Patron & serpent
Hamphill, Clara
Feet and reason at other times stumble. Last month they tripped up badly in Pittsburgh. By episcopal order, women were excluded from the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday (the original...
...Report from Palermo PATRON & SERPENT THE MAFIA GOES ON TRIAL Rome S OMETHING very strange happened in Palermo not long ago: the new mayor, Leoluca Orlando, sent the city's contract for street maintenance out to bid...
...Bishop Bevilacqua has suggested perhaps some other, more inclusive symbolic action could be substituted, one with no likely sexist ramifications, such as a washing of the hands...
...In the 1960s, a gang of Capuchin friars ran an extortion racket that hauled in thousands of dollars in the town of Mazzarino...
...At best, the trial may force the Mafia to evolve once again, perhaps on the mainland, perhaps elsewhere in Europe or in the United States...
...Lest the mandate be too broadly interpreted, misguiding the faithful, the bishop of Pittsburgh set the record straight...
...There is still popular support for the Mafia: when the city awarded the street maintenance contract to a Rome firm, five hundred unemployed workers picketed City Hall with signs saying "We want the Mafia" and "The Mafia provides work...
...Now the church is in the vanguard of the anti-Mafia struggle...
...Luckily, he was a tentmaker, not a podiatrist...
...Commonweal: 198...
...In the 1980s, when the law began cracking down on the heroin refineries in Sicily, the Mafia moved into the cocaine trade in Latin America...
...We know this to be a fact because by the time the evening was over, at least twenty-two had extricated themselves from a ticklish situation in the Kidron Valley, while the other two were left to a sadder fate, following a precipitous fall in the price of silver...
...One teacher took her students on a field trip to Bologna, the northern Italian city with a Communist administration and a reputation for clean government, to show them politicians need not always be corrupt...
...11 April 1986:197But the anti-Mafia forces seem to have a chance of winning some important battles, and nobody has been able to say that in Sicily for more than half a century...
...but he did say later there is neither male nor female in Christ...
...Finally, we know it was the foot of a woman who crushed the head of the virulent serpent...
...Furthermore, whatever the range of the apostolic age group involved, we can surmise all twenty and four feet were osteopathically sound, i.e., capable of running the good race...
...the new mayor, Orlando, is a graduate...
...None of this means the Mafia is defeated, or even badly wounded...
...and that is how we should think of him...
...We are not sure where Jesus gathered the inspiration for washing his disciples' feet...
...Five thousand high school students marched through Palermo on February 7 to show their support for the judges in the Mafia trial...
...Alas, on future Holy Thursdays we may simply have to settle the matter by shaking the dust from our feet, but, as is prescribed, only after the collection...
...In mid-March, police used tear gas to break up a violent demonstration by thousands of unemployed workers in Palermo...
...Four-hundred-and-sixty-seven Mafia suspects went on trial February 10, charged with crimes ranging from membership in the Mafia to kidnapping, drug trafficking, and murder...
...Ernesto Cardinal Ruffini, archbishop of Palermo until 1967, said the Mafia was"an invention of those who want to denegrate Sicily...
...Luciano Liggio, the so-called boss of Corleone, has been indicted for two murders and is suspected of ordering thirty others committed since he was jailed in 1974...
...Nobody had done that before...
...But in 1986, at least in Pittsburgh, it is easy to understand why some males might have refused the honor, and for better reasons than Peter himself...
...In the trial, 90 of the 467 defendants are still at large, including 6 of the 12 Mafia bigwigs believed to make up the "high commission" of organized crime in Sicily...
...We can only wonder whether Veronica's kindness led to the stunning rending of the veil in the Temple on Good Friday, that sign of the New Covenant...
...After all, that is the true water that washes away the layers of encrusted dust which weigh on us all...
...Perhaps she.was a she, clear of sight but hobbled by pretext, custom, and convention...
...The coalition is fragile...
...If there are not enough fishermen, do they need to be flown in from Maine...
...That is Bishop Bevilacqua at his best, feet shining on the mountain...
...The Jesuits' anti-Mafia think tank runs postgraduate seminars whose aim is to educate a new generation of anti-Mafia leaders...
...But what is the rightful proportion of taxcollectors to fishermen for the approved group...
...But even jailing mobsters doesn't put them out of commission...
...The church has always taught that the twenty-four feet washed in the Upper Room that first pivotal feast were not only those of viri, but newly ordained and genuinely apostolic...
...Businessmen and shopkeepers still pay "protection" money, and many Sicilians still count on their local" man of honor" to get them a job, a driver's license, or a bed in a crowded hospital...
...Paul, of course, was often wrong...
...By episcopal order, women were excluded from the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday (the original mandatum having been the "new commandment I give you . . . . If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, how~ much more ought you to wash one another's feet...
...Two years ago the bishop of Pittsburgh told the religious of his diocese, most of them women, that "The interrelationship between the bishop and all the faithful stems from our baptism, which is the basis for interdependence of all the people of God...
...Orlando's support in city council meetings has dropped since he took office six months ago and he risks losing his majority in the city council...
...They are being tried in absentia, as Italian law permits...
...Omertd, the Mafia's code of silence, is crumbling: twentyseven defendants have agreed to turn state's evidence...
...Some of its members have been murdered...
...If the trial has a prayer of succeeding, though, it's because of what's going on outside the courtroom, not inside...
