Don Camillo

 

This is an old draft, I have not found yet the final copy that was published. 

The Don Camillo books 

There are seven of them, stacked up next to my computer, with the usual blue paper band that wraps around the covers of all inter-library-loans from our library system. These books smell of dust and look well-worn; the kind you see filling multiple boxes in used book sales. The friendly librarians at our main branch are always curious about what I take home from my weekly visits—I am quite sure they have never heard of the Don Camillo books!

I read many of them in college, finding them on my parents' bookshelves, or in bookstores where I would spend my meager savings sparingly. Why would a college student during the early 1980s, in Brazil, enjoy stories about an older parish priest in the middle-of-nowhere Italy? The answer resides ultimately in the universality of the Catholic Church and the microcosm imagined by the creative, talented mind of Giovanni Guareschi. The stories may revolve around a small town in the middle-of-nowhere, and the characters are people unlikely to attract your attention, and yet the stories transcend these limitation of space and time to speak to questions of our daily life! 

An Italian artist and journalist, Giovanni Guareschi wrote the Don Camillo books during the 1950s into the 1960s. All the stories take place in the Po River valley in central Italy, in a small town immersed in millennia-old Catholic culture. Don Camillo is the town priest and protagonist, while the Communist mayor Peppone is the antagonist. (Don is a title given to priests in many places, and in some religious orders of priests such as the Benedictines, used as we would use "Father" here for our parish priests.)  Peppone, under the crust of "communism", is still a God-fearing man who brings his many children to be baptized by Don Camillo, but through the back door, of course.

The unforgettable dimension about the Dom Camillo stories reside in the humble priest's conversations with the Crucified Christ. They are present in each one of Dom Camillo stories: they are as common for Dom Camillo as our daily meals. As the problems appear and develop we find him consistently in front of the altar, conversing with Him. Invariably, His responses remind Dom Camillo of what the priest already knows and yet doesn't want to hear. (Does that remind us of something?) This simple wisdom—the wisdom of the human conscience—expressed in his books as the words from the Christ Crucified Himself is what sets these books apart. Indeed, Giovanni Guareschi, writing his own preface in many of editions, warns the readers, in a light tone, that while he apologizes for offending them on account of Don Camillo or Peppone's deeds or words, he does not do the same for the words of Christ Crucified. The reason, he writes, is that "these are the words of my own conscience". 

Each of these independent tales are decidedly dated: as a matter of fact, they can serve as both geography and history lessons. Where does the Po River run through in Italy? Who was Garibaldi, and what did he believe in? Communist leaders will parade through the pages, hailed by Peppone, at least in public, and condemned by outspoken Don Camillo. The last book, Don Camillo and the Flower Children, deals with long haired hippies—good-for-nothings in the opinion of Don Camillo. Our children likely can't relate to hippies, but they will learn something about the late last century's cultural phenomenon in Don Camillo's pages. Guareschi, in his own marvelous way, digs deep inside the heart of some of those youngsters: in one story, Don Camillo helps one by offering his rectory as a sanctuary. This offer comes with a price, and a couple pages later the reader realizes that the bald, clean-shaven, hard working teen working in the rectory is the now-reformed former hippie, feeling relieved and ready to join the armed forces. Ironically, and in a typical twist, the former hippie is the youngest of the Communist mayor's many sons! 

In another story, Don Camillo is reminded by the Christ Crucified with whom he freely converses about obedience and humility, and that only through the exercise of these virtues he will have his prayers answered. Indeed, in removing a statue of Saint Anthony as requested by another "renovating" priest and accidentally breaking it, Don Camillo discovers that the statue has been cast over a much older statue! What follows is the finding of the will of a rich man, dead for decades and openly anti-clerical, who had hidden his secret desire to have a Mass said for his soul and stashed a large sum of money as the stipend! Don Camillo then is able to purchase his own private chapel and to move to this chapel many treasures from his parish church that he didn't want to remove to begin with!  

A charming side dish of these light-reading and delightful books about the adventures of the good priest are the author's own illustrations. Most of these consist of a young angel (Don Camillo) and a young devil (Peppone). They are simple pen and ink drawings, illustrating the type of adventure the protagonists embroil themselves in each of the respective chapters. 

 There is only one website in English dedicated to Don Camillo at home.comcast.net/~doncamillo. Although not recently updated, the website has all of the information one would like to have about the author, his work, book editions and film adaptations. I am happy to inform that there were TV films made of many of the stories and that they are being released in 2008 as DVDs. In fact, during the writing of this article, I added the first two to the queue of my DVD rental mail service. More recently, there were BBC-made TV and radio adaptations as well.