In the name of the Father: the Christian root of the West
di G.Matteo V.Incisa
Just some days ago I stumbled in a colleague’s piece at an online review I cooperate with. Allegedly, it analyzed the actual relationship between the Catholic Church and the Republic of Italy - which happen to both have their ideal, historical and administrative capital city in Rome.
Even if admittedly factious – consciously misinterpreting some facts and ignoring others – such reading raised in me a bunch of perplexities. Because the article was actually well written (even if kind of pedantic). The mind elaborating those critics was aware it was writing most of them in spite of evidence and truth. In the end, that was a divertissement, a rhetorical exercise, a confounding illusion taking for granted things actually not existent. Regardless of this, general opinion – a few comments, essentially – seated aside the proposed view, openly confirming its rightness when not supporting it by remembering the usual list of crimes Church have committed in its two-millennia of history.
Let’s put it candidly: I consider myself Christian in very general way – more in the sense of a deep cultural heritage than in a strictly religious way. Churches see me, if not as a tourist, just for the annual-Christmas-event and more to say hello to annual-lost friends than for listening longwinded speeches based on improbable metaphors (after a Christmas dinner… Go figure!).
Anyhow, confuting the article’s openly-factious-arguments in the effort to propose again a ‘normalizing view’, I think necessary at first to balance the historical heritages and the actual possibilities of something effectively unique in the western side of the world: having a capital city – not even that big – which is also the seat of the major western faith. Rome.*
Since from the very beginning the charming manoeuvres of the author – capturing reader’s attention with a sort of embedding statement – start, with an incipit that, translated, would sound more or less like ‘the incompatibility among religious positions and democracy is not [yet and inexplicably] ruled by law…’.
Such an assumption shall be – democratically – rejected. Besides the appeal such a concept exercises at first out the mind of anyone, can somebody explain me how can be possible to tell someone you’re not allowed to participate to the national political debate on everything because… you’re a priest? Shall I just remember that, until not a long ago, one of the candidates to the US presidential elections was a reverend? Among the things I don’t really appreciate there is the utilitarian two-sided-way Italians often try to manage any topic. The United States of America? When comfortable to some thesis, they’re the greatest democracy in the world; when not useful anymore, they’re just a bunch of idiots that can’t understand that, apparently, there should be some limitations to their liberty of choosing their future leaders since some kind of sub-culture (perhaps inspired to a distort self-created imaginary of the same US) would impose by law the incompatibility among religious positions and democracy. A sort of first-step basis to probably add, then, that religious offices should avoid talking in public over certain subjects and to conclude, in the end, they should not mind at all of secular-matters. As if they’re not citizens. As if they’re not humans.
Of course, democracy is that system that allows some people to express this way. This said, I don’t really know if to thank the Holy Spirit or the human rationalism for that, anyhow thanks for letting democracy be that wonderful mechanism that – until it works properly – never allows these people to become majority in any country.
In support of this bitter (yet respectful) reading of my colleague’s article, his genuine surprise for the recent Time’s degrading of the Pope out from the 100 most influential people of the world. This is symptomatic of another peculiar Italian-way of seeing things with the Church of Rome: the more you see the Pope and its establishment as influential per se, the less you will be prone to concede that, for the rest of the world, the way the Pope is seen is that he might be influential only for those who want to listen to him. Corollary of this is world’s surprise for our occasional complaints over alleged ‘Church’s interferences’ with Italy’s internal affairs agenda. Normal answer to this is that it is not the Church or its representatives that need to shut their mouth up on anything, it’s just up to Republican institutions to act independently from what the various kings of faith say.
And if they’re not able because in the same city, perhaps moving the capital’s administrations somewhere else in the country could be an effective idea to be considered.
Briefly said, the medley of political and religious power is a typical element of human societies at their basic and post-basic levels (i.e. ‘Caesaropapism’). History has showed, though, that priests and sorcerers don’t work that well as perfect administrators or war heroes. Nor this was their aim, usually. Religions love to control people much more than govern or subjugate them. As long as State expands, modernizes or gets in touch with other civilizations, new challenges to this control are continuous. For the Catholic Church (the only existent for a millennium, sided by a young - and prosecuted - Islamism) the secular-issue did not emerge until the authority that preceded its born (and gradually accepted it) ceased to exist: after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, becoming itself the eldest authority in Europe, the temptation arose (and got formal with the fake ‘Contantine’s donation’), lasting with varying success until the year 1870.
