The Communist's Confession

Extract

The little story that follows has something in common with Guareschi’s Don Camillo tales, but it has the advantage of being true; and truth is more interesting than fiction even when the latter is written by a humorist of genius. My true story is not funny, but most Italian priests who know communism at close quarters do not—sometimes for different reasons—find the situation at all funny, and are even inclined to blame Guareschi for having, as one of them said to me, ‘joked about things that are tragic’. That may not be quite fair to Guareschi, but it is a point of view which his non-Italian admirers should not overlook.

As for my story, its setting is the Tuscan countryside today, where three-quarters of the population are communist and therefore officially excommunicated by the Church. That is the first point to grasp. Try to imagine the more obvious difficulties confronting a priest in this situation. Is he to refuse the Sacraments to everyone who has the party membership card and will not throw it away? If so, he knows that he is shutting the church door in the face of most of the men in his parish and more than half the women. Over large zones of central Italy the peasants just assume, as a thing too obvious to need discussion, that the communist party is their party. E il nostro partito: the phrase comes out pat as a matter of course. Moreover it is widely assumed in Italy (at least verbally) that communism is simply Christianity in practice, and that the priests at the bottom of their hearts know this. In other words it is assumed that the barrier between Church and communism is no more than a legal device erected by the priests because their self-interest ties them to the other political faction.