Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [69]
Monti's boast of being the "first none of Rome" encapsulates the key paradox of local specificity and temporality on the one hand and the centrality of both the Universal Church and the city's brooding eternity on the other. In the city's ecclesiastical sites, its people can attain direct experience of the divine.69 But the popular shrines, as material embodiments of everyday life, are also sites of moral corruption as well as of resistance to corruption from above. A religiosity that demands engagement with the material can itself be turned against papal authority when the popes or their representatives display an excess of arrogance, venality, and hunger for power-or simply refuse to accept the autonomy of a local parish or confraternity as part of the divinely ordained condition of the city.
Monti, proud of a deeply venerated image of the Madonna in the parish church, rose in revolt in the sixteenth century when Pope Gregory XIII, apparently out of fear that a local cult could subvert theological doctrine (but ostensibly because the locals wanted to keep it in the humble house where it had been miraculously discovered), tried to have the image surreptitiously removed to the Vatican soon after its miraculous discovery.70 A heavy rainstorm persuaded the local people that the Madonna did not wish to leave. Not only did the local gentry rebel; the image itself resisted relocation, threatening to dissolve in a pile of dust at every attempt at removal. Eventually the pope was persuaded that nothing could be done and relented even to the point of giving his blessing and ordering an appropriately magnificent housing to be constructed in the form of the church. The present parish priest himself pointed out the house, then already a couple of centuries old, where a local notable had organized that resistance to the central power of the church.
Roman history is thus not a simple story of contests between ecclesiastical and anticlerical camps clearly defined and drawn up for battle. Fighting the power of a pope does not mean disputing the moral authority of the church but, on the contrary, subjects the exercise of that authority to divine arbitration. Such continuities persist today in improbable forms; the postwar political history of Italy, with its strident opposition between Communist and Catholic parties until the early 199os, might seem to favor a starkly dualistic reading, but, as David Kertzer has shown, the sworn enemies of the church adopted its symbolic forms and strategies and so increasingly came to adopt some of its attitudes." The breaks are never as clear or absolute as modern political discourse makes them sound, mainly because the moral struggle does not take place so much in the political arena as also in each individual conscience and according to the particular circumstances of each moment of confrontation. Every resident of Monti can see, reflected in the ambiguous gaze of the countless images of the Madonna that overlook the streets, the ceaseless tension between heartfelt piety and the inevitable taint of sin that necessitates and nurtures it, between a perfect and transcendent universal faith and its broken, corrupt materializations on earth.
A Clergy Scorned
Cynical recollections of the less edifying parts of papal history are thus not necessarily irreligious; they simply show that no mortal, not even a pope and certainly not a priest who must manage the earthly goods of his parish church), can escape that agonizing oscillation between good and evil or the passionate debates about where the line should be drawn between them; such is the nature of original sin. Local religiosity may even offer moral refuge from a Vatican perceived as having betrayed the values of humility and charity. Eviction from Monti led the scion of an old Communist family to take part, with his sons, in the parish church confraternity's religious processions, a participation that allowed him to perpetuate a local