An Italian priest fights city hall and nudist beach parties

The Good Book says, ‘Give to Caesar what Caesar is due,’ which, incidentally raises an interesting issue concerning the non-payment of taxes in the USA and elsewhere by church organisations but that’s a topic for another day - if I can be bothered, of course.

Let me digress a bit further, though. There’s an old joke told by one of our Dutch comedians which translates as follows:

It’s Sunday morning and one good citizen is less than delighted when he’s forced to get up to answer the door and finds a priest on his doorstep, who is there for one kind of collection or the other. The freshly risen citizen makes his displeasure known and the priest asks him rather snootily if the man has anything against God.

“No,” the good citizen says, “Just His ground personnel.”

Which, if we can believe Father Giuseppe Miliziano, an Italian parish priest, is more or less the
Roman Catholic Church’s attitude when it comes to Caesar, or the modern equivalent of Caesar’s rule. Meaning that the Church will grudgingly respect the power of the national government but that local representatives can, to quote Stephen King, ‘go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut’:

The Roman Catholic Church is opposing a nudist beach festival in Sicily billed as a “celebration of nudity” over fears of an invasion of naked sunbathers. The Church complained after the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, the village nearest to the planned festival on Capo Bianco recently issued a decree allowing “free use of Capo Bianco by lovers of nude sunbathing”.

But Father Giuseppe Miliziano, the parish priest, said: “The beach belongs to the state, not to the local council. If the state decided to allow people to take their clothes off, there is not much I could do about it. But as far as I am aware no such authorisation has been issued.”

Ah yes, the Church and that whole nudity thing. It all goes back to Adam and Eve, the snake and the Garden etcetera. Having eaten that bloody apple and hearing God approaching, Adam and Eve covered themselves, having become self-conscious for the very first time. ‘The apple of self-consciousness’ doesn’t have the right Biblical ring, however, so let’s stick to the old ‘good and evil’ thing. Without these simplistic dichotomies the Church would not be able to exist, of course. Good and evil, Heaven and Hell, God and Lucifer, sheep and goats, black and white - ad infinitum and ad absurdum.

Anyway, so for the Church that first, original sin of eating the forbidden fruit, is indelibly linked to nudity - the frowning upon which in particular. So, I suppose Father Giuseppe Miliziano was being less than totally honest in saying that he would respect the national government’s wishes when it comes to nudity - and if he did mean it, he should be taken aside immediately by his own superiors for a few elemental ecclesiastical instructions.

Whatever one thinks about the validity of the Church’s tenements, within the world of the Church the good father would be absolutely wrong to bow to Caesar’s wishes when it comes to this whole nudity issue. As Jesus Himself explained, one should honour the law of the land when it concerns all worldly matters, like paying taxes - which the Church doesn’t, as I’ve stated before but never mind that now - but never when it comes to spiritual matters.

Father Giuseppe Miliziano should, in fact, be willing and eager to be thrown to the lions rather than make any concessions when it comes to matters of church dogma, like those earlier Christians were fed to these beasties by the predecessors of today’s version of Caesar. So, in an ideal world our good priest should, about now, be in the process of being processed into cat food - as, perhaps, should be all those other priests who go door to door collecting money on early Sunday mornings.