Introduction: religion as the nation’s cement

Alessandro Ferrari (Reference Ferrari2010) claims that, at the end of the nineteenth century, Catholicism – the dominant religion in Italy – was the only cement binding together the newly unified nation, a nation without a common language or a widespread culture capable of founding civic engagement. Taking a post-secular perspective on religion (Habermas, Reference Habermas2006), which recognises that religion is not simply, to use Raymond Williams’ words (1973), a ‘residue’ soon to be extinguished, this article will explore Italian cinema’s post-millennial constructions of a national ‘religious cement’ as a putative foundation for identity in twenty-first century Italy. I will argue that contemporary filmmakers frequently attempt to create presumed shared values which have a decidedly and even explicitly Catholic imprint, even in light comedies like Lezioni di cioccolato (Claudio Cupellini, 2007), a film in which a central character is Muslim. Two of the key religious stories that I identify as underpinning and supporting attempts to construct the religious cement of Italian identity are those of David against Goliath (1 Samuel 17) and St Francis of Assisi. These narratives work together with simple Catholic values enshrined in Catholic social teaching and remembered from childhood, values which overlap in significant ways with contemporary versions of impegno. My argument here is that Italian cinema’s construction of a shared, and surprisingly monolithic, identity is post-secular: it is built on a religion often remembered nostalgically from childhood, which provides its cement. In line with post-secular thinking, in other words, religion lingers on Italian cinema screens. However, one of my aims in this article is to show how this cement is riddled with cracks, as it is created by suppressing or ignoring religious difference and by burying elements in the history of the institutional church that jar with the narrative, including problematic aspects of the Vatican’s recent religious history: the sexual abuse cases, Pius XII’s actions during the Holocaust, and the Vatican banking scandals. These cracks affect the kind of post-secular Italy which is developing and put into question its likely success.

In the first part of this article, I will investigate the creation of an ideal, post-secular, on-screen Italian from the David against Goliath and St Francis stories before deconstructing the contradictions, divisions, and silences that this ideal belies. The focus of my attention will be on the protagonist of Roberto Andò’s Reference Andò2016 ‘metaphysical thriller’, Le confessioni, which sees Toni Servillo playing the part of an iconic and ambiguous white-robed Carthusian monk and in so doing providing an ideal, post-Berlusconian, ethical icon for contemporary Italy. This nostalgia among agnostic or atheist directors for the values and stories of Catholicism is, I argue, a key feature of post-millennial Italian cinema, and is posited as a basis for contemporary moral, ethical and political behaviour. In the second section, I will show how this ideal can, and does, develop in non-Catholic characters, such as the Muslim character Kamal (Hassani Shapi) in the multicultural romantic comedy, Lezioni di cioccolato 1. However, I will look at how the ideal, ethical Italian actually suppresses onscreen religious difference, raising questions over the position, and integration, of the religious other in Italy. The way in which a great deal of contemporary Italian cinema has focused on positive, Catholic values while abandoning its protest about the history of the institutional Church is the subject of the final part of this article. By focusing on the under-researched area of religious identity in cinema, I attempt to return the question of religion to the core of discussion of identity in Italian cinema.

The question of religious identit(ies) has become increasingly important since the publication by Jürgen Habermas of his seminal article, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere’ (2006). Habermas, and other theorists in his wake, have put into question what most people in the West had, up to a few years ago, taken for granted: the unstoppable forward march of secularisation and the concomitant marginalisation of religion. Instead, Habermas called for the return of religious discourse from the margins of Western society to a decidedly more central position. What many theorists of the post-secular have been doing since then is reframing secularisation in discursive terms as an ‘ideology’ or ‘myth’, thus subtracting from it the truth claims that had seemed, until so recently, obvious, familiar and natural (in Secularisms, for instance, Janet R Jacobson and Anne Pellegrini (Reference Jacobson and Pellegrini2008) define secularisation as a myth which hitches religion to backwardness and the secular to progress and modernity, a linkage which these critics contest). Post-secular theorists, like Rosi Braidotti, call for a better understanding of religious identities, warning that continuing to ignore the place of religion in identity creation and active citizenship, ‘spells danger’ for European democracy (2014, 1). In fact, at the time of writing, one of the greatest global fault-lines in the contemporary world – the divide between absolutist extremist Islamic faith and liberal, but Christian-inflected, secular values – has religious traditions at its core. Conflict and malaise about the place of religion in society – which spark debates ranging from burkinis to terrorism, from Donald Trump’s border policies to Christmas carols – is a defining feature of European, and Italian, contemporaneity. In this article, therefore, part of my work will be to redress the imbalance shown by much Anglo-American criticism, which, in discussions of identity, memory, and history in cinema, pushes towards the margins what might be argued is the defining institution of the peninsula – the Catholic Church – and the diversity of Catholic values and memories which have come to be associated with it.

