Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [51]
Nothing else in Italian life so much repelled Morse as the bizarre, menacing power of the Catholic Church. Hatred of Popery had been common in the New England of his youth, brought there from England nearly two centuries earlier by the first colonists. And now, despite a swelling population of twenty-one million, Italy was economically stagnant, dependent on an old-fashioned agricultural system, its work force largely illiterate. Like nearly every other American who visited Italy at the time, Morse blamed the country’s poverty and moral debasement on the “darkness and ignorance and superstition” of the Church.
Like his compatriots, too, who flocked to Catholic worship as to a circus, Morse made himself a connoisseur of ritual. Attending Catholic services became his chief entertainment in Rome. Mystified, he watched an attendant ceremonially open a prayer book: “bows, turns round, bows each side,” he recorded in his journal, “advances one side of the altar, and kneels; advances to the altar, bows, and kneels again; lays the book on the altar, bows, and kneels again.” He observed nuns taking the veil, the installation of several cardinals, the baptism of a converting “Jew man.” Upon the death of Pope Pius VIII he viewed the corpse lying in state at the Quirinal Palace, clad in an ermine cape and gold-embroidered crimson stole. Later he endured the motley crowd of beggars and nobles at St. Peter’s, to be present for the first appearance of the new Pope, Gregory XVI, trumpets blaring.
What Morse saw of monastic life appalled him as a macabre blend of deathly asceticism and leering sensuality. A group of brown-frocked Franciscans and Capuchins, heads shaven, seemed to him as haggard as disinterred corpses, yet libidinous-looking: “it needed no stretch of the imagination to find in most the expression of the worst passions of our nature.” Intrigued by ceremonial kissing, he recorded one faintly wanton instance after another: virgins kissing the hem of a cardinal’s garment; cardinals kissing the Pope’s toe; nuns kissing nuns; hundreds kneeling to kiss a crucifix; the foot on a bronze statue of St. Peter worn away not by kissing but by wiping preparatory to kissing, “sometimes with the coat sleeve by a beggar.”
Morse experienced the frocks and altars as a lineal descendant of New England Puritanism. Unlike the intellectual religion of his father and ancestors, he decided, Catholicism addressed the imagination but not the understanding: “No instruction was imparted, none seems ever to be intended.” Catholicism was not religion but theater. Like actors speaking their parts, worshippers at Mass mouthed the words of priests—priests he often caught yawning, and whose rushed, inarticulate recitation of Latin prayers struck him variously as “whining,” “drawling,” “brawling,” and “gurgling.” Indeed the playhouse was but the secular offspring of the Church, a “daughter of this prolific Mother of Abominations, and a child worthy of its dam.” Both pretended to teach morality by scenic effect and pantomime, “and the fruits are much the same.”
But much in Catholic culture pleased Morse’s ear and eye. He enjoyed the liturgical music, often going out of his way to hear the singing in some church. The architecture of the great cathedrals seemed “gorgeous beyond description.” And his color-sense delighted in the crimson-gold-and-ermine spectacle of Catholic worship, the shining mitres, flambeaux-lit processions, fans of peacock feather. Not to mention the unexcelled painting