Scandal in Rome has buffeted the church - Italian political corruption purges

Peter Hebblethwaite

OXFORD, England - You won't find Tangentopoli on any map of Italy.

It is a city of the mind, a new word for an old reality. Tangenti are the kick-backs that Italian politicians routinely pocket on all public works. "Bribesville" is the best translation for the system that has ruled Italian political life since the 1980s.

It came to light thanks to the determined efforts of a Milan judge, Antonio Di Pietro. A computer buff capable of tracking down the most recondite transactions, Di Pietro has almost single-handedly uncovered the web of favors, kick-backs and rake-offs that accompanied all public works in Italy. He has become a national hero. Small boys now dream of becoming prosecutors.

The statistics are staggering: 830 businessmen and politicians have been arrested since February 1992; 1,000 others are under suspicion. More than 50 members of Parliament are under investigation, four ministers and two party leaders have resigned, and there have been half a dozen suicides.

If everyone involved were charged, about 60,000 people would have to pass through the courts. Hence the hastily devised March 5 decree declaring that those who confess will be given only suspended sentences, provided they restitute the money and retire from public life. That, it is claimed, is not an amnesty, merely a way of coping with judicial overload. But the president has refused to sign it. Impasse for the moment.

It was hardly likely that scandals so deeply embedded in Italian society would leave the church unscathed. The brother of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, secretary of state, was arrested in Turin. That does not impute any guilt, but it indicates proximity.

The level of church involvement depends on how rigorously one can draw the distinction between "Catholics" and "the church." So far, with one notable exception, it is holding up relatively well.

"The suspicions of yesterday," said Rosminian Clemente Riva, auxiliary bishop of Rome, with wide-eyed astonishment, "have become the realities of today."

Rome has been badly buffeted by the storm of accusations. Riva has proposed a collective Lenten penitential liturgy for the concluding phase of the Synod of the Rome Diocese.

The new Catechism of the Catholic Church, already a best-seller in Italy, has been pressed into service. "Thou shalt not steal" has acquired a topicality its authors probably never intended.

But Riva's potential penitents would be largely absent from the liturgy of reconciliation - and in jail. Already arrested are many members of the Communion and Liberation movement, especially its political arm, the Movimento Popolare, which was supposed to act as a ginger group within the Christian Democratic Party.

Last August, Monsignor Gervasio Gestori, secretary of the Italian bishops' conference, warned the movement at its annual rally in Rimini on the Adriatic coast that it should distance itself from politics and power. With hindsight, this has been regarded as a "prophetic" remark. Did Gestori know something the judges were about to discover? No comment.

More vituperative was Rocco Buttiglione, the philosophy professor who frequently lunches with Pope John Paul II. Formerly CL's leading intellectual, he began to desert the sinking ship last August, alleging that the Movimento Popolare had come to believe that "the end justifies the means." Dazzled by the prospect of power, charged Buttiglione, they were prepared to rob and steal and even kill to achieve their end - a "Christian" presence in the state understood as a permanent place in government for the Christian Democrats.

These warnings came too late anyway. The handcuffs are on Luigi Martinelli, Antonio Simone and Virgilio Sironi, who formed the CL-sponsored terna in the last elections in Lombardy.

The treasurer of the CL movement in Brianza and bead of a series of building cooperatives, Natalino Erba, has been arrested. So has Antonio Brambilla, formerly head of a company called Environmental Services (actually trash collection). But these were relatively small fries. Marco Bucarelli, president of the Movimento Popolare in Rome and Lazio, was taken into custody last week. His was the most distinguished head to roll in Rome.

After that, it was inevitable that his closest associate, Vittorio Sbardella, protector and financier of the CL weekly, Il Sabato, should be arrested. Il Sabato is notoriously even more right-wing than 30 Days, the other CL publication. Instead of attacking "dissident" theologians, 30 Days has started attacking judges.

Sbardella ran the Christian Democrats of Rome. The full extent of his activities is not yet clear. But be used Pietro Pelosi as his agent in the Intermetro project for building the Rome underground: It cost two billion lire per kilometer to dig through Roman remains.

