ROME
National Catholic Reporter
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Rome
When Pope John Paul II used to address seminarians studying in the Eternal City, he would often urge them to “learn Rome.” By that, he meant that just moving around the city, and especially spending time in its estimated 300 churches, can offer an education in Catholicism.
Today is the one-year anniversary of John Paul’s beatification, and it’s also the occasion for a reminder that the late pope’s tip about “learning Rome” is truer than he probably intended. A recent brouhaha over the burial of a mob boss in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare illustrates that Rome’s churches often do, indeed, have much to teach about Catholicism – warts and all.
The scandal centers on the late Enrico De Pedis, a.k.a “Renatino,” who was among the bosses of the Banda della Magliana, the “Magliana Gang,” named after a Rome neighborhood, which was the city’s most notorious organized crime outfit in the 1970s and 1980s. After being gunned down near the Piazza de Fiori in 1990, De Pedis was buried in a crypt within the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare (albeit in what the church’s pastor describes as basically a “closet,” in an unconsecrated area not open to the public).
From the beginning, it always seemed incongruous that a mob boss should end up buried in the kind of space typically reserved for cardinals, Catholic nobles, and other ecclesial dignitaries. That was perhaps especially so in the early 1990s, in an era in which the anti-mafia activism of courageous Catholic priests such as Fr. Pino Puglisi in Sicily put them at grave risk (Puglisi was assassinated in 1993). Critics wondered how the church could back Puglisi with one hand, and open its doors to De Pedis with the other.
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