The ideal Italian: St Francis and David and Goliath

In many ways, Roberto Andò’s Le confessioni (2016) fits squarely within contemporary Italy’s politically committed cinema d’impegno:Footnote ¹ it provides an indignant exposé of an issue portrayed as adversely affecting society (global financial capitalism) and it selects to play the role of hero – the monk, Roberto Salus – an actor (Toni Servillo) who is a kind of cover boy for cinema d’impegno. However, the centring of a monk in place of a figure from the political left (whether an activist, a Moretti-style social-democrat or an old-style communist) is not only curious, it points to a model and ideological direction that, I believe, is highly revealing with regard to post-secular Italian cinema.

In Le confessioni a monk is invited to a meeting of the G8 at a luxury German hotel in Heilingendamm, where the G8 held talks in 2007. He has been invited, alongside a famous author and a rock star, at the behest of the director of the International Monetary Fund, Daniel Roché (Daniel Auteuil). These three characters – author, rock star and monk – provide an artistic and spiritual counterbalance to the hard, cold world of high finance. Not long after their arrival, the director of the IMF asks the monk to hear his final confession in his room: subsequently, the director is found dead, Salus’ plastic bag tied around his head. As the film unfolds, it emerges that Roché and the eight international finance ministers had been planning a secretive economic move that would change the course of history and damage the poorest countries of the world. After Roché’s death, the ministers, suspicious of Salus’ role in the death, flounder and become increasingly anxious to find out what Roché might have confessed. Salus intervenes with silence and few careful words, embarking on ‘a kind of non-violent guerrilla warfare’ (Pasquini, Reference Pasquini2016, 144). He deliberately sows uncertainty among the ministers about the wisdom of taking up a path which, in its race for money and power, will destroy the poorest in society. One by one the ministers back away from the plan, leaving the G8 talks in crisis. The film’s finale centres on Roché’s funeral: the monk gives a strongly worded homily, using New Testament verses, to the assembled ministers and then leaves the hotel, trailed – in a clearly Franciscan touch – by one of the ministers’ dogs.

In this film the target of the critique is global neoliberal capitalism, portrayed in the film as an economic system in ethical, rather than political, crisis, to which a series of negative attributes adhere: totalitarianism, coldness, greed and abstraction. Its separation from ordinary people is visually foregrounded through the film’s location at a luxurious and isolated hotel in Northern Europe: the isolation, modernity, formalism and Nordic splendour stands at the antipodes from Italian filmic representation of warm, informal and sunny italianità. Neoliberalism, in other words, is constructed as the perfect international enemy that threatens the nation state and, in its transnational, transformative power, contrasts with a monolithic and circumscribed notion of an ideal Italian identity embodied by the monk. It is an enemy so wicked that even its own supporters (in primis Roché and the finance ministers) heap scorn upon it.

Andrea Minuz in his book on left-wing cinema, Quando c’eravamo noi (Reference Minuz2014), stresses the importance of the enemy for the construction of identity for the post-ideological left, defining Silvio Berlusconi as ‘an essential incompatibility that functions like a fetish and can bring back to life an ideologically compact “us”’ (2014, 10).Footnote ² If Minuz is correct, and the Berlusconi phenomena helped to keep the Italian left intact by providing it with an enemy against which to define its own (superior) identity, then the post-Berlusconian era provokes a problem. As the certainty of the Berlusconi-enemy, which has kept the left compact since 1994, vanishes, so does the certainty of the ‘superior’ value-system held onto by the left, and founded, according to Minuz, on a ‘nostalgia for communism – not for the real one, but for that collective dream that mobilised an “us”’. It is in the context of an era in which the Renzian politics of the left are no longer founded on a collective communist dream that Le confessioni is made. It is a film struggling to find both political antagonist and political protagonist. It is a film trying to renegotiate a left-wing identity, when the sense of an elite, morally superior, ‘us’, which defines itself against a corrupt, televisual, superficial centre-right, is in crisis. It is a film in search of an ethical identity.

