Pinocchio nell'Era Fascista

 

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is a 2022 animated musical fantasy, loosely based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian classic Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio, Story of a Puppet), reset in Mussolini's Fascist Italy sometime during the interwar period (perhaps at the time of the Ethiopian war). Translated into some 250 languages, Collodi's book long ago became a children's classic. If nothing else, everyone knows its lesson about lying! My generation learned the story (or at least a certain version of it) mainly from Walt Disney's 1940 animated musical, the second such Disney film (following Disney's first animated success Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

The familiar story involves Geppetto, an old Italian woodcarver, and his wooden puppet Pinocchio, who eventually, having learned to be good, becomes a real boy. Jiminy Cricket plays the role of Pinocchio's conscience to guide Pinocchio in matters of right and wrong through various encounters with temptations to wrongdoing.

De Toro's reimagining of Pinocchio politicizes the fantasy. Twenty years earlier, during World War I, Geppetto lost this beloved son Carlo in an Austrian aerial bombardment. Still mourning, Geppetto cuts down a special pine tree out of which he makes a wooden puppet, which (with the intervention of the spirit world) comes to life overnight. When Pinocchio follows Geppetto to Mass, he attracts attention from the village Podestà, who orders him to go to school. Temptation intervenes in the form of a traveling carnival, which separates Pinocchio from Geppetto and sets up the search motif, which eventually leads Geppetto to end up inside a giant fish. Meanwhile, having realized what he has gotten into and what kind of malevolent boss he is working for, Pinocchio mocks Mussolini, which ends his circus career and gets him inducted into the military by the Podestà, whose son Pinocchio befriends. (The Royal Italian army is, one supposes, del Toro's politicized alternative to having Pinocchio turn into a donkey!) 

After getting out of one predicament after another, Pinocchio finally reunites with Geppetto inside the giant fish and eventually sacrifices himself by detonating a naval mine inside the monster. At his encounter with Death, however, he demands to be sent back to life earlier than usual in order to save Geppetto - even at the cost of becoming mortal himself. Geppetto and the others are saved, but in the process Pinocchio appears to have been killed. However, the Cricket (here named Sebastian) having done his duty to steer Pinocchio in the direction of good, claims the promised fulfillment of his one wish and thus causes Pinocchio to be revived, after which they return to Geppetto's home to live out the old man's final years in apparent happiness.

It is a beautiful retelling of a beautiful story about life and death (the shortness of the former and the permanence of the latter), about love and loyalty, about family and friendship, and about the perennial moral challenge of learning to live a good life. It's not really so suitable for easily frightened children, but it is something everyone else should certainly see.

The role of the supernatural (specifically of what, for lack of a better term, I'm calling here "the spirit world") is an integral and especially fascinating element in this story and in de Toro's retelling - as is his intersection of that with the conventional Catholicism (accurately portrayed) of Italians of that time and place. I remain somewhat personally perplexed, however, by the politics of del Toro's rendering. What is the intended significance of setting the story in Fascist Italy? After all, how many movie watchers in the historically challenged rising generations even know about Fascist Italy, let alone recognize and understand all the historically specific Fascist-era allusions? I'm all for educating them about such matters, of course, but I fear our culture's increasing commitment to historical ignorance will remain well in place. Is Fascist Italy here just an analogy for any bad time and place (presumably past)? Or is it an analogy for all times and places (including our self-imagined more "enlightened" era)?

LVII

If, as is often alleged, football is modern America's authentic cultural religion, then perhaps the Super Bowl and the whole complex of social events and celebrations surrounding "Super Bowl Sunday" serve as contemporary American culture's re-appropriation of something like Christmas and Easter (or, to borrow from the words of one acquaintance, if Thanksgiving is Christmas's anticipation, the Super Bowl is Christmas's culmination). It is, in any case, one of the high points, if not the highpoint, of our contemporary cultural calendar.

Full disclosure: personally I dislike football. It may be no accident that football has become the national "sport" of a society so increasingly defined by rage. Football is, I believe, a gratuitously violent, gruesome gladiatorial spectacle that damages its participants, corrupts our culture, and degrades what we still unaccountably call "higher education." Its violence and danger were very vividly displayed just a few weeks ago when a Buffalo Bills player went into cardiac arrest after tackling an opponent. Thankfully, the player's life was saved by rapid, high-quality, expensive medical intervention, but none of that should obscure the violently dangerous and potentially fatal character of America's most popular "sport." (All of that was, of course, cleverly and successfully obscured in the way the media and everyone else quickly pivoted to treating the almost tragedy primarily as a heartwarming human interest story.)

That said, while I dislike football and will likely pay little or no attention to the actual "game," I will happily attend the local Super Bowl party - not just for the pizza, and chicken wings, and guacamole (all good enough reasons), but for the community experience and in appreciation of the communal value of lavish spectacle which makes such community experience possible. Would that as a culture we still had lavish spectacles of a more uplifting sort!

