Metaphor for the Apocalypse

Monte Berico stands near the northern edge of the Po River Valley in the province of Veneto, Italy, not far from the foothills of the Dolomites. At four hundred and fourteen feet tall, it rises gently out of the floodplains to the north and east. On clear days, a bystander at the summit can see all the way to Padova, twenty miles away. The hill also offers a commanding view of the town of Vicenza from a lookout on its northeastern side at the Piazzale della Vittoria, a large square dedicated to the Italian victory in the First World War.

The centerpiece of the hill is the Basilica di Santa Maria di Monte Berico, one of the holiest places in Italy. The church stands on the site of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to Vincenza Pasini, a local peasant woman, in 1426. At this time, Vicenza had suffered for decades from outbreaks of the Black Death. Hearing the prayers of the townsfolk for deliverance, the Virgin appeared to Pasini and commanded her to tell her fellow citizens to build a church atop Monte Berico. Though she was well known for her piety, Pasini could not convince the authorities to do as the Virgin requested. The plague reappeared the next year, killing thousands of people in Vicenza and in the surrounding villages.

Miraculously, the Virgin re-appeared to Pasini in 1428, promising to spare the town if the people heeded her command to build a church atop Monte Berico. This time, the townsfolk listened to Pasini. The basilica was consecrated in 1435. A spring gushed forth out of the ground under the basilica during construction—a sign of God’s mercy towards the city. The Blessed Virgin kept her promise to Pasini. The plague never again reappeared in Vicenza, alone out of all the cities in Italy.

Monte Berico remains a holy site to this day. Many Italians attend daily masses there. The church bells are rung daily in thanksgiving for the deliverance of Vicenza half a millennium ago. Every year on September 8, the city observes a public holiday on the Feast of Our Lady of Monte Berico. Thousands of faithful Catholics march in procession up the hill to give thanks to God for his deliverance of Vicenza from the Black Death.

In recent times, Monte Berico has been the site of an altogether different pilgrimage: the appearance of American paratroopers for physical training. The echo of footsteps on the street leading up to the church is a constant feature of the pre-dawn gloom in Vicenza. The town now hosts the largest American military garrison in Italy. Ten thousand soldiers, most of them members of the 173rd Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), are stationed at two small bases: Caserma Del Din to the north of the city, and Caserma Carlo Ederle to the south and east, where they live and work in the shadow of a town older than the United States by many hundreds of years.

As a young infantry officer fresh out of West Point, I served at Caserma Ederle with the 1st Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, one of the two parachute infantry battalions in the 173rd Airborne. The run up Monte Berico—three miles up, three miles down—was, and is, the centerpiece of physical training in our unit. The run is a visceral reminder of the strangeness of serving overseas in the military. On Monte Berico, Americans are strangers in a strange land. The sense of foreignness is overwhelming. There are no English road signs. The cars are made differently, by companies who have never attempted to sell their wares on the American market. The buildings are built differently. They are spaced closer together than homes in all except the largest cities back home.

The view from the summit is the strangest of all. The sight of Vicenza in the morning light is breathtaking. Vicenza, rightfully, is a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage site. There are no skyscrapers to cover the horizon. The skyline is broken only by treetops, church spires, and the giant Basilica Palladio, monuments to human civilization older than the United States by many hundreds of years. Red tiles adorn the roofs of the buildings. Blue mountains lie in the distance, veiled by haze from the Adriatic and surrounded by trees and vineyards. That surreal, heart-stopping vision of a foreign land is the last thing one sees before heading back down the hill to the U.S. Army—and to the culture of war and violence and death that pervades the world of American infantrymen.

That world barely touches the world of God, of apparitions, of sacred things, that still lives on the slopes of Monte Berico. The scores of muscular, crew-cut, tattooed young men who charge up the hill every morning for physical training present a surreal contrast to the religious observances that take place later in the day. An old regulation requires paratroopers to refrain from swearing, from spitting on the stones, or from calling cadence, but the rule is generally ignored, unless the brigade commander or some other senior officer is close by. In fact, the run up Monte Berico acts as a physical purgative for some. On any given morning, after the paratroopers finish the last sprint up the hilltop, dozens of men collapse onto the stairs leading to the church, retch and vomit upon the stones, then run off down the hill, only to return and do the exact same thing next week.

