A MOST OBEDIENT PROPHET

...A MOST OBEDIENT PROPHET LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM And without honor in his lifetime When an attempt is made to understand the antecedent events and movements that presaged the vast theological and pastoral shifts that took place at the second Vatican Council, Italy is not a place that one normally looks to find such events and movements...

...The career of Don Mazzolari touched some of the most important events and personages of modern Catholicism in Italy...

...The letters that he wrote during this period are not extraordinary...

...Again Mazzolari capitulated...

...In 1960 some friends and disciples of Mazzolari formed a committee to do something concrete in order to pay honor to his memory and his work...

...Mazzolari regarded the Communist success in Italy as confused politics but he also saw that Communism was expressive of a deep anxiety about social life and a symptom of the terrible sufferings of the poorer classes...

...He kept up a warm freindship with the few Evangelical pastors in his area...

...He felt that the Church had closed in on itself and needed to be more open to the non-Catholic world about it...

...In those last days of his life he saw a glimmer of hope that some of his ideas would be accepted as legitimate or, at the very least, worthy of discussion...

...He was not only friendly with known socialists (a traditionally anticlerical group in Italy and hence anathema to Catholics) but was openly sympathetic to some of their ideas...

...requests for prayer books and medals...

...Given the harsh realities of the struggle of the Church with Communism in Italy and its close identification with the Christian Democratic party, this book was greeted with great hostility in Church circles...

...In 1943 the Holy Office again intervened when Mazzolari published a book on the supposed failure of the Church to have a true sense of poverty and evangelical zeal (Impegno con Cristo...

...It is part of the conventional wisdom that France was the testing ground of almost every new pastoral approach and, along with Belgium and Germany, provided the theological re-examinations that would blossom into the Johannine aggiornamento...

...in 1956 the Holy Office again warned him because he gave an opinion to an interviewer about French politics...

...He called for a "Christian Revolution" that would take heed of what the Communist movement called for and he thought that the aspirations of the Communists were not only deeply human but implicitly Christian...

...In a book written in 1933 (La Piu Bella Avventura) Mazzolari criticized the closed mentality of the Church and openly called for dialogue with the secular and dissident world...

...If the problems of Mazzolari with the Fascist regime were not taxing enough (in the last days of the war he had to go into hiding for fear of imprisonment and/or execution for his part in the Resistance) he was also constantly harassed by Church authorities for his "advanced" religious ideas...

...Had his bishop not written a letter of recommendation and praise for his work as a parish priest the censure might well have been even more severe than it was...

...The very proximity of the Vatican and the Italian domination of the Curia kept a tighter rein on Italy than most countries and, while attempts, most of them serious and quite fervent, were made to bring the Church out of its intransigent ways in Italy, the naturally conservative and wildly anti-modernistic Curia resisted these attempts with alacrity...

...It was only when he left the army and took up his first pastoral duties in the small town of Cicognara that his real education and notoriety began...

...but, in the words of another prophetic priest of Italy, Don Lorenzo Milani, one may be mute without necessarily being blind.y being blind...

...His relationship with some of his fellow clerics was always strained because of his political dissent but the correspondence between Mazzolari's bishop and the Holy Office from 1933 until his death is a grim reminder of the obscurantist state of the Roman Curia in the post-modernist years...

...Don Mazzolari was ordained in 1917 and spent the first years of his priesthood as a military chaplain with the Italian army during the final days of the first World War...

...Mazzolari died in 1959 but not before he had seen the election of Pope John and had been received cordially in audience...

...In a short work entitled Impegni Cristiani -Istanze Communiste (1946) he argued that Christians in Italy could not afford the luxury of a simple anti-Communism which could so easily mask a naturally conservative desire to preserve class and economic privilege...

...Furthermore, the Holy Office wrote, given "his pecuilar mentality" Mazzolari was enjoined from writing on any topic analogous to the one he had treated in that book...

...in 1954 he was forbidden to preach outside of his own parish and enjoined from any public utterance on social issues...

...with the Italian Resistance and the primary figures of resurgent Italian democracy...

...Mazzolari's appointment to the parish at Cicognara coincided with the Lawrence S. Cunningham is an associate professor of religion at Florida State University.rapid rise of the Fascist party in Italy and the increasing power of the party at local levels of life in the rural areas of the country...

