Nikita Roncalli: Counterlife of a Pope (Franco Bellegrandi)
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NIKITARONCALLI Counterlife of a Pope Franco Bellegrandi FRANCO BELLEGRANDI NIKITARONCALLI Counterlife of a Pope To Anita, for her quiet, unflagging, precious help Author’s Note Once again to take in hand the manuscript of a book that was never published, open it, leaf through those pages written so many years before, is like stepping into a long- closed house. A house that was once our home, in which we lived, suffered, and loved. The dusty windows are, once again, thrust open, and as the morning light stirs, the rooms from the darkness one after the other, the eye makes out the ancient layout of the furnishings concealed by the coverings, of the objects, of the books once familiar. And approaching the walls and pushing aside with emotion the drape which shrouds a portrait, one encounters the gaze of a person well known and loved who has continued to live for all those years, in the dimness of the closed house, with the very same expression in her look, with the same fettered ability to move you in the splendor of those eyes, in the grace of her face, in the elegant and delicate posture of her figure. Much time has passed, and yet all has remained in its place in the house where year after year not a piece has resounded anymore, nor voice has uttered another word. However for this very reason those ancient emotions indissolubly tied to those rooms, to those décors, to that rich furnishing, to those veiled portraits, appear unscathed by time. No irksome hand has violated that seclusion nor moved anything. Thus time has stood still in those rooms like the subdued beat of the old pendulum on the console, in the stillness and in the shadows in the “physical” absence of life, all the spirituality, all the ideals, all the delusions and all the heightened or consuming passions that breathed so many years before within those walls. As, once again we enter that house, we find them still powerful, intact, pitiless, and punctual in “their” actuality having survived time and events. So it was with the manuscript of this book. Which ought to have been published many years ago, when the facts narrated had just taken place. The draft had been completed effortlessly, without halting reflections, with the voices of the protagonists still resounding in my ears, and the echo of the emotions still stirring in my heart. For many narrated facts I witnessed in person, with the awareness of moving in a world and amidst personages on which the curtain would be forever lowered. Where are they today? Somewhere they exist, and are living their own life. Yet erased from History, which, in spite of them, has turned the page. Confined into silence and lost in the swarming of the anonymous throng. Power has its proscenium and its actors. That is the “sanctioned actuality” continuously proposed. And so today one is led into thinking that a nation is represented by this unicum of plebeians in shirt and tie, with no trait of nobility in their face. And it is these, and always these, in power today. And yet those others, when death has yet to call an end to their days, are still alive. But they no longer “exist.” Their gold- embroidered uniforms, when not consigned to the junk dealer, lay at the bottom of a closet. Their talents produced books that today’s power has relegated into oblivion. Their code of honor called for a duel, to wipe the insult, or for a shot in one’s own head, in the disgraceful instance. People used to saying, watching them at ceremonies, “How noble, what a grand signor!” And yet some would take the streetcar to get to those ceremonies, the greatcoat buttoned up to conceal tailcoat and decorations, and born their destitution with dignity and decorum. But they are forever gone. The last of that rare stock with whom I lived, and befriended under the gilded vaults of the Vatican palace, furnished me with documents and precious information for my book, and encouraged me to write it: May my gratitude and admiration for their courage be with them wherever they are. Preface One could entitle these indispensable lines that introduce the pages that follow, Preface to the preface. The subject of this book is not frozen in time, but rather moves on with time. It flows like the sand in the grand inflexible merciless hourglass of History, arresting its moment is impossible. Only memory can immobilize them in its boundless archive upon which time can however do much, with its fog and its amnesias, more or less controlled by man. For the personal use, these amnesias, of the undemanding humanae gentis. Perhaps never like the present, a present encased in the swift passing of seasons, the political reality of the contemporary world has been devastated by