The Bells of San Martino

At sunrise, at midday and at dusk, church bells call to each other across the Emilian plain. In the past year anticlerical terrorists in the diocese of Reggio Emilia, near Bologna, had answered the bells by murdering five priests. Two months ago the Vatican sent to the tough district a tough bishop, Beniamino Socche.

One evening last month a popular, mild-mannered priest, Don Umberto Pessina, was walking along a lonely lane to his home in San Martino, suburb of Correggio (where the painter of that name was born). There was a bright orange flash among the yellow fireflies. Don Umberto fell, shot through the neck. He managed to crawl to his doorstep, where the assassin crushed in his skull.

Last week, with the killer still uncaught, Bishop Socche decided to invoke an unusually severe measure of church discipline. He placed San Martino and the surrounding region under an interdict. He thundered from his pulpit that unless police promptly solved this murder "by the children of Cain" he would tell the whole world of "the abject terror that weighs down on our countryside. . . . Should someone kill your bishop . . remember that [he] fell because he wanted [to end] conditions imposed on the majority by a few criminals. . . ."

The churches were closed. No priest was allowed to say Mass for the faithful. Only the dying could receive the sacraments.

As they went into their fields each morning, as they paused at noon for the Angelus and wine, as they trudged home in the evening, the peasants heard only in memory the bells that for centuries had spaced the life of San Martino; Bishop Socche's order had silenced them.

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