By John L. Allen Jr.

ROME (Crux) — By sheer coincidence, Pope Francis spent last Sunday in southern Italy, in the city of Matera, which has long been a symbol of the poverty and neglect that’s enveloped Italia meridionale, meaning the southern part of the country since the theoretical unification of the nation in 1870.

Sunday was also the day Italians went to the polls to elect a new government, and it’s entirely possible that the pope’s southern hosts that day may just have identified the “Pope Francis” party in national affairs.

At the big-picture level, the main international headline from Sunday’s results has been the sweeping victory for post-fascist politician Giorgia Meloni and her conservative “Brothers of Italy” party, making Italy the latest instance of a broader European trend towards nationalist right-wing populism.

Although Pope Francis and his Vatican team have kept a deliberately low profile, presumably, he isn’t thrilled with the result since the rise of this sort of populism has been a recurrent source of anxiety for the pontiff.

That outcome, however, was widely foreseen. To the extent there was a surprise, it was an unexpected comeback for Italy’s “Five Star Movement,” which was founded in 2009 as an insurgent anti-establishment progressive force but went into government in 2018 and quickly lost much of its cachet. Although the movement lost half of its national vote compared to four years ago, politics is about perception as much as reality.

Heading into Sunday’s vote, the Five Stars, now led by former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, were forecast at around 10% nationally. Instead, they garnered a robust 16%, right on the heels of the 19% claimed by the establishment Democratic Party, making them the third-largest political party in the country.

Most strikingly, the Five Star Movement emerged as the de facto new governing party in the Italian south. They were the top vote-getters in each of the seven southern provinces of Basilicata (where Matera is located), Campania, Calabria, Molise, Puglia, Sardinia, and Sicily.

Those regions were the component parts of the “Kingdom of Two Sicilies” that ruled southern Italy prior to unification with a strongly Catholic monarchy. It was where Pope Pius IX, for example, took refuge in 1848 when he was driven out of Rome by a brief-lived revolution, and to this day, levels of religious practice across the south, including weekly Mass attendance, remain higher than in the more secularized north.

By all accounts, what propelled the Five Star Movement to its southern victory was support for the so-called reddito di cittadinanza, or “citizen’s income,” basically a minimum income law. At the moment, a low-income family with three kids could qualify for up to 10,000 tax-free Euro a year, depending on eligibility requirements.

The reditto di cittadinanza was originally proposed by the Five Star Movement and adopted when it was in power in 2019. Conte made defending the minimum income the party’s signature issue in the elections and given disproportionately high poverty rates in the south, it’s understandable why that position played well.

To the extent a “Pope Francis vote” was revealed in these elections, one can assemble a strong case that the Five Stars are its logical carriers.

To begin with, Pope Francis is a pope of the peripheries, and in Italy, that’s the south. He’s also a strong supporter of progressive popular movements, which is how the Five Stars were born. He supports precisely the sort of state intervention in the economy on behalf of the poor that the reditto di cittadinanza represents.

For bonus points, Conte himself is a practicing Catholic and a devotee of Padre Pio, whose uncle was a Capuchin friar and a former aide to the famed mystic and healer at his shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo — which, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, is located in the Apulia region in southern Italy.

For still additional reinforcement, consider that the Five Star Movement was formally launched by ex-comic Beppe Grillo on Oct. 4, 2009, on the Feast of St. Francis. Grillo himself, seizing upon a standard reference to Francis of Assisi as the “madman of God,” famously declared in 2016 that “Pope Francis is one of us.”

In fact, polls show that practicing Catholics, meaning those who go to Mass at least once a week, constitute somewhere between 16% and 20% of the Five Star Movement, which is fairly high by the standards of Italian political parties.

To be sure, not all is sweetness and light in terms of the relationship between the Five Stars and the Italian Church.

Like any predominantly leftist party, there are stiffly secularist and even anti-clerical elements within the Five Stars. There are also few ethical themes in Italian politics, from euthanasia to same-sex marriage, where the official positions of the party and those of the leadership of the Church aren’t in strong contrast.

