FEW FIGURES EMBODY the contradictions inherent to Catholicism more explicitly than the poet, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini; as Thomas Hardy observed, the greater the sinner the greater the saint. The Marxist/poet/homosexual/atheist was living proof of the efficacy of baptism: holy water does not wash off. If one is serious about emulating the life of Christ, then one has carte blanche to condemn hierarchy and hypocrisy, rail against institutional authority, and ultimately annoy the powerful so much that they order one’s death. If the example of the saints is instructive, then without meeting this last criterion one is not really trying.

In his lifetime, Pasolini managed to annoy almost everyone in postwar Italian society. A Marxist in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci, he was booted from the Italian Communist Party on charges of corrupting youths (a perfectly Catholic euphemism) and later condemned for his counter-­revolutionary depiction of the life of Christ. Near every movie he premiered was attacked by both fascists and communists, who were appalled by what they respectively perceived as the films’ corrosive immorality and unflattering depictions of the urban poor. In the same year he was convicted for blasphemy – Catholicism being the state religion of Italy until 1984 – the Church funded his 1964 adaptation of The Gospel According to St Matthew, included by the Vatican on its 1995 list of ‘Some Important Films’. He fell out and later reconciled with fellow filmmaker Federico Fellini, refused to marry the infatuated Maria Callas, and in the left-­wing student revolutions of 1968 sided with the police, declaring them the true heroes of the class war. It is not surprising that in 1975 he was horrifically murdered aged fifty-­three; the crime remains unsolved. In the tumult of the Years of Lead – the two decades of hyper-­partisan political unrest initiated by ’68 – it’s surprising no one did it sooner.