Pasolini died at the seaplane base in Ostia, a suburban Golgotha. His mother was not there to weep at the foot of his cross. In fact, there wasn’t any cross. There were tragedy and smirking, challenge and blood, there were the apostles who denied his name, there was the horizon with the sea – which is a kind of desert, after all – and there were low houses, huts belonging to other poor mortal fools, there may even have been a god to whom to cry: “Why hast thou forsaken me?”, but we don’t know what kind of god it was that was hanging around in the skies over Ostia on the night of 2 November 1975.

Pasolini was scandal-prone. He was constantly searching for an absolute truth to be sought as much in Christian spirituality as in the social vision of Marxism, in the pre-capitalist rural world and in the daily apocalypses in Rome’s shanty-town suburbs. He spoke of the last as one of them, as “poor as the poor”. He was a poet who bore his daily cross made of revolutionary reason and of an awareness of sin, of doubts and contradictions.

He had often turned to God (the God of the Scriptures) in his lifetime with an atheist’s prayer on the sidelines of a very human confession on the ongoing contrast between “the flesh and heaven”, the mark of a troubled interior dispute on the meaning of sin, the vexation of chastity and the sacrilege of love.

Pasolini was a secular Christ and in that capacity he faced his fate by walking the stations of a fully-fledged Via Crucis made of falls and condemnations, of warnings and of death. And so we can tell his story in fourteen stations, his own personal way of the cross, his journey towards his suburban Golgotha. We can tell of the poet and the man, of the prophet and the martyr, the human and civic parable of one of the most revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century.

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