Don Giovanni, Lorenzo Da Ponte, and the Unforgivable Sin

Don Giovanni confronts the statue of Il Commendatore at the climax of the eponymous opera.

During Lent, I usually attempt to limit my consumption of secular entertainment and shift over to works with more overt Catholic themes. With this in mind, I noticed a video pop up on my YouTube feed of a work that had long been familiar to me, but that I had never troubled myself to watch in its entirety. 

This was a production of Mozart’s great opera, Don Giovanni. 

Full disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of opera generally, select Gilbert and Sullivan works notwithstanding. Some of the extended Prima Donna arias can really get under my skin.

In the case of Don Giovanni, however, I was willing to put those prejudices aside. 

But wait. How can an opera full of humorous scenes about a complete profligate womanizing scoundrel and his many romantic conquests be Catholic? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I decided on the 1954 production by Salzburger Festspiele, with Cesare Siepi in the lead role, Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting. When I set up the video to watch with my kids, I asked them whether they thought the opera would be a tragedy or a comedy based on Mozart’s music. Listening to the first few minutes of the overture, they thought it sounded very much like a tragedy. But then, inexplicably, the music transitions into something light-hearted. So by the time the singing began, my teens and 20-somethings weren’t really sure which direction things were going to go.

I suspect that’s what Mozart intended. As the opera progresses, we see Don Giovanni, a nobleman living in very Catholic 17th century Spain, behaving like a heathen, particularly with regard to the fair sex. He attempts rape. He murders the victim’s father. He denounces, insults, betrays and abandons his wife, Donna Elvira. He attempts to seduce a bride on her wedding day. His behavior is so awful that a posse of his victims and their protectors seeks to hunt him down and kill him—without success.

Mozart's accompanying score seems to make light of the main character's crimes. Similarly, the librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte—an ordained Catholic priest whose eventful life sounds more like that of Don Giovanni than Don Bosco — approaches the above litany of evil deeds with a certain casual humor. Indeed, one of the most famous scenes features Don Giovanni’s lackey, the buffoonish Leporello, reciting the numbers of women his rakish padrone had seduced in various countries, finishing his recitation with a count of the Spanish ladies, declaring emphatically: “mille e tre!” — 1,003.

But even though Don Giovanni's sins against Donna Elvira are awful and grave, she is of a mind to forgive her wayward husband. She wishes that he would reform his life and come back to her. She feels genuine pity for him, but her hopes are continually disappointed. Even in the last scene, she comes to plead with him to reform himself, saying: “I want that you change your life!”  

But Don Giovanni cannot, for life to him are wine, feasting, and seduction. He mocks Elvira and she departs in tearful frustration, but not before seeing something terrifying at Don Giovanni’s door.

In a previous scene, Don Giovanni and Leporello had jokingly invited the funerary statue of one of the nobleman’s victims, the slain Commendatore, to visit them for supper. At the base of the statue had been inscribed: “Of the wicked man who bereaved me of life, I wait here for revenge.” To everyone’s shock, the statue of the Commendatore has now arrived at Don Giovanni’s door to sup. 

But strangely, the animated statue has not come to strike down Don Giovanni himself—but to give him a choice, a final chance. The statue offers an invitation to Don Giovanni: Will he sup with him? Despite Leporello’s urging against it, Don Giovanni will not succumb to fear. Indeed, it has never been said of him that he was afraid. He is too proud. He will accept the statue’s invitation. 

But when he grasps the statue’s hand and feels his life ebbing away, even then Don Giovanni is too proud to repent. “Repent!” the statue commands three times. Three times, Don Giovanni says “No!” But this finally, is too much. Whereas his myriad of previous grave sins would have been forgiven, Don Giovanni is now guilty of the worst sin. The ultimate sin. The unforgivable sin. 

Final impenitence. 

There can be only one path from this point forward. The statues cries: “There is no more time!” Immediately, flames appear. Ghastly creatures appear. Demonic beings appear. Don Giovanni is seized and brought to hell amidst a Mozartian blast of music in the suitably terrifying key of D minor. 

It is worth considering that both Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte were Catholics, though certainly imperfect ones. In Da Ponte’s case, he was a fallen priest who, at the time he wrote the libretto for Don Giovanni, had fathered several children out of wedlock. Mozart himself, though devoutly Catholic in many areas of his life, was also a Free Mason.