It is into this ideological void that two new figures step: Roché, a post-Berlusconian icon, emblematic of the new enemy of neo-liberalism, and the monk Salus, a character that marks an attempt to move beyond an anachronistic communist hero. The countercultural religious figure found in Le confessioni is key to understanding how a contemporary ideal of Italian moral fibre may be envisaged and constructed in post-secular Italy, providing insight not only into contemporary ideas of Italian ethics, but also into today’s italianità. Deconstructing this figure can begin fruitfully with an analysis of interviews of the director, Roberto Andò, and his screenwriter, Angelo Pasquini (Andò, Reference Andò2016; Pasquini Reference Pasquini2016). Pasquini’s elaboration of the film, with its focus on the terminology of battle and opposition, makes it clear that the foundation for the character, as far as the screenwriter is concerned, is firmly planted in the context of a political engagement marked by left-wing contestation and modelled on politically-committed monks like the Catholic Thomas Merton and the Buddhist Thích Nhãt Ha’nh, both of whom were active in non-violent countercultural activism during the 1960s. Andò’s contribution, despite the director’s professed atheism, is to infuse the character with a greater mystical and Catholic sense of the world: in interview, the terms he picks for Salus repeatedly relate to ‘silenzio’ and ‘pietà’, and while he also discusses his monk in terms of oppositional practices, his language lacks battle-like imagery. Instead, he frames his anti-conformist monk in Dostoevskian philosophical terms, referring to Salus as one who disturbs and disorientates, presenting a ‘radical challenge to power’. This monk is set against a neoliberal enemy which has accrued power of divine proportions; this enemy is described as an Enlightenment god with no care for his creation, a ‘technocratic emanation of a supernational economic reality, indifferent to the rules of democracy’. In other words, the dynamic which is set up in the screenplay and then in the resulting film, presents a battle between a towering, global Goliath and a diminutive, Italian David.

The monk Salus, whose name signifies salvation, acts as a moral barometer uniting political activism and a bedrock of Catholic social values. A non-believing director and his non-believing screenwriter have created an archetypal politico-religious figure to take on the film’s ethical mantle and provide a model for a contemporary post-communist hero. While the monk is anachronistic, and might be thought to be born from a nostalgic backward glance – after all, he exists in an unchanged and unchanging time, in a kind of timeless eternity in which spatiotemporal dimensions are suspended and only his recording machine ties him into the present – he is nonetheless inserted in a contemporary context that is knowingly post-secular. The film opens with a group of veiled Muslim women advancing along the corridor of an international airport – a nod to a contemporary, multi-religious European context – and the politicians and artists at the G8 hotel are rigorously secular in outlook and attitudes. However, while the film insists on the monk’s alterity and exceptionality within post-secular contemporary society, it also posits his deep moral relevance to the contemporary world. The voice of Salus is listened to by those inhabiting the hotel, who call on him, speak to him, await his answers and carefully decipher his riddles. His concluding sermon, in which he challenges the very fabric of post-liberal ideology by citing an abridged version of Matthew 23:23 (‘Woe unto you who scrupulously pay your taxes but neglect justice and mercy’), mobilises a religious form – the sermon – for ethical-political messages of resistance to false (international) systems.

Salus represents a cinematic attempt to create a positive ethical hero in a contemporary Italy which no longer has Berlusconi as the enemy who, in Minuz’s terminology, ‘compacts’ identity. Le confessioni achieves this by turning to a religious model which has a double pedigree. In the first place, there is the story of the historical St Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226) which, through its remediation in Italian cultural production, has gained a mythical and universal quality. Salus, with his penchant for recording the sounds of songbirds and his taming of the German minister’s dog, is implicitly linked to the medieval saint. Selecting St Francis as a model for an ideal ethics has a long history in Italian cinema, stemming back to Enrico Guazzoni’s short film, Il poverello d’Assisi, made in 1911. Some of Italy’s best-known filmmakers, including Roberto Rossellini (1950) and Liliana Cavani (1966, 1989, 2014), have made films on the saint, and TV hagiopics on the saint were recently broadcast by both Mediaset and RAI (2007 and 2009). The filmic St Francis privileges values of simplicity, poverty, humility, and the love of others, especially the social outcast, as represented in the medieval story by the lepers. Most cinematic versions of St Francis also stress his conflict with, and successful detachment from, the well-off section of society with which he does not agree (in Cavani’s particularly political Francesco D’Assisi (1966), this is read as the haute-bourgeoisie), as well as screening a separation from the institutional, hierarchical and ritualised church in favour of a simple Christianity played out in harmony with nature. These features are nearly universal in the Italian cinematic depictions of the saint. The second aspect of the St Francis model is the exceptionally popular Pope Francis (2013–) who took the humble poverello’s name, chose the Vatican guest house over the papal apartments, and has repeatedly discussed the fate of the poor and dispossessed.Footnote ³ Pope Francis has made the Franciscan agenda, beloved of Italian cinema, the core of his mission.

