Heavy Metal Friar

The Gods of Metal festival is the biggest metal event in Italy.  This year, the opening act was Fratello Metallo, an Italian metal band… fronted by a Capuchin friar named Brother Cesare Bonizzi.

Heavy metal is the Devil’s music right?  Put a priest up on stage and watch him get torn apart by the slobbering neck-whipping horn-fingering hordes of depraved metalheads.

Or not.  Metal has welcomed him with open arms.  This isn’t surprising, even though on the surface it doesn’t seem to make any sense.

Metal prides itself on being outsider music.  A priest singing metal isn’t going to be a standard issue clergyman: instead of condemning this form of music out of hand, which is something the clergy tend to do with heavy metal, he celebrates it.  Not just celebrates, he actively and openly participates in it.  That’s a very “metal” thing to do.

Metal is also incredibly earnest: there’s little room for irony in this music.  That guy headbanging in the corner, or walking down the street showing off a black t-shirt of a band only other metalheads will recognize, wears his heart on his sleeve.  It’s an honesty, an unselfconsciousness, that is at odds with our irony-drenched popular culture.  He doesn’t care if you don’t get it, or if you think it’s funny or stupid.  Rather than suffering from the hipster’s cynicism and mockery, he puts the onus right back on said hipster to justify his own disaffection.

I suspect a priest in his clerical garb feels much the same way.  He has an earnest and un-ironic belief in God, regardless of what the people around him think of how he looks or how he thinks.  Brother Bonizzi can back it up too: he found his calling and entered a convent at age 29, shortly afterward he went to the Ivory Coast as a missionary.  He was ordained a priest in 1983 had has been actively doing pastoral work since then.

Thus, if a priest who genuinely believes professes that belief through metal then he’s welcomed by metalheads. Sure, there are some that might not want him there – it doesn’t sound as if he’s had universal acceptance.  Anti-religious themes and occult symbolism are common in heavy metal.  But that’s done in a spirit of rebellion against the mainstream, not in a sense of genuine allegiance with The Devil.  Brother Bonizzi recognizes this: ”There are maybe two or three satanic groups, but I think it’s an act so that they sell more,” he said.

Most metalheads see Brother Bonizzi as, well, a brother.  ”Heavy metal has given me the opportunity to meet a world of people of a unique beauty and tenderness,” he said in an interview.  But the friar admitted that not everyone has welcomed him with open arms.  “About 90 per cent are very good, they accept (me), the other 10 per cent are more extreme,” he said in another interview. There are a few metalheads out there that are so caught up in their particular ideology, like the Black Metal guys, that they won’t stand the sight of a priest under any circumstance.  But they’re the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe.

Belting out metal songs in a friar’s outfit feels perfectly natural to Fratello Metallo’s unique frontman.  I think metalheads pick up on that, and respect it.  The friar might look and dress different from most headbangers, but they’re kindred spirits.