Usually, where the political power is weak – or nonexistent – people looks to any other available authority worth trusting. In Rome – actually in the whole Italian peninsula and unlike France, the Austro-German Empires, Britain or even Spain – no real political authority existed until the clumsy Kingdom of Italy was born, in 1861. Would you be that surprised, then, in discovering that after 1500 years of dominance as the only ever-existing and never-changing authority the Church of Rome is still deeply rooted in the costumes and feelings of the whole country?
The European Union, the Erasmus program and the globalization are quickly leveling out gross cultural differences, shaping the minds of younger Europeans under a more uniform style. It would be deeply superficial, though, not to remember that post WWII Italy was still close to Europe more in words than in facts, being not much more that a giant countryside of superstitiously believing peasants.
These considerations allow me, then, to feel perfectly comfortable in declaring myself laical even recognizing that the Western lowest common denominator, the matrix of its modern sentiment, is its Christian root. Within the Christian world, then, the Roman Catholic Church still today represents the majority of it and anyhow is plainly recognized as ‘the Authority’ even by the other Christian Churches – directly or implicitly, since the only with a definite world-wide structure. As long as ‘the’ referral term, even for critics, is that one and that one only, this is the authority you count on for your own existence – the one you very probably originated by (and eventually will reunite with…).
On the Roman Church’s structure, another wrong assumption to invalidate is the article’s incoherent intertwine made between its democratic-deficit-regime (recalling Bruno’s condemnations or Galilei’s abjuration – as if democracy would not jail every day innocent people or hadn’t poisoned Socrates to death) and a sort of assumed egalitarianism Church is alleged to promote or represent. Aside this, article’s submissive comments focused on the outrageous ‘golden palaces’ where clerical establishment live instead of sharing the outcasts’ misery. Well, let’s try to fix this: Church and faith, prior to Lutero’s intervention, were not conceivable as anything else than strictly hierarchical: hierarchical was the medieval fight for supremacy within the Conflict of Investitures as well as hierarchical is the structure of the Christian faith. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Such vertical structure is son of the time in which it has been conceived. As in the welfare state you have the so-called social-security-cushions to moderate pure meritocracy and capitalism, in the medieval Church you have major and minor virtues, mercy and compassion to mitigate the inevitable differences that separate castes. Our soul might be equal to that one of anyone else, but for God’s sake no one has ever said we had all to be equal in our real lives. Not even in the Soviet Empire. The idea should be to alleviate and enhance poor’s conditions, not to downgrade to misery in order to better understand them.
Almost natural comes, then, the answer to another critic on the ‘interreligious dialogue’ sabotage Pope Benedict would allegedly operate. All the monotheist religions, from the whole Christian family to Judaism and Islamism, consider themselves connected but superior to the others. I do actually not find anything strange in that, otherwise they would not be monotheistic religions. It might be just my personal view, yet the ‘interreligious dialogue’ is a fictitious relativistic concession to modern times, something unconceivable per se in the DNA of these religions. Brutally said, it is possible to dialogue with those completely different from you, trying to find some matching points and pray together, but why to chat with somebody you want to reunify with or absorb, since pray’s wording is actually the same already? That’s not having a dialogue, it’s lying.
Last assumption to be straightened is the one that, the other way rounding the previous reasoning, sees the nowadays Roman Catholic Church as a ‘minority’, and would like it to be treated consequently. Well, allow me to ask: in respect to what? It Italy the 90 per cent of the population or so keeps defining itself as Catholic, and in that not-that-small four-sided piece of the world that goes from Moscow to Vancouver to Buenos Aires to Athens the 90 percent of the population is Christian (not considering important parts of Africa or Australia, etc.). Among all Christian beliefs, Rome’s Bishop always has been recognized of a sort of ‘primacy’ as the successor of Saint Peter (theological scuffles where on what this should imply in terms of concrete powers in relations to the other pontiffs).
Indeed, the idea of ‘equal treatment’ – natural son of modern times – shall be counterbalanced with the principle of representation – thanks to which, for instance, political parties share available media-time in proportion of their concrete representation. Let’s put it like this: I am definitely not a fan of the ‘Vatican-minute’ our main TV-news provider (the TG1 on RaiUno) daily grants to the Roman Church’s apparatus, yet I am surely not willing to sacrifice on the altar of the ‘equal treatment’ other single-minutes for Jewish, Muslims or Are-Krishna communities (and no, I really don’t feel to be anti-Semite or whatever kind of racist and intolerant adjective may come up to your mind).
