American Catholics who travel are sometimes surprised to learn that other countries have different holy days of obligation. We have six and we tend to think that everyone everywhere has them. But arriving in Dublin on March 17, folks find out that the pubs are closed and the people are in church because it is national holy day, thanks to St. Patrick’s feast day. But Italy two days later has its Catholics in church for St. Joseph. There they have 10 holy days of obligation. So at this time in March, let me greet my Irish and Italian friends.
I have taken groups of travelers to both countries often, and invariably everyone has a grand time. Irish and Italians are friendly to a fault. Whatever the ancestry of my travel mates, we experience the welcome of folks there. My own origins are Italian, on both sides. My grandparents and great-grandparents came from Abruzzo, Basilicata and Calabria, the noble south, from where most Italians in the U.S. came. Forgive my boast that Italy is the world’s fifth strongest economy and yet possesses within its borders 55 percent of the world’s art treasures.
But one quality about which you hear little is the luck of the Italians. Unlike the Irish, famous for theirs, Italians enjoy a two-millennia streak of unequaled luck. How so? Consider that our Jewish friends have suffered abuse for that long with the unfair label of Christ-killer even though only some Jewish authority figures in the time of Jesus wanted him silenced. Annas, Caiaphas and the Jerusalem city council known as the Sanhedrin felt the sting of Jesus’ public attacks on their legalistic misuse of the Law of Moses, obeying its letter but ignoring its spirit. The fact that they succeeded in whipping up some of the Jerusalem populace is no justification for the sinful anti-Semitism that has disgraced Christianity for so long.
What is the Jewish-Italian connection? Quite simply, some Italians conspired with the above authority figures in the terrible death of Jesus, yet their descendants were never held to even a shadow of the same kind of abuse. Pontius Pilate, Herod and the Roman guard were all Italian, and they actually drove in the nails, doing the harsh work of executing a man they knew was innocent.
Yet Italians were never tarred with the same brush. In fact, most readers at this point are wondering how you can parallel Italians with Jews in this matter, so unfamiliar is this comparison. In Jerusalem in Jesus’ time, these two factions hated each other. The Romans were occupiers, never a popular entity anywhere, and the Jews were the captive subjects of Caesar. His forces were ordered to eliminate any sort of rival to his rule. Jesus knew this and still insisted on his radical preaching about the Kingdom of God. The evangelists quote him as speaking about no other subject more often. While he had no political ambitions, the Romans knew that his view of the world with God in charge outlawed the systematic unfairness of Roman rule. That made him a public enemy.
We his disciples are the surprised travelers in this world which is God’s Kingdom, surprised that we are bound to advance the Kingdom by insisting on the same fairness, the same social justice so feared by the Romans co-responsible for his death. By our very discipleship we are obligated to tear down systems of injustice like discrimination against immigrants or minorities, women or gays. We are required by our faith to protect the environment. We have no choice but to advocate a national budget that promotes the common good. And no one can accuse us of partisan politics because we are not endorsing any one political party. This is what is meant by the ban on mixing religion and politics. There is no ban against spending ourselves the way Jesus did, bringing about a world more resembling God’s domain rather than Caesar’s or Satan’s.
As an Italian-American Catholic I feel the need to reach out to Jews who have suffered unfairly from Christians’ stereotyping. I consider my ancestors unaccountably lucky at not being branded en masse like them for something that a few Italians did centuries ago. I do not know if I would have been as strong as our Jewish friends who have had to suffer monstrosities like the Holocaust, right in our own allegedly enlightened times.
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