Paul Elie
To understand the death penalty, Mario Marazziti likes to say, you have to go to Texas. In 2000 (having seen San Quentin in California) he went to Texas, and that has made all the difference. After that trip, and through many more, came his friendships with John Paul Penry, Dominique Green, Eddie Johnson and other men sentenced to death. After it came the World Coalition for the Death Penalty, the moratoria on executions in individual countries, the presentation of 3.2 million signatures to the United Nations Secretary General, the UN General Assembly’s statement against the inhumanity of capital punishment, and the pledges of several dozen countries to abolish the death penalty or suspend its use. Out of that trip, that is, came the growing movement for abolition of the death penalty worldwide; and out of it came the thirteen ways of looking at the death penalty presented in this book.
Just as Mario had to go to Texas to understand the death penalty, if we want to understand the present movement against the death penalty we have to go to Trastevere. In Trastevere—the rustic, vibrant district “across the Tiber” from imperial Rome—the group of friends known as the Community of Sant’Egidio came together in the spring of 1968 and began their efforts, first in the periferia, Rome’s outskirts, then Southern Italy, Northern Europe, Africa, and now overlooked or disdained places and peoples all over the world. In Trastevere they developed an informal way of working together rooted in friendship rather than authority or efficiency, and made it a new model for activism akin to the ones developed in Velvet Revolution Prague, Zuccotti Park, and Tahrir Square. In Trastevere they brought together rival tribes and hard-line Marxist-Leninists from Mozambique to settle a bloody civil war through dialogue and what they call “weak strength”—an approach that, when you see it in practice, really makes you think that friendship can change the world.
The guidebooks still call Trastevere a working-class district, and so it is in some respects. There are still plenty of working people in its walk-up flats and apartment houses. Yet the district—a short walk across the bridge from the Campo de’ Fiori, a stroll along the pilgrim path from St. Peter’s Basilica—has lately become an upscale bohemia akin to the East Village or the Mission District. The ochre apartments (and the people stepping out of them) are a feast for the eye, and an actual feast is available on every corner, from the trattorie Fellini frequented to the posh and modern Glass to the floating Irish pub moored in the river. In summertime, especially, it can seem that the carnival of food and drink, of fashion shoots and artisanal this-and-that, has shoved the place once celebrated as “Rome for Romans” aside.
On the face of it, Trastevere is a postreligious place, too. Churches are everywhere, it’s true, and the trasteverini regard St. Francis of Assisi (who stayed there while in Rome) and Raphael (who called on his mistress, the Fornarina, there) as native sons. And yet most churches are closed most days, shuttered, chained up, and implacable, so that they strike you not as destinations or even as buildings but as outcroppings on the landscape.
But there’s one significant exception. In early evening, crowds of people converge on the piazza fronting on the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, whose bell tower is the local landmark. They are on their way to eat at one of the four hundred local restaurants, to smoke a cigarette or lick a gelato near the old stone fountain, to watch mimes and acrobats perform in the piazza. Or they are actually bound for the basilica itself, where, at 8:30 every weeknight, Sant’Egidio holds the nightly service known as la preghiera.
I have been to the service perhaps a dozen times. You pick up a book and a headset and find a seat on a long bench below the ancient mosaics of Christ, a tallish proto-modern Mary, and the earliest Roman saints. The church—it must hold a little more than a thousand people—is full or nearly so. The crowd is mixed: young and old, stylish and not, lay and clerical, Italian and German and African. An organ note is struck and the call and response begins. There’s a recitation of the Litany of the Saints (the ancient names read off and invoked) and a reading from the New or Old Testament. A member of the community gives a homily in Italian, which can be heard in simultaneous translation on the headset. Then comes the Padre Nostro—the Lord’s Prayer. This is not a Mass (that is on Saturday night). There is no Communion, and, generally, no priest presiding, and so it ends abruptly, with people spilling out of the basilica, already in conversation, and into the square.
