Forlì opens its churches after seventeen months closed by the Pope

FORLÌ, Romagna, this week, 1283 AD — The churches of Forlì opened this week. For seventeen months they had been closed to the public worship of the city, since Pope Martin IV laid Forlì under interdict in March of last year. An interdict is not aimed at one man, as an excommunication is; it falls on a whole place, and a whole town is its ordinary form in these times. It is the almost complete suspension of the liturgical and sacramental life of that place. The interdict was lifted this week, and the Mass is public again.

This is the city that held out against a papal army, and whose people beat Saint Philip Benizi, prior general of the Servants of Mary, and drove him out when he came to bring them back into the Pope’s obedience. It has now come to terms.

Forlì came under the interdict because it would not come under the Pope. Romagna has been a province of the Papal State since 1278 AD. The city stands on the Montone — up in the hills the river is called the Acquacheta, and it has lost that name by the time it reaches the walls. It is the surest refuge in Romagna for Ghibelline exiles, men of the imperial side of the quarrel that runs through every city of the region. It has held out against assault after assault. Papal forces have besieged it since the summer of 1281 AD, and the army sent to take it back — papal, Angevin and French together — is commanded by the rector of Romagna, Giovanni d’Appia. Pope Martin IV added the interdict to the siege. Neither moved the city for a year and a half.

Both took a price out of it. Fires and wrecked buildings are on the record of these months, from the fighting between the factions inside the walls and, more than that, from the army outside. Whole quarters will have to be built again. Ghibelline exiles from Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Florence and Ferrara have moved into houses left empty by Forlivesi, the people of Forlì, who were sent into exile. The newcomers have set up a commune of their own inside the commune that took them in. On May 1 last year the papal and French cavalry broke into the city in a sudden massed attack. The Forlivesi, led by their captain Guido da Montefeltro, turned on them and killed them in the streets by the thousand, most of them French knights. Guido Bonatti, the astrologer, was in Montefeltro’s service in the city while it went on.

An interdict of this kind leaves the work of a city alone. What it stops is what the city does in church: public Mass and the ringing of the bells are forbidden, and a marriage may be celebrated, but privately. The baptism of children is allowed, and so is the Viaticum, the last Communion, for the dying. For the people of Forlì who had no part in the quarrel, that was seventeen months without a wedding Mass, without the bells and without Sunday Mass.

In the contrada di Campostrino stands the convent of the Servants of Mary, a house of friars in Forlì since at least 1275 AD. The head of that order came to it during the interdict. St. Philip Benizi was making a visitation of the Forlì friars, and he used the visit to urge the citizens back into the obedience of the Pope. The men of the city beat him and drove him out of the gates.

Forlì gave way in the end. It surrendered to the militias of the Church this year, and with the submission the interdict came off.

Among the young men of Forlì through all of it was Saint Peregrine Laziosi, eighteen years old, the only son of the noble Laziosi and the son of a Ghibelline leader. He had spent his youth in the political fighting between Guelphs and Ghibellines in his own city. This year he went to St. Philip Benizi, the friar the men of Forlì had thrown out, and asked him for the habit of the Servants of Mary. St. Philip agreed and received him.

In Campostrino today the friars’ church, Santa Maria dei Servi, stands on Piazza G. B. Morgagni, and the Servite community is still next door at Via Mercuriali 1. The people of Forlì call the church the basilica of San Pellegrino Laziosi. St. Peregrine’s body lies inside it, in a chapel of the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds built for him. Forlì keeps his feast on May 1, with the citron fair in the streets. Every Wednesday at five there is a prayer in the basilica for the sick, and above all for those with cancer. Greeting the people of Forlì in the Piazza della Vittoria on May 8, 1986 AD, Pope St. John Paul II named him among the city’s saints: “san Pellegrino Laziosi, tanto caro alla devozione dei Forlivesi” — St. Peregrine Laziosi, so dear to the devotion of the people of Forlì.