On the other side, it should also be noted that ‘to protect the rights of minorities’ means to extend rights already of common use to the major part of society and yet not conceded to some nucleuses of it, because of popular or politic will. Democratically (and politically) speaking, decision is here whether to extend Church’s privileges (beside the Vatican-news-minute – a quenched-to-be practice) to the other creeds, not to retreat them in order to set back a supposed equal treatment among all faiths. As before, we don’t have to be all poor to be equal. In the end, it’s a political decision, the fact it has not been enforced yet does not necessarily mean we live under a tyrannical regime that does not respect diversity. Moreover, I believe it is way too early to ask such to a country who defined Catholicism as the State Religion until just 17 years ago.
To conclude, a thought I would like to share with the Catholic reader. As known, Catholicism is not the most modern-friendly faith. To be honest, no faith likes changes, yet Rome proved itself quite reluctant even in considering the eventual existence of most of those occurred in history (for the first couple of centuries at least). Such attitude is also connected to the ‘papal infallibility’, an inglorious and antihistorical dogma put in paper in 1870 but at all times existed and enforced. One of the result of this concept is that, formally speaking, any actual critic to any action of the Pope, its establishment or the Christian faith in general for as it is structured and approved by the Pope, transforms you immediately in a protestant. This is a point Catholic people often forget (or simply not consider) and the Church of course does not stress, probably conscious of the unlimited negative potential such principle can cause in modern times.
But now tell me: are you sure to be 100% Catholic?
*There is another city that has an even more peculiar position: Jerusalem. Capital of two states (or at least that is what is supposed to be soon), holy city for three religions. Though, a speculation on it is not possible under the aspects of the present thesis, not being Jerusalem considerable as a ‘western’ city.
G. Matteo V. Incisa @ July 3, 2008
Caro Matteo,
complimenti per il tuo articolo, che contiene diversi utili spunti di riflessione su uno degli argomenti più complessi della storia italiana ed occidentale. Proprio oggi mi sono imbattuto in un articolo se El País nel quale si afferma che “Los privilegios políticos, sociales, simbólicos y económicos de los que disfruta la Iglesia católica en un país supuestamente aconfesional como España no tienen parangón en el mundo democrático” (http://www.elpais.com/articulo/opinion/excepcion/religiosa/espanola/elpepuopi/20080704elpepiopi_11/Tes). Una opinione abbastanza divertente, se non fosse per quel seccante “mundo democrático” del tutto in linea con le ultime dichiarazione del governo spagnolo nei confronti di Roma.
Per quanto riguarda il tema del dialogo interreligioso, che è stato già puntualmente introdotto da Margherita Sacerdoti sulle pagine elettroniche di questa testata, vorrei semplicemente sottolineare le differenze tra questo pontificato e quello precedente. Giovanni Paolo II aveva inteso il dialogo con le altre religioni come un confronto da giocare su tutti i campi, da quello culturale a quello dogmatico che, come giustamente sottolinei tu, è l’aspetto più complesso. Il papa polacco aveva scelto la strada del confronto diretto - un militare potrebbe chiamarla la strategia “del comando avanzato” - mandando i suoi preti in zone dove il conflitto interreligioso era più forte. Una strategia rischiosa - l’assassinio di Padre Santoro a Trabzon non è che un esempio - ma che stava già dando diversi successi. In particolare la religione cattolica si stava facendo conoscere per quelle qualità che anche gli appartenenti ad altre religioni non possono che ammirare: la carità, la generosità, l’amore per il prossimo ed il perdono. Valori che non necessariamente convinceranno i fedeli di altre religioni a convertirsi al cattolicesimo, ma che tuttavia sono in grado di creare qualla base di fiducia che potrebbe forse evitare che le previsioni di Huntington riguardo ai conflitti di faglia continuino ad avverarsi.
In questo senso la decisione di Benedetto XVI di valorizzare la natura europea del cattolicesimo e di sottolineare l’aspetto dogmatico del culto rischia, a mio avviso, di allontanare ancora di più la Chiesa dagli “hearts and minds” di chi cattolico non è.
Sono contento che sia arrivato e si sia manifestato il salvatore della patria.
Ovviamente mi presento, sono Sergio Panzarella, l’autore dell’articolo da lei tanto duramente criticato, ma incredibilmente poco sfatato.