Oil on Troubled Water

Homily for the feast of Blessed Pope Pius IX [1792-1878, pope from 1846 to 1878], Paulist Fathers Mother House Chapel, February 7, 2023. 

Sometimes, when I get discouraged in my postulator assignment, I recall how Pope Saint John XXIII wrote of Pius IX: "I would like to be worthy to celebrate his canonization." Pope John was disappointed in that aspiration, but presumably he got over it.

Pius IX's pontificate intersected - fortunately for all of us here - with the priesthood of Isaac Hecker. As Pope, Pius IX was part of the complex of forces and personalities that Divine Providence mysteriously brought together to make the Paulist Fathers a reality, inspiring in Father Hecker a lifelong respect and devotion towards the Pope who, at their first meeting had affectionately called him "Bravo, Bravo!"

It was at that first meeting that Hecke had famously expressed his vision of the Catholic Church as oil on the troubled waters of the then religiously divided and politically polarized United States. For all that has happened since, the waters seem just as troubled now as then. But do we still have the confidence that he had in the healing power of Christ's Church in our troubled time?

In good 19th-century style, Hecker understood the Church as Christ's continuing incarnation, continuing his healing and saving life and mission in our world - and meeting just as many obstacles as Jesus himself had! As far as we know the Pharisees were generally very good people, perhaps among the best of their time and place. But like so many religious people, then and now, they were stuck in "This is the way we've always done it." We always wash our hands, why don't you? [Mark 7:1-13].

(Actually, I think that probably wasn't such bad advice, but that's another discussion for another day!)

The problem with being stuck in the "This is the way we've always done it" mindset is that it makes it hard to notice anything new, anything different. There, right there, was Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, the Savior of the world, but the Pharisees were so busy washing their hands, doing what they'd always done, that they missed what God was doing.

If we really aspire to be oil on the troubled waters of our deeply divided and politically polarized world, we may need something more than "This is the way we've always done it." We need to be alert to where Jesus is pointing us and how he is challenging us today.

(Photo: Tomb of Blessed Pius IX, Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls in Rome, taken by me in 2012.)

Who Votes First?

 

For as long as I can remember, the "first in the nation" presidential primary has been in New Hampshire, one of the smallest and otherwise least electorally significant states. Back in the day, the NH Primary was always held on the second Tuesday in March (the date when town meetings and non-partisan municipal elections are traditionally held in that state). NH state law still stipulates that the presidential primary held be on that date, but it directs the NH Secretary of State to advance the date, if necessary, to ensure that the NH primary always takes place at least seven days before any "similar election" in any other state. New Hampshire's disproportionate importance in the presidential primary process derives primarily from its "first in the nation" position. Hence the date has been moving earlier and earlier. In 2020, it was February 11. Meanwhile, for the past half-century, the Iowa Caucuses have also acquired unique prominence because of their uniquely early position in the election- year schedule.  In 2020, the Iowa Caucuses took place on February 3 - one week before the NH Primary.

All that is now about to change. Meeting in Philadelphia, the Democratic National Committee has voted approved a plan to rearrange the early Democratic presidential primary calendar. South Carolina - the state which saved Joe Biden's primary campaign in 2020 - was awarded the first primary, on Saturday, February 3, 2024, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on February 6, Georgia on February 13, and Michigan on February 27.

What the calendar will actually look like is still unclear. Republican-run New Hampshire is unlikely to change its law to accommodate the Democrats, who may have to skip NH altogether. A Democratic candidate who ran in and won in New Hampshire on an unapproved date would, according to party rules be penalized, losing half the convention votes he or she had won.

Hurting the feelings of Iowans and New Hampshirites does not seem to have worried the DNC too much. Many Democrats have long objected to the outsized influence of those two, predominantly rural states which are so unrepresentative of either the country as a whole or the Democratic voting base. Like Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina is also a red state, but its Democratic voters are heavily African-American and so do at least represent a key constituency of the Democratic voting base. Nevada is actually a more competitive state and so may be more important in the general election. It also heavily represents Latinos, another potentially key constituency within the Democratic party. So the logic of the change is largely unassailable. (A case could be made that better than South Carolina would be a more Democratic-voting or more competitive state like Michigan. Such arguments will likely come up next time.)

The way we elect American presidents is best characterized as crazy. The present primary system is bizarre and can easily result in nominating someone who is not the real first-choice of a majority of the party. The inflated importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, because of the media attention that comes with their early position, has only highlighted the unrepresentative character of those states. 

On the other hand, Iowa and New Hampshire were "retail politics" states, where candidates had to campaign in person and interact directly with voters in a way which those states' relative smallness and other distinctive characteristics required but which would be much less feasible in larger states. The quadrennial image of candidates at New Hampshire diners or at the Iowa State Fair speaks to something important in American political self-understanding.

