A Saint on Death Row (5 page)

But they persevered. As they began to grow into a larger organization, they formed additional meetings throughout Rome, then throughout Italy. Often, the church halls where they tried to meet were shut to them by priests who thought their youthful spontaneity and priestless informality smelled
of Protestantism. Soon enough, however, there were Sant'Egidio communities in most European countries, then in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the United States and Canada being the only region where Sant'Egidio remains relatively unknown. Though the headquarters of Sant'Egidio, close by the great Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, keeps no record of numbers, there must now—forty years after their first meetings—be close to sixty thousand members throughout the world, perhaps less than half of them in Italy. Anyone who wishes to become a member, no matter his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof, national/ethnic background, or sexual orientation, is welcome. Anyone who wishes to participate in one or another of the Community's activities without becoming a member is also welcome.

All the communities meet for a prayer service, usually several times a week, that has scripture reading and a reflection by one of the members as its center. The chanted psalms and hymns they sing, though characteristic of them, seem inspired especially by the chants of Russian Orthodoxy, as is their use of an icon of Jesus that serves as the focus of attention. But the service, wherever it is enacted, retains a simplicity and an intensity that cannot but impress even the casual visitor. For many years, the original Roman community met for prayer in the Church of Sant'Egidio, a former convent of enclosed nuns that was given to them and from which the movement took its name.

Now, having outgrown its own church, the Trastevere chapter meets for prayer each night in the large Basilica of
Santa Maria, which is close to an apartment my wife and I own and where we spend a part of each year. Santa Maria, extraordinarily beautiful, is a mostly twelfth- and thirteenth-century building whose foundations are as ancient as the fourth century, when Christians first emerged aboveground to take their places as equal citizens of Rome and began to build the distinctive edifices that would ever after characterize the great city.

To stop at a description of the Community's prayer would be to falsify these people, for it is the works of Sant'Egidio at least as much as the prayer that distinguishes them. Though the original community in the heart of Rome contains many middle-aged members (as the students of ‘68 have grown gray and sometimes bald), its ranks have been continually replenished by people in their teens and twenties. Other satellite communities, of which there are more than a hundred in and around Rome, are more specialized: communities of the elderly, of poor working people, of gypsies. In each community, friendship with those in need takes precedence and consumes many hours of donated labor. Each night in Trastevere, for instance, fifteen hundred homeless people are fed at sit-down dinners served with graciousness and even style. Likewise, hundreds of substantial bags of groceries are distributed each week. The Trastevere community runs three refuges for abandoned old people, two AIDS hospices, a home for abused and abandoned children, and after-school programs for immigrants and others in the poorer parts of the city. It even runs a delightful, inexpensive restaurant—gli Amici (or Friends)—
in Piazza di Sant'Egidio, staffed entirely by mentally handicapped adults.

Each October, the Community organizes a torchlit March of Remembrance for the Roman Jews and all other Jews who perished under the Nazis. This march winds dramatically from the portico of Santa Maria and ends at the steps of Rome's great Synagogue. Almost as dramatic is the enormous feast for the poor that the Community hosts each Christmas afternoon inside the Basilica of Santa Maria.

More than fifteen years ago, members of the Community, believing they had a gospel responsibility to act as peacemakers, undertook a series of quiet, amateur efforts on their own and succeeded in arranging a peace in Mozambique between the guerrillas and the government (after sixteen years of war and one million casualties). The peace has held ever since. Not only did the Community go on to help achieve a similar, if less certain, peace in Guatemala, it continues to attempt reconciliation in Algeria, the Balkans, Burundi, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and other hot spots, working intuitively and patiently, never abandoning hope, and true to the belief that “war is the greatest poverty of all.”

Each year, for more than twenty years, the Community has hosted an international interfaith conference in the hopes of building peace in troubled parts of the world by encouraging informal bonds of interfaith friendship and cooperation. At these conferences I have seen Arabs lunching with Israelis, Serbs dining with Bosnians, Irish Protestants drinking with Irish Catholics. Italian food and Italian wine are most helpful
in establishing the right atmosphere—but above all there is the magic of Italian hospitality. As in so many of the Community's initiatives, the overriding goal is to quell hatred and division and to strengthen the bonds of community and fellow feeling wherever these can be encouraged.

