A FUTURISTIC CATHOLIC NOVEL

...Yet that does not totally vitiate the point that Morselli wishes to make...

...Should he have read the signs and walked out, assuming he had the courage to do so...

...Except for a hardly remembered monograph on Proust that he published during the war he saw ' nothing but rejection slips...

...The culmination of this week's stay will be a visit with the Pope...

...What emerges from this journal of a week in Rome is less than a story (there is no plot to speak of) but more than a diatribe...

...What provides the gossip mills most of their gist, though, is the rumor that the redoubtable Jackie Kennedy, very much alive and kicking, also has eyes for the undeniably attractive Pope...

...Or did it mean that he saw that there is a certain ambiguity created precisely at the intersection of culture and faith at any given moment and thus stayed through a simple act of faith...

...Morselli wrote this book in 1966 and his eye for the more ludicrous possibilities of aggiornamento was 'sharp if, surprisingly, benign and forgiving...

...Born into an extremely wealthy family of Modena, Morselli led the pampered life of a young wealthy man about town until shortly after the Second World War when he retired to a hilltop villa and lived the life of a virtual recluse until his death in 1973...

...The hero remains a devout Catholic at a time when all the vital signs of Catholicism as he knew them were showing strange and alarming indications of fluttering and gasping...

...He is in Rome as a pilgrim and as a visitor to the places that he remembered from his seminary days...

...Were Morselli the type to do such things, one could well imagine him signing a petition for the retention of the Latin language for the liturgy...

...One recalls Percy's brilliant image of the old-style priest who supplements his income by manning a fire tower for the forestry service in Love in the Ruins...

...Priests are married, of course, and rumor has it that the present Pope, an Irish monk given to monastic discipline and now dwelling outside of Rome where he is given to solicitude and the raising of exotic snakes as a hobby, is seriously interested in marrying a well-known theosophist who has left her native city of Rangoon to be hard by the papal headquarters...

...Even before his retirement from the' public scene he studied and wrote constantly but could get none of his -plays, novels, pamphlets, poems, or essays into print...

...Loyola University of Chicago has become the center of a whole new missionary movement to spread the ideas of psychoanalysis as a religious surrogate and their magazine Unconscious and Sacrament is justly famous...

...This idea, already tested by Brian Moore in his novella Catholics and by Walker Percy in Love in the Ruins, now gets a continental treatment...

...His own conservatism, tempered by the inevitable changes that have come from forty years of aggiornamento, allows him to be, at the same time, a man of firm conviction but free from rancor as he observes those who move further to the religious left...

...Morselli's hero is less dramatically cast as an observer but he still serves the same function: he sees religious fashion and fad moving away from the center in search of new meanings without any guarantee that new meanings will in fact emerge...

...Unlike Moore's poignant story of the Irish abbot being buffeted by the illiberal liberals of the future or Percy's boozy hero struggling through Kierkegaardian Uaumas in 1983, Morselli's novel evokes the bittersweet mood of a city that had been largely shapsd by the papal presence and now lacks it...

...After his death a manuscript was discovered among his papers of a novel that had been previously submitted to publishers but without any acceptance...

...He observes with a degree of detachment and comments without passion...

...as he himself once said to a friend, the total income from over thirty years of literary work amounted to less than one hundred dollars...

...The Church has not only made its peace with technology but has baptized and exalted it far beyond anything Harvey Cox dreamed of in the sixties-the theological best seller of the year, in English, of course, was Gadgets and Sacramentals, The narrator of these phantas-magorical events is a Swiss priest, married but ever so faithful to his wife, who is in parish work and edits a small Catholic weekly in the southern part of Switzerland...

...The Italian government has solved the economic problems of the southern area of the country by turning the whole area over to the Jesuits who now run it along the lines of their famous Paraguayan plantations of the eighteenth century...

...Last year, a small publisher in Milan published that novel as part of a series of experimental novels...

...One senses throughout the book a profound respect for what the Church has been and a great love for the values and institutions that it has managed to create in its history...

...The priest-hero had his visit with the Pope, was edified, and returned to his wife and his pastoral work...

...He also hopes to drum up some interest in a theological work that he has written on the veneration due to the Blessed Virgin...

...Morselli's novel explores an increasingly favorite theme of the "Catholic" novel: the shape of the Church in the future...

...He is not a critic, much less a jeremiah...

...With Percy he shares a truly fey sense of humor and with both Moore and Percy a profound respect -almost a nostalgia- for the tradition of Catholicism...

...His novel is the product of a peculiarly unsettling moment in modern Catholic history and for that reason-quite apart from its lightly worn learning and its wit-it is an important cultural artifact...

...There is, in the first place, the horror that the new look of Catholicism is hopelessly banal and vulgar...

...Morselli does not answer .those questions for us...

...We are left to wonder about the future both of the hero and of the Church...

...The novel, Roma Senza Papa (Rome Without the Pope-Adel-phi, 1974) has sold an amazing eight thousand copies-something quite extraordinary for first novelists in Italy- and is now in its second printing...

...Its most hysterical and vulgar supporters may be found in the readership of the Wanderer...

...The novel is set at the end of the century and the implications of the post-Vatican Council theorizers are inexorably being worked out...

...This point of view is hardly new or original...

...A FUTURIST CATHOLIC NOVEL LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM Guido Morselli committed suicide at the age of sixty-one in the Northern Italian city of Varese after what must be judged one of the least successful literary' careers in modern times...

...The Rome of the year 2000 is still Rome but the peculiar sense of papal Romanitd is gone and Morselli cannot applaud that lack...

...The parenthetical warning that Morselli utters seems to be that if the substance of the old faith gets transmogrified under the influence of Freud, technology, or what have you, it might just be a devil's exchange...

...It may be precisely because of that sense of ambiguity about the cultural life of Rome yet a sense of the firmness of faith that has caused the Italian critics to cite Pascal and Kierkegaard as they attempt to do some closer exegesis of this singular work...

...The old evolutionary theories of Teilhard have been replaced with a hypothesis that all of mankind is evolving, not towards Omega, but up to the now ideals of Scandinavia- the "nordicization of the species...

...Morselli manages to evoke a complex mood that represents, I suspect, the feelings of any number of older Catholic intellectuals...