•
THE
JESUIT
of their society. The most recent tradition is, of course, Fascism. It
is not by chance that the Communists are diligently following the
blueprint of Fascist conquest: armed squads, punitive expeditions, etc.
There are no two ways of doing the same thing, and why bother to
invent new methods anyway? Aside from that, there is the fact that
nobody seems to know exactly how to avoid going back to the funda–
mental propositions of Fascism: state authority, state corporatism,
and nationalism as a cement. Very few people are Fascists, of course,
and everybody wants caution above all: the dangers are too many.
And what institution can, in Italy, give a better guaranty of
caution than the Church, the locus of all tradition, and of all pru–
dence?
If
Italy goes authoritarian, the Church will palliate authori–
tarian harshness, as she did under Fascism.
If
democracy wins, she
will see to it that it is .accompanied by the right dose of authority.
In Italy, the Church offers not heaven so much as protection from
the sheer impact of history. And she has recently acted quite effec–
tively as an intermediary between the defeated nation and the great
of this world. Italians are indeed bound to feel protected by her.
In this respect at least, Father Martelli had been right. I went
to see him in his church. It is .a horror of a church, built in a kind
of streamlined Romanesque style which is the religious equivalent of
the somber emptiness of Fascist official architecture: a parallelepiped
of bricks laid flatly on the ground and flanked by another paral–
lelepiped of the same material, but standing up, as it has to represent
the church tower. The heart of the malicious infidel cannot help
rejoicing at such a prodigy of structural insincerity. Martelli's office,
however, was .a plain whitewashed room, mostly empty, showing all
the signs of exemplary Jesuit parsimony. There was the same im–
placable dreariness I had known in college. Martelli had by no means
tried to make his bourgeois parishioners feel at ease irF there.
Of the things I had imagined about hirp from .afar, one proved
to be right. Namely, he had clearly worn himself out with work.
Outwardly he looked healthy and strong. But in walking he had to
help himself with a cane, and he advanced at a slow and heavy pace,
as
if
he were repressing a hidden pain or making a great effort at
every step. There was effort in his speech, too. His shiny cassock was
mended in more than one place. He wore thick-soled boots, battered
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