The Eulogy Is the Confession
Tancredi’s line has long outlived the novel that produced it: if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. People quote it as cunning. In the book it is bleaker. The Sicilian aristocracy of Il Gattopardo keeps its titles, its balls and its funerals, and gives away everything the titles were for. Don Fabrizio sees what is happening and attends the ceremonies anyway. The ceremonies are what remain. Lampedusa was writing about forms that survive the order which made them intelligible.
Emma Bonino died on 11 September at seventy-eight. Days later the Italian political class gathered in the Campidoglio for a civil state funeral. Giorgia Meloni was there, with the president of the Republic and a row of former prime ministers. She had already written that their stories and sensibilities had been distant, and that this had never prevented her from recognising Bonino’s peso and her ruolo in the public life of the nation. The funeral said the same thing standing up.
Decency explains a condolence. It does not explain the wording, and it does not explain the attendance. The newspaper version is thinner still: that she was buying a morning’s respectability from papers which will call her a fascist again by Friday.
What she said was true. She meant it. That is the difficulty.
Bonino’s significance is not in dispute. She procured an illegal abortion in 1974, handed herself to the police the next year, and worked with a centre that performed abortions by the thousand. The private offence became a public campaign. She entered parliament in 1976. Law 194 followed in 1978. Then a term as European commissioner, the foreign ministry, and a career premised on the claim that Catholic Italy’s moral order stood in the way of human freedom and should be dismantled. She was the one who made it public, and she lived long enough to be eulogised for it.
Meloni has been in office nearly four years. Law 194 remains.
What was fought as an assault in 1978 is now, in the mouth and in the presence of the Italian right’s most successful politician, a role in the public life of the nation. The people who lost are the ones inheriting it.
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Statesmen praise enemies they still mean to beat. That is an old permission of the funeral oration. Naming peso and a role in the nation’s public life, then taking a seat in the Campidoglio, is the language used for a founder.
She did not have to abuse a dead woman, or time a statement on the unborn to a coffin. A private note would have done. Silence would have done, and everyone who watches these things would have read it. She took neither.
Her Catholicism does not run that way. She is openly Catholic; her opponents say so more loudly; for four years the European commentariat has treated her as the face of a Christian politics in Europe. The faith is there. It has the status Don Fabrizio’s titles had once the ceremonies were all that was left of them.
An inheritance gives you a vocabulary and a story about your people. It asks for what you were already prepared to give. Jurisdiction keeps telling you what you may not concede after the concession has become popular, after the coalition has made its peace, after reversal would look like vandalism. The first produces tributes. The second produces refusals.
Most of what now calls itself Christian politics in Europe is the first. It defends cribs in town squares and crosses in classrooms, and it is right to, because those things are being taken down by people who know what they are doing. You can keep the furniture and accept every settlement the furniture was meant to express. The crucifix stays on the wall. Nothing taught under it follows from the crucifix. Honour the woman who legalised abortion, stand at her state funeral, call yourself the last defender of Christian Europe: there is no contradiction if the Christianity is a possession rather than a bind.
The obituaries also record her friendship with the late Pope Francis, “despite” their views on abortion and euthanasia, and that he encouraged her humanitarian battles. The pope, whose office exists to hold what cannot be conceded, kept a warm friendship with the woman who legalised abortion in Italy. The disagreement is mentioned in the tone used for two friends who support different clubs.
If only politicians did this, one could talk about votes. The votes belong to people who like the settlement. A pope does not stand for election. He has no coalition and no paper to placate. The same gesture from the Vatican and from Palazzo Chigi, toward the same woman, and then the prime minister in the hall: cowardice will not cover it.
Both had decided, without putting it so, that 1978 was permanent, and that the remaining task was to be humane inside it. Honour costs nothing once she is no longer an opponent. She is the past you came from. That history runs one way, and that the settlements it produces are final, is a thing the secular left has said openly since the Revolution. The Church spent most of that period saying otherwise. The eulogies are how you can tell it has stopped.
Don Fabrizio knew. He went to the ceremonies knowing what had been lost and what the forms were now worth. That knowledge is why he is tragic and not merely finished. The Italian right has the ceremonies. It thinks it is holding the line as it files past the coffin.
Those who still hold the older view are a faction inside institutions whose leadership does not. They will be called uncharitable, disproportionate, late. Some of that will come from men in mitres. It will not be argued, because nobody involved experienced it as an argument. There is no vote to point to, no encyclical, no moment anyone can be held to.
