By Elizabeth Scalia | OSV News
(Photo/ OSV News)
“To love, it is the most creative and godlike act of all.”
In Anthony Mancini’s “Ashes,” the line is uttered by Concetta, a Sicilian woman living in post-war Taormina. It is 1949, and she has spoken those words to a German Jesuit priest, Father Anton Weiss, who has recently retired from ministry and moved into a rectory in this picturesque town with plans to “write and meditate.”
Though uncertain of what he will write, Father Weiss — who spent decades producing scripts for Vatican Radio in Rome — has faith that something will come out of his journaling.
The Jesuit’s arrival in Taormina has coincided with renewed threats from Mount Etna, which is alternately belching flame or spewing steam but never committing to fulfilling its potential for drama and mayhem.
In this way, Etna is not unlike Father Weiss, whose potential in retirement is revealing itself in fits and starts, and in ways entirely unpredictable to his own idea of himself — of what he has been, and what he imagines he might like to be.
If that sounds reminiscent of the Confiteor (“in what I have done; in what I have failed to do, through my fault …”), it’s no accident, but part of the literary charm of this evocative novel, which will remind some of Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” in its imperfect priest-protagonist.
Father Weiss has been a very dutiful priest, and faithful to his vows, but Taormina is shaking him from the ground up, and not just because of the volcano.
Recounting an old love (and betrayal) in the face of beautiful young attractions, his celibacy is threatened — he begins to want it to be threatened.
When opportunity comes, however, his priestly instincts overpower his desire, for the sake of what becomes “creative and godlike” love.
For all his good priestly instincts, the Jesuit Father Weiss does live up to another priestly stereotype. When a newlywed comes to him with concerns about her husband, he indulges happily in a bit of too-clever-by-half reasoning that has become stereotypical of members of the Society of Jesus.
The residents of Taormina run the gamut from the thoughtfully sophisticated to the simple and unquestioning, and they by turn prick or soothe Father Weiss’ conscience.
Having for generations been overrun by history (or Etna’s ashes), the Sicilians have become practical in their morality. In these impoverished post-war years, their survival depends on the tourism of writers, romantics and wealthy gay men with a taste for local farm boys. For them, judgment takes a back seat to getting by.
The peasants among them are as superstitious as they are devout, and not terribly interested in whether their priests are truly celibate.
Concetta, for instance, may well be the mistress of the pastor in whose rectory she works, eats and sleeps. Her unclear status is as meaningless to her neighbors as the possibility that she also may be a “strega,” a witch, with the powers of prognostication and healing.
Ultimately, this is a book about love and honesty — and the kind of honesty it sometimes takes to love.
Those with a taste for either/or Catholicism and readily redemptive outcomes may find “Ashes” difficult to like in its pointedly both/and ambiguities; its frank — but never explicit — treatment of sexuality; and its willingness to indulge in gossipy speculation, without ever going beyond or judging it.
For readers who have been waiting for a Catholic literary novel to come along and challenge (or even shock) them, however, “Ashes” may prove to be a satisfying read whose complexities remain interesting long after the conclusion has been reached.
— “Ashes” by Anthony Mancini. Tolmitch Press (2023). 278 pp., $16.
