Some Sort of Sicilian Saint

FIRE UNDER THE ASHES by James McNeish. 324 pages. Beacon Press. $5.95.

Sanctity is hard to explain--even when it is present. Saints have often been impossible people who undertook impossible tasks and succeeded in highly improbable ways.

Such a one is Danilo Dolci, a 41-year-old Italian who for 14 years has headed a volunteer movement designed to lift a few Sicilian villages out of a squalor unmatched in Europe and to raise the inhabitants from the torpor of despair. Dolci (TIME, April 9, 1956) has been proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize, denounced by the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo; he has won the support of many Communists and some Jesuits, been threatened by the Mafia, and been prosecuted for obscenity by the Italian government for his book Report from Palermo. In common with most of those on the church's Calendar of Saints, Dolci makes no sense to sensible men. He may well be a saint but if so he will be the first to have received the Lenin Peace Prize. James McNeish, an itinerant New Zealand journalist, has now undertaken Dolci's biography. It is a strange story, and possibly a more ambitious writer would not have succeeded so well. McNeish lets the facts speak their own contradictions and confesses himself baffled, after four years' active association with Dolci, as to the central essence of his subject.

Reverse Strike A hulking, meaty, headstrong man, the father of five children, Dolci is a complex of anomalies who seems to pious Italians a devious political crank, and to political reformers a man of exasperating otherworldliness who will fast and pray to get a road built.

It is ten years since Dolci's "reverse strike" won him prominence in the world press. He led a group of unemployed Sicilians out to repair a government road to their village and was imprisoned for trespass. He began in Trapetto, a no-hope town of 2,800, and improvised from day to day the program of action--religious, economic and political--that marks his movement today. He took on the Mafia, which controlled illegal trawler fleets that were robbing the local fishermen of their livelihood. He played the organ in church and criticized the parish priest for his refusal to allow barefoot children to attend Mass. He begged money for food for the starving. He tried to do something about the ancient stink of the picturesque airless houses and to stop children playing in the open sewers. He discovered that when appeals to charity failed, he could exploit a flair for dramatizing unpleasant statistics and shame Rome itself into granting public funds for public relief. When all else failed, he fasted.

"Pack of Jews." Today the Mafia seems to have agreed to live and let Dolci live, although he has given wide publicity to telling statistics--such as that in one village Mafia murders since 1945 outnumber the village's dead of both world wars. As for the Roman Catholic Church, Dolci is now a "lapsed Catholic," and he blames the breach on the "lack of a tradition of charity, even on the level of almsgiving" of the church in Sicily. His fall from the faith he also attributes to the sermons of two Sicilian priests: one denounced a destitute congregation of peasants as "a pack of Jews" for failing to supply the church lire they did not have; the other instructed his peasant parishioners to ostracize sinners.

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