They aren’t leaving, though. They are in the middle of things. Many of them have come to la preghiera after putting in a day’s effort at one of the Sant’Egidio projects scattered through Trastevere. Behind a plain door on a steep hill, the Community’s pantry feeds 1,200 poor people a three-course meal, with Sant’Egidio members acting as waiters. A flat nearby is the office of the Community’s adoption service, which makes matches between European couples and children from Cambodia, Burkina Faso, and other countries. A back street near where Francis of Assisi worshiped among lepers is a welcome center for Gypsies and immigrants, and homeless Italians as well, who find hot showers, clean clothes, help in avoiding deportation, leads on jobs, or just a place to sit down and be known by name. On the Piazza Sant’Egidio behind the basilica is the Trattoria gli Amici, which employs mentally disabled men and women as maitres d’, waiters, cooks, and sommeliers—and so has created new jobs for people with special talents at a time when, in Italy, a good job is hard to come by. Every Christmas Day, the Community makes the basilica of Santa Maria itself a space of welcome for several thousand of Rome’s poor people—Italian as well as Mexican, Peruvian, African, Syrian—who are invited to eat a holiday meal on red-draped tables set up on the priceless Cosmati tile floor in the nave.
It’s a paradox: this sixteen-hundred-year-old church, the oldest church in the world consecrated to the Virgin Mary, built on the site where the Roman Christians to whom St. Paul addressed his letter met for their prayer service—this most ancient of Rome’s still-standing basilicas is also the least museum-like of them all. It’s a meeting place, a social hub, a bazaar of ideas and good works, and a hothouse of conviviality, where strangers become friends and friends become more than friends.
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One evening a few years ago I met Mario Marazziti in the rear of Santa Maria after la preghiera and we set out for supper at a favorite place of his, making our way through the crowd of people outside the church—with whom we had been invoking the saints a few minutes earlier—and down one of the narrow streets leading from the piazza to the Tiber. An early member of the Community, Mario gradually stepped into the role of its volunteer portavoce, or spokesman. When I first met him, in 1998, he was employed as a TV producer and manager for RAI, Italy’s state media company, and I was writing a piece about Catholic-Jewish relations for the New York Times Magazine. I’m not sure what I expected in a humanitarian from RAI, but I didn’t expect Mario, whose dark suit, straight black hair, and big smile seemed to suggest an Italian ex-Beatle.
If Trastevere embodies the paradox of Europe—emphatically old but with pockets of exceptional vitality—Mario Marazziti embodies the paradox of Sant’Egidio: at once wholly worldly and something like holy. Or so I have come to feel as I’ve gotten to know him across fifteen years. He is no stranger to high society: through an old friend at the prominent wine journal Gambero Rosso he and his friends put together Vino per Vita, or Wine for Life, an initiative where Italian wineries run by Mario’s contacts give the proceeds from certain bottlings to Sant’Egidio’s campaign for AIDS relief in Africa. He can be irreverent, relishing the story of a cleric friend whose poor Italian led him to open the church’s millennial ceremonies in 1999 with a crude profanity. For years, he spent part of each New York visit hunting down audio gear for his son, Andrea, a rock guitarist. Yet he is selfless and tireless on behalf of Sant’Egidio—on behalf, he says, of “the gospel and friendship.” I had learned of him through a Sant’Egidio group at St. Malachy’s Church near Times Square led by the author Thomas Cahill, who was hard at work on the third book of his seven-volume “Hinges of History” series. The group never had more than ten members, but Mario sustained us with phone calls and email messages. I later asked him how he kept up with us and his countless other friends worldwide. “Friendship is not proportionate,” he said matter-of-factly.
It would be nice to say that over soup and red wine in Trastevere that night Mario told me the story of Sant’Egidio. And why shouldn’t he have? There is nobody better able than he, with his years as portavoce. And it is a story full of hooks for a journalist in a hurry: civil wars and AIDS relief, presidents and popes, headlines and peace prizes, and dialogue between religious leaders—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim.