The St Francis-Pope Francis model is key to understanding contemporary Italian cinema’s creation of the religious cement on which a national identity can be founded. The steadfast interest of the film industry, including its left-wing art-house or cinema di qualità directors (Rossellini, Cavani, Andò, Daniele Luchetti), in the Franciscan story may seem curious. However, many of the values embodied in the Italian biopics and hagiopics on St Francis, in Le confessioni and in the biopic of Pope Francis, Chiamatemi Francesco (Luchetti, 2015), appear to merge a medieval story with two key strands of thinking that emerge in Italian cinema today: a political impegno with its roots in the student protests of 1968 and Catholic social teaching which foregrounds the needs of the poor and vulnerable, the protection of the basic rights of workers, the development of solidarity with one’s neighbour, and the stewardship of creation. The confusion between the two systems arises from the evident overlaps that exist between aspects of social teaching and socialist and communist concern for workers’ rights and solidarity with the poor. One might sum up the core of the politico-religious blend in two words taken from Salus’ sermon at the end of Le confessioni: ‘justice and mercy.’ The focus on ‘justice and mercy’ in the film’s finale is not casual. Salus’ sermon omits the third word that appears in the original Biblical text, ‘faith’, thereby eliminating the spiritual and supernatural to focus on two ethical terms: justice and mercy. Emptying out the specificity of religious belief, and the historical accuracy of religious history, in order to concentrate on a blend of selected aspects of social teaching and left-wing politics is at the heart of Italy’s attempt to create the cement that binds identity through the medium of film. It creates an epistemological problem in terms of the difficulty in distinguishing between certain kinds of moral and ethical attitudes seen by many to exist, in part at least, in both left-wing political thought and in Catholic social teaching. If Salus is a monk, he also has much in common with left-wing heroes of the cinema d’impegno, stalwarts of the Italian national production that range from Peppino Impastato (I cento passi), a murdered left-wing anti-mafia activist, to Giorgio Ambrosoli (Un eroe borghese, Michele Placido 1995).Footnote ⁴

If one of the remembered stories behind Salus is that of St Francis, and the blend of left-wing protest and social teaching that he embodies, the second is the even more obviously mythical David against Goliath story from the Old Testament. The Manichean dichotomy between Salus and neoliberal leaders in Le confessioni, as well as that between the young Jorge Bergoglio and a corrupt political system in Chiamatemi Francesco, between a real priest and the Mafia in Alla luce del sole (Roberto Faenza, 2005), or an invented one and the Camorra in Pianese Nunzio 14 anni a maggio (Antonio Capuano, 1996), confirms how deep-rooted the countercultural David against Goliath motif is, and underlines how this formula of the little man (and he is usually a man) who embraces ‘justice and mercy’ and bravely strives against a corrupt system is one of the most important keys to the narrative structure of Italian cinema. The David against Goliath trope can indeed be read as the quintessential contemporary Italian plot form, underlying not just the films discussed here, but also a vast array of impegnati subgenres, including those dedicated to the mafia (Peppino against the mafia in I cento passi); the contemporary economic system (Anna against her employers in Mi piace lavorare, mobbing); and the Vatican (Picciafuoco against a Vatican-backed plot in L’ora di religione). This trope, with its cinematic pedigree rooted in neorealism, emphasises the individual against the system, the politically powerless against the politically powerful, and – for me the crucial part of the puzzle – the ethically powerful against the ethically weak. Motifs of David against Goliath and St Francis form a cement which yokes oppositional, countercultural and ethical value firmly together, blending Catholic social ethics and left-wing politics into a tightly woven mix which is a significant part – if representations in cinema are in any way reflective of reality – of what it means to be Italian in twenty-first century Italy.

Post-secular identity and the suppression of the Islamic other: remembered teachings from Catholic childhood

The blending of political and Catholic values together to forge a cinematic cement creates a specific national cinema which has a clear effect on the ability of Italy to develop both as multicultural and post-secular. Its effects can be seen on how successfully cinematic voices from minority religions can enter an industry which has such a well-defined sense of ethical-political identity, and such a strong sense of a narrative structure founded on a particular type of hero and a particular set of values. Ferzan Özpetek’s cinema is fascinating in this regard. A gay Turkish national who moved from a primarily Muslim country to Rome in 1976, took Italian citizenship and made films from within the Italian cinema industry, has increasingly and visibly absorbed aspects of the religious and political matrix in which he works. If his first two films, Il bagno turco (1997) and Harem suare (1999) worked with an exoticised, remembered, oriental matrix which he blended with Western values, a later film, Cuore sacro (2005) set entirely in Rome, not only cites the Catholic sacred heart in its title and adopts the imagery of Michelangelo’s Pietà, but establishes a ‘conversion’ narrative in which a hard-working business woman, Irene (Barbara Bobulova) believes, like the neo-liberal leaders of Le confessioni, that economic necessities are more important than socio-political consequences. However, by the end of the film, she looks for redemption and gives up her riches to help others. The film exposes the importance of helping others, particularly the poor and dispossessed, in a narrative that embraces the oft-repeated mix of giustizia, pietà and opposition, a narrative that dominates so much of contemporary Italian cinema d’impegno. Özpetek has effectively erased his ‘accent’, resulting in a recognisable RAI Cinema production (Grassilli Reference Grassilli2008), with reduced references to Turkish culture and to Islam over time as he increasingly embraces a secularisation which, despite the portrayal of positive gay characters, carries a distinctly Catholic flavour. If Özpetek’s career, in which he slowly takes on the trappings of Catholicism, is anything to go by, conforming to the ethical matrix is an important part of being accepted as an ‘Italian’ rather than migrant filmmaker.

