On Saturday evening last I visited the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. It is a magnificent church with gilded ceiling, three naves divided by a double row of columns, a huge canopy over the altar (as in St Peter's), mosaics dating back to the 5th century along the walls representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
I was on my way at the time to a bus office to join a night-time tour of Rome but seeing a representation of Padre Pio on the fine facade of the basilica and crowds streaming out, I thought I would see what was or had been going on.
The church was still crowded, especially over to the right of the altar where a choir was singing what I thought was an American revivalist hymn. In fact, the congregation was almost all Italian and the occasion was a solemn Mass in preparation for the canonisation of Padre Pio the following day.
I put a euro into a machine at the back of the church to listen on a telephone to the history of the basilica, and it was while I was listening that I first saw him. Dressed immaculately in a long black soutane, a bright red skullcap, with a broad red sash across his belly, dripping to the ground with tassels at the end. A cardinal. He was a fine, handsome man, tall, erect, fine face. People flocked to him as he made his way down the aisle. He seemed to like the attention.
Women clasped his hand and kissed his ring. He responded by placing his hand on their heads or, in the case of a few younger and good-looking women, tickling them under the chin. He was speaking to them, every now and then wagging a long index finger. He saw a young man with a backpack towards the back of the church and when he reached him he placed his two hands on the young man's shoulders, removing the right one to wag that long finger, again looking down the fabulous bony long nose.
By this time I had gone outside the church and was observing him from there. He was splendid. All the confidence, self-importance, hauteur that I remembered of church dignitaries from decades ago but which I thought was now merely a memory. Now, here in Rome last Saturday, in the Basilica of Maria Maggiore, there was a Hollywood representation of a Prince of the Church in the full prime of authority, poise, assurance and that superb arrogance.
He had seen me observe him and eventually he came towards me, offering his hand to shake, rather than to kiss. He shook it and he said something to me in Italian. I said I didn't speak Italian and he asked me in English if I was American. I said, no, I was Irish. He asked me my name and I told him and then asked him his name. He seemed a little taken aback but then distracted himself with yet more fawning admirers.
They haven't lost it, and although hierarchies in America and Ireland and elsewhere might have been taken down a few pegs by the revelations of the scandals surrounding them, at the heart of the empire there remains that spectacular pride.
It was on show on Sunday in St Peter's Square. It was just the vast throng of the faithful herded into pens around the square and the crowds spilling down Via Conciliazone, the massed choir at the right door of St Peter's, the line of cardinals and bishops, flanked by Swiss Guards, and the understated altar on the steps of the basilica with the focus on the hunched, pitiable figure of the defiant Pope. It was more the occasion.
It was the canonisation of a monk whose distinctions evoke a model of religion that, one thought, had been discarded quite some time ago, the magical and freakish. I do not intend to be disrespectful to the very obvious devotion to Padre Pio, but it seems bizarre that right now especially the Catholic Church should be seeking to elevate someone whose claim to prominence was a stigmata, claims of bilocation, miracles and unquestioning obedience.
The Pope himself spoke of Padre Pio's special holiness and his extraordinary gifts as a confessor. But is it likely he would have come even to prominence, let alone sainthood, had it not been for what might be described as the magical dimensions and the obedience? Padre Pio's obedience was in the face of alleged calumnies perpetrated against him even by the Vatican during the course of his lifetime.
But surely this is a bad time for the Catholic Church to be celebrating silent obedience when the times demand outspokenness? Is the message not that, for instance, those priests and seminarians, who spoke out recently over what was going in Maynooth 15 years ago, would have been more saintly had they remained silent?
Yes, in a sense the canonisation of Padre Pio is a rebuke to the Vatican establishment, because of his persecution by the Vatican 60 years ago and a rebuke in that the initiative for the canonisation came not from inside the Vatican but from the overwhelming tide of sentiment among the Italian laity in particular. But it is also a message that, no matter what is said about the church and no matter what the church does, it still has the power of miracles and still the right to demand unquestioning obedience.
And that no matter how grievous its deceits and cover-ups of the sexual abuse scandal and, worse still, its lingering justification for the Catholic culture of antisemitism that was part of the impetus behind the Holocaust, the show goes on in all its majesty, splendour and insouciance.