As a practical matter, those small early states have also made it more possible for "outsiders" to get attention and succeed against more favored insiders - famously, for example, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The more "direct democracy" scale of those contests has also made it possible for opposition figures to outperform establishment expectations, as happened in New Hampshire with Eugene McCarthy in 1968 (leading to LBJ's withdrawal from the race soon after) and Pat Buchanan in 1992 (foreshadowing both George H.W. Bush's eventual electoral loss and the eventual "populist" turn in the Republican party).

"Democracy" has multiple dimensions. The democratic deficit inherent in allowing such unrepresentative constituencies as Iowa and New Hampshire have such disproportionate influence in the primary process is laudably being corrected by highlighting more diverse constituencies in more representative states. In the process, however, another value in democratic politics is being further diminished with the reduced role for the in-person "retail politics" which was so characteristic of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Candlemas Day

The familiar carol concludes on the 12th day, but today is actually the 40th - and final - day of Christmas. In Catholic countries, it is a common custom for the nativity scene to remain in its place in churches until today. So eleven years ago at this season, while I was studying at "Saints' School" in Rome, I took advantage of that unique opportunity of almost a full month between my early-January arrival and Candlemas in which to visit the various presepe, which were on display in Rome’s many churches.

In the western, Latin Church, today is currently called the Presentation of the Lord, although for several centuries it was also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the Gospel [Luke 2:22-40], Mary and Joseph took the child Jesus to Jerusalem according to the law of Moses in order to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the ordinary obligation in that society to be purified after childbirth, reflecting ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood, and the requirement of ritual purification after any direct contact with blood. The second concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus from Egypt). 

But, whatever the official title, a common popular title for today’s celebration in the West has long been Candlemas Day, because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early morning, pre-dawn procession, somewhat penitential in character – with which the more solemn celebration of Mass today begins. This replaced an earlier pre-Christian Roman pagan custom. According to the medieval traditions recounted in The Golden Legend: "On the calends of February the Romans honored Februa the mother of Mars the god of war, by lighting the city with candles and torches throughout the night of that day. ... Since it is hard to relinquish such customs and the Christians, converted from paganism, had difficulty giving them up, Pope Sergius transmuted them, decreeing that the faithful should honor the hold mother of the Lord on this day by lighting up the whole world with lamps and candles."

The name Candlemas calls attention, obviously, to the blessed candles, but also to their light – and to Jesus as the One whom that light symbolizes. In the Gospel, the aged Simeon recites the canticle, “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace.” In the Roman Rite,  this canticle, known as the Nunc Dimittis,  is an important part of Night Prayer (Compline). Concerning this, the great 20th-century liturgical scholar Pius Parsch wrote: “As we sing it we see Simeon holding the Child Jesus in his arms and then, with grateful heart, retiring from his earthly service to God. We too are in the Lord’s service. At the close of day we hold the Savior in our arms, mystically speaking; we hold Him in faith, in grace, in the sacraments, especially the Sacrament of the Altar. Fervently we thank God for His blessings; and we are prepared, if it be His will, to take our leave from the world.”

Coming close to midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, a secular version of Candlemas is Groundhog Day. (The fact that both mark this seasonal signpost is obviously not coincidental.) Even those who may never have heard of Candlemas have heard of Groundhog Day and connect it with the change of seasons. While the weather is still wintry, the days are noticeably getting longer. Whereas Christmas comes at the mid-point of the winter’s darkness, with the year’s shortest day and its correspondingly longest night, Candlemas comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one older way of reckoning the seasons) from winter to spring. Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. So this last of the winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these winter light festivals are meant to symbolize.

Meanwhile, at the same time as we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: and suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek (Malachi 3:1-4), we hear wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

So, even as we take one last look back at winter and Christmas, Candlemas looks ahead to spring and Lent, and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter. Meanwhile, Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.

Since 1997, Candlemas has also been observed as the World Day of Consecrated Life. Just as on this day candles are blessed symbolizing Christ who is the light of the world, so too religious priests, brothers, and sisters are called to reflect the light of Jesus Christ in the Church. It is obviously an especially appropriate day to pray that God will continue to bless his Church with abundant vocations to these communities so critical to the life of the Church. 

For me at this stage in my life, there is a joining of images and themes. Spending their lives in the Temple, Simeon and Anna seem to me to signify religious life in an obvious way. But they are also - and very pointedly - presented as old, retiring (as Parsch put it) from their earthly service to God.  Obviously, while their age makes them representative figures for Israel's long wait for the Lord whom you seek, at the same time they easily elide into representatives of so many religious priests, brothers, and sisters in the various Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (among whom I must include myself) who are also old, who have spent so much of our lives in the Temple, and are now approaching the end and preparing to pray our final Nunc Dimittis.

Homily for the Presentation of the Lord, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, February 2, 2023.