The co-opting not just of foreign directors into this ethical identity, but also of foreign characters, can be seen in Lezioni di cioccolato 1. Claudio Cupellini’s comedy is founded on the thesis that Islam can live side by side with both Catholicism and secular Italy in a multicultural, post-secular modernity. It is a liberal and ecumenical portrayal of religion that smoothes over difference. The narrative development shifts from religious rigidity to open-minded liberalism, a narrative structure reflected in other assimilationist narratives like Fariborz Kamkari’s Pitza e datteri (2015). It makes visible Islam’s difference, only to subsequently neuter it, subduing conflict and rendering difference unthreatening. Lezioni di cioccolato 1 and 2 are comic productions which provide well-meaning and comforting portrayals of alterity for an Italian audience. In Cupellini’s work, the abject, so often inscribed in Italian films on migrants, as Áine O’Healy (Reference O’Healy2010), drawing on Kristeva, notes, is avoided. Instead, the film centres on a positive and powerful migrant character, Kamal, one of the few Muslims on Italian screens at that time who was neither victim nor criminal, but was posited instead as a role model for Italians.

Cupellini’s first film is a classic comedy of mistaken identity which recounts the tale of an unscrupulous Italian entrepreneur, Mattia (Luca Argentero) and his Egyptian worker, Kamal (Hassani Shapi). Kamal, having been commanded to work on a roof without scaffolding, has fallen off. Encased in plaster from waist to neck, he gets revenge by compelling his boss to enter a prestigious chocolate-making competition. Mattia has to assume the Egyptian’s identity, complete with a new name, accent, haircut, tan and clothes, or Kamal will tell the police what really happened. A pretty contender on the course, Cecilia (Violante Placido), who is pathologically attracted to liars, falls for Mattia-Kamal. Mattia must contend with issues around migrant integration as well as learning the Egyptian’s culture, to successfully pass himself off as a national and religious other. The film concludes with Mattia and Kamal winning the competition by making a chocolate which perfectly marries the flavours of Umbria and Egypt. Having learnt some moral lessons, Mattia again embraces his Italian identity and, once Cecilia has recovered from this surprise, asks her to marry him. In the final scene, a slowly rising crane shot reveals Mattia and his new-found friend Kamal lit by the late-afternoon sunshine and framed against idyllic Umbrian hayfields. They are still teasing each other about their sameness-difference, but with companionable humour and warmth.

Kamal’s character is interesting. He is a well-integrated Egyptian Muslim constructed throughout the film as a positive role model, the antithesis to the Italian Mattia. While Mattia’s world revolves around profit, exploiting others for his own gain and shallow, no-strings-attached relationships, Kamal works diligently in construction at the same time as pursuing a career for which he has a genuine passion (making chocolate), and is married with an extended family network. As Mattia says to Kamal, ‘Why am I not like you? You have all the values: family, God, your relations. You’re just perfect!’ It is to Kamal’s ‘Islamic’ value system that Mattia, on some level at least, begins to aspire, and this aspiration radically changes him.

Kamal’s very crudely sketched Islamic values – little more than avoidance of pork and alcohol and a warm attachment to an extended family – is not, however what it seems. No number of kitsch Aladdin’s lamps and oriental carpets can stop the film erasing the religious and cultural difference it initially establishes. The Islam represented by Kamal turns out to have much more to do with a vanished Catholic Italy than it has to do with the Koranic faith. An imagined, pre-relativist, pre-multicultural, pre-modern Italian identity, is precisely what – somewhat paradoxically – Kamal comes to inhabit and represent. Lezioni di cioccolato is a comic tale which harbours a deeply conservative message: the Muslim other is assimilated and co-opted as a safe, recognisable self, one who shares the ‘authentic’ values of ‘family, God, the relations’. This leaves no space for the discussion of the difference, or the possibility that there might be real incompatibilities between two value systems. After all, the Islamic family, as films such as Laura Muscardin’s Billo Il grand Dakhaar (2007) or Maurizio Zaccaro’s L’articolo 2 (1993) point out, is not the same as the Italian one: Islamic law’s position on polygamy, divorce, and on the position of women is quite different.

