Don Macchi

Every year on 6 August, the feast of the Transfiguration and the anniversary of the death of Pope Paul VI, Don Pasquale Macchi was there in Saint Peter’s for the mass of suffrage. He noted with delight that the congregation hadn’t thinned out. Indeed, the celebration had to be transferred from the chapel in the Vatican Cellars to the Basilica; exactly to the altar of the Cathedra

Giulio Andreotti

Paul VI with his secretary Don Pasquale Macchi in the Vatican gardens

Every year on 6 August, the feast of the Transfiguration and the anniversary of the death of Pope Paul VI, Don Pasquale Macchi was there in Saint Peter’s for the mass of suffrage. He noted with delight that the congregation hadn’t thinned out. Indeed, the celebration had to be transferred from the chapel in the Vatican Cellars to the Basilica; exactly to the altar of the Cathedra. Some gaps among us old members of the Federation of Italian Catholic University Students were the result not of the fading of memory or of the August heat. One by one we return – let us hope – to Our Father’s House. The new devotion to the Merciful Jesus increases one’s hope that things won’t go badly.
Macchi came to Rome on other occasion during the year, staying with two priest friends who have gone before him: Father Carlo Cremona and Monsignor Donato De Bonis. Now they are up above together.
Don Pasquale always fostered the memory of his pope with filial affection and with great intelligence, stressing in particular his openness to contemporary art, of which the new rooms in the Vatican Museums represent the highpoint. I remember an amusing episode in that regard. Fifty years ago, when the market price of Chagall lithographs was almost negligible, I bought in Paris one of the biblical series, which stood out in my study. Gracefully Don Macchi let me understand that it would make a fine showing in the Vatican: of course. Some time later my wife, visiting the Museum (it was when some works of Manzù had been acquired), was struck by the similarity of the Chagall lithograph to... mine.

Why didn’t Macchi mention it in the book and not describe the affair even afterwards? I believe that he was afraid, while Monsignor Curoni was alive, that the investigators might force him and the Milanese chaplain to give up the name of the convict who had suggested the proposal. Does our legal system allow for the right to silence on the basis of the secret of confession? Nevertheless precisely on 9 May, as Moro was being killed, the lying intermediary was about to have a meeting that had the appearance of being conclusive

But it wasn’t alone a passion for art that drove Macchi (and Pope Montini). It was a means of exercising the evangelizing apostolate in a milieu by then almost wholly split off from the Church. Macchi also continued in Loreto and afterwards. Suffice to mention his backing of Floriano Bodini, with the two very fine statues of Paul VI at the Holy Mount of Varese and in the Nervi Hall.
Of the Macchi books, the diary detailing the dreadful weeks of the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, is of particular historical value. Almost every evening Don Pasquale came to my home so he would be able to keep the Pontiff up to date, study possible moves, cheer us mutually. There is only one omission in the book, no mention of the possibility of a ransom that the Holy See was very ready to pay. That didn’t clash – as did political negotiations with the Red Brigades – against immutable questions of principle and I encouraged him. Through the national co-ordinator of Prisons Monsignor Curoni, a Milanese chaplain transmitted the request-offer. But was he a valid intermediary? Macchi told me that they had asked him for “proof” that he really was connected. He gave it by saying that we shouldn’t take the Red Brigades communiqué of the following day seriously. It was the clamorous one announcing the death of Aldo Moro, whose dead body was said to have been thrown into the Duchessa lake near Rieti. A great uproar, immediate investigation and search: there was a dead body, but it wasn’t Moro’s. The Red Brigades were quick to declare the communiqué a falsification, almost leading to believe that it was a government manoeuvre. But everything resolved with the assassination on 9 May and the symbolic recovery of the corpse off Via delle Botteghe Oscure, home to the headquarters of the then Communist Party.

Paolo VI, with his secretary, inaugurating the Gallery of modern religious art in the Vatican Museums on 23 June 1973

From everything that has come out it seems certain that the request for ransom had not been initiated by and there had been no possibility of its being welcomed by the slaughterers of Moro and his escort. It has instead been linked to a character with a criminal record, already responsible for an attack on a security van.
Why didn’t Macchi mention it in the book and not describe the affair even afterwards? I believe that there was the fear, while Monsignor Curoni was alive, that the investigators might force him and the Milanese chaplain to give up the name of the convict who had suggested the proposal. Does our legal system allow for the right to silence on the basis of the secret of confession? Nevertheless precisely on 9 May, as Moro was being killed, the lying intermediary was about to have a meeting that had the appearance of being conclusive.
Hope that the outcome would not be tragic had been provided in those last days by the letter from Aldo in which he requested to transfer from the Christian Democrat parliamentary group to the “Mixed” group. It was part of his efforts to evade death by getting his jailers to believe the idea that alive and free he would be a fierce adversary towards us and towards the Communists.
Don Macchi’s book-chronicle is very clear on one point. When Paul VI wrote his letter to the kidnappers, begging them to release Moro without conditions, no one had suggested it to him.
How the Pope then felt the tragedy was seen in Saint John Lateran when he not only stigmatized the killers, but reproached God for not having heard his prayers.
In many affairs – certainly not comparable with this – Macchi was a faithful executor of the wishes of Paul VI. The charity of the Pope – in the widest sense of the term – was of infinite depth and scope. Don Macchi was always edified by it.