Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [34]
Monticiani proclaim their sinful condition in loud, public prayers as they walk in solemn procession during Holy Week, calling on the holy Virgin to "pray for us" (prega per noi)-this plea for intercession being repeated in sepulchral unison by predominantly female voices, led by the incantatory invocations of the priest over a portable loudspeaker and periodically interspersed with the solemn music of a brass band. These prayers remind the entire community of the burden of sin that all must carry, and of the central importance of hierarchy (in its double sense of priesthood and inequality) in mediating its alleviation. The rite of confession absolves a declining population of faithful Catholics of the burden of particular infractions; because it does not cleanse them of their shared sinfulness, however, the price of such complicitous communion is the maintenance of the church's authority.
Even those who do not go to church acknowledge, in a shrug of the shoulders or a complaisant wink, the inevitability of human imperfection. The very buildings around them, many deliberately neglected by their owners, with cracked or fallen plasterwork in the hallways and unkempt clumps of weeds in the courtyards, attest to the impermanence and suffering of this life. While ruined buildings appeal to a romantic aesthetic, they also testify to the ceaseless attrition, the recurrent mortality, of history. Conservationists' attempts to perpetuate and generalize their time-stained appearance long into the future ironically undermine their more focalized significance for the people who have lived in them, and have put up with their flaws, for generations. The encompassing irony is that the capital of the Catholic world should be known as the Eternal City, given the romantic ruins that so fascinated the eighteenth-century artist Piranesi, the now frequent condemnations of old houses as collapsing (fatiscentfl, and the moral corruption of Rome's political life. Its inescapable temporality is at once theological and social, and in both senses is inseparable from the inevitable decay of all things material.
Theologically, original sin is seen as a debt to the devil;' and debt is by definition a condition that accentuates the sense of time, through repayment, the process that is, significantly,' called redemption; Christ is the Redeemer because it is Christ who, through suffering, redeems the sins of the human race and brings the hope of a return to eternal bliss. He also, and concomitantly, allows humans to achieve a state of forgiveness, their souls purged in that limbo between Hell and Paradise. Socially, this process is economic, and is rendered more so by the ability of the wealthy to pay for more masses, erect more holy images and monuments to their own piety, and bestow more gifts-especially as bequests-on the institution, the church, that represents the divine will on earth. The church's practice of issuing indulgences for a faster passage through Purgatory effectively converts temporality into a new hope of eternity, which is tantamount to final and comprehensive redemption. On the way, each person must be absolved of the many minor sins committed during the temporal sequence of a lifetime or risk eternal damnation.
The debt that is thereby redeemed has its counterpart in the earthly life. The repayment of a debt should ideally be disinterested-that is, literally without any interest payments-and be voluntary and unrelated to time. In practice, economic