Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [87]
Some may appear to be more fortunate in their machinations, even if, in the end, they must appear to cede gracefully to the inevitable-itself an important recuperation of social capital from the jaws of financial disaster. Thus, a wealthy participant in a Monti condominium found himself threatened with a lawsuit when he failed to pay his annual fees; but he and the condominium administrator who served the writ clearly had an understanding that he would now pay up all his arrears, having gained a substantial amount of interest through the delay. A close but cynical friend noted with both admiration and a measure of malicious glee that his delaying action had been effective but had now come to an end: "It's been years since he paid up. But now he does." Jt is probably indicative of a very comfortable mutual understanding that the defaulter subsequently offered strong support to the administrator when a group of the residents wanted to fire the latter. 33) Evidently, however, the tactic was a repeatable act; and the same man, who employed the friend's daughter, only paid her wages under pressure and then with a check postdated by several months.
For those in arrears with their taxes and fines, the ability to manage time with a certain insouciant flair pays off handsomely. As with the confessional, moreover, sometimes quite nominal slaps on the wrist can-if the payoff is sufficient-provide complete absolution from any further guilt. It is in this context that the widely reported priestly abuses of the confessional as a site of wheeling and dealing provide a significant model. One would not have to prove that priests are always so outrageously corrupt-indeed, I would very much doubt it-in order to see that the widespread assumption that they are provides a familiar template for understanding the institutionalized venality of the bureaucratic state as well.
In avoiding the payment of fines, timing is crucial; the citizen will try to figure out when the next condono is likely to arrive. Beyond the general expectation that some such amnesty will eventually appear, however, prediction is wildly uncertain. The citizen must try to calculate the probabilities of getting a new government within a short time; if the prediction is accurate, the citizen has a better chance of getting off with a vastly reduced fine and comprehensive absolution from future prosecution. Such calculations form part of the accounting that each householder must do, much as parking fines are calculated into a citizen's monthly expenses. (In fact, citizens often simply ignore them, calculating, at minor risk, that the authorities will never follow up.) Citizens have learned to compensate for their own imperfections by relying on the similarly inherited weaknesses of the authorities. The parallel with the doctrinally grounded pragmatics of the Catholic church seems inescapable.
Priests, as human beings, are as subject as their parishioners to the consequences of original sin; in a district favored by such a notorious libertine as the Borgia pope Alexander VI, it should probably come as no surprise that even priests have frequented the brothels of Monti in recent memory. Like their parishioners, too, priests find reflected in the Roman landscape the evidence of their flawed condition; and if they do not see this clearly, lay people are more than willing to point it out, as in the frequent anticlerical graffiti that litter the walls. There is also a punning Roman proverb that ironically lampoons the church's presumed venality: "a Roma Dio non e trino, e quatrino" (in Rome God is not triune, He's a quatrino [a coin formerly issued by the Vatican State]).34
Conversely, the Vatican, like many bureaucracies, shares much of the culture of those whose lives it regulates, and the church has trained