Posted in the library, playing around with Wikipedia. The teenager across from me huddles over a phone propped against an old tome, hoodie on, airpods in, watching anime, which, judging by the pitched-up audio, is at 2x speed.
I wander around the high-ceilinged halls and call my cousin, a new convert to Catholicism. We talk sacraments, Catholics vs Protestants, faith in the modern world.
Philly’s central library has a Parisian grandness, ornate concrete pillars face onto a busy boulevard. Tall steps lead into a gaudy entrance hall. Winter boots have dragged in a thin layer of crystallized salt and flaky ice, stomped and pressed into ashy debris that cloaks the marble-tiled floor.
—
The public computers are mobbed, for some reason only by men, old heads watch music videos, millennials are glued to YouTube shorts. Dissonant, muffled audio screeches beneath foamy headphones.
Not so many months ago, like a sacred hotbox sesh, white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel and announced our first American pope, Leo XIV. Now, a year deep in his reign, he spars with an increasingly powerful faction within the Church: the always-controversial and sometimes-disgraced Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
Even in an institution beset with accusations of archaism, cadres of outspoken reactionaries like the SSPX diagnose a Church overly malleable to modernity, manifest in a series of Church reforms fomented in the early 1960s. In a reckoning convoked by Pope John XXII and concluded by Pope Paul VI over four years, the Church council voted in favor of refreshing practices for a 20th century, hyper-rational audience: priests were asked to face the parish and speak in vernacular (prior to the referendum, clergy preached in Latin, East towards the Lord rather than the parish). God, SSPX argues, was demystified in favor of human connection and understanding. The new God is relatable, and therefore vulnerable to manipulation.
—
I lean back and look up to the rafters. Gaudy images of the engoldened Vatican and deep purple ceremonial gowns play through my head. I’m struck with a longing daydream, not for a summer in Italy, but the ambrosial wonders of the Italian market.
I fantasize about imported prosciutto, the deliciously thin pork scarred with layers of fat and the homunculus mortadella, laced with vibrant pistachios and cherry peppers, cured sausages hanging from metal rafters like Mario’s mistletoe, luminescent jars swirling with green olives and wrinkled sundried tomatoes, stacks and stacks of canned San Marzano Tomatoes ranging from 64 oz barrels to 4 oz tins like Russian Nesting Dolls, all encased in rows upon rows of fresh and dried pasta.
I think of the stale English Muffin I’ve packed to hold me between a large breakfast and large dinner, and am filled with nausea. So instead I stuff books into my overburdened messenger bag, helmet up, and head for South Philly. One headphone in, I pull up a biography about Leonardo Da Vinci. On precariously icy streets I half-listen to dispensations on the renaissance man, his illustrious melding of math and art with science and religion, life before knowledge was carved into rigid disciplines.
On South 9th, colorful stalls line the road for blocks. Steamy breath rises from men bedecked in furry winter garb hawking produce. I chain my bike to scaffolding and head for the stands. The Italian market offers the opportunity to negotiate with your food, the clinical aisles and polished produce of a grocery store made charmlessly impersonal in comparison with these open-aired awnings.
I pick up and examine plums and grapes and strawberries, looking for fruit with just the right amount of give. Tasteful blemishes pock the fruit like beauty marks. Satisfied with my selections, my fruit is lifted to a scale, a total is tallied. The even $5 price tag tells me a number was rounded, who knows whether up or down. I crumple a $5 bill into a worked hand, the brief contact the first time I’ve touched someone today, I realize.
In a world increasingly sterilized with the mechanized logic of barcodes and contactless payment, the Italian market holds onto its own logic, choreographed gestures and chitchat that baste your interactions in unspoken rules. Corporatized replicas of the old stalwart establishments of the street proliferate, but their inveterate cleanliness never quite mimic the storied dirt of their originals.
Inside a warmly lit deli I elevate my lunch and order a hoagie. A circular blade carves capicola onto an awaiting roll. The proprietor wordlessly hands me a slice to try before continuing to saw. Fresh mozzarella, red-wine vinegar, and pickled peppers join an already hefty sandwich.
I ask the deli worker about the store. He says the deli’s been in his family for three generations and points to framed photographs of a black-and-white street filled with smiles and strollers. He lives in the suburbs now, but rides in on his motorcycle. The area has changed, he says, but his family’s deli hasn’t, what we do works. Some people come searching for nostalgia, some just for groceries.
He speaks unhurriedly despite a line building up behind me. I ask him if he can point me to a fish shop and he smiles as if being reminded of an old friend. Anistasi’s, he says, there’s no place better.
I can smell it before I can see it; the briny odor floating over the block. Inside, people jockey for position in an informal line. Beneath a glass canopy sit a vast assortment of whole fish, crustaceans and crabs atop beds of ice. Behind the shopkeeper lobsters are piled into a tall tank, blue rubber bands castrating wide claws.
I make eye contact with the middle-aged woman running the show and she flashes over with a notepad. I ask for haddock. She says they ran out but have something better: hake. I’ve never heard of it and it sounds more like a slur than a tasty animal. I’m unconvinced but she sells me on it, launching into a monologue on the delicately soft fish, flakey crevices perfect for soaking up a punchy dressing of lemon and garlic.
I comply and she flags over a man with a bloodied apron to come scale and debone two petite hake. As we wait for the butchering she tells me she was just in Lebanon. She has a Lebanese niece, she says. A beautiful country. I have to go, apparently.
Two cleaned and gutted carcasses flop onto the scale and she rings me up. I’m Janet, she says, come back next week and tell me how it was. I will, I say, and I do.
The Italian Market is filled with juxtapositions, new but empty restaurants with shiny white tablecloths next to old, crumby facades lively with conversation. Am I, like a Civil War Reenactor, merely indulging in nostalgia, romanticizing my life through participation in a storied institution? The market has an easier time with this question than the Catholic Church because culinary desires haven’t changed all that drastically in 100 years; it has not yet lost sight of its primary function: fresh produce, salty meats, service with a side of banter.
The Church must contend with modern congregations not as willing to come to religion simply because it’s the preeminent social institution. Faith can no longer just be, it has to make sense. And that means letting in the potentially erosive question: why this version of the story?
Though the history they wish to return to is colored by self-serving idealism, SSPX endeavors to reassert Church authority by reinstating tradition. Implicit in their proposition is the restoration of a Church a little more alien to its parishioners. Like a magician, they seek to hide their tricks in a liturgy that is inscrutable, impersonal, and therefore mystical. In this nostalgic past clergy are cryptic and therefore indisputable.
And perhaps SSPX are right, perhaps a scriptural literacy does in fact undermine the feeling of God. Tradition offers the chance to be emotionally subservient to history, an increasingly seductive pull, as we are increasingly made to self-define.
With the sun descending I strap flashing lights to my seatpost and bike home. On each corner lie cars double-parked with guilty eyed men stuffing paper-wrapped sandwiches and creamy cannolis down their throats. I don’t know these men but recognize familiar faces, perhaps myself one day.
END