Both da Ponte and Mozart would have been very familiar with the teaching of the Church on final impenitence. This teaching is drawn from the early Church Fathers who considered final impenitence to be the sin against the Holy Spirit mentioned by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

“Therefore I say to you: Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but the blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven. And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, nor in the world to come.” [Matthew 12:31-32]

Saint Augustine of Hippo summarizes the teaching as follows:

“For by the Holy Spirit, by whom the people of God are gathered together into one, is the unclean spirit who is divided against himself cast out. Against this gratuitous gift, against this grace of God, does the impenitent heart speak. This impenitence then is the blasphemy of the Spirit, which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.….But this impenitence or impenitent heart may not be pronounced upon, as long as a man lives in the flesh.” [Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 21 on the New Testament, Chapters 19-21]

Don Giovanni, in his final act, final minutes and seconds on the stage, steadfastly refuses to repent, even when he feels his own dissolution at hand. Is it his love of pleasurable sins that drives him to this point? No, it is not. It is only his pride. For truly it is written: “Pride goeth before destruction.”  [Proverbs 16:18]

Portrait of Lorenzo Da Ponte as an elderly
man in America by Samuel Morse. From
the frontispiece of the 1929 edition
of his Memoirs. 

As a somewhat ironic point of emphasis, let’s revisit the strange meandering life of Don Giovanni’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, in light of the above teaching. 

Da Ponte would eventually leave Europe and settle in America with his wife, Nancy Grahl, in 1805. He spent the remaining 30-odd years of his life on a variety of ventures, from opening a bookstore, writing poetry, and building an opera house in New York City, to serving as a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. He wrote an extensive memoir of his life, the 1929 edition of which includes the following note at the end:

“Early in 1831, Da P. had sent some of his poems and a letter [to his one-time academic colleague, Monsignor Jacopo Monico, who was at this time, Patriarch of Venice]; and the Patriarch had replied with great deference, expressing, among other good wishes, the hope that Da P. ‘might someday settle his affairs that his last moments should not be embittered by any trace of remorse.’ Da P. now sent the Patriarch the “Sonnets to Ann” with assurances that ‘the holy counsel and Christian good wishes’ of that ‘foremost pillar of the portals of the Church of Christ,’ ‘had produced in his soul the effects desired by such a charitable heart.' That was why, seven years later, sensing the approach of death, he felt free to summon the Rev. John MacCloskey, future Bishop of Albany, to his bedside that he might make confession and receive absolution at the hands of the Church.” [Memoirs of Lorenzo da Ponte, p. 491]

So it seems that the librettist of Don Giovanni eventually proved himself a better Christian gentleman than his own rakish character. 

When presented with the command: “Pentiti!” he responded, “Sì!” 

Was Constantine a Sincere Christian? ~ In his own words: The Oration of Constantine to the Saints

At 43 feet in height, the replica of the Colossus of Constantine in Rome is truly impressive.

Most visitors to Rome over the years have marveled at the famous fragments of the Colossus of Constantine. Largely destroyed and dismantled in antiquity, this massive work of marble, wood and bronze once stood in the Basilica of Maxentius. Significant chunks of the Colossus are now located in a courtyard at the Capitoline Museum in Rome where my wife and I visited them on our honeymoon a few decades back. 

In 2024, a magnificent replica of the Colossus was erected nearby in the garden behind the Capitoline Museum. While the sheer size of the work has drawn considerable attention, the fact that it does not display any obvious Christian iconography and, indeed, seems to portray the emperor as Zeus-like, has led some folks to assume that the replica is evidence that Constantine's Christianity was somehow insincere. 

My wife with Constantine's
tremendous head in 2000.

How close this modern replica resembles the original is a matter of conjecture, as its creators exercised some significant interpretive license with regard to the design. This matter is dealt with in considerable detail in an excellent post on the NumisForms site entitled: Designing a Colossus. So I'll not get into much detail on that question here. Suffice it to say that the decision by the Factum Foundation to portray Constantine as Zeus was based on "conjecture, maybe not even particularly well informed conjecture."

The point of this post is to contradict the facile confirmation bias that many experience when seeing this version of the Colossus. The most common immediate reaction is: "See? Constantine was a pagan and portrayed himself as such." 

Well, sure. Up through about AD 306 Constantine was a pagan. Beyond that, he reportedly even had a vision of Apollo a few years before his more famous vision of the Cross. But after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine began the process of becoming a Christian. It is not known when exactly he became a catechumen, but after about AD 312 when he and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, his affinity for Christianity becomes increasingly evident.