...The Christian Democratic Party, long a political machine that delivered votes for the Mafia and ensured that a few mafiosi or their representatives became Sicily's members of Parliament, is purging its ranks...
...But the Mafia kingpins went underground or to America, where they bided their time until the Allied Army enlisted their support to conquer the island, then gratefully installed them as mayors of Sicilian towns...
...But then, the Passion narrative makes clear it was a man who washed his hands, and a strict interpretation of the sacramentary would likely disallow women from such a Pilate program...
...Their testimony is backed up by evidence from bank records and wiretaps, available for quick reference on computers in the Palermo courtroom...
...When the law started asking too many questions about where the money for the construction business was coming from, construction in Sicily came to a halt and the Mafia began investing its money in Spain and Switzerland...
...Looking down the road from here, one wonders what future course events might take in Pittsburgh...
...In the forties, fifties, and sixties, when the Mafia was consolidating its political and economic power in Sicily, the church preached antiCommunism, encouraged the faithful to vote for the notoriously corrupt Christians Democrats, and denied the very existence of the Mafia...
...They are determined to root out what they call the Mafia mentality: the intricate system of exchanged favors and political patronage which makes it impossible to carry out the simplest bureaucratic task in Sicily without the help of the Mafia...
...The Mafia, over the years, has shown its ability to evolve as the situation requires...
...One man who refused to pay was murdered...
...It's a trial that's taking place in a different social climate," said the Reverend Ennio Pintacuda, a Jesuit priest at Palermo's Center for Social Studies, a sort of anti-Mafia think tank...
...Three of the defendants who originally agreed to turn state's evidence changed their minds and withdrew their testimony...
...Vir, of course, as distinct from the Latin homo, which signifies mankind, is the male person, one known for virtus, that is, his deeds of manly excellence...
...In 1982, after the murder of Gen...
...CLARA HEMPHILL (Clara Hemphill is an associate producer for CBS News stationed in Rome...
...Nobody is predicting that the present trial will finish off the Mafia...
...The judges are not isolated...
...We do know that Jesus' first miracle was set in motion by a woman, and that although the Samaritan woman may not have been a Winifred, she did gather many to Jesus at the well...
...Orlando, a long-time crusader against the Mafia, succeeds a series of mayors who ~,ere either ineffectual against the Mafia or in the Mafia's hands...
...It is the biggest trial in Italy's history, and the most important anti-Mafia trial since Benito Mussolini's "Iron Prefect," Cesare Moil, had 147 defendants convicted in 1927...
...Invoking the Latin text of the sacramentary, not often enough referred to in these days of simultaneous translation, Bishop Bevilacqua directed that this year in Pittsburgh only real men, viri, need apply for the event...
...When the blind man finally had his eyes opened at Winifred's Well, perhaps he found the lame guide was not really a man...
...Orlando, a Christian Democrat, is widely seen as Palermo's first honest and competent mayor since World War II...
...He is part of an odd coalition of honest Christian Democrats, Communists, trade unionists, priests, teachers, policemen, judges, and journalists united against the Sicilian Mafia...
...It is fair to say that the sacramental effect of the first feet washing did not take hold until much later, perhaps after Pentecost when the apostles finally stood up...
...No doubt some will suggest he did so from the then recent scene of Mary Magdalene squandering the money of the poor...
...for forty-seven years, the contract had been awarded routinely to a company controlled by the Mafia...
...As the island industrialized, so did the Mafia, moving from the country where it intimidated the peasants and murdered labor organizers, to the city, where it took control of the construction business and, eventually, the drug traffic between the Middle East and the United States...
...The "third level" of the Mafia -- the unnamed high-level politicians and financiers whom many Sicilians believe are the real power behind the mob -- has not been touched...
...But, as Francesco Rosi, the film director, said at a debate, sponsored by the University of Palermo, on the Mafia in February: "Sicily is beginning to breathe...
...Three policemen who played a key role in bringing the defendants in the present case to trial were murdered last summer...
...It seems that half or more of the feet around have a congenital chromosomal impairment, an impediment which excludes them from the Holy Thursday rite...
...The grisly murders continue: a businessman who refused to pay protection money was murdered and his nine-year-old daughter was shot in the lung a year ago...
...Mussolini tried to wipe out the Mafia with mass arrests, show trials, and summary executions...
...Salvatore Cardinal Pappalardo accused corrupt elements of the Christian Democratic Party of murdering Piersanti Mattarella, the president of Sicily's regional government, in 1980...
...Schools have set up anti-Mafia courses to counter the image of the mafioso as the super-cool tough guy on the block who recovers stolen property, dishes out patronage jobs, and keeps peace in the neighborhood...
...In realizing that, perhaps both were freed...
...We assume the sacramentary excludes all those authentically diagnosed with virilescence...
...The church, too, has changed...
...It can happen, even in Pittsburgh...
...Last April a car bomb wounded an anti-Mafia magistrate and killed a woman and her eight-year-old twin sons...
...As recounted by Giuseppe Fava, a journalist murdered by the Mafia two years ago, the friars would go to a victim's house, knock on the door, make the sign of the cross, and say: "The mafiosi want ten million lire within a week...
...As Sophia Loren said about such matters, "Sex appeal is 50 percent what you've got, and 50 percent what people think you've got...
...Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, the cardinal accused the central government in Rome of abandoning the man it sent to fight the Mafia in Sicily...
Vol. 113 • April 1986 • No. 7
