Pacifics but not pacifists

The infernal rosary of Kosovo (pauper’s graves, crematorium, torture chambers) has confirmed the rightness and the rigour of my opinion, already anti-pacifist. In the edition of the 1st of May, “Ultime Notizie” (last news) head of “Avvenimenti”, (the most read journal in Rome, Modena, Reggio Emilia) published my discourse opposed to the whole pacifist chorus: Acli, Scout, “Abele” Group, Pax Christi, Blessed Peace maker, Catholic Action students. They all follow Wojtyla’s position often in a manner that seems to be interested and courtly. Personally, I have a high opinion of Papal office, but the theological and anthropological bounds need to be clear and attained to the directions of the highest theology. No man is God and no one is an omniscient man.

A lot of anti-pacifist bishops preferred not to speak because they feared Rome. We are in a typical situation. Everyone must obey Rome always and anyway. Its theological, ethic, political opinions are equivalent to dogmas.

If Karol Wojtyla, about the Kosovo emergency, had sustained “the humanitarian intervention”, like for Bosnia, the same catholic forces would have been easily interventionist. The servility and the adulation for every pope is the most serious cancer of the Catholic Church. There are a lot of Catholics who believe in this strange hierarchy of values: first the Pope and the Madonna, after, perhaps, Jesus Christ, and then God (Whom, moreover, no sanctuary or religious feast is addressed to).

Fabio Santolini’s article reports my essential distinction between peaceful men and pacifists. Peaceful man cherishes feelings of peace, pacifist man considers peace an absolute ideology, which he sacrifices justice to. For example: I personally could never kill a man. But if a paedophilic is about to kill a baby, in spite of myself and my pacifist principles, I kill the paedophilic if it’s necessary.

No principle is absolute, not even that of peace. Our absolute is only God. Undoubtedly, you should have some principles and follow them, but you have not to became their slave. Man is always the target. He is not only spirit, that’s to say universality, but also flesh, so Circumstance and situations. It is always Man, in his complexity, the concrete and true rule of authentic ethics, which always have two lungs: the one of principles, the other of things. So ethics are similar to man, defined union of the brain and heart, a many sided prism by Remigio Ferretti, word shamanist. In more philosophical terms, Man is a union of universality, a multiplicity of things and abstractness of principles, which is necessary and unavoidable.

Pure principles cause fanaticism. The pure reality (very impure!) produces eternal pragmatists. The summary principles-reality produces the priests of humanity, in the most radical and extensive meaning of the word.

Jesus in his action shows this ethic dialectic and dialectic ethic. Man of principles and exceptions, at the same time, according to Oscar Wilde ‘s suited definition. On one hand, he declares the indissolubility of marriage ; on the other hand, he considers the moderate divorce and opposes the careless divorce of his time. The sceptical reader can verify it in the 19th chapter of Matthew ‘s gospel, verse number 9. The actuality of Jesus is wisely made silent by catechesis and by catechism, often reactionary for ethics, although rightly conservatory for dogmatism.

We, as Christians, are called to imitate God, who became man and arrived in the flesh and blood of history and in the chronicle from a dimension of abstraction. God’s only dogma is Love. Our faith must become more and more radical up to becoming mysticism and contemplation, a tasty and almost tactile experience of God’s Love .Only the Contemplative, those who put heart and eyes in God’s abysses and winding ravines, will obtain the world and men’s hearts, like the Myths of the Gospel.

Christianity of the third millennium will not play on the huge crowds, tragically remembered, on power and political pressures, but on the smiles and laughter and courage of prophetic and contemplative Christians. They act on reality and in history only after they have breathed the air of the divine peaks. They are inspired in their intelligence by God’s very musical Truth. They can give historical judgements inspired by the Holy Light. They exercise politics bravely, following their Teacher’s example, in Spirit’s leading light.

Jesus proposes the fresh figure of the Infant to His apostles and to His church, who are upright and politicians. Whose essence is not Power, but Love. In this meaning the Infant becomes the paradigm of all Gospel, that is the Song of Songs of Love in all its forms and exigencies, up to the death as pure gift of himself. Love, principle of all principles, source of the same rationality of saints, superior to the same faith . We are saved by means of faith, we are completed by means of love.

We are purified by means of faith, we are glorified by means of love. The first Christians in the name of love (for men’s sake) avoided weapons; Joan of Arc, the legendary girl of Orleans, in the name of love (for France), took up arms against English aggressors. Milosevic had to be stopped in the name of love for the people of Serbia and Kosovo, in the name of love for European and universal peace. Am I a pro-American? No, I am not; I have simply felt and judged in the Spirit, anticipating the judgement of history.

Thomas Moore in “In the cloister world “, a little precious book, defines a bright parable.

At the beginning of dusk (the most magic and visionary hour, according to esoterism) a very innocent pilgrim was suddenly in front of a beautiful medieval abbey, where he saw some mason-monks (angels?). But he was amazed when he realised that the monks were destroying the abbey. The abbot, who directed the work, explained to the incredulous pilgrim the holy reason: ” we are destroying the abbey because it blocks the view of dawn, which is rising”.

Dawn is our task as Christians of today and tomorrow. The passion of a prophetic and no more medieval church. The gift of the intercession of Angels to men and inhabitant of Monopoli of the year 2000.

Priest Dr. Franco Ratti

This article is available in Italian too