There is plenty of material in the Community’s press kit. But over soup and red wine that night, and on many a night since, Mario told me the stories not of the projects he had undertaken over many years, but those he was engaged in that very week. He explained that he was just back from Mozambique, the base of Sant’Egidio’s anti-AIDS program, DREAM, which is overseen by his wife, Cristina, a medical doctor. “From Mozambique and Texas,” he corrected himself, and added, “From the culture of life, and the culture of death.” In Texas he had visited his friends on death row. And he had made a strange discovery. “The former execution chamber at the prison in Huntsville, the death chamber with the chair, is now a museum of the death penalty in Texas,” he said in amazement. “A museum which has an actual curator! Where the old death chair is kept on display!”
As he refilled our glasses from the bottle—a robust red wine from the Sicilian vintner Planeta, the neck of it stickered with an image of a dove crossing a rainbow, Sant’Egidio’s logo, indicating participation in the Community’s Wine for Life program—I tried to picture him at a Motel 6 in Huntsville, Texas, and to imagine what his friendship might mean to a man sentenced to death.
What it would mean, in the months to follow, was this. Mario would make a documentary for RAI about Texas’s death row, called Thou Shalt not Kill. He and Tom Cahill would join his friends on death row in a “book group” with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose book No Future Without Forgiveness Cahill had published during his years as the head of Doubleday’s Image Books imprint. He would describe life in the prison at conferences across Europe. As the date drew near for the execution of Dominique Green, whose conviction and sentence of death seemed especially dubious, he would take part in a vigil in Rome, so that in the hours before Green was executed, while the Catholic churches even in Texas paid scant attention to Green’s plight, several hundred members of Sant’Egidio were there at Santa Maria in Trastevere, keeping him in their minds and hearts. He would manage to get John Turturro to narrate an English-language version of the film about Green, called Dominique’s Story. He would present 3.2 million signatures calling for a moratorium on executions to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan—and would be written up in the New York Times as a man “who has used up all his vacation time traveling for the death penalty moratorium.” After Silvio Berlusconi was ousted from Italy’s premiership once and for all and placed under house arrest, Mario would enter electoral politics—one of the leaders of the 1968 generation whom the center-left drafted to run for office in the hope of repairing Italian politics, run Vegas-style by Berlusconi for most of their adult lives. He would be elected to the lower House of Parliament, the Camera dei Deputati. Now when he came to New York, it would be as the head of the Human Rights Committee of the Camera dei Deputati, part of the Italian delegation to the UN General Assembly’s “Presidents’ Week.”
And he would write this book, in English, out of the conviction that the place where the death penalty is most vulnerable just now, is the United States of America.
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Over time—and many coffees and cornetti—the history of the community did emerge in conversation. It’s the story of a lay-led, forward-looking Catholic group that has grown and thrived while keeping its simple student ideals in sight. Sant’Egidio is at once one of the church’s so-called “new movements,” a counterpart to NGOs like Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch, and a peacemaking outfit that has helped end conflicts in Ivory Coast and Guatemala and has pioneered the “preventive peace process” in Guinea and Niger. And yet it remains, for all that, a group of friends—friends who often wear the tapered suits and hand-stitched shoes of Italy’s professional class, and who are as apt to sit for a coffee with a homeless person as with an archbishop or the Mayor of Rome.
The movement’s founder, Andrea Riccardi, has as a distant ancestor a monk who was beatified, the third of four steps toward being declared a saint. But his own father was a banker, and when he first read the New Testament in earnest it was as a humanities text at the Liceo Virgilio in central Rome. He felt the text was urging him to lead “a more authentic life.” He organized a prayer meeting at a nearby church, attracting a dozen students, who set about working among the poor people living on Rome’s ragged outskirts. The meeting spread to other high schools in Rome. When the participants entered the Roman university La Sapienza, their meetings grew further. After classes they would set out for the periferia on their Vespas, and find there, among people on the margins, a new kind of family.
