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By Root 636 0

of the sixteenth century, at least one prominent theologian was arguing that gratitude was the mark of "civility" and "urbanity"-and from here it was a short path to accepting some forms of profit and the circulation of value "on condition that this value be effaced by the gesture of the giver."" In this privileging of civility-which in turn obscures the inner motivations that had been the particular concern of those who condemned usury in an earlier age-we can discern the emergence of the rhetoric of manners and friendship that often softens the violence of usury today, and is indeed the principal disguise for an entire range of socially recognized actions that violate formal rules both religious and civic.

Such casuistry, however familiar, leads many Romans to feel that the church has too often failed to live up to its own precepts. At no time was this sentiment more strongly expressed than during the year of the jubilee, an event that since medieval times has recuperated the imagery of Old Testament debt forgiveness and offered the church numerous opportunities to advance the salvation of its flock of sinners.31 Romans instead saw the jubilee as a business opportunity that the Vatican would cynically exploit to the fullest; it did not escape the notice of critical observers that the sudden proliferation of routes to forgiveness for the consequences of original sin through the sacrament of the confessional coincided with a new building boom and what struck some as a routine apology for the church's own past sins even as they were being replicated in the present.32 In Rome, which encapsulates the capital of a vast theocratic commonwealth while also serving as that of a secular state with strong left-leaning tendencies and a bitterly anticlerical working class, a history of ecclesiastical oppression and scandal offers the clearest possible evidence that no human being is exempt from the failure to stand up to temptation.

In particular, the church's evasive and casuistic handling of both usury and the ownership of real estate, with the consequent victimization of debtors and tenants, is a lightening rod for all the resentment that centuries of cruel and rigid control have accumulated. The Jubilee year saw a massive rebuilding of much of the city's fabric and a huge expansion of property speculation in anticipation of the arrival of the pilgrims; local commentary generally saw in these developments an economically profitable collusion between the city government and the church hierarchy. The Jubilee did not seem a blessing to many; even a relatively religious shopkeeper with a royalist past called it "this damned year 2000"-damned, because many hoped to make a financial killing and most were doomed to bitter disappointment. Only the churches and the tourist agencies, he predicted, would do well. The holy Jubilee itself, in other words, was imperfect, riddled with the all-too-human flaws of an event of historical significance; at least the pious shopkeeper's bitter reaction was in this sense consistent with doctrine.

This was also a year in which rights to the city were arguably more sharply contested than ever before. In particular, the huge World Gay Pride demonstration that summer tested the limits of the much-touted virtue of tolerance and found them exceedingly narrow. Agreements with the Italian state notwithstanding, the Vatican claimed Rome as its peculiar responsibility, arguing that the procession should not take place there in the jubilee Year.33 The Vatican leadership tried, unsuccessfully in the end, to pressure the city authorities into banning the entire event-one of the few major issues on which Mayor Rutelli refused to yield to ecclesiastical pressure. The Vatican argued that the demonstration would be an insult to the pope as well as an exercise in bad taste; a local right-wing newspaper, I1 Tempo, collected signatures in support of the ban.34 In the end, however, the march went ahead, much to the highly public disgust of the church and its sympathizers. Even the threatened attempt to head it off from the