ABSTRACT
There are still sightings of ‘weeping’, even ‘bleeding’, statues of the Madonna, and the cult surrounding the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro in Naples is still going strong, as are the romeaggi and other celebrations of local shrines. Italian city churches and streets are still testimony to the enduring power of local cults in another way, that is, prayers to the Madonna and local saints for favours, whose success is recorded by the presentation of votive artefacts at their statues. These phenomena are largely, but by no means entirely, southern Italian ones. But regional diversity is not the only criterion here;
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the recitation of the rosary than the younger faithful: one only has to sit at the back of an Italian church in the early evening to confirm this. There has also been resistance among some Italian Catholics, as elsewhere, to a kind of ‘protestantisation’ of Catholic Eucharistic worship, the apparent removal of ‘mystery’ by making the priest face the people across what appears to be a ‘table’ rather than an altar and the replacement of Latin with the vernacular in the celebration of Mass. There are now thousands of Italian Catholics who belong to organisations that are liturgically and doctrinally traditionalist (and often politically right wing). There are even supporters of Mgr Marcel Lefebvre, the deceased French archbishop who denounced the Second Vatican Council as ‘the work of the Devil’ and consequently led his followers into schism.2
