Only the spirit of freedom can save us from the Chinese virus
If the coronavirus emergency has been badly managed, as in Italy, the aftermath is a climate of fear and intimidation, the idea that state control is far preferable to individual freedoms
Religious and laity compared on the post-epidemic world in the book "Questioning the coronavirus between faith and reason"
An epidemic always evokes metaphysical reflections, because it takes man away from the immediacy of daily life – therefore from the placid worldliness – and confronts him with death. The coronavirus evoked strong feelings and also values that were too easily ridiculed (think of Cirinnà's "what a life of m." Referring to the traditional family): in the face of a global challenge, fundamental ties return, from family and friends to the community one; the importance of the spirit of sacrifice returns. But if the coronavirus emergency has been badly managed, as in Italy, the aftermath is a climate of fear and intimidation, the idea that state control is far preferable to individual freedoms.
Alberto Castaldini refers to this climate in the introduction to the collective volume published by Belforte “Questioning the coronavirus between faith and reason” . Castaldini writes:
"The fear of contagion grows out of all proportion: that is the most creeping and widespread virus … Fear, when it spreads, nourishes itself, takes root and is then eradicated with difficulty, even if it is not based on real data".
The collective volume alternates reflections of exponents of the great religions (the three monotheistic, but also the Buddhist) and lay authors.
The virus pushed us to confront the eternal stone guest of human existence: death (and Scialom Bahbout in the volume refers to the precious reading of Ecclesiastes, the biblical book of the “vanitas vanitatum” ). But in the same way it must encourage us to love authentic existence, life lived to the full. The passage by Luca Bassani is interesting:
Judaism attributes an extraordinary value to life: "Choose life" (Dt 30, 19). "You will observe my precepts and live in them" (Lev 18: 5) is an imperative of the Torah. We learn that human life takes precedence over all precepts.
Discourse that given the common biblical root can be extended to Christianity itself.
However, what life is without freedom? In Italy it became clear that a sort of paternalistic, indeed maternalistic regime was being established that envelops the citizen to the point of paralyzing him and that confuses the courtly concept of "public health" with the more prosaic survival needs of a government with shortness of breath. The words of Raimondo Cubeddu are important:
Faced with this reduction of life to its biological aspect, eliminating everything that makes it worthy, all that remains is to set out on a "Venezuelan" drift made of carelessness for the survival of a viable economic system, for the fate of survivors and for the future of the younger generations. The government's perspective thus seems to be that of facilitating the transition from an already unexciting "mass noble society" (Luca Ricolfi) to a "mass citizenship income society". The basic illusion, the result of ignorance, is that a recovery will be possible (even after the capital of companies and individuals has been destroyed) without an adequate system of individual incentives and insanely relying on public debt, on "assets" …
To this we could add what in the volume – for parish charity – is not explicit, namely that the Venezuelan drift of politics, of temporal power, corresponds to a disturbing South American, Nicaraguan drift of representatives of spiritual power …
And yet, Marco Gervasoni notes:
"The movement of man towards God always follows ruptures and traumas in the community, as was the religious Renaissance in France after the French Revolution or always after the Franco-Prussian War: the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur in Paris is there to testify together with the semi-conversion of the atheist Ernest Renan. In Italy the religious revival took place after the two world wars, in particular after the second, while in Russia after the black years following the collapse of the USSR and in the USA following September 11th ”.
The great challenges of history require answers that draw from the deepest dimension of the individual, in which the sense of the Sacred also finds its place, as a perception of Totality, of the overall Design of the Universe; it is precisely for this reason that faith must not be reduced to a mere media spectacle (this is the warning that Cardinal Sarah launches in the book) and that it does not act as a repeater of the slogans prevalent in the media. Also because, as Giulio Meotti notes, the liberal- inspired media world had to witness the bonfire of its vanities. Meotti writes:
The pandemic also showed the sidereal distance between the wealthy and worldly classes and the population, the middle classes. Madonna, Cate Blanchett, Robert de Niro, Pierre Niney, Juliette Binoche… Two hundred artists and scientists signed a “manifesto” on Le Monde to ask for “a radical transformation” of our societies after Covid-19 . The end of "consumerism" invoked by those who live in luxurious lofts and villas and practice the old vice of moral narcissism.
Wanting to tie the two levels, the political and the spiritual, into a single knot, we could say that this virus that arose from the impermeable depths of a collectivist dictatorship must teach, if still needed, the value of individual freedom: of the individual who con his free enterprise raises society after a health catastrophe and of the individual who, as a conscious soul, turns to the Divine, in the manner he deems most appropriate, also reserving the right to dissent against a clerical bureaucratic class that today in a certain part (not all, as the clear intervention of Cardinal Sarah testifies) oscillates between Venezuelan slogans and "agreements" with the Chinese power.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/solo-lo-spirito-di-liberta-puo-salvarci-dal-virus-cinese/ on Sat, 29 Aug 2020 04:02:00 +0000.