By AD 324, following his defeat of Licinius, it is absolutely evident that Constantine is a Christian. Anyone who doubts that can read the words he himself spoke in his Oration to the Saints. The text of this lecture was preserved by the bishop Eusebius Pamphilus who knew Constantine personally and also wrote his well-known ancient biography, Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine. The entire oration is a profession of Constantine's faith and a defense of Christianity. In it, you will find the emperor praying emphatically:

"Do thou, O Christ, Savior of mankind, be present to aid me in my hallowed task! Direct the words which celebrate your virtues, and instruct me worthily to sound your praises." [Oration to the Saints, Chapter 11]

You will also find Constantine presenting evidence for the truth of Christianity, not only from the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, but also from pagans such as the Erythrean sibyl and from the Roman poet, Virgil, author of the foundational epic of Rome, the Aeneid. 

The emperor goes on to condemn those pagans who have persecuted Christians, even going so far as to ridicule pagan beliefs, saying: 

"What, then, have you gained by these atrocious deeds, most impious of men? And what was the cause of your insane fury? You will say, doubtless, these acts of yours were done in honor of the gods. What gods are these?...You will allege, perhaps, the customs of your ancestors and the opinion of mankind in general, as the cause of this conduct. I grant the fact: for those customs are very like the acts themselves, and proceed from the self-same source of folly. You thought, it may be, that some special power resided in images formed and fashioned by human art; and hence your reverence, and diligent care lest they should be defiled: those mighty and highly exalted gods, thus dependent on the care of men!" 

[Oration to the Saints, Chapter 22]

Finally, in an echo of his contemporary and sometime confidant, Lactantius, Constantine gives a brief catalog of the dreadful ends suffered by those emperors who persecuted Christians most severely: 

"To you, Decius, I now appeal, who has trampled with insult on the labors of the righteous: to you, the hater of the Church, the punisher of those who lived a holy life: what is now your condition after death? How hard and wretched your present circumstances! Nay, the interval before your death gave proof enough of your miserable fate, when overthrown with all your army on the plains of Scythia, you exposed the vaunted power of Rome to the contempt of the Goths.

You, too, Valerian, who manifested the same spirit of cruelty towards the servants of God, hast afforded an example of righteous judgment. A captive in the enemies' hands, led in chains while yet arrayed in the purple and imperial attire, and at last your skin stripped from you, and preserved by command of Sapor the Persian king, you have left a perpetual trophy of your calamity. 

And thou, Aurelian, fierce perpetrator of every wrong, how signal was your fall, when, in the midst of your wild career in Thrace, you were slain on the public highway, and filled the furrows of the road with your impious blood!" [Oration to the Saints, Chapter 24]

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Of course, he could not leave out his contemporary and one-time mentor/captor, Diocletian. In this passage, Constantine provides his own witness of Diocletian's vicious character and unstable psyche, attributes which are echoed by Lactantius in his own work, On the Deaths of the Persecutors: 

"Diocletian, however, after the display of relentless cruelty as a persecutor, evinced a consciousness of his own guilt and owing to the affliction of a disordered mind, endured the confinement of a mean and separate dwelling. What then, did he gain by his active hostility against our God? Simply this I believe, that he passed the residue of his life in continual dread of the lightning's stroke. Nicomedia attests the fact; eyewitnesses, of whom I myself am one, declare it. The palace, and the emperor's private chamber were destroyed, consumed by lightning, devoured by the fire of heaven. Men of understanding hearts had indeed predicted the issue of such conduct; for they could not keep silence, nor conceal their grief at such unworthy deeds; but boldly and openly expressed their feeling, saying one to another: What madness is this? And what an insolent abuse of power, that man should dare to fight against God; should deliberately insult the most holy and just of all religions; and plan, without the slightest provocation, the destruction of so great a multitude of righteous persons?" [Oration to the Saints, Chapter 25]

Interestingly, Lactantius also reports fire destroying parts of the imperial palace in Nicomedia on two separate occasions 15 days apart. He claims that the fires were set by Diocletian's junior emperor, Galerius, in an effort to frame the Christians for the deeds. [see On the Deaths of the Persecutors, Chapter 14]

Constantine wrapped up his oration with a ringing profession of his faith in Jesus, urging his hearers to pray fervently to Christ:

"It becomes all pious persons to render thanks to the Savior of all, first for our own individual security, and then for the happy posture of public affairs: at the same time intreating the favor of Christ with holy prayers and constant supplications, that he would continue to us our present blessings. For he is the invincible ally and protector of the righteous: he is the supreme judge of all things, the prince of immorality, the Giver of everlasting life." [Oration to the Saints, Chapter 26]

After reading the entirety of Constantine's oration, it becomes impossible to maintain the position that the first Roman emperor to tolerate Christianity formally in law did not truly believe Christian doctrine or remained partially pagan to the end of his life. 