The greatest sacrilege against the shrine during my time in Italy occurred on Tuesday, September 8, 2020, on the Feast of Our Lady of Monte Berico. After months of lockdowns that prohibited large gatherings, the provincial government opened the church for crowds of people to observe the festival. At the same time, the 173rd Airborne also lifted its restrictions against conducting physical training on the hill. My boss and I decided to run up Monte Berico, something we had not done since the lockdowns began in March. Scores of other soldiers made plans to do the same. Nobody connected the lifting of the restriction to the feast day. We were only vaguely aware of Italian holidays. We regarded them as an opportunity to drink (if they fell on one of our few days off) or as an obstacle to training (the Italian civilians were always sent home and most base services closed).

We set out soon after dawn. It was a hot, humid morning. Sweat poured off our backs as our feet pounded the pavement. When we reached the last straightaway to the summit of Monte Berico, we found ourselves lost in massive crowds of people. Everyone wore masks. Ambulances, police officers, and first aid workers were everywhere. The men were dressed in suits and ties. Dozens of girls carried garlands of flowers. Everyone seemed to be wearing a cross or holding a rosary. The line to the door of the church stretched out the doors onto the pavement. Groups of paratroopers weaved their way through the procession, completely unmasked, heedless of the swirling masses walking around them.

Our presence was not welcomed. As we neared the threshold of the church, someone shouted angrily in perfect English—”You shouldn’t be running up and down the mountain!” “It’s a feast day!” someone else chimed in. Gradually we realized what we had done. We stopped and drank at a water fountain, next to a posse of first responders giving C.O.V.I.D. tests to elderly parishioners, then made our way back to base with dozens of other scattered paratroopers. No one else said anything to us.

“We’re going to get in trouble for this,” my boss said as we jogged through the gates of Caserma Ederle. He was not mistaken. Later that day a message came from Brigade castigating the entire unit for daring to profane Monte Berico on an Italian holiday and forbidding anyone to run up the mountain from now on. Everyone who had gone to the hill that morning—perhaps a hundred soldiers in our battalion alone—was ordered to turn themselves in to their supervisor and receive a written counseling documenting our disrespect to the local population.

A written counseling was no laughing matter. “How were we supposed to know it was a feast day?” my boss demanded angrily. “It’s f—ing Tuesday,” we cursed while we made our way to the battalion commander’s office to confess what we had done, as if holy days only occurred on weekends or at Christmas or on New Year’s.

As it happened, no one got in trouble. The counselings never took place. In a matter of hours, the incident was forgotten, buried beneath the day-to-day minutiae of work in an Army unit in a foreign land. In October, Italy went back into a kind of half-lockdown. Religious ceremonies became a thing of the past again, even for Christmas and the other observances of Advent. The profaning of the Feast of Our Lady of Monte Berico by American paratroopers became just another footnote in the long history of Vicenza, completely forgotten even by most of the people who witnessed it.

I have often thought of that incident in the years since. At the time, I was not religious, except for a vague, residual Protestant Christianity, mixed with Catholic superstitions picked up on my travels in Europe. I recited Psalm XXIII before every parachute jump, and I sometimes prayed to Saint Michael the Archangel for a safe landing, though I rarely prayed otherwise. Not until 2021, broken down by two years of lunacy during the pandemic, did I recover my faith in God. But that was long after what happened on Monte Berico.

In 2020, I did not feel guilty for profaning the Feast. I made many excuses for myself. We did not enter the church itself. No one that I saw swore or spit or called cadence on that day. We did not wear masks, but we were not required to do so under Italian law, provided we were exercising. We did not interfere with any of the ceremonies or remain long on the mountain.

Even so, the contrast between the reverence of Italian Catholics observing their age-old rituals and the single-minded obliviousness of American paratroopers going about the business of physically training for war has long endured in my memory. For the profaning of the Feast was a window into two profoundly different worlds that collided on the peak of Monte Berico.