1968, the year of student uprisings, was also high season for activism inspired by the Second Vatican Council, as Catholics worldwide sought to put the “spirit of the Council” into action. But the Community’s first members, as they tell it now, had no great inspiration. They were Romans who sought to break through the spirit-killing anonymity of the postwar city. Their texts were the newspaper and the New Testament, their program was “the gospel and friendship,” and their models were local heroes: Francis of Assisi; St. Philip Neri, the sixteenth-century city priest, whose home church, the Chiesa Nuova, was the site of their first meetings; and Pier Paolo Pasolini, the eccentrically spiritual Italian filmmaker, who described the periferia as “the true face of Rome.”
In 1970, when Mario joined the group, the friends who had met at the Chiesa Nuova were still teenagers. As other student movements foundered, theirs grew stronger. Three years later the cardinal of Rome gave them the keys to the disused church of Sant’Egidio, tucked behind the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. The attached convent was owned by the state. The community started to use the abandoned spaces: they were squatters for good causes. The Jesuit scholar Carlo Maria Martini paid a visit, and asked to join their work with the poor in the periferia. Soon bishops and cardinals were coming over from a Vatican-owned palazzo round the corner. In those days Sant’Egidio was the only church in central Rome that was open at night, and the prayer service outgrew the tiny church and migrated to the basilica, where it attracted pilgrims from around the world, who in turn founded Sant’Egidio communities of their own.
They kept up their work on Rome’s periferia, and this led them to the city’s center. Upon his election as pope, John Paul II—the first non-Italian to hold that office since 1523—resolved to make himself known in Rome by paying pastoral calls on all the city’s parish churches. During his first visit to a church in Garbatella in outer Rome in December 1978, he met some members of Sant’Egidio and was taken with their approach; he reached out to the group, beginning a relationship that led him, in 1986, to grant Sant’Egidio a charter as a “public lay association.”
On Sunday, October 27, 1986, a hundred or so leaders of the world’s religions met in Italy to pray for peace. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox; Jewish and Muslim; Buddhist, Shinto, Hindu; animist and Native American, they made their way up the hill to Assisi, fabled hometown of St. Francis and his friends. After praying in groups at sites around the village, they took turns offering prayers from a stage outside the basilica. As a finale, they went onstage all together: the Orthodox Supreme Patriarch and the Archbishop of Canterbury to the right, the Dalai Lama to the left, and, in the middle, Pope John Paul II. The World Day of Prayer for Peace was John Paul’s idea, and while it had been choreographed, in accordance with Catholic doctrine, to set him off distinctly from the others, the photographs in the next day’s papers showed him standing in the group as one religious leader among many. It was a sight without precedent in the long history of the papacy, and it led some traditionalist Catholics to denounce John Paul as a pope flirting with heresy. But it opened a door; and with the door open, the pope stepped aside to let Sant’Egidio carry the event forward, making the Community an advance guard for peacemaking and interreligious dialogue.
The Community was itself diverse in its makeup and interreligious in program, and this came to be reflected vividly in the annual Prayer for Peace, held each year in a different city: Warsaw, Brussels, Milan, Jerusalem.
Its projects across Rome were well established: welcome centers for immigrants, and the elderly, and “schools of peace” in poor neighborhoods. As the movement spread across Italy and beyond, so did its sense of the periferia, which was deepened by Riccardi’s sense of history and other members’ growing experience in government and politics. For them, diplomacy came naturally as a tool to reduce poverty (since “war is the mother of all poverties”), and in time their gifts were put to the test. At the invitation of some Mozambicans who came to Rome, Riccardi and others went to Maputo, that country’s capital, bringing food and aid packages, because the combined effect of the country’s long civil war and a famine was destroying the country. In Maputo it was apparent that, without peace, no amount of aid would be enough. So Sant’Egidio invited Mozambican government officials and leaders of the opposition guerrilla movement to come to Rome for peace talks—and they came, surprising everybody. When, after twenty-six months of intermittent talks, they emerged from the old convent in October 1992 with a peace accord, Le Monde on its front page announced a “Pax Romana;” soon the Italian press dubbed Sant’Egidio “the United Nations of Trastevere.”