Although he was unbaptized until shortly before his death, Constantine was clearly a believing Christian catechumen with a zeal for bearing witness to the faith even publicly with his own lips.  

Catherine Gandeaktena ~ From Savagery to Slavery to Sanctity

Catherine Gandeanktena and her husband Francis Tonsahoten,
as taken from the cover of Catherine of the Erie. 

Practically everyone has heard of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawk nation and the first formally canonized indigenous American saint. 

Almost no one has heard of Catherine Gandeaktena. 

But a new historical novel, Catherine of the Erie by Claudio R. Salvucci aims to change that. 

Though almost unknown among Catholics today, Catherine Gandeaktena's role was an important one. Indeed, if it were not for Catherine, the world may never have known about Saint Kateri. Catherine of the Erie successfully puts this devout, humble woman and her harrowing life story on the literary map. 

Newly published!
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Here is some historical background which will help the reader appreciate Catherine Gandeaktena's story as presented in this novel.

Catherine was a woman of the Erie nation. Like most of the other Iroquoian-speaking nations—among them the Hurons, Neutrals, Susquehannocks, and the Iroquois themselves—the Eries were a confederacy of tribes organized around clan alliances and living in semi-settled long-house villages. In the traditional scheme of things prior to European contact, the Eries were every bit as powerful as their neighbors, numbering perhaps in the tens of thousands. At the peak of their strength, they could field an army of 3-4,000 warriors. 

In the 1640s when Catherine was born, the Erie nation was situated on the south shore of the Great Lake that bears their name even to this day. They were alternately known as the Nation of the Cat, as explained in the Jesuit Relation of 1655, "because of the prodigious number of Wildcats in their country, two or three times as large as our domestic Cats, but of a handsome and valuable fur." [from the Jesuit Relations as quoted in Iroquois Wars II, p. 108]

By 1650s, however, the political and military balance of power in the Eastern Woodlands began to shift rapidly. For one thing, the Iroquois, whose location in present-day central New York put them in close proximity to Dutch and English settlers, were able to acquire European weapons. With easier access to muskets and ammunition, the Iroquois soon became a terror to their neighbors. By 1649, the powerful Huron nation had been invaded, conquered, and scattered by the Iroquois. A few years later, the same fate befell the Neutrals. Over the next twenty years, the Iroquois would wear down and defeat even the powerful Susquehannocks in what is today central Pennsylvania. 

The Eries knew that they war with the Iroquois was inevitable. But they were a warlike people themselves and many of their young warriors welcomed the conflict. Describing the Cats and their fighting prowess, Fr. Le Mercier writes:

"The Cat Nation is very populous, having been reinforced by some Hurons, who scattered in all directions when their country was laid waste, and who now have stirred up this war which is filling the Iroquois with alarm. Two thousand men are reckoned upon, well skilled in war, although they have no firearms. Notwithstanding this, they fight like Frenchmen, bravely sustaining the first discharge of the Iroquois, who are armed with our muskets, and then falling upon them with a hailstorm of poisoned arrows, which they discharge eight or ten times before a musket can be reloaded." [from the Jesuit Relations as quoted in Iroquois Wars II, p. 108]

In 1653, open warfare broke out between the Iroquois and the Eries. The Cats seemed to be the aggressors in the initial encounters as described by Fr. Mercier: 

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"They [the Iroquois] informed us that a fresh war had broken out against them, and thrown them all into a state of alarm: that the Ehriehronnons [Eries] were arming against them....They informed us that a village of Sonnontoehronnon Iroquois [the Seneca—one of the original five nations of the Iroquois confederacy] had been already taken and set on fire at their first approach; that that same nation had pursued one of their own armies which was returning victorious from the direction of the great lake of the Hurons, and that an entire company of eighty picked men, which formed the rear-guard, had been completely cut to pieces; that one of their greatest Captains, Annenraes by name, had been captured and led away captive by some skirmishers of that Nation." [from the Jesuit Relations as quoted in Iroquois Wars II, p. 108]

