Live long enough to become a hypocrite. A blessing or a curse? It depends upon each of us, I suppose, and how earnestly we live. That said, I’ve come to appreciate a certain strain of hypocrite in recent years, one willing to reconsider tough stances and modify their position when the available evidence changes. There’s a line between hypocrisy and learning, of course; it’s determined by how willing one is to accept that altered reality, as opposed to denying it into oblivion. It can be rough on the old pride, though.
Here’s my hypocrisy of the moment. Younger me was religiously intolerant, and particularly critical of Christians and Christianity. It was the popular thing to be, though I can’t know how much that swayed my perspective; I certainly gravitated towards plenty of unpopular views. Pilgrimage helped me to become more open-minded, though I’ve remained secular in orientation over the years. And yet, in recent years, I’ve arrived at a conclusion that younger me would have scoffed at, ridiculed even: the world would be much, much better off–America, certainly–if more people lived in alignment with Christian values.
For years now, plenty of Americans have been CHINOS, or Christians in Name Only. For a while, this had rather innocuous connotations; people were culturally Christian, celebrating Christmas and Easter, but never setting foot in church or lifting a Bible. No great harm in that. In more recent years, though, a subsection of Christians have essentially rejected traditional Christian values altogether, viewing Jesus’s practices as soft, effeminate, and the stuff of losers. An undeniable radical streak wove through early Christianity, something that younger me managed to ignore wholesale, and plenty of contemporary Christians have followed suit. So it goes; it never takes long for the young, dangerous upstart to be co-opted by the establishment. But those foundation stones remain.
Italy is holding its breath right now. Every time I catch the television news, or see a newspaper in a bar, I’m reminded that the Pope is still alive, though perhaps hanging by a thread. Francis has been a reformer, the “cool Pope,” a leader of Catholicism who became quickly beloved by non-Catholics for his willingness to assert morality over political expediency or Church supremacy. He’s the last image I see on the television this morning before I sip down the dregs of my cappuccino and depart the bar.
My route today breaks into three chunks. First, I move in a southeasterly direction from Gallipoli. While I’m ostensibly following a footpath through fallow fields for much of the first half of this segment, it is badly overgrown, and before long my feet and pants are soaked. Even olive trees, my loyal companions, are harder to come by here; most of these areas seem long neglected. In time, though, I emerge on a more solid dirt track, followed by an unused paved road, and I’m grateful for the chance to dry out. This section concludes when I ascend into Matino, a town oddly positioned on one side of a hill, sloping steadily upwards, and then ending abruptly at the top as it flattens out.
The second chunk proceeds in a more direct eastward course, following a lightly trafficked paved road, eventually concluding at a dead end, when it yields the ground to a pine forest. I soon discover that this is another ridgeline, and that the earth plummets sharply on the other side. The third and final chunk heads due south, following this narrow pine forest most of the way to Ruffano, before descending back into the valley for the home stretch.
What is most noteworthy about this last section is that I’m no longer freestyling. Instead, I overlap at this point with the blue and white blazes of the Cammino di Don Tonino Bello, and like the Pope, Bello has me thinking about Christianity today.
Don Tonino Bello was born in Alessano, just south of here, in 1935. It didn’t take long for him to enroll in episcopal seminary in Ugento, due west of me. While he later spent some time at a seminary in Bologna, the dedicated son of Puglia returned to Alessano soon after, where he was ordained a priest in 1957. Nearly all of his remaining years would be spent in this region.
He coined the term “church of the apron,” by which he meant that his church would serve the marginalized and that he would personally work to humble himself and strip away all signs of power. For that reason, he was known simply to all as “Don Tonino,” and he prioritized works like the creation of a Caritas group to promote charity, provided treatment to those suffering from drug addiction, and left his parish house open at all hours to those in need of a roof over their heads.
In time, his activist bent expanded, as he endeavored to make a wider impact. After Pope John Paul II elected him the first bishop of Molfetta-Ruvo-Giovinazzo-Terlizzi in 1982, he joined striking members of the Apulian Steelworks of Giovinazzo in the streets. In 1985, he was named National President of Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement, and later spearheaded an initiative to protest the Gulf War. The most striking moment of his life came in December 1992, by which point he had already undergone surgery for stomach cancer. Joining with 500 volunteers, he marched on foot from Ancona to Sarajevo in the midst of the siege that had locked down the city for months. On the day they arrived, heavy fog and tempestuous weather allowed safe passage, something that had been so rare over those preceding months–a stroke of good fortune if ever there was one.
A movement began in 2007 to canonize Don Tonino–the process by which man is elevated to sainthood. Pope Francis, in an acknowledgement of the man’s impactful life, visited his tomb in Molfetta in 2018, and three years later he authorized the promulgation of the decree on heroic virtues, the second hurdle to be cleared on the road to sainthood. This means that Don Tonino has already been established as a “Servant of God” and as “Venerable.” The third step is “Blessed,” or beatification. Sainthood follows, but requires, among other things, proof of two miracles associated with the individual under evaluation. In any case, that’s a matter for another day.
I’m sure that if I could review the life of Don Tonino Bello, or Pope Francis for that matter, there would still be any number of theological, ideological, or moral points of dispute that would exist between us. But as a starting point, it’s hard to go wrong with support for the most vulnerable, practical interventions in service to harm reduction, and direct action to confront abuses of power. That’s a Christianity I can get behind; I’m pleased to have the opportunity to, figuratively at least, follow in Don Tonino’s footsteps for a couple of days.
