23/12/2000

Beliefs

Mario Marazziti, a 48-year-old Italian journalist, was bustling around Manhattan last weekend amid the throngs of shoppers and wide-eyed tourists. His goal, however, was not to find the perfect gift or to admire the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center or to take in a performance of the "Messiah" or even to scout out projects for the official Italian television channel, of which he is a senior manager.

He was here to help put an end to the death penalty.

On Monday, Mr. Marazziti presented Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, a petition signed by 3.2 million people calling for a moratorium on executions. The signers, from 145 countries, included Elie Wiesel; the Dalai Lama; President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic; President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia; the Most Rev. George Carey, the archbishop of Canterbury; and several high Vatican officials.

Some of those 3.2 million signatures were gathered by Amnesty International and some by Moratorium 2000, the campaign of Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote "Dead Man Walking" and also participated in the United Nations event.

But the bulk of the signatures � about 2.7 million � were gathered by the Sant'Egidio Community, an unusual movement of Roman Catholic lay people for which Mr. Marazziti is the spokesman.

Founded in 1968 and based at the Church of Sant'Egidio in the Trastevere section of Rome, the community has 30,000 members in small groups in 40 countries. The movement has grown through personal contacts; friendship is a key theme. The groups meet regularly to pray, spend time together and exemplify the Gospel in shared activities with those on society's margins.

The Sant'Egidio Community is one of a number of new lay movements that have emerged to fill gaps opened by the extensive changes in Roman Catholicism's devotional and organizational life after the Second Vatican Council.

"It's a way of being Christian for ordinary people," Mr. Marazziti said a week ago, "taking seriously the Gospel, serving the poor and trying to create bridges instead of walls."

Most of this activity is small scale, local and personal. On Wednesday evening, for instance, a Sant'Egidio group of about a dozen New Yorkers met for prayers at St. Malachy's Church on West 49th Street; about half then headed uptown to spend time reading to children with AIDS.

But in the 1980's, Sant'Egidio's bridge building also took on an international dimension. The movement's mediation led to the 1992 peace accord, now under strain, between warring factions in Mozambique.

The community has undertaken similar initiatives, with varying success, in Albania, Angola, Guatemala, Kosovo, Lebanon and Somalia and currently in Burundi. In February, Unesco will award the group this year's prize for peacemaking.

Not surprisingly, Sant'Egidio's campaign for a moratorium on capital punishment began with personal contact, correspondence with a death row inmate in Texas � a correspondence that now extends to hundreds of people awaiting execution around the world. And personal contact remains a key to the campaign. "To get 3 million signatures, you need to talk to 10 million people," Mr. Marazziti said with satisfaction.

He puts the annual number of executions at 4,000. Not long ago, he said, China alone had executed that many, a toll now reduced to about 1,500. He said Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United States are among 86 nations retaining the death penalty and accounting for the remainder.

"There are bigger problems in the world," he admitted. He spoke of millions in prisons and refugee camps and of the toll of AIDS in Africa, which the Sant'Egidio Community is hoping to reduce in another project. "But this is symbolic," he said, "a step in civilization. Once slavery and torture were seen as normal, but the modern conscience doesn't see that."

Similarly, abolishing capital punishment would ratchet up the human conscience to a new level of what is simply unacceptable, he said.

In accepting the petition, Mr. Annan seemed to agree. He acknowledged that "many still hold that the right to life can be forfeited by those who take life, just as their liberty can be abridged." It was a position, he said, "strongly held by many persons of wisdom and integrity."

But "if I may be permitted a personal view," he added, "the forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict on another, even when backed by legal process. And I believe that future generations, throughout the world, will come to agree."

In Rome, to mark the delivery of signatures to the United Nations, the Coliseum was lit up. It was the 15th time the ancient arena of bloodshed and death had been lit since Dec. 12, 1999, when Pope John Paul II joined in the death penalty moratorium, as part of the Catholic Church Jubilee Year celebration of the millennium.

A giant thumbs-up, the old Roman gesture of mercy for defeated gladiators, was projected onto the Coliseum's walls. Each lighting has celebrated a gain in the campaign, like the commutation of death sentences or the suspension of capital punishment somewhere in the world.

Mr. Marazziti is now back in Rome, with his wife, who is a researcher in preventive medicine and teaches at the University of Rome, and with their teenage son. A volunteer like all the other Sant'Egidio members, he has used up all his vacation time traveling for the death penalty moratorium.

On Christmas Eve, the Sant'Egidio Community will be distributing meals to homeless people in Rome's streets. On Christmas Day, more than 400 of Rome's homeless, poor immigrants and elderly will sit down for dinner in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Meanwhile, for the closing of the Jubilee Year, the Coliseum remains lit until Christmas. And after that? "If there were positive news," Mr. Marazziti said hopefully in a phone call from Rome, "the lighting could be revived."

Peter Steinfels