Top 12 reasons I love Italians:
12. We Irish and Italians like each other. We are different. We are both Catholic. Two things matter most: blood (family) and faith (Church). You are always Catholic. You can never be un-Catholic. You can be a porn star, a mafia hitman, a fascist or a Marxist...but you are still Catholic. Every Church is your Church, every priest is your priest, every hermit is praying for you. At your death, awaiting you is Christ and his Church.
11. Italian mafia movies: De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Palminteri, Gandolfini and Liotta. Primal! Virile! Dramatic! Passionate!
10. (American) Italian food is the best! Everyone knows that!
9. Growing up, living, praying and working in urban NJ I am always around Italians. They are fascinating. They act and talk like gangsters. But many are tender, holy, meek. I eventually outgrew my adolescent timidity and conviction that Italians are tougher than myself and my kind. Actually, a lot of Irish are awfully tough. (Not me!) They are loyal and vengeful. They either hate you enough to kill you on sight or love you enough to die for you, in a NY minute.
8. Italian men are men and Italian women are women. No gay-affirmation! No gender ideology! "Patriarchy" is a good word. Camile Paglia can explain this better than me.
7. The luminous balance of the sacred and profane: the mafia boss who drives his wife to daily mass, the Italian bakery with pictures of the Sacred Heart, Francis of Assis, Sophia Loren, Padre Pio, and Claudia Cardinale.
6. The natural beauty of Italy: coastland, farms, fields, cities.
5, The History: Greeks, The Empire, Hannibal, Visigoths, Huns, the law, the architecture. You walk the streets of Rome and any cobblestone under your foot can be 2,500 years old.
4. The beauty of the Renaissance, artwork, statues, basilicas, Churches.
3. Church history: relics of Peter, Paul, virgins, martyrs, popes, mystics, hermits. I am "Roman Catholic"...not Jersey City Catholic or Orange, NJ Catholic.
2. Italians are to holiness what Kenyans are to marathons or Irish to alcoholism. 90% of stigmatists are Italian. They just are passionate, intense, inflamed with love for Christ: Francis of Assis, Catherine of Siena, Padre Pio, Maria Gioretti, Gema Galganni, and So many others. They levitate, bilocate, die incorrupt, fight demons, heal miraculously, receive locutions and apparitions, and SO much more.
1. Sophia Loren. (Full disclosure: I was only 14 years old, without defense, when I say her in El Cid. I lost my mind, broke my heart, and fell into terminal covetousness. I have never been right. At this point, my hope is that my encounter, directly with Christ, at my particular judgement and my cleansing in purgatory will set me right. Actually, it is not just Sophia. It is all Italian women. It may be a stereotype, but I don't really care: If you are Italian and female your food is from heaven, your soul is that of a virgin/martyr, your body that of a pagan earth goddess, your heart that of a Madonna. Just sayin...)
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