Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [61]
It is certainly true that neither the casuistry of conscience nor the rhetoric of the jubilee and its attendant notions of forgiveness and tolerance cut much ice with ordinary Romans. The church attracts a great deal of dislike simply because of its special privileges. While the church has always defended its exemption from paying property taxes on buildings used for religious purposes, for example, its definition of those purposes may have stretched ordinary credulity beyond tolerable limits; it has certainly allowed itself a generous interpretation, to say the least, of the law allowing it to accept bequests of real estate tax-free as long as these were used for charitable purposes. What is more, the church has lately found itself confronting charges of tax evasion on its revenues from rent income and calls for the imposition of the municipal property tax (Ici) for the first time since their introduction in 1992.47 Such calls find a ready audience in workingclass Rome and among the city's left-wing intellectuals. While the hierarchy urges tolerance in general terms, moreover, its practices-notably its opposition to the World Gay Pride procession-suggests a selective understanding of tolerance at best. Critics have also attacked its calls for tolerance toward immigrants as a disingenuous argument for allowing cheap labor to invade the housing market and work force to the detriment of Italians' interests.
The persistence of expectations of material rewards for social pressure, however directly it may seem to contravene the values of a pre-Reformation Christianity, is not antithetical to the established practices of the church in everyday life; indeed, it is the church and its appointed allies (the socalled black aristocracy) who are deemed worthy of owning significant real estate, rather than those Weberian upstarts who might consider themselves entitled to show themselves the elect of God by actually working for such material evidence of their condition.
The burdens of property management, however, also create ethical dilemmas that are deflected from the central power of the Vatican by the doctrine of subsidiarity, much as the same doctrine is deployed to justify the capital accumulation and ethnic exclusivism championed by the European Union's most right-wing politicians. In an Italy governed during much of my fieldwork by a right-wing coalition and shadowed by a church both extolling what it regards as the Christian basis of true European identity, and unprepared to compromise with notions of ethical or cultural relativism, the physicality of the church's presence in everyday life maintains venal temptations that test the ethical will of citizenry and priesthood, sinners all. How can a protestant sense of the civic emerge and survive here? The observable failure to pass the test, to resist temptation, repeatedly confirms the wisdom of the doctrine and especially the logic of the indulgence-the anticipated forgiveness for petty crimes yet to be committed. If we are truly sinners, we cannot live without that endlessly repeatable promise of salvation. Even the pious rhetoric of disgust seems at times to perpetuate the civic corruption that it decries.4s
Rome, the center of the Catholic world, is also deeply anticlerical. The political Left has habitually opposed corruption that it associates, in the post-World War II era, with the rule of the right-wing Christian Democrat