hollow because the new pope, as the release points out, had just published an article affirming the right to housing, and because the term "charity" reminds the victims of eviction that it is above all a churchbased charity, Caritas, that supports the sometimes indigent immigrants in spaces that used to be inhabited by Romans of long standing. In this painfully imperfect world, charity itself is not unmixed with sin.
Tenants are adept at turning the theological rhetoric of the church against its official bearers. Believers and atheists can unite behind a challenge to the church's right to interpret a scriptural image of Christ that its own actions betray. The residents of another nearby palazzo, also