Electricity: that's when all the trouble started...

You don't have to live like they tell you.

What's going to happen if you break all the rules and want something the world tells you is dumb or not worth having?

"But people will think I'm weird."

Honey, too late.



~

Warm welcome in chilly Cascia

Overnight in Cascia in a freezing cold but otherwise perfectly adequate little pilgrim's hotel (Blankets... lots and lots of blankets...). Took a good long walk around yesterday afternoon and saw nearly all of it in two hours.

Met the nice elderly nun at the Agostiniane, who spends her time manning the parlor, chatting with pilgrims and tourists and making everyone feel welcome. Her hands never stopped while she crocheted the hats and scarves and baby-booties and every other thing you can think of to crochet that were piled up all over the nuns' gift shop. The work of many years. (She knew I was a straniera right away, of course, but seemed to think I was secretly Polish and kept trying to give me Polish language holy cards of St. Rita. I think I convinced her in the end, and I got a handful of the cards with the St. Rita intercession prayer in English to hand around to friends when I get home. (That is, "home," to Sta. Marinella.)

I got into a conversation with Giovanni, the nice chap who owns the hotel and who has to live there now since his house was damaged in the October quake. (His alone on his whole street... worse luck!) And he understood completely about looking for a house in Umbria. "The sea is nice for a holiday," he said, "but Umbria's the place you want to live." Without my having asked, when I went for my walk he had been busy talking to his friends in town, asking around if anyone had a flat or a house they wanted to rent out. One of these friends was the guy who owns the pizza shop downstairs from the hotel, and when I went down in the morning for a slice of "rossa," he became animated over how nice Cascia is.

This morning, Giovanni walked me over to the bar - his bar, you understand... the one next door is for other people... bought me a cafe doppio and introduced me to Mario the bar owner...

This is how Italy is. Giovanni assured me that there were no "agenzia immobiliare" in Cascia. "That's not how we do things in Cascia. Norcia, yes, but here no. we have a different mind here." It's just as well, since I do have a very good realtor who came to see me in Norcia and said he'd be working on getting a house "for you and the kitties to be safe..."

But Giovanni dove right in. I'm a straniera, but also a fellow "terremotata."

So, now I'm back at the bar, (the right bar,) having a tea and a packet of crisps, watching the news and waiting for the bus down to Spoleto, so I can get the train to take me out of the Peaceable Kingdom of the Valnerina, and back to that other place, that other Italy. But I know Umbria is waiting for me to come home.



O powerful Santa Rita,
You are called the Saint of the Impossible.
In this time of need
I come to you with confidence.
You know my trials,
for you, yourself were many times burdened in this life.

Come to my help,
pray with me,
intercede on my behalf before the Father.
I know that God has a most generous heart
and that he is a most loving Father.
Join your prayers to mine
and obtain for the the grace I desire *of a home in the Valnerina*

I promise to use this favour, when granted,
to better my life,
to proclaim God's mercy,
and to make you widely known and loved.

I ask this through Christ our Lord.



~


(I've just realized I have not posted the update. The house is not "agibile". My flat is fine, and so is the one downstairs, but the third floor (second in Italy) is badly damaged. I think the chimney needs repair too, since it smoked very badly when I was there in December. This means that it is not possible to live in the house. Further, the commune is not issuing repair permits until the quakes stop, and when this will be is anyone's guess. I was there two nights and felt a total of about ten, mostly small, one big. It means that the house is not going to be repaired in the immediate future. For this reason, my realtor has said he will start to work on finding me another house in the area. Cascia, Roccoporena, Monteleone... quite a few of the little towns of the Valnerina are not so badly hit, so there are possibilities still and there is quite a lively little bus service that trundles all over from town to town - mostly for older people to go to the shops in Cascia and for school children.

All the efforts in Norcia right now are focused on getting the little "case degli legni" built and prepared for all the people whose houses are completely collapsed or so damaged they're not safe to go into. Whole sections of town outside the walls have been bulldozed and flattened to make room, and the little pre-fab houses are going up. All of Norcia looks like a giant construction site. Some of the little houses are completed and are already occupied. I saw housewives hanging laundry outside and signs of kids toys and life generally carrying on, which was very heartening to see.

The little houses are only being made available to people whose houses are permanently damaged or destroyed. In some cases the firemen have been helping people get their things out of their houses, packing boxes of china and carrying out sofas and other things because they can't let people in even to rescue their belongings. I think it is going to be several months before it is possible even to begin repairing houses that can be repaired. Many, many houses are so badly damaged - in some cases with parts of roofs and whole walls collapsed - that the remains will have to be bulldozed.

From a distance, Norcia looks damaged but mostly still there. In reality and for purposes of living daily life, there is very little left. And with 3000 people wanting to come home and 70% of the housing stock damaged renting in Norcia is currently impossible.)

I'm here, and ... it's awful...

I got off the bus yesterday in the brilliant sunshine, and a feeling of gloom and hopelessness settled over me like a dark fog. Fr. Benedict said in an interview recently that people have been very depressed, and I can understand now why.

The town looks like one gigantic construction zone, with piles of masonry everywhere, scaffolding, cranes and people in hard hats and steel-toed boots... in which the world's biggest circus has come to camp for the winter. Norcia has become a strangely silent and depressing place. The centro is open, (and the blessed pizza place is running.. thanks be to God!). A few shops, a couple of restaurants are running, but at night it's a ghost town, with most of the piazza blocked off and full of carefully preserved, numbered and labelled masonry from the basilica laid out, piles of rubble and equipment taking up the rest.

I was awake half the night, my mind racing around and around over the same territory. There are at least 3000 displaced people in Norcia, nearly all of whom want to come back, and 70% of the residential structures badly damaged, "inagibile," or outright collapsed. Many, many people with a good deal more 'natural right' to be here than I can't come home.

I just kept going over the options over and over and over - maybe a year in Perugia to study Italian; maybe a stint in Narni where there are at least affordable rents and a Mass to go to (albeit, SSPX); maybe Spoleto and take the bus up on Sundays to Norcia to come to the little Mass in the container here at the monastery... Really, anything... ANYthing but summer in Lazio - that miserable swamp of sweaty tourists, heat, humidity and mosquitoes...

All night, round and round and round... all interspersed with unpleasant dreams [again... sigh] of being trapped in a collapsing building carrying a huge box of cats. Aaaaand about six times this lovely state of mind interrupted with earthquakes... just in case I forgot what this was all about.
I'm sitting now in the hall of the agritourismo - one of only two places left able to receive guests - listening to Blue Oyster Cult and having my coffee, and nearly despairing. Thank God for coffee... thank God for kindly Umbrian ladies with beautiful, sturdily reconstructed country houses...

It seems impossibly selfish of me to even imagine I could be the one Special Person who could find a house or flat to rent, while so many people are still sleeping in campers and trailers and anything else they can find. Or living in hotels unable to return. Really, what am I thinking?

But then the roundabout starts from the beginning again: where else is there to go? What else is there to do? For good or ill, no matter what, this seems to be my place, and I've spent my whole life looking for it. I found it and now it's been taken away.

It reminds me with rather grim humour of a conversation I had with Fr. Cassian once after Mass on the Basilica steps: "Everything is so perfect, the only thing I'm worried about now is that some catastrophe will take it all away. A piano will fall out of an airplane onto my head..."

Who knew? Apparently me.

I'm really not very good at making decisions. I have usually done things by the Sherlock Holmes method of figuring out all the things that are impossible, and doing whatever is left. But this is a puzzle, a conundrum that is nearly stumping me.

Everybody so inclined, I could use some help. This puzzle is more than I can figure out. I need some kind of miracle, a sign or at least a clear path. I'm praying to St. Philip Neri - who has never let me down before, and to Sts. Scolastica & Benedict, St. Anthony to "find" a solution, St. Joseph who knows all about how important home is.

Goblin Market

I've been re-reading Ursula K. LeGuin's magnificent Earthsea trilogy, and I am remembering why these early, "classic" works of high fantasy had such a hold on my mind when I was young. 

And it's made me realise something. I've finally figured out what the problem with the internet is.  

The internet is a strange and dangerous place, the most ephemeral, almost fey and imaginary land, as devious and perilous – and as enticing – as any old Celtic underworld full of changelings, baffling oracles, capricious gods and deceitful fairies. For us mortals, it is a realm of wonders and secret knowledge but hemmed about with dangers, of false turns and dead ends and shifting pathways, illusions and misdirections. And it is populated with a race of tricksters who might tell you the simple truth to a plain question, but at any moment and for reasons unknowable, might also lead the unwary traveler into a trap, a spiral of deception and disinformation.

And don’t forget that the place itself, its very nature, is inhuman and a danger, quite apart from what dwells there. Innocent people have become ensnared in it, forgetting family and work and the smell of the fresh air and the feel of the sun, and finally forgetting even themselves, in its delightful glamours. Its twists and turns, with its little sparks of light, lead us further and further down its branching, twisting passages, until we have forgotten why we entered, and lost track of the movement of time.

Who has gone into it and not betimes waked, as if from a strange trance, in which the very room we sat in has faded into distant shadows, to find in what seemed like only moments that hours have passed and the daylight gone.

But the same impulse drives us to return to it as pushed the old heroes to climb down into those cold stone passages, not seeking treasure, but knowledge and wisdom. Somewhere, we feel, in that vast labyrinth is the thing we are looking for, that we may have looked for all our lives. And we can become enchanted by it, returning to it helplessly again and again, forsaking everything merely human and natural, obsessed with finding that one thing, certain we will recognise it even if we don’t know what it is.

And it is true, there is treasure in it, but it is often disguised as a plain old bit of stone on the floor, something we would pass without a glance in our rush to grasp some pretty, glittering thing.

The old and the wise and the simple, the shepherds and woodsmen and goose-wives, those whose lives are already complete and rooted in reality, with good, hard work to do and children to raise, who sleep sound from sunset to dawn, know enough to stay away from it, to ignore its shimmering enticements. But the young and dissatisfied, the city-dwellers who have lived all their lives hemmed about by pretty distractions, who don’t know the real or recognise a fairy glamour, are drawn to it like magpies to bottle tops.

And like those old Celtic myths of an undying land full of heroes and fey wise-women, the internet lasts forever. It is in one sense the most deceitful and changeable place, but at the same time also as immutable as diamond. Whatever is placed there for safekeeping is there forever.

But it is possible, with the right understanding, to go into it and come out again with something useful, though perhaps not easily and not often. I’ve never known anyone with a stern enough will to use it without any ill effects – and it seems particularly to drain and weaken the faculties of the will. It affects also the person’s ability to trust his own knowledge, however sure it was at the start. He will go in thinking clearly and knowing how to tell truth from falsehood, but the longer he is there the more its charms work upon his trust in himself. The more he will think he has been deceived in the past, and all his knowledge is vain. This is the first part of the enchantment.

An intelligent man attends to his work and his family and his life, and he deals with the enchanted lands as he would with any other mortal peril; only if he must. But if he must, there are certain wards and rhymes and charms to bring with him, certain disciplines of the mind he must know to be safe. He must know the rules; never to eat or drink anything, never to join in the dances. He must train his mind and will as he would his arms and back for work. And above all, he must know who he is and remember why he came there. There will be times when he must will his eyes not to see the fairy enticements, and restrain his hearing to reject the snippets of songs and bells and flutes that would lure him off his path. He must train his mind as he would a hunting dog not to run off chasing sounds and lights.

As we know from all those old tales, it is a rare man who can do these things. Most of the time the stories are tragedies in which simple men are caught and lost, never to come out in the lifetimes of his family, remembered sadly as just another fool snared by the enchanted and deceptive fairy snares. Perhaps he would emerge again a hundred years later, forgotten by everyone, a stranger in his own home.

Goblin Market

Christina Rossetti

With clasping arms and cautioning lips, 

With tingling cheeks and finger tips. 

“Lie close,” Laura said, 

Pricking up her golden head: 

“We must not look at goblin men, 

We must not buy their fruits: 

Who knows upon what soil they fed 

Their hungry thirsty roots?” 

“Come buy,” call the goblins 

Hobbling down the glen. 

“Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura, 

You should not peep at goblin men.” 

Lizzie cover’d up her eyes, 

Cover’d close lest they should look; 

Laura rear’d her glossy head, 

And whisper’d like the restless brook: 

“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, 

Down the glen tramp little men. 

One hauls a basket, 

One bears a plate, 

One lugs a golden dish 

Of many pounds weight. 

How fair the vine must grow 

Whose grapes are so luscious; 

How warm the wind must blow 

Through those fruit bushes.” 

“No,” said Lizzie, “No, no, no; 

Their offers should not charm us, 

Their evil gifts would harm us.” 

~

Who shakes the earth out of its place; and its pillars tremble…

Today is the Feast of Santa Scolastica, hermitess and patron of Benedictine nuns, the saint under whose protection I place myself and my future life in Norcia.

Scolastica, rimasta unica erede del ragguardevole patrimonio della famiglia, rifiutando ogni attaccamento ai beni terreni, chiese al padre di potersi dedicare alla vita religiosa entrando in un monastero vicino a Norcia. 

Scolastica remained the sole heir of the remarkable heritage of the family, by rejecting all attachment to worldly goods, her father asked her to devote herself to religious life entering a monastery near Norcia.

~

He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength.
Who has hardened himself against him and succeeded?

He who removes mountains, and they know it not
when he overturns them in his anger;

Who shakes the earth out of its place;
and its pillars tremble…

Job 9


~

How strange the paths of our lives seem. From time to time we stop and look back and think, “Who would have thought things would have turned out like this? How could anyone have guessed I’d be here?” And yet, here I am, preparing to return to a half-ruined town and to try to recalibrate my life along new lines. Or maybe we could say, very, very old lines.



If you are over 50, you might have experienced this feeling of remoteness from your past. It seems as though we look back and down on a long road, as though we have spent many days climbing a mountain trail. And in some places the trail turns and you can sit down on a stone or a bit of grass and see the way you’ve come, with the place you started perhaps just visible, far off in the misty distance. Then you see this other person, a little dark figure toiling uncertainly up the long way and you can pity that person because you know what lies ahead. But it’s just a phantom, a distant memory.

Converts will recognise this strange feeling of detachment from our past. And the moreso if we are converts not only from secularist modernism to a serious-minded Catholicism, which is rare and alienating enough, but to the far less likely “second conversion” to a realm even further in and higher up, to Traditional Catholicism.

Many who read him wonder how C.S. Lewis could have been so insightful, to so accurately identify human failings. But he answered the question himself, saying that he was a Christian "not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else". In reality, to be a Traditional Catholic is to live every moment of every day in an entirely different country, a dazzlingly illuminated parallel world of meaning, of rationality and coherence that seems to exist slightly out of phase with the rest of the world and from which we watch the world moving farther away every day.

So we have become interior expatriates. And the longer we stay in this realm, the more distant and vague and shadowy the World Outside becomes; the less it has to do with us, the less we can even understand the old language, the old ways of our previous lives. We can remember them, but they are no longer ours.

We converts, we newcomers, stop now and then and wonder how we came into this brilliantly lit place whose walls are clear as windows, pouring light onto the shadowy World Outside. I know people who have lived their whole lives in that bright house and have never known the vast and terrifying gloom outside. But their native language is the one we have had to adopt. This is the value of converts to the Kingdom, since we can remember how we used to think and see and feel. We can, if we try, even still understand and speak the old Black Tongue, and know it when we hear it.

I am often asked, “How did you know so quickly that Bergoglio was going to be such a disaster?” I try not to say the first thought that comes to mind: “How is it that you didn’t?” The moment he walked out onto the loggia, he was sending the signals, his dress, his gestures, his words all speaking the language he intended us to understand; it was as though he was looking straight at us. Those first hours and days he was all but shouting his blasphemous intentions. I have not yet met a Traditionalist Catholic who did not understand him almost immediately. By its light we see everything else.

How did I get here? There is one constant impulse I’ve felt throughout life that I don’t know the origin of, this drive to know what’s really true. The need to know the truth has been a lash prompting this long chase half way around the world. Searching for the One True Thing has been Ariadne’s thread, unwound behind every step through the strange labyrinth of this life. But however strange it seems, here I am and I've had my answers and know what to do.

And now I’m going back to Norcia, but not immediately and not all at once. There are some things to be done first, and some precautions and preparations it would just be sensible to make. As strange as it may sound, and ongoing quakes notwithstanding, I’m going to go out on a thin limb and say that I think I’m being “called” to go back and that whatever is going to happen next is going to happen there.

The time has come. The basic necessities are there: supermarket, bank, pharmacy, hardware store etc are all running out of portables. The weather has eased off a bit and it’s not so cold and the early signs of spring will show in the next few weeks. But it’s still no time of year to be sleeping outdoors in Umbria. And the monks have warned me that the earthquakes haven’t stopped; they feel every one of the shakes.

"Yes we’re feeling all of them. You could keep your apartment down there for another few weeks so when you come back here you could set up a tent outside when its less cold to sleep in to be safe? Many people still aren’t sleeping in their houses even if agibile, for the same reason."

The house has stood up well so far, almost miraculously, but it is impossible to know how many more large shakes it will withstand. So, I've decided to buy a little wooden “casetta,” essentially a garden shed to put in the car port, since a tent isn’t going to do. The one I found is 550 Euros, including delivery, comes flat-packed like Ikea stuff, and can be put together with hand tools.

I’ll run my extra-long cable to it from the house for an electric heater and a light, put in the air mattress and sleeping bag and wait it out the same way my neighbours have.

The quakes won’t last forever, but before they stop we don’t know what will come. There are still hundreds of small tremors per day, and a couple of weeks ago we had another “swarm,” a series of bigger shakes followed by a few days of constant smaller aftershocks. The geologists say there is no reason to think there will not be more severe quakes coming before it’s over.






Despite this, since I’ve been down here in the swampy lowlands, I’ve given it a lot of thought but keep coming back to the same thing: where else can I go? What else is there to do?

It seems a strange choice because in its current state, the Norcia we knew is gone and will not come back for a long time. There is little in the human sense to recommend it. It is certainly possible to live there, but the charming tourist town with its medieval streets and sausage shops is closed, “red-zoned,” occupied only by busy emergency construction workers, piles of rubble, scaffolding and cranes. Its picturesque medieval walls are partly collapsed, its people living in trailers, portables, campers and inflatable tensile structures in the never-picturesque “zona industriale” down the valley.

Norcia’s churches are all – every one – reduced to heaps of rocks, and Mass is offered daily by the monks in a tiny portable up on the hill. The nuns have fled their monasteries and our monks have moved up into a fenced-off solitude on the mountainside. There are no more Psalms chanted to the glory of God in the home town of St. Benedict and the church down the road that stood where his sister Scolastica once lived her early monastic life, 1600 years ago, is ruined.

The little tourist town that was so attractive to the pleasure-seeking Roman tourists is shut now, but I lived there long enough to have found something else. Yesterday I was talking to a friend about it, saying that I was having difficulty giving a logical, rational reason to go back. He said, “Well, it’s home.” And it is.

The day we left Norcia – four adults and a huge box of cats jammed into a tiny car – with no luggage and no plan except to get somewhere else, reminded me of the night I left my parents’ home, in 1981 at the age of fifteen. Not since then had the immediate future been so completely unknown. I had no plan at all then and no idea what was coming – nearly forty years of wandering. But like that other time, it wasn’t aimless. There was never a moment when I didn’t know I was looking for something.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with vocation directors and novice mistresses since then and in every one I was told the same thing: “When you find the right place, you will know.” Frankly, this sounded like drivel. It sounded like “feelings.” And I never felt it. I lost count of all the monasteries I visited where I didn’t feel it. There was always that nagging urge to keep going, keep looking. It went on so long that I came to assume I was either emotionally deficient and couldn’t feel it, or that it was nonsense.

But the evening I first came to Norcia, even before I’d met the monks, I finally felt it. My friend and I had come there in late February and we got off the bus in the dark, not really knowing where we were. We muddled our way to the Basilica and caught the monks’ shop just before Br. Ignatius closed up. He gave us the key to our lodgings and we went to find something to eat before Compline.

But the five minute walk, through the Porta Ascolana and up the back way to St. Benedict’s piazza, was enough. This was it. I finally felt it deep in my guts, though I had no words for it except: This is it. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew, I recognised the thing I had been looking for and there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation. During that visit, my friend and I went to a realtor’s office and started enquiring about rents. (And a little bird whispered to me to get a house well outside the walls.)

It wasn’t all perfect, and the War of the World was present there very obviously. Especially in the summer. Before the quakes it seemed as though there were two towns, competing for the same space. In summer, Norcia’s identity as an ancient and holy place was submerged under its modern disguise as a tourist mecca – the standard Italian programme of turning one’s town into a loud, tawdry theme park of itself to rake in a season’s worth of cash.

Though not well known outside Italy, it was a major destination for Romans escaping the heat of the City in the summer holiday; the town took pains to entertain them with the kind of racket and blare that Romans seem to like, with loud concerts day and night in the Piazza.

Summer in Norcia was rather a trial and the only time its real identity peeked out was in the quiet of six in the morning, time for Laudes, when the only sounds were the bells, the Chant and the high-pitched cries of swifts wheeling overhead. I think I was not the only one to breathe a sigh of relief when the nights shortened and the September rain started and sent packing back to Rome the whole noisy, ugly, yammering horde.

The quakes have put a stop to that rivalry, at least for a while. It is not Norcia they destroyed. I believe the town will still be a place to go, but not for the reasons the well-heeled Romans came. For the time being, that Norcia is gone. But this leaves room for us to build the other Norcia. The people who come now won’t be there seeking pleasure, five star restaurants and entertainment but something more Real. Something you can’t pay for. Something perhaps that they will have to help build themselves.

When I was trying to decide in November where to go or what to do next, I received many invitations, the most tempting of which was from a group of traditional nuns in Germany. They offered a place in their guesthouse for me and the kitties, as long as we needed it. But it didn’t feel right. I had a chat about it with Fr. Spiritual Director, and he said no, come back. Come home as soon as possible. There are things to do there and perhaps a role to fulfil, a “niche” as he said.

And there are things to do. There needs to be a place for women to go, a real place of spiritual retreat and not merely lodgings to stay in, and I’ve been asked to start thinking about that. An annual theological conference there is going ahead, I’m told, even if they have to sleep in tents (in July). I have had conversations with my artist friend who agrees we should start organising painting and art history courses. There’s a lot of work to be done.

This is the spiritual and cultural warfare that is needed even more now that the crisis in the Church has reached its current dog-whistle pitch. The confusion and darkness in the World Outside has reached a point where no one is sure how to proceed. Father agreed that the time of activism is closing, and this is a time for the supernatural response.

~

So...

There are still some practical, logistical difficulties I could use some help with.

First, I could use some help buying the casetta, the shed to sleep in. And for March, I will have to pay rent on two places. It’s annoying but unavoidable; since the house in Norcia was listed as agibile, the rent has to be paid, starting February 15th, but at the moment I still can’t live in it. So it was a choice of paying up or moving out. But because I wasn’t expecting to be going back so soon, I’m still contracted on the flat in S. Marinella until the end of March.

Donation button is at the top of the page, and I would be very grateful for any assistance. And I want you to know that I remember your intentions in the Holy Rosary and at Mass.

Second is something rather different and more difficult and long-term: I could really use some actual physical, bodily help. That is, a person. At least for a while.

I’ve decided to start canvassing the Traditional Catholic world to find a… well, a “spiritual roommate,” let’s call it for now. I know there are many out there who have told me how much they would like to visit Norcia, but of course the quakes have meant we had to put plans like that aside. But when they are finished – and they will eventually – I could really use both some help and some company.

First, the spiritual life – that is, the day-to-day routine of the Divine Office (just three times a day, not eight) is a lot easier to do on the buddy system.

But to be honest, I’m just plain starting to feel my age. I’ll be 51 in March, and the long-term after effects of chemo and cancer surgery have begun to catch up to me. It’s getting more difficult to do alone all these fun, rustico, outdoor things like chopping wood and turning over the veg bed and building bean trellises. I have ambitions to get a place with a larger property and keep bees and chickens and maybe a goat or two. Maybe even a donkey. But I have to admit, it would be difficult to do alone.

As life stabilizes in Norcia, and things settle into a routine, the time will come to start a kickstarter or other crowdfunding campaign to buy a piece of property, something well outside town in the countryside, close enough to the monks’ land to participate daily in their Offices and Mass. This, we hope, can be made into a place for prayer and contemplation, for solitude but also community for women, for those who want to visit, but also for those who might want to stay a while.

Of course, who would dream in such a time of founding a religious community? It would be madness, no? So obviously no one would dream of suggesting such a thing. But no bishop, no pope, no authority in the world can stop someone from praying together with one's roommates. And even praying quite a lot, in an orderly, "regular" way... Right? Certainly Santa Scolastica, having been born at the end of the Old Empire that was about to collapse, would not have thought that was what she was doing. She merely lived with a group of ladies of like mind, and prayed.

God has not finished telling us what His plans are for Norcia or for the Church or for the dark and sad World Outside; things have not settled down. But there are plans afoot. It’s time to get back to them, somewhat chastened though we might be. I can’t help but feel that these disasters in Norcia and in Rome are a kind of recalibration. A chance for God to turn things in a completely new direction, both for me and for the town. And maybe for others.

~

And thank you, especially to those who have stayed steadfast internet friends all this time.



~

Money talks

This, by the way, is the guy who has offered to pay for the rebuilding of the Basilica of San Benedetto in Norcia: Brunello Cucinelli.

Cucinelli had bowled into Rome that morning from Umbria, a mountainous region north of the capital, where he lives in a hilltop village called Solomeo. Solomeo is not far from Perugia, and dates to the twelfth century. Its population in the last census was four hundred and thirty-six. Over the past thirty years, as his company has grown from a one-man operation to a business employing five hundred people, with an annual turnover of more than two hundred million dollars, Cucinelli has been renovating the village. He has enacted a peculiar fantasy of beneficent feudalism, with himself as the enlightened overlord, and the residents, many of them his employees, as the appreciative underlings. A castle with walls of honey-colored stone, several feet thick, has been converted into a factory; its chambers hum with the sound of knitting machines, its basement rumbles with ceaseless laundering. A Renaissance villa close by has been turned into a dining hall for employees; with a vaulted ceiling and views of the hills, it is often mistaken by tourists for an attractive restaurant. Cucinelli contributed to the restoration of the village’s Church of St. Bartholomew, which was founded in the late twelfth century and rebuilt in the seventeenth. He has repaved streets, restored squares, and built a woodland park. In addition, he has constructed a two-hundred-and-forty-seat theatre, crafted in the architectural vernacular of the sixteenth century. It has a pseudo-classical portico whose large Latin inscription, “B. CVCINELLI CVRAVIT A DOMINI MMVIII,” recalls the façade of the Pantheon, in Rome.

I'm rather in favour of enlightened feudalism.

I was horrified to read a story in an Umbrian newspaper that the local bishop - who shall remain nameless but whom I've long since nicknamed Bishop Skinny McFancypants - who is well known for his great love of his local tanning salon - suggested that in order to make the "new basilica" into a "global tourist attraction" it should be rebuilt as a synthesis of "modern and ancient" styles.

I was briefly in despair until I remembered the fact that Mr. Cucinelli had already called dibs on the Basilica and was close friends with the monks.

This is the Chiesa di San Bartolomeo in Mr. Cucinelli's village of Solomeo, just outside Perugia, which he paid to restore.


I would call this acceptable



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