...He befriended a priest who had left Orders and even baptized the man's children...

...At the end of the war Mazzolari turned his attention to the tumultuous area of cold war politics in Italy...

...The bishop, in turn, communicated this information to the committee with a long letter in which he also wrote, supremely unconscious of any irony in his words, that for the committee to obey would be the highest tribute to pay to the deceased priest since it would be so clearly demonstrate "a sincere submission to the Church which is expected of every true Catholic...

...The interesting thing about the intervention of the Holy Office was that the book was not judged heretical or even erroneous but was censured because of the supposed danger that would come from a book that had been favorably received in Italian Protestant circles and which had received a positive review written by Ernesto Buonaiuti, the noted Church historian who had been excommunicated as a modernist in the era of Pius X. Mazzolari obeyed the Holy Office without hesitation but quietly observed to a friend that "they had no right to commit moral homicide in the name of orthodoxy...

...When the Holy Office heard of this plan Cardinal Ottaviani sent a letter to the bishop of Cremona reminding him that the book had been removed from circulation when it first came out and that the original imprimatur was no longer valid...

...Mazzolari did, of course, some rather daring things for a man of his time...

...satisfaction at having stopped the sale of pornographic postcards at their bivouac...

...This book, totally innocent by today's standards, was condemned by the Holy Office, ordered out of circulation, and the bishop of Cremona was ordered not only to monitor any of his future writing but also to watch his preaching and any other public utterance...

...his refusal to allow the Fascists to use his church for thinly disguised political rallies...

...Mazzolari's life from the early Twenties until the very end of the war was marked by his protest against Fascist policies...

...But if Pope John was sympathetic, there was still hesitation on the part of the Curia, and the career of Don Mazzolari ended posthumously on a somewhat ironic note...

...It is only now that he is getting the recognition that he deserves and Bedeschi's sensitive book has served him well...

...They decided to underwrite a new edition of his book La Piu Bella Avven-tura which had first been published in 1934...

...He was, for example, one of the few priests who openly spoke out against the Racial Laws of 1939 when-and this fact should never be forgotten-as eminent a cleric as the Franciscan Agostino Gemelli could, in the same year, open the academic year at the University of Bologna with a blatantly racist and anti-Semitic speech...

...He was, as the title of the book suggests, always most obedient...

...In the postwar period, and right up until his death in 1959, there were numerous other skirmishes with the Holy Office: In 1951 he was forbidden to preach outside of his diocese because of his connection with the liberal religious review Adesso which he had founded...

...It fairly well summed up the misunderstandings that plagued him all his life...

...and his active cooperation with dissident political and intellectual figures who he hoped would, in time, give new life to Italian politics...

...He was in contact with Fascists and Communists...

...The result was almost predictable: The Holy Office censured the work and the author was told to take a five-day retreat at a religious house during which time his right to celebrate Mass was suspended...

...The Holy Office also said that it would not permit a new imprimatur and the bishop was asked to see that the book was not reissued...

...But it is somewhat simplistic to think of Italy as resting in dogmatic slumber before the Council...

...His career was, in a sense, a lonely and misunderstood one...

...his correspondence reveals letters to Popes and other senior clerics of the Church...

...Mazzolari had an early, and singularly intuitive, distaste for Fascist politics which thrust him rather rapidly into a long (and exceedingly lonesome) struggle against Fascist attempts to use the Church for its own political advantage...

...Spurred on, no doubt, by a bitterly critical review in the authoritative Civilta Cattolica, the Holy Office ordered the book withdrawn not because it was in error but because of its intemperate manner of expression...

...They reflect the simple piety and provincial worldview of an unsophisticated priest of the era: pleasure at the number of his soldiers who went to Mass and Communion...

...These things would have marked Mazzolari as open but not a threat until he began to publish books calling for a program of openness towards those outside the strict confines of the Church...

...A case in point is the life and the career of Don Primo Maz-zolari, a Cremonese priest (died 1959) which has been amply chronicled in a new book which became a best seller in Italy: Lorenzo Bedeschi's Obbedi-entissimo in Cristo (Mondadori, 1974...