A Catholic Priest in Love: The Little World of Don Camillo

During my sophomore year in high school, I became obsessed with all things Catholic. Most likely it was due to a "forbidden fruit"  thing: Nazarenes thought that Roman Catholics were the epitome of evil.

  One day I found The Little World of Don Camillo (1950) at the St. Pius Catholic Church book sale: a small, yellow collection of short stories, illustrated by cute, half-naked angels and devils.

I had never read anything like this before. There were lots of stories about boys in love with boys, or teenagers with adult men, but never two adults!  And one was a tall, muscular Catholic priest who assaulted people with candlesticks!  And the other, a Communist!

The small yellow hardback remained on my bookshelf for several years before vanishing; I think my mother accidentally put it in a "to donate" pile.

The Little World of Don Camillo is the first of eight collections of short stories about the priest of a small village in Tuscany.  Formerly a boxer and World War II resistance fighter, Don Camillo has hard fists and a hot temper.   The Mayor, Peppone, once fought the Fascists beside Don Camillo, but now he is a godless Communist. The two former friends, on opposite sides of an ideological fence, argue religion and politics as they vie for control of the village.

Peppone is married, but his wife and children rarely appear.  And almost none of the stories involve the hetero-romance of other characters.  Often they involve a conundrum that requires Don Camillo and Peppone to work together:

Vandals steal Don Camillo's clothes while he's swimming.
Don Camillo returns to the boxing ring to save the town's honor.
Don Camillo and Peppone are stuck on a ferris wheel.
Peppone is lost in the mountains, and Don Camillo must rescue him.

During the next twenty years, Don Camillo and Peppone grow into middle age, and though they remain "enemies," their love for each other shines through more often than not.  In the last volume of the series, Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children (1969), a young, hip priest has come to town, and butts heads with Peppone's hippie son, and the cycle begins anew.

The French-Italian movie Don Camillo (1952) starred Fernandel as Don Camillo and Gino Cervi as Peppone (above), and Franco Interlenghi (left) as the young hunk who requires their assistance.  Four sequels appeared.

There was also a 1980 BBC television series, with Mario Adorf and Brian Blessed, and a 1983 Italian movie with Terence Hill (left) and Colin Blakeley.

The author, political satirist Giovanni Guareschi (1908-1969), was a conservative Catholic, and probably heterosexual -- he also published humorous stories about his wife and children. I wonder what he would have thought if he knew that his books had a strong gay subtext.

The Transcendent Flesh: Brother Sun, Sister Moon

When I was a kid, my church hated the Roman Catholic "cult."  The Pope was the Antichrist, priests and nuns were possessed by the Devil, and millions of their brainwashed followers worshipped idols and drank wine.  Our Sunday school teacher cautioned us to never speak to a Catholic, if we could help it, or we might get brainwashed, too, and never walk past a Catholic church, or a priest would "get" us.  

In college I dropped out of church.  When the Preacher called to check up on me, I told him I was going to another church now.
Which one?
"Roman Catholic," I said, just to shake things up a bit.
He slammed the phone down, and by the next Sunday, my family was being shunned, stared at, and whispered about.  They made me call the Preacher and tell him that I was only joking.

The first real Catholic I met was Frank, the boy on the Prospect List.  I spent the night with Todd, a Maronite Catholic, at  music camp in the summer of 1976.  My first view of the real Roman Catholic Church came the next fall, when my Medieval History class  at Rocky High saw Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972), about the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

Like many movies and tv programs of the era -- That Cold Day in the Park, Hair, If...., even The Bugaloos -- it featured  a "wild youth" who shakes up the establishment.  Raised in luxury as the son of a wealthy Italian merchant, Francis is repelled by the materialism, avarice, and aggression of the adults.  He goes to war, but cannot bring himself to fight.  He seeks refuge in the Roman Catholic Church, but finds it antiquated and materialistic. So he "lights out for the territory" and starts a hippie commune. . .um, I mean a monastic order.

To symbolize his rejection of the material, Francis sheds his clothes, revealing a beautifully sculpted backside.  So a naked male body shows us the way to Paradise.

Some of the movie posters tried to transform the movie into a heterosexual romance, but Francis has no interest in women.  Or in men, either.  He has a best friend, Paolo (Kenneth Cranham), but his love extends to all living things and even inanimate objects, and cannot be contained in a single person.

Actor Graham Faulkner, reputedly gay in real life, also stripped down to play a Cornish farmer with rather shapely thighs, frolicking on the beach with writer D.H. Lawrence in Priest of Love (1981).

Director Franco Zeffirelli, gay in real life, often used beautiful male bodies as symbols of transcendent reality, even when they have sex with women, as with Romeo (Leonard Whiting, left) in Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Today I know much more about the Roman Catholic church.  I've read The Seven Story Mountain.  I've seen the Sistine Chapel.  I know about the histories of popes and saints, the scandals of the priests, the intense opposition to gay marriage and all things gay (but check out this blog, The Wild Reed, Thoughts and Reflections from a Progressive Gay Catholic Perspective).

But in the early days, I found there appreciation of male beauty that the fundamentalist church of my childhood denied.