The Catholic evaporation
Zuppi: “The Gospel is not truth”. The responses of the president of the CEI and the crisis of the Church in Battista Falconi's comment
At least around Christmas, there is a reflection on the fate of the Catholic Church. It is now a topic that is only talked about if there is an opportunity in the calendar, in the news, or in the restricted circles of specialists. In the general narrative, the Church is no longer newsworthy. With the Pope who arrived "from the end of the world", Catholicism has also confirmed a progressive peripherality, in the sense that it takes root above all far from Europe and the West which we once considered the planetary fulcrum.
It is inevitable to start, as a starting point, from the interview granted by Matteo Zuppi , the president of the CEI (Italian Episcopal Conference), from which we quote verbatim: “The Church is changing rapidly… It is a world that is ending. The kids get up to confirmation, then we don't see them anymore, and there's no longer really a priest to chat with… We have to combine humanism and evangelization." To the interviewer's agreeable quote, "Pupi Avati says that the Church risks not knowing how to speak about the Gospel, of being reduced to an NGO", the head of the Italian bishops responds, still literally: "The Gospel is not a distillation of truth… Not we must be afraid of contaminating the truth with life… The truth is lost like the taste of salt when it is not united with life”.
Phrases much more significant than the one on which the Corriere decides to make a headline because, in fact, linked to a news episode: "It would be divisive to impose the nativity scene with a law". The reference is to the proposal of the Brothers of Italy not to impose but to defend this tradition, where in a school it is proposed to repeal or modify it to be sensitive towards other cultures and religions. The question – with all due respect to Zuppi, the Corriere , the Fratelli d'Italia and the schools – refers to a premise from over two thousand years ago, the entry into Christianity in the Roman world. At the introduction of a principle, monotheism, which is highly divisive compared to pagan syncretism, since it also bases metaphysics on an idea of truth and error, rather than on the open comparison conducted in the classical world.
This is what is happening today too, with some accelerations that we know well: political correctness, the woke culture, the tendency to worry (in an intellectualistic way rather than with real charity) before and more about others than about us, first person plural which indicates the the identity indefectibly expressed by any territory, population, state or nation. A sort of extroverted sensitivity that does not take into account how any sign or symbol acts as the tip of the iceberg of a much more relevant factual reality. To clarify: no one imagined that insisting on the seats reserved for black passengers on a bus would lead to the revolutionary repeal of the apartheid in force in the United States until a few decades ago.
In the case of the Church there is then a further acceleration, the process of self-reform conducted without a reliable evaluation of the consequences, caused by the distance between the ecclesial hierarchies and real society. The moment a priest talks about sex, for example, he is talking about something of which he has very indirect experience. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council gave rise to a modernization that determined the very rapid dispersion of a heritage of frequency, practice, beliefs, vocations and relationships accumulated over the centuries. An unexpected misfortune that Paul VI soon became aware of, admitting in a memorable and unacknowledged speech that "the smoke of Satan" had entered the Council… We believe in something preternatural that came into the world precisely to disturb, to suffocate the fruits.
Pope Francis continues to introduce "innovations" which in substance are so minute that they do not satisfy those to whom they are addressed but which, at the level of external image, lead to splits, divisions and controversies. In this way the Catholic evaporation is not slowed down, as the statistics say, on the contrary it increases the confusion and worsens the hypothesis of a split on the conservative or traditionalist side. Wing which, however, is struggling in an unsolvable contradiction: a traditionalism that goes against Petrine primacy cuts the trunk on which it rests and too severe criticism of the reigning Pontiff undermines faith in the Pentecostal mystery, part of the more general faith in power supernatural which the Church, for believers, would be the holder of.
Ultimately, there is precisely this: the general confusion about what is true and what is not, about what matters and what is superfluous, about the transcendent and the immanent. An existential crisis that cuts across faiths, ideologies and politics, which undermines the very idea of progress, of tomorrow, of the future, of development. Mirroring the almost pathological sensitivity towards those "different from us", there is very little attention to our persecuted brothers: see the Armenians expelled from their land, in which Christmas will no longer be celebrated, the Palestinian Christians, who are also in serious difficulties, or those directly massacred in Africa and Asia.
Little of this emerges in the media, perhaps less relevant things emerge, for example Enzo Bianchi who defines the Meloni government as "great steps towards barbarism". The great ideal and operational force that concerns us most closely in a geographical and cultural sense, Islamism, is also ignored or trivially politicized. The French, for example, have a much clearer idea than we do of how the demographic and ideological strength of today's Islam aims at the prospect of a "replacement", to use a term in vogue (on this, it is unmissable to read " Submission”, the novel by Michel Houellebecq). Compared to our cousins across the Alps, we still live in a less traumatic dimension, but more attention should be paid to apparently peripheral events, such as those underway in Monfalcone. The Northern League mayor closed two Koranic places of prayer due to lack of permits, sparking a revolt to which part of the opposition gave its support, persevering in the suicidal tactic of pursuing any protester of the government and the majority who appears minimally or temporarily credible.
Pd and/or Five Star go after Muslims as well as influencers, with consequences that are sometimes very different from those desired, as demonstrated by the case of Chiara Ferragni. Balocco will pay in commercial terms for the choice of adopting her as a testimonial and probably the Democratic Party will not benefit from the past support for Fedez's wife. But that's another story.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/levaporazione-cattolica/ on Sun, 24 Dec 2023 08:29:10 +0000.