Se togliamo le ampie parti del suo articolo in cui si affretta e si affanna a definire, peraltro in maniera abbastanza presuntuosa, la mia lettura faziosa, partigiana, volutamente capziosa, finanche pretestuosa, devo ammettere che lei ha detto ben poco sulla tesi centrale e molto su temi collaterali, altrettanto importanti, quali la situazione americana, il presunto livellamento insito nel processo di globalizzazione, la struttura della Chiesa ecc, ecc…
Mi dispiace altresì che lei abbia iniziato, fraintendendo (volutamente forse) la mia prima frase. In quanto proprio quella era una battuta assolutamente ironica, poco pregnante con il tema, se vuole, riferita alla nostra situazione politica, infatti dicendo: “L’incompatibilità tra monoteismi e democrazia non è sancita dalla legge, a differenza di quella prevista tra alcune cariche “economiche” e pubblici uffici, ma quello è un altro discorso”, mi riferivo più o meno esplicitamente alla situazione dell’onorevole Silvio Berlusconi e alla sua, più che presunta, netta incompatibilità con la carica di presidente del consiglio, ma ribadisco quello è un altro discorso. Non rileggerò una seconda volta il suo articolo, quindi non lo snocciolerò punto per punto come ha fatto lei, molto gentilmente con il mio, definendolo pedante, quando questo procedimento da lei messo in pratica assume caratteri di pedanteria forse un pò più marcati.
Le devo inoltre riconoscere una grande abilità di ri-interpretazione e di macchinazione delle parti del testo, anche di quelle che probabilmente non ha considerato, a sostegno della sua lettura; procedimento non molto corretto dal punto di vista “deontologico” e informativo.
Nessun prete deve mantenere il silenzio, per il semplice fatto di essere prete, nessun bavaglio alla chiesa, riproponendo alcune parole del mio articolo che lei (forse ancora volutamente) ha trascurato, quella che è la velata speranza dell’articolo è una democratizzazione del ruolo della Chiesa all’interno del dibattito democratico, mi scusi la ripetizione, che è utile proprio per ribadire la tesi: una Chiesa con questo potere è in contrasto con la democrazia, ma la Chiesa è solo un esempio di istituzione – organizzazione – azienda – persona, che per la loro stessa natura e caratterizzazione rendono difficile, ostacolano, la dinamica democratica. Se lei difende il potere della Chiesa appellandosi ad un presunto principio di rappresentatività, devo essere io a rimproverarla di pretestuosità. Lei si sente rappresentato da questa Chiesa?
Ancora nessuno ha esaltato la democrazia come forma migliore dei mondi, quindi non riporti le colpe o le disfunzioni della stessa, perché tutti ne siamo abbastanza consapevoli (giustizia, strapotere della maggioranza, dei partiti…). Siamo un pò meno consapevoli delle disfunzioni e colpe della Chiesa, quelle più attuali ad esempio, che lei dimentica di citare, funzionamento dell’otto per mille, immotivati sgravi fiscali, apertura? Quindi può far bene, sempre nella dinamica democratica, ricordarle una volta, nella tempesta mediatica di missionari-santi e preti-salvatori.
Non ho messo in dubbio la radice cristiana della cultura europea, quindi poteva risparmiarsi tutta quella manfrina sulle percentuali di cristiano-cattolici italiani, europei, mondiali; per di più: sono tutti realmente e “deontologicamente” cristiano-cattolici? Sono dei “buoni” cristiano-cattolici, secondo i Testi? Se anche dopo questa scrematura ci fossero ancora miliardi e non milioni di cristiani o cristiano-cattolici qualcuno vieta il distacco o l’opposizione contro questo massimo comun denominatore? Forse sì. Come le testimonianze storiche da me riportate, che ancora una volta (opportunisticamente?) lei ha ignorato, dimostrano. Non ho il tempo di scrivere un ulteriore articolo in questa sede, ma le chiederei di spiegarmi meglio quali sono le premesse sbagliate, false o ancora pretestuose dalle quali parte il mio articolo, il mio ragionamento, la mia tesi. Quando riuscirà a scrivermi, rimuovendo valutazioni di sorta e testo sottolineato, che peraltro, mi ricordano, non è consono a questo giornale, le risponderò inviandole la bozza del mio articolo di risposta.
Mi scuso con i lettori di non poter discutere tutte le provocazioni-temi sollevati, questioni di tempo, esami imminenti. Al più presto mi riesporrò sui temi.
Saluti.