Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [40]
In another act that seems to suggest something other than tolerance, the Vatican had the Jewish vendors of religious paraphernalia removed from Via della Conciliazione, the road connecting the Vatican to the rest of the city. Ironically, these vendors were-perhaps in a faint echo of their money lending forebears-handling the commerce for which the church itself affected such distaste, but from which it clearly profited both materially and in the propagation of its symbols; their signature items were statuettes of the Madonna. The Vatican also enlisted the help of the Italian police in forcibly expelling the homeless people who were sleeping at night in St. Peter's Square. Here, too, the irony did not escape local critics, who were appalled that such an action should coincide with the pope's calling on Roman families to extend their hospitality to the homeless.
Not coincidentally, the most visceral issue concerning rights to the city was that of housing. Here, the connection with the Vatican was more tenuous and much less consistent. Nonetheless, evidence of at least tacit church complicity in processes of eviction and gentrification was not hard to find. Families that had resided in the historic center of Rome for many generations received only a temporary stay of eviction by various church bodies. Such delays, mostly engineered to avoid the too-obvious irony of a brutal showdown during the internationally visible jubilee year, could not disguise the fact that in this sacred year, with all its promises of redemption and the forgiveness of debt, many would be preparing to leave their old homes forever.
Rome, the flawed city called "eternal" but so deeply steeped in the history that is, we are told, the consequence of the Fall, is by virtue of that paradox an ironic echo of Paradise on earth. The expulsion from Paradise is, among other things, an allegory of the presence of temporality in human life: aging, the pain of parting, the decay and collapse that is built into every aspect of human experience-corruption of the flesh and corruption of the soul. For a city dubbed "eternal" to host the headquarters of a religion so concerned with the transience of all things earthly requires a ceaseless reckoning with materiality; as buildings decay, so souls backslide.
Absolution is doctrinally banned to those who committed their offenses in the full expectation of obtaining a formal absolution for future derelictions and without any sense of contrition. But that is only the view from dogma. In practice, who is to know whether another is contrite? How does one judge such an invisible condition, especially in a city where people are often afraid to take each other's professions of friendship at face value? Religion has an efficient answer to this dilemma as well: that what other people think is irrelevant, since it is only at the Last judgment that a true assessment will be recorded-and will indeed be eternal.
Such a position is crucial in a city whose lifeblood is small-scale trade. The fathers of the church taught that no financial transaction should be conducted with a view to profit; the mere desire to reap profit was sinful in itself. Repeated insurrections against the central authority by poor orders of monks and nuns, and the final revolution that led to the emergence of Protestantism, never succeeded in deflecting the enrichment of the church, which appointed itself the guardian of all the evil instruments of temptation, including wealth itself. And since one