Lezioni di cioccolato is an escapist comedy which avoids any deeper analysis of difference and conflict. It withdraws from the discomfort of facing the other by re-centering the other within the frame of a safe and familiar Southern Catholic Italian morality, here seen as charmingly backward and simple. Kamal, played by a Kenyan actor whose Italian is much more grammatical offscreen than it is onscreen, is orientalised as a child, with large innocent wide eyes, childish constructions, and naive value assertions, like ‘Man and women equals children … if no, what your life means?!’ The need to reaffirm the basic values of the teachings of Italian Catholic childhood, abandoned by many Italians as they grow up, is portrayed by the film as critical. It is the only way to escape the spiritual corruption of a contemporary secular, capitalist Italy in which profit has become the central value. This lesson leaves visible marks on Mattia: at the end of the film he has become a kind of hybrid – part Italian (the well-cut designer suit) and part North-African (the tan and ‘Sahara’ shade curly hair). He aligns himself with the racial and religious other through a shared love of food. However, Islam’s different values have been subtracted from Mattia’s new Mediterranean brother, Kamal.

As in many films that deal with minority religions, the conflict which appears to exist between Islam and a secularised Catholic Italy does not actually inhere between these two forces. Instead, the real conflict is established between an individualistic, capitalistic secularisation (bad) and an Italian value system which, perhaps paradoxically, an (unrecognisably watered-down) Islam comes to represent (good). In other words, films like Lezioni di cioccolato present concerns which are only in small part about the Islamic other, and instead express a deep-rooted unease about a secularising and capitalist modernity. Kamal’s character is not being used only to show Italians what they have become (by employing Kamal’s character to criticise Mattia’s values), but also the model of Italiani brava gente that they once were. The unspoken paradox of this film is that the nostalgia it voices for a time of absolutes (the family and God, especially), is not the golden-tinted, multicultural future painted in the final scenes, but a rose-tinted past in which a pre-multicultural Italy had a firm set of Catholic values that were once – so the myth goes – taken for granted, where now they are challenged by multiple choices about how best to live one’s life. Buried under the manifest dream of solidarity with the other, is the search for a lost self, a self which existed in a paradise prior to the arrival of the other. We should not be surprised at the non-assigning of the position of abject, victim, or criminal to the character of Kamal: he avoids the negatives associated with the migrant because, under the surface appearance, he is the mythical, authentic Catholic through and through.Footnote ⁵

A wide range of films treating the religious other in contemporary Italian cinema demonstrate an overwhelming desire to make the case for the similarity of different religious beliefs, focusing attention on communal belonging and shared values, especially those values of family, charity, and love for the other. These films seem to posit a generic Catholic-inspired set of values, shorn of specificity, as a source of good. This can be seen to emerge from the filmmaking of both Muslim-born directors (Melitti, Özpetek, and Kamkari) and those raised as Catholics (Benigni, D’Alatri, Cupellini, Olmi) and across a range of genres (drama, comedy, cinema d’impegno). Hamid Nacify (Reference Nacify2003), discussing transnational film from an American perspective, notes how ‘capitalism continually reterritorializes its liminars and transnationals through strategies of assimilation and co-optation, transforming them into ethnic subjects and productive citizens’ (210), and Italian cinema is highly complicit with the process outlined by Nacify. Its value system appears to render it difficult for Italian cinema to face religious and religiously inspired ethical difference head on, and to welcome an un-neutralised other. An ethics derived from a blend of Catholic social teaching and left-wing idealism creates a cement which implicitly requires conformity from the film industry. There is little space for migrant cinema where this fails to conform, or indeed for the more radical, extreme and challenging, cinema which has developed in other parts of Europe, as outlined in Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall’s book, New Extremism in Cinema (Reference Horeck and Kendall2011).

Post-secular identity and the suppression of history

If one of the victims in the construction of identity is a genuine dialogue with a religious other in which that other’s distinctiveness is retained, rather than co-opted and suppressed, the second victim is history. The ideal ethical identity reverently memorialised in Italian cinema typically goes unchallenged, and is complicit with the turning of a blind eye to the controversial aspects of the Catholic Church’s institutional history. This is probably most clearly seen in Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam (2011), where an atheist director known for his bruising attacks on Italy’s political institutions turns his directorial attention to the Catholic Church and provides a surprisingly benevolent account which fails to lift the lid on the many controversies that beset the history of the institution.

What emerges from post-millennial cinema is that the concentration on remembered Catholic values as a basis for contemporary Italian identity opens up a significant blind spot centred on the Vatican’s history, both its recent history and the longer-standing controversies. This belies the fact that during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the Vatican has negotiated three particularly uncomfortable and long-running criticisms which one might imagine would attract the attention of those working in the Italian cinema industry, an industry which has long been interested in exposing scandals (Uva, Reference Uva2011). These scandals are the Vatican’s treatment of the Jews during the Second World War; the international paedophile crisis which, after a good deal of simmering, blew its lid in 2002; and, finally, the fiscal irregularities and allegations of mafia and underworld links at the so-called Vatican Bank (the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or IOR). These are three scandals in Italy that are not closed, but linger on awkwardly in the present perfect tense.

