Edith Kurzweil
LETTER FROM ITALY
Italy is always full of surprise and chaos, but more so this
time. I arrived on May 13, the day the Pope was shot, and before
leaving two weeks later, the country had had a referendum, a major
scandal which swept through the entire government and caused its
fall, and the Christian-Democrats, with the "help" of the Socialist
leader Bettino Craxi were about to lose the premiership for the first
time in thirty-five years. Not all of these events, of course, were
causally connected, but there were many implicit relationships, if
only because of the way Italian economic and political institutions
are structured.
If,
for example, Mehemet Ali Agca, whose deed shocked the
world, had not been apprehended immediately, and had managed to
disappear amongst the tourists and believers who surround the Pope
whenever he leaves his Vatican chambers, everyone would have
thought that the attempt on the Pope's life had been engineered by
the radical left, by antiabortionists who had good reason to be
incensed by his interference in Italian politics - a breach of the Con–
cordat between church and state-a few days before the May 17
referendum. Although the assailant was caught, the crime, of
course, was not solved, and the only plausible motive might have
been hatred of Catholicism by Muslim Turks, aggravated for Agca
when the Pope visited Istanbul.
Yet as the Italian media continued to report and to comment
around the clock, reality and fantasy often converged, and this was
not surprising, given the possibilities of interpreting the absurdities
and the horror of a terrorist act in a country with a number of right
and left guerrilla organizations. For once, however briefly, politics
was left aside , and Communist and Socialist leaders almost jumped
the gun on the Catholics in condemning terrorism - in particular
and in general- even before they discovered that Agca belonged to
an international Fascist group . It still is not clear whether this group
is not a cover-up for other connections.
Some Italians thought the left had to dissociate itself from this
