The mass bells of Maremma: the waning of European Christianity

For several years now my wife and I have spent part of the summer in rural Tuscany, sometimes in the picture-postcard mountain countryside above Fiesole, deep in what the British (whose current prime minister regularly holidays there), like to call Chianti-shire, but more recently in the hills of the western Maremma, miles from the tourist route. In this less glamorous though still lovely agricultural region, almost nobody speaks anything but Italian and, by and large, foreign tourists rarely come. So last July saw us once again ensconced in a friend's farmhouse, just outside a small hill town two hours' drive from Rome.

To avoid the hideous 1960s parish church in the marketplace, you can drive instead to a chapelry in a neighboring hamlet. The priest--let us call him Don Ignazio--is a barrel-shaped septuagenarian who has been the parocho of both communities for close to fifty years. The ancient building, tiny and topped by a dissonant bell that clanks out the call to Mass, is dedicated to an obscure virgin martyr. Her statue, glassy eyed and clutching something alarmingly moist and anatomical-looking in its right hand, gestures operatically from a niche over the altar. The altar itself is a Baroque wedding cake in a sanctuary that has never been reordered. Don Ignazio therefore celebrates with his back to us, though this is necessity, not liturgical intransigence.

In July, even up here in the hills, the sun can be oppressively hot, and then, in defiance of recent Vatican directives, the perspiring old man dispenses with his chasuble and functions in crumpled alb and stole. Don Ignazio's sermons are essentially folksy and energetic retellings of the Gospel story of the day, rounded off with appropriately edifying liturgical and theological generalities, though to Anglo-Saxon ears he makes surprisingly little effort to relate these general truths to the specifics of real life or current events. By contrast, his bidding prayers and notices are warm and detailed, displaying a close knowledge of the people we are praying for, and dwelling specially and affectionately over the memory of the dead for whom the Mass is being offered. This summer the congregation consisted of three elderly men, one of them in a wheelchair, eight women aged thirty to seventy or so, and us. There were no children or young adults, though this perhaps reflected the fact that the hamlet, picturesquely suspended over a deep river gorge, is no longer much of a working community, many of its houses empty, or converted into neat retirement or vacation homes.

Mass in the town church two miles away is less picturesque, but Sunday congregations there are of course a little bigger, and do include a handful of young families, or at least their women and children. Nevertheless, the numbers attending don't often get far into three figures, and the vast majority of the little town's residents stay away, as they have increasingly done now for several generations. The Communist Party has traditionally had strong support in the region, and though that has faded, there is widespread cynicism about the church's financial affairs and postwar political entanglements. The proprietress of the only local hotel, an educated and decent woman who has lived in the town all her life, wasn't able to tell us the Sunday Mass times, and, so far as I know, never goes herself.

Besides all this, the social structure of the town is in flux. Until a generation ago, it was a functioning market town, most of its inhabitants engaged in the local agricultural economy, the town itself the center of a self-contained district with a strong regional identity. Nowadays it is half empty for much of the year. Though the majority of its houses are still in the hands of the same families who have always owned them, many of their owners have left in search of a living. They work in Rome, and drive up to the hills for vacations or weekends. Interestingly, these nostalgic weekenders are far more likely to turn up at Mass, at any rate on the major festivals, than the locals who have never gone away. The appalling modern church, plug-ugly and decorated with kitsch religious art that makes Mickey Mouse look sophisticated, was and is Don Ignazio's pride and joy, built in the 1960s, when congregations had grown too large for the ancient medieval pieve, or parish church. The pieve would hold them all comfortably now, and Don Ignazio, who is, incidentally, the historian of his town and a man of character, energy, and distinction, like many another country priest, has presided over a local religious decline mirrored everywhere in Italy, a country that can still turn out ardent crowds to greet the pope in visits to shrines like Loretto, but whose regard for the teachings of Catholicism as a practical guide to life is sufficiently indicated by the fact that it has the lowest birth rate in Western Europe.

Don Ignazio is hardly to blame for the evaporation of religious commitment in the idyllic and once deeply Christian countryside of the Maremma. The practical alienation of Italians from their church began several centuries ago, and can be traced to a variety of specific causes. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the church's long and inglorious history of association with political repression in a divided Italy, and more particularly its disastrous confrontation with the emerging Italian state in the nineteenth century, a relationship whose low point was signalled in 1878, when a Roman mob tried to throw the coffin of Pope Pius IX into the Tiber.