Each Lent a priest picked two people to stop killings

ROCCAPORENA, Umbria, 1406 AD — On the first Sunday of Lent, in the parish church at Roccaporena, the priest picked one man and one woman out of the people at the service. For the next twelve months their job was to settle the village’s quarrels. They had to do it before a quarrel turned into a killing.

The valley had its own rule about a killing. When a man was killed, his family was owed a death in return. And they did not have to kill the man who did it. Killing one of his relatives counted the same.

The job was not the priest’s idea. Cascia, a walled town on a hill two and a half miles east, governed this valley. The town was at war without a break with the towns around it. Its written laws picked out ordinary people to make peace between families at war with one another. If they could not do that, they were at least to stop the two families killing each other.

The couple who kept being picked

The priest named the same two people over and over: Antonio Lotti and his wife, Amata Ferri. The two of them went to a quarrel as soon as they heard of one. They stayed until the two sides were speaking again. Whatever Antonio and Amata decided, the village accepted it as though the decision had come from God. The valley called them the Peacemakers of Jesus Christ.

They were not lords, just a family with enough money. The only reason people in the village looked up to them was the job.

The daughter who stayed

Antonio and Amata were getting old, and they had one child. She was a daughter, Saint Rita of Cascia. St. Rita told them she wanted to enter religious life. Antonio and Amata wept and begged St. Rita not to leave them alone in their old age. She stayed.

In 1397 AD they found her a husband: Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino. He was young, he was from the valley, and he already carried weapons. Antonio and Amata wanted a man who would keep their daughter near them, and children who would keep the family from dying out. The towns of Italy were split between two parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Cascia had held with the Guelphs, the party on the Pope’s side, since 1260 AD. Paolo was a Ghibelline.

The family moved out of the village to the Mulinaccio. It was land of Paolo’s with a bigger house and a grain mill he could run himself. Around 1406 AD, on the path a short walk outside Roccaporena, he was ambushed and killed. Paolo was the son-in-law of the two people this valley picked, year after year, to stop the killing.