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of collective responsibility along the lines of individual self-interest. A tax evader would presumably not wrestle with torments of conscience as a priest might do over some gross act of greed, but the end result is the same. All are left to their own devices; all must face the consequences; and all try to anticipate those consequences through a calculus of material cost and benefit-the tax dodger because such offenses may eventually be amnestied, the priest because sins can be expiated through a range of deprivations from the monetary cost of an indulgence to fleshly mortification.

Catholicism is deeply concerned with the material world. This seems surprising only from the perspective of a Cartesian distinction between the material and the symbolic-the same socially disengaged dualism that views theatricality as necessarily superficial and virtue as absolutely opposed to vice. Such readings distort the lived experience of the people of Rome. Without vice and its material temptations, and without the unceasing aggravation of conflict, virtue has no opportunity to shine. But a world without wickedness is in any case doctrinally unthinkable.

Through the concept of original sin, which is also the single cataclysmic event that brought temporality and history into the human condition, Catholicism accords enormous significance to the presence of temptation in everyday life. It is both a moral alibi and a test of virtue. It thus encompasses the daily sins of the faithful and at the same time provides the means of alleviating the consequences of those sins in the afterlife. If the historical sensibility thus embraced by the church provides the sole antidote to the culture of death represented by criminal forces such as the mafia, as one religious apologist argues," this same sense of temporality and its attendant imperfections provides a theological exoneration of real-life peccadilloes. A historicity that charts the path from a state of original sin to the ultimate redemption is no less capable of carrying countless individual tales of abject backsliding, and there is no more dramatic physical illustration of the wages of such sin than the profusion of aesthetic styles and the palimpsest of broken rules that together constitute the historic center of Rome.

Indeed, the shoulder-shrugging acceptance of minor sin is the expression of a cosmology that also informs the organic development of the city itself, inasmuch as urban space here is a complicated palimpsest of multiple infractions of often evanescent and ill-defined laws. But the sinful condition of humanity also poses very practical dilemmas for the representatives of the faith itself. Thus, for example, a priest assured me that the inability of concerned clergy to prevent some of the more harrowing evictions carried out by various churches and confraternities reflected the necessity of not interfering with each priest's individual struggle with the temptations of the material world. (An older colleague of his had already pointed out that many of the properties once owned by religious bodies had been sold off to raise funds for charitable causes, so there was also a historical reasoning behind the Vatican hierarchy's repeated insistence that it was not competent to intervene in particular cases.) Nor was this something that could be corrected from above; the doctrine of subsidiarity leaves the burden of responsibility weighing on the individual priest's soul.45 Each member of the clergy must face the consequences of his own actions alone, in his conscience in this world and before divine judgment in the next.

Subsidiarity might be thought to provide a moral alibi, but it is also clear that some of the speculative use of real estate conducted in the name of the church emanated from the highest echelons of the clergy. Four years before the jubilee, in 1996, the Vatican itself attempted to fire and evict the peasants farming the land in the agricultural zone of Acquafredda, in the hope of turning that land to an economically more profitable use.46 Whether the pope himself