Reversible Destiny by Schneider Peter T.; Schneider Jane; & Peter T. Schneider

Author:Schneider, Peter T.; Schneider, Jane; & Peter T. Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

SAN SAVERIO IN ALBERGHERIA

Sociologist Mario Diani has studied how, in the 1980s, clusters of activists with ostensibly opposite political identities began to work together in some Italian cities (1995). His case is the environmentalist movement of Milan, made up of conservationists opposed to the degradation of natural and artistic resources at the hands of “mass” industrialization, and Marxist “political ecologists” struggling to improve working, health, and safety conditions for industrial laborers. Attempting to understand the mutual, if sometimes fragile tolerance of these two clusters for each other, Diani cites the waning of Cold War tensions, and with them Italy’s red-white dualism, well before 1989; the transformation of the Italian economy from an emphasis on large-scale industry to small-scale industry and service sector expansion; and the associated emergence of a well-educated “new middle class” whose members influenced the styles of protest of both conservationist and political ecology organizations. Especially significant, he thinks, was the socialization of many of the political ecologists in the “new politics” experiments of the previous decade, the 1970s. Disenchanted with intractable quarrels, they had then learned to eschew ideological exclusiveness and compromise with progressive Catholics (see also Melucci 1996: 274). By the same token, the conservationists moved leftward, joining with political ecologists in specific local arenas, for example, to oppose the construction of nuclear power plants.

In Sicily, nuclear power plants were not an issue, but nuclear arms were, as youthful protesters of Catholic and Communist background came together in the 1970s to agitate against the installation of a NATO missile base in the rural town of Comiso, a protest led by Pio La Torre. Allied in grassroots organizations and through volunteer work, protestors also tackled crises of poverty and housing in Palermo, which still showed the effects of the 1943 bombing, compounded by earthquake damage from 1968. In concert, grassroots organizers of secular and Catholic persuasion mobilized squatters to occupy unused spaces, form settlements, and demonstrate in the hope (almost never fulfilled) that the city would provide utilities and transportation.5

The rectory of the San Saverio Church in Albergheria was a beacon for this kind of activity. A small nucleus of priests from towns to the east of Palermo with a history of mafia violence—Casteldaccia, Bagheria, Altavilla—had become interested in the neighborhood’s destitute families living in crumbling, bomb-damaged structures. One of the concerned priests, Francesco Stabile, became a regular contributor to the journal Segno. Another, the Redemptorist Don Cosimo Scordato, was assigned to be rector of San Saverio, where he created a model social center. Lay radical members of the Giuseppe Impastato Center for Documentation, engaged with the same issues, gave their wholehearted support.

By 1985, Scordato had made the tiny San Saverio Church into a focus of antimafia activity. The church itself, a baroque jewel with spiraled columns flanking its entrance, was cleaned and restored, the piazza in front of it cleared of parked cars and lined with potted trees and benches. A large mural was painted on a wall facing the piazza. Mimicking the scenes of feudal

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