The Community of Sant'Egidio has recently begun to build clinics for HIV/AIDS patients throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, for which medical doctors of the Community train local staff. These clinics have already had signal success, especially in halting the communication of the virus from pregnant woman to fetus and in reaching more children than any other program in Africa. To help pay for its efforts, the Community has somehow lured the prosperous Italian wine industry into backing its Wine for Life program by which many of the best bottles of Italian wine sport a Wine for Life decal. The decal represents a small tariff on each bottle, which in turn supports the building and staffing of the African clinics.

As I read over the above paragraph, the thought presses upon me that to write that “the Community has somehow lured the prosperous Italian wine industry” is more than a little disingenuous. I know exactly how the Community has managed to do this: they have a secret weapon named Mario Marazziti.

Mario was among the first Roman teenagers to join the Community. Not as securely bourgeois as many of the other early members, he was orphaned fairly early. His mother died when Mario was six; his father, a piano player and erratic
provider who sired children by several different women, died when Mario had barely finished university. Such experiences set Mario well apart from his contemporaries. I doubt there are any children on this earth better cared for than middle-class Italian children, who generally live with their parents into their thirties, can count on substantial trust funds to cushion their way in the world, and may even have their mamma installed as cook-housekeeper for the duration of her natural life. To find oneself cast out upon the world with little but one's own wits as weapons is an experience few middle-class Italians would be familiar with. It might be expected to leave an Italian boy crabbed, resentful, even permanently disoriented. It made Mario strong, graceful, and resourceful.

Now in his midfifties, Mario has what for lesser mortals might be considered three full-time jobs: a director of RAI, the national television service, he has recently been named president of a government-sponsored foundation that tackles problems associated with diseases of the blood that especially afflict people born in the Mediterranean region. (Like Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia, these blood diseases can be found almost exclusively within certain genetically related groups.) Mario has been married for many years to another member of the Community, Cristina, a quiet, effective doctor, who is largely responsible for turning the African AIDS program into such a success.

Together, after fulfilling every jot and tittle of the long and excruciatingly difficult adoption process demanded by the Italian state, Mario and Cristina succeeded in adopting Andrea,
a boy who came to them at last as a ten-year-old from the Community's shelter for children. There were, of course, a few rough patches in the raising of Andrea, who had no confidence in himself at the outset and required much shoring up by his adoptive parents. I recall Mario's intervening when a teacher told Andrea at the age of thirteen that he should give up school and “go to work.”
“Professoressa stronza!”
exclaimed Mario under his breath, invoking the most vivid Italian slang. In his carefully composed letter to
la professoressa
, however, Mario merely suggested that
she
, not her student, would be well advised to seek another line of work, so as not to destroy teenagers just starting to bloom. Not long ago, Andrea graduated cum laude with a degree in the science of education from the Roman university LUMSA. Today, Andrea is himself a father—of little Matteo—and Mario and Cristina are what can only be called supergrandparents.

But being a grandparent, super- or otherwise, should never be considered a job. Mario's third job, which he has held for many years, is as
portavoce
(press spokesman) for Sant'Egidio. Whereas his first two jobs yield modest salaries, this third one, like all Sant'Egidio jobs, pays nothing. It was in this third job that he came in contact with Dominique Green.

Dominique told me when we first met that he had been advised by another Death Row inmate that, given his lack of familial support, he needed to look for a new family. Italy, the older man said, try Italy. The Italians are really bothered by the American institution of the death penalty. Maybe you could find support among them. Dominique took this advice
and wrote to several Italian periodicals, asking for friends. One newspaper—
l'Unità
, at that time the Communist Party daily—translated his letter into Italian and printed it (as did a humor magazine,
Linus
, now defunct).

Here is Dominique's letter. Unfortunately, the original has disappeared. I was able to obtain only the translation into Italian, as published by
l'Unità
in March 1995. Though I have translated
l'Unità's
Italian back into English, I can give no guarantee that the English words I have chosen are exactly the same ones Dominique used. This is as close as we can come to hearing Dominique's voice in his first attempt to move into the world beyond his prison cell:

Stefania Caterina, a young member of Sant'Egidio, read this plea, underlining the words “simply someone who wishes to become my friend and to write to me.” Though she was hardly in a position to do more than this, she answered Dominique's letter—but in her native Italian, not knowing that Dominique knew no language but English. Here is Dominique's response, exactly as he typed it on an ancient typewriter the prison allowed him to use occasionally. As in the letters to Jessica quoted above, the punctuation can sometimes be peculiar, but the letter also shows the first faint notes of the simple eloquence that would become the hallmark of Dominique's writing: