“Yet, Church, to you I came. / Pascal and the songs of the Greeks / tightly in my hand, ardent, as if // the quiet farmhand mystery / deaf in the summer of forty-three / between the village, the vines and the shore // of the Tagliamento, were at the center / of earth and sky; and there, throat, heart and stomach // torn apart on the distant path / of the Fonde, I spent the hours / of the most beautiful human time, the whole // my day of youth, in loves / whose sweetness still brings me tears… / Among the scattered books, a few blue // flowers, and the grass, the clean grass / among the sagebrush, I gave to Christ / all my naivety and my blood.”
You may have recognized in this translation lines taken from the poem La religione del mio tempo (The Religion of My Time). They are the opening lines of a virulent invective against the Catholic Church, an invective that concludes with the words “La Chiesa / è lo spietato cuore dello Stato” (The Church / is the merciless heart of the State). In the violence of his invective, Pasolini could not help but recall the years of his youth in Friuli, when he was seized by a sort of religious rapture. Later, speaking of the religion of his time, he compared the Christianity of the simple farm hands of Friuli with the paganism of the young people of the Roman suburbs, a Rome where, with regard to the religion of his time, he found himself having to reckon with “the pious landowners,” “vile pupils of a corrupt Jesus.”
Two contrasting elements coexisted within Pasolini’s personality. On the one hand, there was a religiosity of an instinctive, formless kind, far from the systematization based on the dogmas of Christianity understood as an institutional religion; on the other hand, as a son of his time, he could not help but rationalize all of this. At one and the same time he lived through two opposing moments, which he took up in The Religion of My Time: “How far he has come from the tumults / purely interior in his heart, / and from the landscape of primroses and virgulae // of maternal Friuli, the Nightingale / sweetheart of the Catholic Church!” This article is reserved for paid subscribers. Please subscribe to continue reading this article
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