CATANIA, Italy – The mother had prepared everything for the baptism. She dressed her little son Antonio in a handmade satin suit with a tailcoat and a matching cream-colored top hat that glittered with rhinestones. She hired the photographers and bought the baby a gold cross. She booked a large buffet lunch for the whole clan in Copacabana.
But when the pastor in the Sicilian city of Catania went through the usual liturgy, asked the family to renounce Satan and spooned holy water on the writhing baby’s head, much of the ritual was lost.
“It’s not right,” said Agata Peri, 68, little Antonio’s great-grandmother. “I definitely didn’t make that decision.”
The church did. On this weekend in October, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Catania issued a three-year ban on the old tradition of naming godparents at baptisms and baptisms. Church officials argue that the once essential figure in the Catholic upbringing of a child has lost all spiritual significance. Instead, it has become a networking opportunity for families looking to increase their fortunes, secure gold chains, and make beneficial connections, sometimes with local power brokers who have dozens of godchildren.
Education, church officials said, came down to earth as a secular custom between relatives or neighbors – many had no faith or lived in sin and were now just a way of strengthening family ties.
And sometimes mob ties too.
Italian prosecutors have prosecuted baptisms to find out how underworld bosses spread influence, and court mob widows have reversed their most venomous malice for “the real Judases” who betrayed the baptismal ribbon. It is a transgression most associated with The Godfather, particularly Baptism, in which Michael Corleone gives up Satan in the church while his henchmen beat up all of his enemies.
Church officials warn, however, that more than anything, secularization led them to wipe out the godparents, a Sicilian cause that has been going on for 2000 years, or at least since the dicey early days of the church, when bishops are known to vouch for sponsors for converts, to prevent pagan infiltration.
“It’s an experiment,” said Monsignor Salvatore Genchi, Vicar General of Catania, while holding a copy of the ban in his office behind the city’s basilica. The monsignor sponsored at least 15 godchildren and said he was well qualified for the role, but estimated that 99 percent of the diocese’s godparents were not.
The break would give the church some time to send Catania back to Catholic school, but Genchi wasn’t optimistic it would last. “It seems very difficult to me,” he said, “that one can turn back.”
In 2014, Archbishop Giuseppe Fiorini Morosini of Reggio Calabria, where the ‘ndrangheta mob is rooted, proposed a 10-year stop of the godparents, arguing in a letter to Pope Francis that a secular society has spiritually gutted the figure. That, he said, also makes it ripe for exploitation by gangsters.
Morosini said a senior Vatican official, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, now on trial in the Vatican on money laundering allegations, replied that all of Calabria’s bishops must agree before proceeding. They have not.
But Morosini said he had brought up the issue over and over with Francis, who was “very attentive”, and told him at a meeting in May, “‘Every time I see you, I remember the problem of the godfather. ‘”
Pastor Angelo Alfio Mangano of the Church of Santa Maria in Ognina in Catania welcomed the ban, mainly because it gave him a break from spiritually questionable characters who pressured him and others with “threats against the pastor” to sponsor them appoint.
Sometimes, he said, the position was used for social extortion and usury, but most of the time it became a method of enforcing Sicily’s entrenched culture of ritual kinship.
“It creates a stronger bond between the families,” said Nino Sicali, 68, when he cut a swordfish with a machete at the fish market in Catania. When he was named godfather, he said he responded by making his godson’s father a “comparison” – or co-father – with his own children. Over the years, Sicali said he was committed to helping his difficulties settle financially. “He died because he owed me 12,000 euros,” he said.
Some families looked for godparents who opened the doors.
Salvatore Cuffaro, a former president of Sicily, said he doesn’t have many godchildren, “only about 20” and only agreed about 5 percent of the requests. He was asked about his “Christian principles”, which he had demonstrated over decades in political life.
“Despite the opinions of some priests, I took care of all of my godparents,” he said, and directed them to attend Catholic schools.
Nicknamed “Kiss Kiss” for his propensity to kiss everyone, Cuffaro spent nearly five years in jail for telling a Mafia boss that he was bugged. He denied these allegations and denied that a mafioso had ever sponsored anyone on the island.
“At least in Sicily, where I lived, it doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s just a religious bond; there are no bonds of illegality. “
He was concerned that by abolishing tradition, the Church would “throw out the baby with the bath”.
Parents who baptized their children in churches across Catania on the first Sunday of the ban were also appalled at the loss of a beloved tradition.
“It’s shocking,” said Jalissa Testa, 21, who celebrated her son’s baptism with a dance in the Basilica of Catania while her husband serenaded a crowd of women waving white napkins. “In our hearts we know, and they will know that he has a godparent.”
Marco Calderone carried his six-month-old son Giuseppe past a newspaper clipping on the wall of the Church of Santa Maria in Ognina with the inscription “Baptisms and baptisms: stop with godparents”.
“It could be done away with for them,” said Calderone. “Not for us.”
Afterwards the family posed on the church steps and the family photographer – “Do you see the necklace on this baby?” Said the photographer – called on the godfather to do so.
“Salvo,” Calderone called, beckoning the unofficial godparents to join them.
Even the family, who received special permission to sponsor because a death in the family delayed their previously scheduled baptism, was upset by the rule.
“I don’t understand why the Church is doing this,” said Ivan Arena, 29, who may be Catania’s last godfather, after his nephew’s baptism, who wore a three-piece powder blue suit and white cappola. “I am for the old traditions.”
After this ceremony, the priest turned to the family on the other side of the nave. The women shimmered in sequins and the men wore monk barbel – short in front, long in back, shaved around the ears. They did not receive any such allowance.
“What difference does that make,” said the proud father Nicola Sparti (24), who described his job as “a little bit of it, a little bit of it” – “Flee Carabinieri on a motorcycle,” read a recent newspaper article about him . “One day the godfather is there and the next he is gone. But a father is forever. “
Sparti and his wife then drove to the nearby town of Aci Trezza for a photo shoot in front of the three majestic sea cliffs that, according to legend, heaved the Cyclops onto the fleeing Odysseus. They put Antonio in a remote-controlled white miniature Mercedes and cheered as he drove through the harbor.
Pastor Giovanni Mammino, Vicar General of the city, came over them after a baptism from the Church of St. John the Baptist. His diocese requested forms from godparents swearing that they were believers and not members of the mafia. In contrast to Catania, he said, his diocese had taken a middle course and allowed godparents, but did not need them.
Now people are hatching across the border from Catania to be baptized.
“They keep coming back here to have the godparents,” he said.
However, the Sparti family had obeyed the rules and only came for lunch. They drove to nearby Copacabana, where they celebrated with heaping plates of pistachio noodles, cakes, gifts and generations of parents and godparents.
Alfio Motta, 22, Antonio’s uncle, was watching everything from the DJ console and thinking about what could have been.
“I feel like the godfather,” he said. “Even if I don’t have the title.”
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