Unemployed

This afternoon we visited Santa Rosalia the Patron Saint of Palermo. We scaled the scores of stone steps to a bright, white even hopeful church. It's damp, dark interior is the cave where Rosalia lived in prayer and solitude till the end of her life during the 16th Century.

Hundreds of penned notes, requests, tokens, offerings and prayers nearly litter the walls and bowls set out for this purpose. Missing are the signs and admonitions to "keep quiet," "no flash photography," "no naked legs." Rather than a tourist destination for the heathen masses we are in church. Serious church. I drap my bare shoulders with my scarf and we gently enter the volcanic & limestone sanctuary.

Catholicism in Sicily is a strange thing. It is as much Catholic doctrine as it is Pagan. A mixture of both, seasoned by centuries of Middle Eastern, African, European, Norman, Asian and Celtic occupations. Unlike Northern Italy, Northern France, Ireland, or the Brooklyn of my Irish-Sicilian upbringing, Jesus Christ is not the focus. Sure the Mass is dictated by the Vatican and follows the canon. But outside on the street where people live, where they build their shrines, bake their bread, devotional pastries and host their ritual processions, it is the Virgin whose sacrifice throws the faithful into frenzy. Her sacrifice is personal, intimate, palpable. And it is Santa Rosalia the Virgin Hermit who in 1624 saved her children the city of Palermo from the plague.

Italy's faithful often describe themselves as non- practicing believers. Why bother go to confession when they can't really repent. Once divorced, to love again is forever a sin. Yet today, Franco takes my hand as he prepares to pray to this gilded, stone virgin.

Maybe Santa Rosalia can help. Maybe she will.

At the end of his first day as one of the hundreds of thousands unemployed Sicilians, we head for the beach and swim in a beautiful cove, cradled by craggy, limestone cliffs an almost lunar landscape; thousands of steps away from any road or person; and for a moment the severity of Sicilia is strong enough, gentle and loving enough to comfort one of her beaten sons in this Tyrrhenian pieta.

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