Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [70]
Echoes of such battles between local piety and the encompassing secular power of the Vatican reverberate down through the centuries. One of the taxi-driving historians and a left-wing butcher, for example, recalled with ill-concealed glee the exile of the popes to Avignon in r 309-although, the butcher caustically remarked, "it's now two thousand years we've lived with the popes ... we've tried to send him to Avignon [in exile], we've tried sending him to Viterbo-but the pope always comes back-don't ask me why, he always returns to Rome. I don't know why! I don't know why! The pope keeps coming back to Rome!"
Anticlerical sentiment has found a new source of anger in the large population of eastern European immigrants, given great visibility in Monti by crowds that regularly converge on the Ukrainian church on the main square. A minor incident nicely illustrates the connections that local people increasingly perceive among immigration, government, and church. A local resident who one day saw me being attacked by a group of Gypsy children using a large sheet of cardboard to try to block my way and confuse me-a common device of petty thieves on Rome's sidewalks-thought that nothing could be done to stop these incidents. Revealingly, he blamed the lack of seriousness ~serieta~ in the application of the law on the Vatican's repeated calls for tolerance ~tolleranza~. Prejudice against immigrants and Gypsies, which this man clearly and unequivocally expressed, feeds the anticlericalism of those working-class people who, in an earlier age and as yet innocent of much contact with immigrants, would mostly have supported the Communist party. One retired old man, apparently a member of a vigilante group, made a point of hanging around the areas in which Gypsy children allegedly attacked tourists and tried to rob them, and experiencing great delight whenever he was able to thwart these youngsters and earn the grateful praise of their intended victims. The church's call for tolerance does not resonate well with these self-appointed guardians of public safety.
Anticlericalism is reinforced, more strongly today than ever before, by the frequency with which churches have been evicting working-class tenants from their homes, sometimes, if rumors are to be believed, in order to house much more densely packed populations of immigrants at inflated rents. Several of the confraternities responsible for recent evictions are based abroad, or in places-such as the Lombard city of Bergamo-known to despise Rome and considered scarcely less foreign by many Romans. For most locals, all these religious bodies are thinly disguised proxies for "the Vatican. "
One local observer of a particularly cruel eviction by a religious confraternity remarked bitterly, "I'm a believer-but I'm also anticlerical, because it's just not fair." On another occasion, he justified having hung a little portrait of the cult figure of Padre Pio on a wall of his own house by again affirming his fundamental belief in his religion, but said that he would not visit the saint's shrine because he disliked the "business" (he used the English word) that went with such pilgrimages, as opposed to the selflessness of priests who went to Africa to care for the sick and destitute. Such disaffection from the institutional church is a centuries-deep tradition in Monti. It does not necessarily conflict with personal religiosity; on the contrary, religious values provide the yardstick by which the entire clerical structure is judged and found wanting.
Such dislike of "the priests" (i preti[-especially for their callous disregard of the local poor, sick, and aged-is far from new. Recall the young Trastevere barber with whom Stendhal liked to