We often made fun of the Italians as superstitious cultists. “It’s such a Catholic f—ing country” was a comment frequently made in the barracks and in the offices of the small American bases. Two and a half years after I helped to profane the Feast of Our Lady of Monte Berico, I am not so forgiving of my younger self and my peers. The true nature of the American Empire has now been fully revealed. That crass remark about superstitious Italians encapsulates the basic difference between the world of the sacred that erupted for a moment in time to Vincenza Pasini atop Monte Berico and the cult of death promoted by the United States on Italian soil since the Second World War.

That difference takes on real significance in the village of Longare on the outskirts of Vicenza. Less than two miles away from the basilica, an even greater sacrilege against God occurred for many decades. Cut deep into the hills to the south of Monte Berico are a series of concrete bunkers secured only by a chain link fence and a small detachment of guards. Inside these bunkers, the United States stored a stockpile of nuclear-armed shells for the M109 and M110 howitzer systems for many years during the Cold War. Had the Soviet Union and the United States gone to war, the city of Vicenza—World Heritage site, jewel of Veneto, most beautiful of all the old Italian cities—would have perished in a rain of fire and brimstone. And the Basilica di Santa Maria di Monte Berico, monument to the simple faith of a peasant woman and her descendants, would have perished with it, beyond any possibility of recovery.

Nor has that danger gone away with the end of the Cold War. Thirty years after the removal of nuclear weapons from Vicenza, the threat of war between Russia and America looms large again, as the Russo-Ukrainian conflict drags on into its second year. The United States is a belligerent in all but name. Italy is also involved, having sent huge stockpiles of equipment to Ukraine under the auspices of N.A.T.O. If—when—war breaks out, nuclear weapons are poised to strike once again at this little corner of Veneto, annihilating the little church on the hill and the townsfolk who live in its shadow.

We are endlessly told that our military commitments in Europe are for the greater good, and that by stationing our troops in foreign lands, we serve the cause of global freedom against tyranny. Americans young and old are brought up to believe that our nation plays the starring role in bringing to all humanity the blessings of a new birth of freedom. At the present time, our national mythos is in the process of reinvention, to rid it of those inconvenient, accomplished white men who centuries ago transgressed against the liberal sympathies of our time. The more recent, more relevant past—especially the consequences of our victory in the Second World War and the global empire that we obtained after it—have never seriously been debated. It is simply taken as axiomatic that American military power, while sometimes mistakenly employed, always ultimately stands for the cause of justice in this world.

Ten years after I swore my oath of allegiance to enter the United States Army, I no longer believe in these words. N.A.T.O., the stationing of American troops overseas, and the endless wars of choice we have conducted since 1945 are far less an object of debate now than they were even a generation ago. The United States has spent the last twenty years engaged in a nonstop conflict in the Middle East which has killed or displaced millions of people while serving no discernible interest except to line the pockets of politicians and corporate leaders in Washington. American elites are even now preparing the country for war against China and Russia in the interests of preserving our power. In all of this, the American people have barely been consulted. Are Americans in 2023 prepared to die in the service of a global empire of freedom? Is the price of liberty for all worth the risk of nuclear annihilation for people thousands of miles away from our country’s borders? Is it our business, as strangers in their land, to make that choice for them? No one seems to know—or even care—what the answers to those questions are.

Even so, those questions remain. For me, the answers are clear. The American empire and its troops are not bearers of peace. We are a harbinger of judgment. The profaning of the Feast of our Lady of Monte Berico is not an isolated happening in a remote corner of the world, far from our homeland. It is a metaphor for the apocalypse, for the collision of time and fate and destiny with God’s wrath. “Woe to that man by whom the offense cometh,” Christ said in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. God may have rescued Vicenza from the Black Death. Will he do the same in the event of a nuclear holocaust, begun at the behest of America? That is very much an open question, a question that need only be asked because of the presence of our troops in that small town thousands of miles away from our homeland.

In the meantime, in the shrine on Monte Berico, faithful Catholics gather daily, as they have for half a millennium, imitating a peasant woman who, in simple faith, did for God what Our Lady asked of her. If there is to be any survival of the Armageddon slouching towards us, it is to be found in the example of people like her, and in the words and the rituals and the processions that commemorate the mercy of God upon those who call upon him.