Yet one of the major themes of last Sunday’s vote, noted by commentators of all political stripes, was the relative absence of avowedly Catholic voices in the debate; one noted pundit actually referred to the “disappearance” of the Church from political life.

Only time will tell if that obituary was premature or if what the elections actually did was to identify, and actually to reward, the lone plausible repository of something akin to a Pope Francis agenda.

Should the Five Stars take a few steps in that direction, Italy could become a very interesting laboratory experiment indeed.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — One cannot love and worship the Eucharist without compassion for the poor and marginalized, Pope Francis said at a Mass concluding Italy’s eucharistic congress.

“Let us recognize that the Eucharist is the prophecy of a new world, it is the presence of Jesus who asks us to dedicate ourselves to an effective conversion,” which includes the conversion from indifference to compassion, from waste to sharing, from selfishness to love and from individualism to fraternity, he said in his homily Sept. 25.

The pope concelebrated the Mass at an outdoor stadium in the southern Italian city of Matera, which was host to Italy’s 27th National Eucharistic Congress Sept. 22-25.

Rain, thunder and lightning storms forced the pope to travel by airplane and car rather than by helicopter from the Vatican.

In his homily, the pope reflected on the day’s Gospel reading (Lk 16:19-31), in which Jesus tells the parable about the nameless rich man who “dined sumptuously each day” and ignored the poor man, Lazarus, “who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps.”

When Lazarus died, “he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham,” however, when the rich man died, he was sent to “the netherworld, where he was in torment,” according to the Gospel reading.

Pope Francis said, “It is painful to see that this parable” is still alive today with so many “injustices, inequalities, the unequal distribution of the earth’s resources, the abuse of the powerful against the weak, the indifference to the cry of the poor, the abyss we dig every day creating marginalization.”

All of this, he said, “cannot leave us indifferent.”

The parable talks about the abyss or great chasm that the rich man dug between him and Lazarus when they were alive, so now, “in eternal life, that gulf remains,” the pope said.

One’s eternal destination is determined by one’s earthly life, he said. “If we dig a chasm now,” separating oneself from others, then “we dig our own grave for later; if we raise walls against our brothers and sisters now, we remain imprisoned in loneliness and death later.”

The Eucharist offers a “permanent challenge” to adore and worship God, not oneself, the pope said, and “to put him at the heart” of everything.

“Only the Lord is God, and everything else is a gift of his love,” he said.

“If we worship ourselves, we die, asphyxiated inside our tiny ego; if we worship the riches of this world, they take possession of us and enslave us; if we worship the god of appearance and are inebriated in wastefulness, sooner or later life is going to ask us (to pay) the bill,” Pope Francis said.

“Instead,” he said, “when we adore the Lord Jesus present in the Eucharist, we receive a new way of looking at our lives as well: I am not the things I possess and the successes I am able to achieve; the value of my life does not depend on how much I can show off nor does it diminish when I go through failures and setbacks.”

“Every one of us is a child who is loved” and blessed by God, “who wanted to clothe me with beauty and wants me free from all enslavement,” he said. Those who worship God are free and are slaves to no one, he added.

The pope asked people to rediscover the prayer of adoration and to pray for a church that is “eucharistic, made up of women and men who break themselves like bread for all those who gnaw on loneliness and poverty, for those who are hungry for tenderness and compassion, for those whose lives are crumbling because the good leaven of hope has been lacking.”

The ideal, he said, is “a church that kneels before the Eucharist and worships with awe the Lord present in the bread, but which also knows how to bend down with compassion and tenderness before the wounds of those who suffer” and to become the “bread of hope and joy for all.”

“For there is no true eucharistic worship without compassion for the many ‘Lazaruses’ who walk beside us even today,” he said.

“While we are hungry for love and hope or are broken by the trials and sufferings of life, Jesus becomes food that feeds us and heals us,” he said, and while injustice and discrimination against the poor continue, “Jesus gives us the bread of sharing and sends us out every day as apostles of fraternity, justice and peace.”

After the Mass, Pope Francis went to the Archdiocese of Matera’s new Mensa della Fraternità, a soup kitchen and social center for the poor and the elderly. The pope greeted the staff and blessed the new structure, which was completed as a project in conjunction with the eucharistic congress.