The first of cinematic silences centres on the Holocaust controversy, which began in the 1970s when the public silence of Pope Pius XII in the face of the Shoah began to be contested internationally. Concerns resurfaced in 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius XII ‘venerable’, a decision met with anger by Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Congress, which requested that a full assessment of Pope Pius XII’s relations with the Jews was undertaken before proceeding (Tornielli, Reference Tornielli2014).Footnote ⁶ Since 2000, two films have been made in Italy about this pope: Christian Duguay’s Pius XII: Under the Roman Sky (2010), a two-part film for television made by a Catholic production company, Lux Vide, and Liana Marabini’s Shades of Truth (2015), a low-budget film presented Out of Competition at Cannes.Footnote ⁷ Both are hagiopics, presenting Pius XII as a good and saintly man, and produced, at least in part, by Catholic-owned production companies. In Pius XII: Under the Roman Sky, historical documentation is sacrificed to sepia-toned narration and, while the producers claim that bibliographical research was carried out, they freely admit that what matured from these sources was ‘an impression’ rather than a ‘historical judgement’ (Lux Vide, 2010). There is no attempt to confront, and little even to acknowledge, the alleged scandal.

Cinematic responses to the second major scandal that the Vatican has had to tackle over the past decades – the sex abuse crisis – similarly lack critical teeth. In the US, for many, trust in the Church collapsed in the aftermath of an explosion of revelations of abuse in 2002. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Vatican investigated 3,000 cases of alleged abuse that went back over 50 years, including 130 cases in Italy, according to lawyer Sergio Cavaliere (Kington and McDonald, Reference Kington and McDonald2010). On cinema screens across the world, and particularly in countries with significant Catholic populations, angry depictions of the abuse crisis soon followed. An international subgenre emerged which included films like The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002); Aisling Walsh’s Song for a Raggy Boy (2003); Our Fathers (Dan Curtis, 2005); Deliver Us from Evil (Amy Berg, 2006); Doubt (John Patrick Shanley, 2008); Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (Alex Gibney, 2012); and Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015). In Italy, however, there was cinematic silence. The only significant film that has dealt with clerical abuse is Pianese, Nunzio, 14 anni a maggio, which was made in 1996, in other words both before the scandals broke and prior to the period I deal with in this article. What happens in Pianese, Nunzio is interesting enough to warrant a mention here, nonetheless, as it stands at the antipodes to the rest of the international subgenre. Italy’s only fiction film to date to deal with sexual abuse in the Church excuses a priest for having sex with a 13-year-old by inscribing him within the ideal Italian mode discussed in the first section of this article. The erring priest is positioned inside a David against Goliath narrative structure as he attempts to singlehandedly fight the Camorra in Naples, a criminal organisation which uses his affair with the boy to frame him and cause his downfall. Despite having sex with the underage boy, the priest fits into the ideal of a good, ethical, oppositional character, and so the target of moral critique falls not on him, but simply elsewhere.

It is only around the third of these three major historical controversies – the mystery surrounding the Vatican bank – that there has been any critical response from Italy’s cinema industry. This apparent anomaly, I argue, is simply the exception that proves the rule. Since the millennium, Giuseppe Ferrara’s I banchieri di Dio: Il caso Calvi (2001), and Paolo Sorrentino’s immensely successful Il Divo (2008), draw the worlds of banking, the mafia, a masonic lodge known as Propaganda Due (P-2) and the Italian political class together through the entangled, and ultimately deadly, stories of two notorious bankers, Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona, whose relations with the Vatican bank led to the Bank being swept into a web of offshore holding companies which later came under intense scrutiny with regard to tax evasion and money laundering.Footnote ⁸ Both thrillers conspire to knit together the various powers active in Italian life, as if they were segments of an intricate web which ultimately controls society and the players within it, but is too vast and complex to ever be fully grasped. I banchieri di Dio shows corruption travelling throughout the institutional structures in Italy. By cutting rapidly between a radically wide number of spaces occupied by each key power base (the Vatican, the houses of parliament, the Ambrosiano bank, judicial offices, US banks, wealthy villas), it presents the Holy See as one element in a mosaic of power bases, equal in terrestrial power to the state, the P-2, and the mafia. The complex, often jarring, mosaic, patched together through rapid cutting, is reinforced by the removal of boundaries between the spaces occupied by the powerful, creating a spatial porosity which features a rich array of large windows and open doorways as well as a significant number of sequences presenting busy movement between spaces (up and down stairs, along corridors, in cars). The rich and powerful move between their privileged spaces with ease. The interpenetration of worlds is a motif repeated in Il Divo: the famous scene which captures the arrival of Andreotti’s men (the ‘brutta corrente’) in menacing slow motion, captures politicians, a businessman and a cardinal all exiting their cars in identical fashion, as if no distinction held between these three parts of society. The blurring of distinctions and emphasis on spatial porosity in these films emphasises the Vatican as a powerful player which works seamlessly alongside the powers within, and outside, the state. Il Divo and I banchieri di Dio, alongside Buongiorno, notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003), in which Pope Paul VI is criticised for allowing the head of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, to die, are some of the few mainstream films since the millennium to mount a critical attack on scandals in Church history. Their critiques all rest on the portrayal of the institutional Church as a terrestrial power. The Church in these films is Goliath, not David. It is a powerful giant fashioned from a jumble of combined hierarchies: political, ecclesiastical and criminal. It is constructed in terms of its institutional power rather than its values. It is situated on the side of the privileged, not on that of that of the poor and dispossessed.Footnote ⁹

