Dear Editor,
in the column “Letters to the Editor” of wednesday 4 and 11 of march, two readers serenely and politely spoke about the parental choice of Raffaele and Anna Satalino, from Monopoli, about their daughter Angelica, blessed and to be baptised in the adult age. This act belongs to me and to the Movement I founded, the MO.CO.VA. (Second Vatican Council Movement), committed for many years, in Italy and abroad, for the conciliar updating of the catholic Church to the most important problems of the postmodern man.
For this I feel involved.
I beg your pardon for the “esprit géométrique”.
When Raffaele and Anna define the baptism of a child as violence, they evidently do not use the physical and coarse idea of violence, culturally typical of the patriarchal society, but announce, in the light of our democratic and personalistic sensibility of today, that any imposition of values is violence.
The most positive revolution of the 900’s is that of the woman. Now we await the revolution of the Child. Suggested by Jesus, being way ahead of time, as Subject and Person..
The society is no longer medieval, i.e. with the same faith: it is now multichristian and multireligious. Child baptism can be imagined only in a patriarchal society, where the father decides the faith of his sons and the prince the faith of his people.
Child baptism is no longer tolerable in the name of the parents’ faith, who are, in most cases, only registered and informal christians.
The catholic Church, at the eve of the third millennium, must be able of conversion, renouncing to the multitude for a believer, to the quantity for quality, knowing that the quality produces real quantity. It has to apply to the babies a coherent spectrum of the human rights, supported by John Paul II. Including the right of not to undergo baptism, which is underestimated by the Church against its intentions.
At last we catholics have to admit, with the sincerity of the prophets, that child baptism has become the largest expedient of the System to guarantee million of official (not real) catholics. An expedient slowly and unconsciously pondered by history.
Thank you for your hospitality. Yours faithfully
Founder of the MO.CO.VA.
(Movement Second Vatican Council)
This article is available in Italian too