c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

ROME _ Rome seems more affluent than it did even a couple of years ago. Poverty is invisible. There are as many construction cranes as in Chicago.

Italian affluence is not an illusion. Northern Italy has the same per capita income as Denmark, the richest country in the European Union. Northern and Central Italy are about the same as Germany, the second richest country. Southern Italy is comparable with Greece, the poorest country in the EU. Conditions in the Mezzogiorno have improved, but Italy is still unable to cope with its own internal Third World, perhaps because of the constant political instability.

Roman women are still the most handsome women in the world. The improvement in lifestyle has enabled them to dress even more smartly. They continue to treat their pseudo-macho men with the mix of amused tolerance and affectionate contempt most women feel toward men; the Roman women, serenely self-confident of their sexual appeal, do it more openly. They all have cell phones which they use with considerable style.

The Italians are the worst drivers in the world and the bravest pedestrians. Their ice cream is the best in the world. You can find on the souvenir tables statues of Pauline Borghese by Canova next to the Pieta and of Aphrodite next to Pope John Paul II.

But the clergy and religious around the Vatican never smile. Attempts to say”Buon Giorno”to them are ignored, though three nuns _ probably Irish or Americans _ did respond to my greeting. The priests, in their Roman collars and clerical suits seem locked up in their power, such as it may be, and self-importance. Perhaps I wouldn’t smile either if I were part of a bureaucracy in which someone was always trying to stab you in the back and the local citizens treated you with contempt. Nor would I smile if I knew that I had become irrelevant to most of the Catholic world.

I sat next to three American priests _ students it seemed _ at dinner. Bright and confident young men, they had all the answers, though pretty clearly they didn’t know what the questions were. I found myself hoping they were destined for chancery offices where they would do less harm than in parishes.

One of the advantages of the millennial jubilee celebration, American priests tell me, is that the local government is spiffing up the city and cleaning the facades of all the churches. St. John Lateran and St. Mary Major, for example, are glittering white again. Moreover there is major construction work on the facade of St. Peter. The city stands to make millions of lire on the jubilee, though even in May of a non-Jubilee year it has more tourists then it can cope with.

A visit to Rome also recalls the third session of the Second Vatican Council and the great hopes and expectations of the era. It was the springtime of the church. But so many of the giants of that time in the mid-1960s are dead now and the men who have blighted the hopes of that period, whether out of fear or the need to possess power, must bear great responsibility for what they have done.

Meanwhile, those of us who find the Vatican, its Curia and even St. Peter’s to be excessive, must nonetheless be impressed by the deep Catholic faith and piety displayed by the pilgrim tourists.

Here, one thinks, is the real strength of the Catholic heritage, unappreciated by the bureaucrats who think they are running the church.

The streams of people have been coming to the”tomb of Peter”for a long time _ when the 10th century popes were bandits, rapists and killers who preyed on the pilgrims and when the Borgias, the Barbarinis, and the Borgheses were draining the church of wealth for their own greed and glory. But the faithful can distinguish between the heritage and the imperfect humans who administer it.

Thousands of years from now, when everyone will know that the Vatican Council II was one of the most important events in Roman Catholic history _ though they won’t remember precisely why _ the pilgrims will still be coming. They will still find an imperfect Church lead by imperfect humans and they will still love their Catholic heritage.

DEA END GREELEY