BY SAMUEL PICCOLO Special to the VOICE
One afternoon in July, I was lying on a stone bench in Rome. I had begun the day in Naples, first walking across the city to get to the train station, then making the journey to the capital and settling in, and then setting off again to explore. And it had been hot—the relentless heat that overwhelms Italy daily in the summer, broken only by night or the rare building that is air-conditioned.
But as I lay on the bench there was some suggestion that, after three weeks without rain, the sky was finally going to release some of its weight. My eyes were closed, my head resting on my bunched up backpack, and I felt a handful of drops come down. Not enough to keep me awake.
It was the distant clomping that did wake me—not because of the volume of the sound but the incongruity of it. The motors and yells were surely louder, but they all belonged, whereas the clip of horseshoes on cobblestone did not.
The sound grew stronger as I sat up, and became more full, the clops became distinct and it was clear that we were dealing with not a single horse but a whole fleet.
When the fleet indeed appeared from down the road behind a building they did not disappoint. Glossy, groomed, glowing white, they were all truly impressive specimens. Riding upon each horse was a policeman in ceremonial dress, each clasping a brass instrument in one hand, and the reins to their mount. When the whole lot of them had passed me by, there was no other option but to follow.
I followed them down the block to another square, an opening the size of a basketball court in front of a church. I was not the only one who had been attracted to these pied trumpeters, and the square was quickly filling up. The horses swept through the square and arranged themselves into the outline of a half-moon, one policeman—the conductor, I presumed—remaining in front. And then they waited a long while.
The square attracted even more passers-by as the moments accumulated, and soon the horses grew as restless as the spectators, pawing at the stone, shaking their coffin-like heads from left to right. I had no idea what was going on.
Suddenly, or perhaps not so suddenly, since a quiet roar could be heard to grow inside, the doors to the church were flung open, and a parade of people poured out, young and old, but mostly old, cheering, clapping, the sounds of singing behind them. Three or four habited nuns stood beside me, speaking Spanish, admiring the horses.
After so long of struggling with Italian, I was pleased to hear a language I understood, and eavesdropped on them as they girlishly picked their favourite.
“What is going on?” I asked of one. “Why are so many people here? Why are there horses, and the band?”
She replied that it was a festival, the festival of Solennità Maria Santissima del Carmine, and that all of this was in honour of her. As I was told this, the back of the church finally emptied out, even more people in robes and cassocks, and the Santissima herself, on a litter.
A dark-skinned plastic mannequin, life-sized, wearing a long white veil, she was carried by the crowd out into the open and held up high. Once she was in position the conductor raised his arms, and the band, at last, came to life, blasting out a song.
I listened closely, and it seemed to be the Colonel Bogey March, a British tune based on the whistles of a golfing military man. When this bout of bogey was over, they immediately launched into another perplexing bit: New York, New York.
I asked my sister friend, “Why are they playing this music to her? This is not Italian music. What does it have to do with this celebration.”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just a party!” and went back to clapping her hands and swaying with the music. Seemingly the whole street was doing the same, one hand holding their phones and recording the events, the other waving in the air.
When the Sinatra song was over, the place gave a rousing cheer. The Santissma was hoisted even higher in the air and carried back into the church, being applauded all the way. It was the strangest thing I saw in my entire time in the country.
*
This month I began grad school at a Catholic university. I went to a mass for the first time, heard the tradition, fumbled along with the words while the others recited from a lifetime of memories, sat in the pew quietly during communion. That afternoon, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a report detailing the abuse of some 1000 children by 300 priests over many decades. I heard talk of it in the hallway of my department, with faculty wondering what the university would do about the “crimes against humanity” in Pennsylvania.
The next day, at orientation for international students, I was part of a group of 25 or so new arrivals to the US, including among them a priest from Uganda beginning a doctorate in theology. In making the rounds of the group, we introduced ourselves to everyone else, and when I spoke to this man, Father Linus, who looked to be about 40, I asked how long it had been since he entered the seminary. He said that he had been a priest for six years.
I told him that I had just finished reading a novel narrated by a priest in Ireland, a man suited to the clergy but who nonetheless detailed the enormous sacrifice and commitment involved in the vocation, and I offered that it seemed to me to be one of the more difficult things that one could choose to do. I thought of how, in the story, when the priest begins his career he is revered, given seats on the train, goes weeks without needing to cook for himself, and how when he ends it he is a pariah, spat on in public, punched and arrested when trying only to return a lost boy to his mother. And I remembered how, in the litany of names named in reports in Ireland, the priest reads of his own friends charged, tried, guilty. And how he ends the book lying face down in the dirt, thinking to himself that, in his silence, he was “just as guilty as the rest of them.”
Father Linus smiled, a bit sadly it seemed to me, and agreed that it was not an easy thing.
“We need your prayers,” he said, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “More than you can know.” ◆
