Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [67]
His attachment to the sites of this religiosity manifests an intriguing tension, one that perhaps draws on the working-class history of the shrines but that at the same time addresses paradoxes within the current doctrines of the church. On the one hand, by incorporating explanatory lectures, and by thereby producing a philology that occludes older understandings of the shrines, he seems to endorse the ongoing gentrification and monumentali- zation of the district. On the other, his intense focus on the physical spaces of his parish represents a doctrinally sanctioned displacement of physical desire. The priest must deploy to the sites of his church the sensuality frustrated (as an outsider might interpret it) by what for him is a willing acceptance of the sacred charge of celibacy: "I was speaking of the connection of the priest with the physical place of the church. So there we are talking of a discourse of affect that is tied to the choice of celibacy and to the way of living, that's the point, the realities of sentiment-the sentimental realities, so to speak."
On the one hand, he said, his role as parish priest was an administrative one. On the other, however, he described with sparkling warmth the pleasure he felt after he had cleaned out the previously abandoned little Church of San Salvatore and removed the accumulated garbage; this, he said, was "a very beautiful moment." And then, after he had performed the ritual of the Eucharist in this newly cleaned church, his eye fell on a set of prayers for deconsecrated churches in his breviary. The church had never been deconsecrated but had simply been ignored and allowed to fall into disuse, but he was beset by a sudden urge: "At that moment I felt the need to pray, to have everyone there pray, and to reflect, on the place, on the physical space as ... on the church as a building, and as a metaphor; and this was a moment of great intensity for the people, I realized-and nor was it a moment of lesser intensity for me." Such moments stand out far beyond his administrative role; they are the truly spontaneous expressions of a deep and consuming love.
This sublimation of the sinful condition that he shares as a member of the human race deflects temptation into a materiality that ultimately reproduces and celebrates the passion of Christ. It grounds this physicality anew in the sites of local devotion, but in the process also "purifying" these sites of older associations with the erstwhile notoriety of Monti social life. This connectedness, "a slightly strange relationship" (una relazione un po' strana) between the priest and the physical space of devotion, also moved him, for example, to spontaneous prayers of contrition for the church's past cruelties to the Jewish population, in a space-the Church of San Salvatore, the Savior-that had played such a key role in their persecution; acknowledging that cruelty but also explaining that it had been intended as a benign act of saving souls, he spoke to a new kind of redemption that was consistent with the revised teachings of the Catholic church about its relationship with the Jews. In the same vein, he also thought that it would be good to have a weekly prayer service both to ask for God's pardon for what was done by the church to the Jews but also to give thanks for their physical salvation inasmuch as the church, both as a built space and as a local institution, became, like other such sites, a refuge for numerous Jews during the Nazi persecution. He would also like to add the Easter