'Pontificale in San Marco'

Author: Elio Bartolini

Publisher: Rusconi Libri / 1978

Pages: 172

 

I have long been wanting to write about this book, even if that meant the added pleasure of re-reading it again.

It meant plunging into the beauty, the mellifluous sound of Italian as it can be written by someone who really knows how to handle the language.

This novel is as Baroque as the time it describes - all silverware and heavy red brocade, an era of masques and intrigues, and centred in and around Venice, where else?

April 1751 was when Europe was dominated by three women - Madame Pompadour in France, Empress Maria Teresa in Austria and the Czarina of Russia. Between them, or a combination of these three together with the Pope in Rome, they settled most of the issues in Europe.

The book opens with the arrival of Dolfino, the Patriarch of Aquileia. Coming from an old Venetian noble family he has come under intense Vatican pressure to resign and bring to an end the glorious 1,700-year history of the Aquileia patriarchate, which is as old and of apostolic origin directly from St Mark as that of the Apostle Peter in Rome.

There is a long history of rivalry between the two, and also of divergent views on matters of policy, even on doctrinal matters, especially the all-important Homoousios clause in the Creed of the Mass, which caused the Great Schism between the Roman Church and the Orthodox one.

So the Pope, conniving from Rome, with the help of the Hapsburg Empress of Vienna, finally persuades Dolfino to surrender the patriarchate. There cannot be two sources of authority in Western Europe. The patriarchate cannot remain an independent source of authority. It will be split into two dioceses and Aquileia will sink into today's village obscurity.

The Pope offers to make Dolfino a cardinal but he refuses.

At the end the Patriarch obtains from the Pope a rather vague commitment to issue a doctrinal definition of Mary as Mater Amabilis. Many years later this would become the Church dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Dolfino has one last request to make - he wants to celebrate one last Pontifical Mass as Patriarch in the most holy church in Venice - St Mark's with all its golden interior.

True to its nature, the book then dedicates one entire chapter to the detailed ritual of the robing of the Patriarch before the Pontifical Mass. I remember the same detailed rubrics carried out in the Oratory of St John's in the mid-1960s.

But the Patriarch carries with him a fatal sin - he cannot forget that when still a boy he glimpsed his mother naked. Later his mother visited him at night and they spent the night as man and woman. And his friendship with Angela Cornaro turned out to be not as platonic as some might have thought, even though as children they were quite innocent.

After the Pontifical Mass the Patriarch goes incognito and tours the many popular entertainments in St Mark's Square.

Still incognito he enters a lowly church and asks the priest in charge to confess him. But when he reveals that he is a priest and has had sex with his mother the priest refuses him absolution because such sins can only be absolved by the Pope.

The next day people find a bundle on the steps of an altar dedicated to Our Lady. On closer inspection it is found that the bundle is the Patriarch and that he is dead.