A proportion of that money ended in the pockets of Sbardella and Pelosi. They used it to buy - in the name of their wives - the mega-restaurant Parioli in the fashionable Prati district of Rome.

Though it has kept a lower profile than CL, Opus Dei is also involved. A warrant is out for the arrest of Giuseppe Garofono, formerly delegate-manager of Montedison, one of the biggest names in Catholic finance. Through the group ironically called Ethics and Finance, Garofano has links with Angelo Cailola, president of the board of IOR - the Vatican Bank.

But undoubtedly the main blows of "Operation Clean Hands" have fallen on Communion and Liberation.

Always critical of Italian Catholic Action, which had made "the religious option" and tried to distance itself from party politics, CL was riding high in the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.

Indeed, at the 1987 synod on the laity, CL not only claimed to run the show but was proposed by John Paul as the very model of the "new movements," which expressed the charismatic nature of the church better than the old religious orders.

Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, archbishop of Milan, pointed out how dangerous and divisive they were. Martini is one of the few public figures acknowledged to have "clean hands." From 1984 he has been speaking of one of the "three plagues" of Milan as "political and administrative corruption."

Martini's hostility to CL was often attributed to Jesuit "jealousy" of the new movement. It now appears to be more solidly grounded than that. Three years ago, CL began to move closer to the Socialist Party of Bettino Craxi, now resigned and under investigation.

Though sometimes presented as an audacious "opening to the left," it was nothing of the kind, since Craxi's party was socialist in name only. The alliance may have had more sinister implications.

As prime minister, Craxi signed the revised concordat with the Holy See in 1984. One interpretation now is that it marked a veil drawn over mysterious events such as the death of Roberto Calvi in 1982, the abandoned investigation of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank's alleged involvement in the crash of the Banco Ambrosiano.

On the more political level what has been revealed in Milan is that the kick-backs were not just the result of greedy individuals on the take. Cash regularly went into the party coffers as a way of purchasing political influence. Placemen in state companies allotted contracts on the basis of rigged tenders. The "commission" they expected was usually 5 percent, but it varied from town to town.

At first it was every party for itself. But after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, they began to collude. In Milan, for example, 50 percent of any bribe went to the Christian Democrats, and 25 percent each to the socialists and the communists (now rebaptized as the Democratic Party of the Left).

The Italian political system has been called "partyocracy" rather than democracy. Far from being loose coalitions brought together to fight elections, Italian parties are huge organizations with great powers of patronage. They needed large injections of cash to pay their many full-time employees. A referendum on the funding of political parties is scheduled for April.

For decades since the war the Christian Democrats and their coalition allies were kept in power by the fear of communism: Elections were portrayed as a battle between home rule and Moscow rule. Few questions were asked.

But now that constraint has been removed, Italians have a real electoral choice and the establishment parties all have suffered grievously. They have lost out to the Lombardy League in the north and to a reformist Christian democratic group called the Rete (Network). The coming man is Leoluca Orlando, former mayor of Palermo, Sicily, who has tried to clean up the party and rid it of Mafia pressures.

Yet for last year's April 5 election, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who runs the Rome diocese on behalf of Pope John Paul II, made the usual preelection plea for "the unity of Italian Catholics" - a not very subtle way of telling them to vote Christian Democrat. When they did not obey, Ruini consoled himself with the thought that the situation would have been worse had he not made his appeal.

Martini, meanwhile, in Milan, also advocated "the unity of Italian Catholics." But by that be meant not automatic support for the Christian Democrats so much as unity on the values of honesty and integrity.

His most recent book, Journey Around the Vocabulary of Ethics, is moving up to join the Catechism on the best-seller lists. It would make excellent prison reading for those with unwanted time on their hands. Reading can be an influence for good. Di Pietro got one politician to "confess" by simply placing a copy, of Fyodor Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment on his desk.

COPYRIGHT 1993 National Catholic Reporter
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group