Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [68]
The priest can thus embrace an entire religious community that his church had hitherto disdained as an ineradicable reminder of its sin-begotten origins. It is within the same framework that he also subsumes popular worship within the ritual space of the parish. Such acts make it easy to forget that, in an earlier and earthier age, the yoking of religiosity and carnality might not have seemed as strange as it often does in our own post-protestant times. In this sense, the priest's historically grounded progressivism is itself paradoxically conservative. It hearkens back to established doctrine, one that also recognizes history itself as a consequence of humanity's fallen condition, and to the ultimate desire for a universally Christian world.
This conjuncture has its own pragmatic logic in the present social context of Monti life. The presence of the church, architecturally ubiquitous, is also socially embedded through the personal commitment of this popular and well-respected parish priest. But his very humanity constitutes something of a threat from the point of view of those who continue to oppose the church's presence in their everyday lives, or at least to express discomfort about its ubiquity.6" The materiality of his commitment to his parish, a source of great enthusiasm to the faithful (an enthusiasm, in his own judgment, that sometimes far exceeds the demands of a more reflective religiosity), means that the struggle is joined in the real time of daily political conflict; the spiritual is thus thoroughly embedded in the material, not only theologically, but also politically. Treating these various elements separately would thus distort the experienced realities of Monti life and belie the often-expressed Roman desire for compromise and symbiosis.
The procession to the Madonnelle offers a dramatic illustration of the significance of place, sanctity, and history in reinforcing localist sentiment within the universal claims of the Catholic faith. It gives Monti a distinctive materiality that marks it off from the rest of the city of which it is nevertheless a vital and resonant part. The procession is heavily gendered; most of those who participate in the procession are women, and the hymns are an often discordant but restrainedly enthusiastic paean of female religiosity, over which the priest's voice, amplified by a portable loudspeaker, soars with occasional but unmistakable authority despite his recent arrival in the parish-sometimes leading the singing, more often explaining the historical antecedents of the procession and its stations. In a city where taxi drivers are history buffs and book collectors, this parish priest is notable for his several studies of local devotional history, works that he compiled after only a few years in office.
His miniaturized pilgrimage, an invitation for locals to rediscover in their home terrain a model of what millions of pilgrims have sought in Rome for centuries, purges the urban fabric of some of its notoriety (and perhaps also of his own unease at so sensual a reminder of the constant struggle with materiality in his pastoral life). It thus creates a moral trajectory that, for an incandescent moment of hope, also both sublimates a sinful past to a rationalized present and symbolically overcomes the threatened tragedy of the neighborhood's impending social dissolution. Such moments of heightened effervescence also occasionally highlight local struggles-in town meetings about traffic problems or the sometimes violent disagreements that sometimes erupt between older and younger condominium residents-between the values and practices