a tremor as macroscopic as unpredictable, which has upset the political geography of half of our globe, and uncovered pots in which were brewing hallucinogenic schemes. The Soviet macrocosm has disintegrated piece by piece. All of its quasi-centenary monolithic order has been run through by cracks and clefts whence with the swiftness of an otherworldly nightmare have detached and flown away, obedient to a mysterious centrifugal force, vital fragments of its empire, which seemed unassailable and indissoluble. Communism, in an instant has disintegrated. It no longer exists. And Soviet Russia with hat in hand asks mercy of the dollar so as to feed herself. The last great ideology of the twentieth century to which, willingly or not, millions of men have given their intellect and sacrificed their lives, is sinking in a jubilation of shame. The ship is sinking and the rats are abandoning the ship in droves. All precipitously distance themselves, those who professed their beliefs in Communism in order to dunk in the doughnut of their avidity, and are now crying out the anathema. But this their distancing themselves, this their ostentatious outrage cannot annul facts and documents, cannot wipe out inescapable responsibilities, and cannot erase with a snap of a finger heavy and very uncomfortable accounts/scores. Regrettably for that multitude of “ex,” with tragicomic punctuality the sins are starting to catch up. And so this manuscript, recounting the approach between Church and Marxism, blossomed amidst the lights and shadows of the Giovannean pontificate, lived by the author in full, a step away from the pontifical throne, bestirs at the breeze of an actuality unimagined at the time of its draft. The distance of those days has been increased hundredfold by the forward flight of History. Days sanctified in the liturgy of the proletariat and strict political and social realities, solemnly affirmed and apparently indestructible. Days in which these pages yellowed by the years were written with a solid – if callow – faith in the fairness and legitimacy and honesty of the intent. Pages rather quite documental than literary, and thus designated by the intent – or vain ambitions? – of the author to a future which then seemed well beyond the discernible horizon of a lifetime, yet with equally solid uncertainty as to the if, how, and when, they would be consigned to the printing press. Indeed, these pages on which intermingle diary, chronicle, and history mostly unknown to most, are blotted by the original sin of a guilt, at that time deserving of the most passionate blame: having dared, against every opportunistic logic, to trace a “counter-life” of John XXIII that would underscore the revolutionary commitment of that Pope, which earned him the name of “Pope of the communists.” The sudden fall of Soviet communism has triggered a centrifugal jumble within the muddled ranks that used to be the party of the sickle and the hammer. No one has ever soiled his hands with the Bolsheviks; no one has pocketed ready rubles; no one, by George! has ever compromised himself with Moscow. And in the meantime, as in a Biblical scourge, from the half-closed archives of the Kremlin are darting out, as deadly thunderbolts incinerating the fake, irrefutable documents corroborating the closest – and logical – cooperation of these individuals with the Soviet “Mamuska” (mother). Most of the media, which follow the stream, are hunting down the comrades lost. Every man for himself. Yet entire generations did embrace communism. And many still carry it in their hearts. In the West and East alike. Especially in the East, the feast over, after the first bitter taste of the new reality. Even on the night of the coup, of that 19 August 1991, there was no counting of the ante-march comrades who wept and laughed, glued to the TV broadcasting the martial sequences of that ephemeral coup d'état. Here now, finally, comes Stalin’s red army, taker of Berlin, to reestablish the inviolable power of the State Party against the treachery of the little bourgeois, whom Uncle Sam has bought by the pound. In the depths of the mausoleum of the Red Square, the mummy of Lenin has aroused and calls out to the revival. Those spirits, pure no matter what, respectable flag- bearers of faithfulness, lived in their exalted fancy the night of the coup. They beheld in the courtyards of the barracks, cut by the beams of the spotlights, the officers standing on the tanks, haranguing the troops; beheld the invincible blood-hued flag kissed by the commanders. They perceived the cry of the engines and the rattling of the caterpillars. But the exaltation was short-lived. As bitter, the reawakening. Many are now fleeing the old beloved party, which diligent hands have castrated of its historical, chrismatic emblem.