What made this peace possible? Riccardi, and Mario with him, speak of “weak strength,” which they say is inspired by group’s original idea about the gospel and friendship—the impulse “to start from what unites and not from what divides people,” as “good Pope John” XXIII used to say. It may sound vague, but it works: it invites people who are nominally adversaries to come together through friends in common. This requires a spirit of friendship, yes—but also cultural awareness, flexibility, a willingness to set aside vested interests, an eye for opportunities within seeming obstacles, attention to the human factor, and lots of hard work.
Likewise the community’s method of organization. There is an elected president and an executive board, but few other members claim formal titles. They take different roles as needed. Andrea Riccardi—now a professor of church history—has served (post-Berlusconi) as the Italians government’s minister for human rights, paying special attention to the rights of the tens of thousands of migranti coming to Italy by ramshackle boats from North Africa. Daniela Pompei is renowned as an advocate for immigrants and their rights. Claudio Betti, a teacher fluent in English, is a presence for Sant’Egidio in North America; so are the husband-and-wife team of Andrea Bartoli and Paola Piscitelli, he as dean of the foreign service school at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and she as the organizer of a nascent Sant’Egidio community house on Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan and a Christmas meal for the poor akin to the one in Trastevere.
The friends who founded Sant’Egidio are European eminences now. They receive honorary degrees and prizes from UNESCO and other groups; they are invited to speak worldwide; they write opinion columns for La Vanguardia and the Corriere della Sera. The Christmas dinner is now offered in sixty countries to some 150,000 guests. The annual Prayer for Peace—held in recent years in Krakow, Munich, Sarajevo, and Antwerp—draws several thousand participants from the full spread of religious traditions. The lighting of the Colosseum when a country rejects the death penalty is covered by the press in Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English, and in five languages on the movement’s website, www.santegidio.org. Georgetown University was the first North American host of the Prayer for Peace, in Washington, DC, and the university’s president, John J. DeGioia, takes part in the annual event wherever it is held. Princeton University has students learn about the movement during a summer course in Rome. When the US Secretary of State travels to Rome, a meeting with Sant’Egidio often takes place.
Some months after his election, Pope Francis came over from the Vatican and spent two hours at Santa Maria in Trastevere with the Community and the poor. The streets of the neighborhood, always crowded, were absolutely jammed. The occasion was not Mass, but unique “communion event,” in which Francis’s teachings on the role of mercy and the value of friendship with the poor and seemed naturally akin to the Community’s own efforts and outlook.
In 2014 Francis followed John Paul II and Benedict XVI in denouncing the death penalty as a violation of civilized norms and our common humanity. It was the strongest statement against the death penalty the church has ever made.
Mario Marazziti turned sixty not long ago. His business cards identify him as a Deputato in the Camera dei Deputati. He remains a genius of friendship and an enthusiast for whatever it is the Community is doing to make the world a more humane and livable place. He’ll mention a plan to bring Wine for Life to the United States in the form of a tie-in with Newman’s Own salad dressing. Or he’ll hint at Sant’Egidio’s back-channel role in creating a “bridge” to end the violence in Syria and make a political solution possible. As we step out into the Roman night, the flats dark above the thronged trattorie, he’ll talk about a plan for Sant’Egidio’s members in Rome to reach out the city’s elderly in the summertime, visiting them and performing simple tasks so as to keep shut-ins from dying in a heat wave as Europe feels the effects of climate change. “One of our people goes to the top of the stairs with a bag of groceries or gives the doorman a few euros to do it,” he explains. The effort to form networks of neighbors has become a “pilot program” funded by the Italian government, with an eye to spreading it throughout the European Union as an antidote to the loneliness of many elderly people and an alternative to the costly impersonal approach of most social programs. Compared with lighting up the Colosseum or fighting AIDS—or bringing the death penalty to an end worldwide—it’s no big deal. But as he describes it, it seems not only simple but natural and necessary, one more way for people to be friends to one another.