It is not the Catholic Church’s handling of the sexual abuse cases or the treatment of the religious other (in this case, the Jews) during the Holocaust which has attracted criticism in contemporary Italian cinema, but the relationship of the Church with power, privilege and money. This is relevant to my argument here because it confirms, rather than undermines, the key position of the St Francis and David against Goliath narratives. Portrayals of a rich and privileged Church position it at the antipodes of both stories. I would argue that Italian filmmakers in Italy today take the Church to task almost exclusively when it contravenes the narratives which provide religious cement and are fundamental to ‘compacting’ an Italian identity on screen.

Conclusion: narratives for post-secular cinema

What is happening in the contemporary on-screen construction of identity is fascinating. While one can certainly trace lines of continuity with neorealist cinema and argue that neither the St Francis narrative nor the David against Goliath trope are new – after all in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) an ethical hero with clear Catholic-inspired values (Don Pietro) fought against the cruel and powerful Nazi system – what we are seeing in post-millennial cinema is more complex than simply a smooth transferral of neorealist ethics into twenty-first century Italy. Not only have these values been adjusted over time, but they must contend with a changed socio-political ethos in which immigration from Islamic countries as well as the diminishing of the terrestrial power of the Catholic Church and the rise of neoliberalism have been transforming the place of religion. Italy is becoming post-secular: religion has not disappeared but is in the process of being repositioned. Italian cinema is making a powerful, but not unproblematic, contribution to that repositioning.

The repositioning of religion which I have traced in this article sees some of the focus shifted from an institutional Church that was so central to the screening of religion, especially in auteur cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. In an increasing number of films, such as Corpo celeste and Habemus Papam, the institutional Church is indeed shown as weakened. What a significant number of contemporary films are doing instead is focusing on a set of values emerging from a set of narratives (David against Goliath, and St Francis) and an essentialised, remembered religion of childhood. These values emerge defiantly in the face of contemporaneity and are set against neo-liberal values, terrestrial power and privilege, seen on some level as not fundamentally Italian. They are posited as a ‘cement’ unifying on-screen Italians. However, this cement is fragile. The co-opting of the religious other means that Italian cinema is typically not meeting one of the greatest challenges of post-secular society: how to deal with a multi-religious society in which not all members share the same religious and ethical values. Rather than face this challenge, many parts of contemporary Italian cinema instead revert to tried and tested Catholic narratives and to a nexus of giustizia-pietà-opposition which rests on a blend of Catholic social teaching and impegno and uses the narratives I have described in this article. The suppression of uncomfortable elements of the Church’s past and present perfect suggest that the positive Catholic values and narratives may not strong enough to withstand the confrontation with history. In other words, the new post-secular, multicultural Italian identity is being set up on an unstable footing. It is all too easy for the spectator to be lulled into identifying with a good, oppositional hero who firmly stands up against the enemy, whether that be a corrupt government, the mafia, or neo-liberalism. The ideal characters enable an easy, even lazy, identification, prove unchallenging, and tend to block the development of more challenging forms of cinema. They present fundamentally conservative messages which conform to an easy ethical context and do not challenge moral certainties and established value systems. Such films are ultimately comforting, but ask for little genuine ethical reflection. As Nikolaj Lübecker (Reference Lübecker2011, 160) claims, it allows a spectator to say, ‘I am that, I am on the side of the good’, rather than engaging with their ‘inner bastard’. The religious cement emerging in Italian cinema risks promoting complacency in the face of a post-secular world in which the relation with the religious other needs urgent and serious attention and the history of the Catholic Church cannot be swept under the carpet. Italy’s cinema needs to look more closely at the ‘inner bastard’ if it is to heal the cracks in the fragile cement of its emerging post-secular identity.