The Moro Affair by Leonardo Sciascia

Author:Leonardo Sciascia [Sciascia, Leonardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783780259
Publisher: Granta Books
Published: 2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Not all the papers publish this letter. And compassion, though it provokes some tremors, does not prevail.

The Christian Democratic Party is, according to the Press, ‘lacerated by uncertainty’. Moro’s family publicly states a ‘resolute’ request that the Party ‘declare its willingness to accept the conditions for the prisoner’s release whatever, in substance, these may be.’ The Party, lacerated more by the certainty that it must do nothing than by uncertainty, can only entrust International Charity (a Vatican-sponsored humanitarian society of which hardly anyone has ever heard) with the task of ‘seeking possible means of inducing President Moro’s kidnappers to set him free’. In fact there are no possible means since the Christian Democratic Party makes a point of reasserting ‘its unfailing dedication to the democratic State, to its institutions and to its laws, in active solidarity with the constitutional parties.’ But among the constitutional parties the Socialist Party breaks off at this point its inactive solidarity. It wants to do something to save Moro’s life. Thus it becomes a sort of Prodigal Son, or Black Sheep.

To assuage the Christian Democrats’ laceration Paul VI intervenes — a few hours before the Red Brigades’ ultimatum expires and by a letter the Vatican radio broadcasts and of which the papers publish an autograph reproduction the next day. A letter with an apparently highly Christian motivation but which, in fact, reveals in its exhortation to ‘those of the Red Brigades’ to release Moro ‘simply, unconditionally’ a tacit acceptance — not to say approval — of the Christian Democrats’ declared ‘unfailing devotion to the State’.

In the ‘People’s Prison’ Moro, unlike the majority of Italians, is not impressed by the Pope’s prostrating himself before ‘those of the Red Brigades’, and well aware of the fact that Paul VI has a stronger ‘sense of the State’ than the French Minister of the Interior, Prince Poniatowski who, not so long ago, declared that it was perfectly licit to negotiate with terrorists in order to avoid the sacrifice of ‘innocent human lives’. In other words, Prince Poniatowski shares Moro’s views. And it cannot be said that the French State isn’t a State. It is one, and with all the trimmings — perhaps even too many.

So Moro will try to persuade the Pope. ‘In actual fact the swapping of prisoners benefits (and this is an argument I humbly beg to submit to the Holy Father) not only those on the other side but also him whose life is at stake, the non-disputant, that is the ordinary citizen like myself.’ And in one of his, last letters he will observe, less humbly, that the Holy See’s attitude to his case denotes a departure from previous attitudes and a refutation of the entire humanitarian tradition: ‘This is something atrocious, unworthy of the Holy See … I don’t know if Poletti [Cardinal Poletti] can rectify this enormity so unlike the Holy See’s general attitude …’ — obviously referring to the Pope’s gesture a month before when he offered himself as hostage to the German terrorists who threatened to massacre the passengers of an aeroplane in Mogadishu.

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