How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again. As to the mozo, a Sulaco man—his wife paid for some masses, and the poor four-footed beast, being without sin, had been probably permitted to die; but the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure. They are now rich and hungry and thirsty—a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and been released. (I.1.4)
Here, we get the tale of two gringos and one mozo who went looking for treasure. The mozo, a Christian, was allowed to die when things went south, whereas the gringos (who ostensibly weren't Christian) weren't. This moment sets us up for the way Christianity/Catholicism is threaded into the background of the novel without ever really taking center stage.
Quote #2
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were his divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women, preserving in these matters a lofty and silent attitude. (I.3.3)
This passage refers to Giorgio Viola's attitude about religion. It seems that he's more interested in worshiping political principles and figures than anything else. The way he views the relative importance of religion and politics kind of mimics the way the book treats these topics.
Quote #3
Though he disliked priests, and would not put his foot inside a church for anything, he believed in God. Were not the proclamations against tyrants addressed to the peoples in the name of God and liberty? "God for men—religions for women," he muttered sometimes. In Sicily, an Englishman who had turned up in Palermo after its evacuation by the army of the king, had given him a Bible in Italian—the publication of the British and Foreign Bible Society, bound in a dark leather cover. In periods of political adversity, in the pauses of silence when the revolutionists issued no proclamations, Giorgio earned his living with the first work that came to hand—as sailor, as dock labourer on the quays of Genoa, once as a hand on a farm in the hills above Spezzia—and in his spare time he studied the thick volume. He carried it with him into battles. Now it was his only reading, and in order not to be deprived of it (the print was small) he had consented to accept the present of a pair of silver-mounted spectacles from Señora Emilia Gould, the wife of the Englishman who managed the silver mine in the mountains three leagues from the town. She was the only Englishwoman in Sulaco. (I.4.47)
While he's still not super-interested in organized religion, Giorgio Viola seems to believe in God and think this belief can fuel the holiest thing around: political commitments. What do you make of his reference to Mrs. Gould and her Englishness at the end of this series of thoughts about religion, though?