It was the capture of this Annenraes which would ultimately bring doom upon the Eries. Reports of his torture and death lit a fire under the Iroquois confederacy who mobilized all their warriors and invaded the Erie homeland with guns blazing. The end result was the utter annihilation of the Cats. Once their fortifications were breached, the Iroquois attacked and slaughtered without mercy: 

"Their boldness so astonished the besieged that, being already at the end of their munitions of war, with which, especially with powder, they had been but poorly provided, they resolved to flee. This was their ruin. For, after most of the first fugitives had been killed, the others were surrounded by the Onnontaguehronnons [the Onnondaga—one of the original five nations of the Iroquois confederacy], who entered the fort and there wrought such carnage among the women and children, that blood was knee-deep in certain places." [from the Jesuit Relations as quoted in Iroquois Wars II, p. 127]

During this period of horrendous cruelty and demonic vice (which I have previously chronicled here, here, and here among other places), it seems almost miraculous that such a gentle creature could emerge who, by her modesty, humility, and aversion to violence, appeared almost pre-disposed to Christian holiness. 

Yet that was Catherine Gandeaktena. 

Having been raised within a simmering cauldron of rage that featured regular displays of horrific torture and cannibalism, somehow Gandeaktena managed to remain aloof from all such excesses of wickedness. When her nation fell, Gandeaktena was made a slave and brought in cruel bondage to the villages of the Iroquois. Yet even as a helpless slave, Gandeaktena was able to win over others by her natural virtues. This description of her early life was recorded by the Jesuit fathers:

"God having permitted that Gentaienton, a village of the Chat nation, should be taken and sacked by the Iroquois, Gandeaktena, which is the name of the one of whom we are speaking, was taken into slavery together with her mother and brought to Onniout [a village of the Oneida nation of the Iroquois]. There the misfortune of her country proved the blessing of our captive. And her slavery was the cause of her preparing herself to receive through baptism the liberty of the children of God. The innocency in which she had lived, even before intending to become a Christian, seemed to have prepared her to receive this grace; and it is an astonishing fact that, in the midst of the extreme corruption of the Iroquois, she was able, before being illumined by the light of the Gospel, to keep herself from participating in their debaucheries, although she was their slave." [Jesuit Relation of 1679]  

Later, Catherine Gandeaktena would become one of the founders of the Mission at La Prairie near present-day Montreal. This Mission would become a magnet attracting Christian converts among the nearby native tribes. So well-known would this haven become that the saying, "I am going to La Prairie," came to mean among the natives: "I am giving up polygamy and drunkenness." 

Catherine died a holy death surrounded by the devout prayers of her husband, Francis Tonsahoten, and friends in AD 1673. 

Four years later, in the autumn of 1677, a young Indian girl named Kateri Tekakwitha would arrive at the mission Catherine had helped to found which, by this time, had moved a short distance away and become a safe haven for converts to Christianity among the nations. It was here that Kateri's faith and devotion would grow, thrive, and achieve full flower. As told by Fr. Pierre Cholonec, her spiritual director and biographer: 

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"[W]hat edified her exceedingly was the piety of all the converts who composed this numerous mission. Above all, she was struck with seeing men become so different from what they were when they lived in their own country. She compared their exemplary life with the licentious course they had been accustomed to lead, and recognizing the hand of God in so extraordinary a change, she ceaselessly thanked Him for having conducted her into this land of blessings." [Kateri Tekakwitha: The Iroquois Saint, page 30]

If you enjoyed reading this brief article about these heroic women of the wilderness, I encourage you to check out Catherine of the Erie. The novel brilliantly captures the life of Catherine and spirit of these harsh times, and has the advantage of being written by an author who really knows his stuff. Mr. Salvucci not only appreciates and illuminates the Catholic aspects of the story, but is also well versed in the history, folk-lore and languages of the Eastern Woodland tribes. In fact, several of the quotes above come from his work as co-editor of two volumes on the Iroquois Wars. And the frequent appearance of Iroquoian words and phrases throughout the novel is the product of his work as editor of a series of early Native American vocabularies and word lists.

Catherine of the Erie is a relatively short novel (about 160 pages) and is suitable for teens. If your young reader is particularly sensitive, be aware that there are some pretty intense scenes of warfare, as well as a dream sequence which is a little scary.