Earliest Remembrances

The twenty-something mother sits bedside as she shushes the two-year old on her lap and the baby in a crib beside. A dim, flickering, reddish glow breaks and splays through a balcony and window onto the wall. Ominously quiet, half a dozen friends crowd the small balcony's wrought iron railing overlooking the street below, but not so much as to draw attention. She moves quietly from bed to balcony, and back, hoping the disquieted child would mind to stay on the bed. The baby sleeps, thankfully. But the boy knows a big deal is up. He sees the shifting shadows on familiar big people faces at the balcony. He hears an outside growing rumble of shouts and other cacophonies overwhelming earlier sounds of the evening's silence. (How could you miss it?) He slips between legs and peeks through the railing. Just there to the right, where the road in front of the country house bends a strong left turn -- you see the little shrine sitting in the bend? -- as roaring a bonfire as you would ever want throws masses of sparks into the air to rival stars in the sky opposite. He sees its hot light bouncing off a jostling mass of unknown faces that fade back into the darkness. Torches punctuate the size of the mob, rods and banners wave about in the air. Right over there he sees the statue borne by a now bestilled cart that had led the advance. A figure stands on a makeshift dais, he gesticulates violently, bellows over the shouts of his ad hoc congregation. The big people at the balcony and window agonize. Will they survive a conflagration tonight? The boy's face burns only with the flush of agitation.

The year: 1949/1950. A large two-story country house just outside Rome, Italy, sits off a two lane road. Looking out from the house, following the road along the front to the right, one sees the road make an abrupt left turn directing travelers from the rural outskirts immediately into the Eternal City. As was common throughout Italy, a small shrine figuring Madonna and Child blessed said travelers as they made their way through the countryside. The house served as an unsecured compound for a small band of missionaries with the Churches of Christ who had moved lately from Texas to Italy. Their intent was to bring the gospel of Christ to a war-ravaged land perceived to have lost the essential message. One of the mission members had served in the U.S. army as allied forces in World War II fought Nazi troops occupying Italy. After war's end, and overwhelmed by the despair and devastation he witnessed, that soldier had decided to return to the nation with a message of hope, then under a different command and with vastly different weapons: the kingdom of God and the Spirit's panoply.

Now in the States, he spoke tirelessly among the congregations eventually convicting a team of young men and women to move to Italy to preach Christ. With toddler in tow (the only child to make the inbound journey), his bride traveled with him to the land foreign to her as light to darkness. When one considers present-day Italy (indeed, present-day Europe) as an idyllic tourist destination, one has no notion of that country seventy years ago. The rubble of destroyed civilization behind war's end served as nobody's tourist destination then.

These young people settled in the environs of Rome thinking early on that in a few years, as the wisdom of their simple gospel message should be received well, they would return to their homes in the United States, thence to "regular" life. The scene indicated above, and many others of like portent, gave opportunity for reassessment of early expectations.

In our twenty-first century enlightenment, by which all persons become their own laissez-faire gods (providing lesser gods stay out of the way), their mission seems laughable in its scope and a mild embarrassment to a weak Protestant heritage. Nonetheless, the little mission group created quite a stir among the state-sponsored hierarchy such that various authorities sought to remove them from the country. One of the mission team, eventually designated "persona non grata," had to leave Italy, never to return. Others of them ended up giving a lifetime of ministry in that mission.

Their cause, having developed political overtones related to the exercise of religious freedom, in 1956 occasioned the first case ever heard by the recently established Italian Constitutional Court. The court affirmed the right of persons to disseminate written religious (and other) information without prior governmental approval, in keeping with the new Italian constitution. Even so, the Lateran Pact of 1929, developed by Mussolini and the Roman Catholic Church in fascist Italy, yet dominated to give that religious entity official and privileged status. The Pact held until 1984 when the Italian government and the Roman Church signed a new agreement greatly constraining, but not eliminating altogether, its privilege.

My dad was the soldier mentioned earlier, serving as a ski trooper in the 87th Infantry, 10th Mountain Division. It's interesting how certain seminal events in a person's life can take place, and though the memory of them barely fades, they're never really talked about much, if any, at all. An event becomes integral to life's tapestry without seeming to be part of it. Just so, it was about half a century later that I first asked him what the thing was all about. He explained.

An association called the Catholic Action served as a loosely organized political action group. Its composition consisted mostly of lay Roman Catholic people whose agenda promoted the advance and defense of Roman Catholicism. In the early years of that mission of the Churches of Christ, the Catholic Action in the varied communities often opposed evangelistic meetings held in those cities, sometimes with physical violence, but always with verbal abuse and interruptions during the meetings. Sometimes such opposition sought to take legal action against the mission congregations because the mission might have placed a sign over a meeting place without first gaining governmental approval for the sign, or for handing out unapproved informational leaflets and brochures, or for other similar reasons. They sought to discourage the mission and, through the free exercise of intimidation, to stop conversion. (The last notable of violent actions took place in Aprilia, in 1957, on the outskirts of Rome: the Action packed the meeting hall rented by the mission, destroyed the furniture, and drove out native and foreign preachers who feared for their lives.)

On the occasion indicated at the start of this writing, a mob had formed by instigation of Catholic Action, and it had evolved into a procession of sorts. Leading the throng, a cart carried a statue of the Virgin Mary considered to have much mystical power. There had been concern that the roadside shrine of Madonna and Child adjacent to the mission house, though efficacious enough for travelers, remained unequal to her present task. So, delivery of the Virgin Mary statue from its sanctuary in Rome to the roadside shrine, and by means of the throng's special pleadings, cajolings, warnings, imprecations, and intercessions -- the kidnapped statue should impart great power to the besieged shrine. The shrine thus emboldened might then drive out the heretics from the midst.

The families witnessing the events from the balcony learned of these details later. But in the moment, they feared the mob would surround the house and burn them up in it. Prayer came easy, but not the night.

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Other childhood memories of that idyll, distinct from that event, include sun-bathed dalliances in the grassy yard behind the country house, wanderings through flowering, maturing vegetable gardens, chickens pecking at little things on the ground, frightfully toothed geese behind the fence, meanderings by the bench at the side yard gravel path, and Mom, with baby in arms, overseeing each step.