JUBILEE AND DECLINE

Monopoli, November 20th 1998

The Church is going to celebrate the Jubilee bringing to light all the triumphalism of religion, politics, economy and of mass media. The Evangelical spirit and style of Pope John XXIII, the authentic prophet Pope, are absent. He was a man who won hearts without any expensive missionary journey, but with modesty and wisdom of the heart, with the shining knowledge of God, with a smile arising from a spirit reconciled and harmonised by the Grace of God. A man of conciliation and not of communication and presence at all costs.

Nevertheless the foundations of this Church, as gaudy as a prostitute, are shaken by the Spirit of God and by the force of history. Against the apparent strong, unresolved problems crash like a storm: from the forced celibacy of priests to the Manichean opinion of sex, from the refusal of women-priests to the vision and the usual procedure of an imperial and dictatorial power, rather than a synod power and expanded to the so-called “laymen” (misunderstanding and ambiguous term) finally made jointly responsible.

The man of today cannot recognise himself in the last encyclical “Fides ratio”, rich of scholastic ideologies and, as always, deprived of biblical sense. So sensitive as to be vulnerable, the man of today discovers values of emotion, of intuition, of “seeing”, improving, despite this, the most clear technical and scientific rationality. He can feel Orphean fear in himself, reread the intuitions of preclassical Greece, the Greece of Orpheus and Museus, contemplate the silent ear of Eleusian misteries. Recovering his proper essence on the Thessalian leaf of the fourth century B.C.

“Who are you?”

“I’m the Son of the Earth and of the Starry sky”

The man of today is not Wojtyla’s man made of “ratio et voluntas”, adverse to the discoveries of psychoanalysis, fugitive from his own essence, made like a superstructure, just able of self-discipline and obedience, rather than listening and responsibility.

Above all in this time, love has to be considered not only as a moral principle, but first of all a metaphysical and gnoseological principle. Who loves, knows. We are all called to this superior, suprarational, sapiential, mystical, “friendly” knowledge.

The obscure and blazing Parmenides (540-470 B. C.) in the fragment number 16, quoted by Aristotle, heavenly affirms: “Knowledge produced by heat is purer and better”.

A pagan, on the anthropological point of view, can talk sublimely unlike some Popes.

Regarding the encyclical, we haven’t the right to remove, with Manichean eye, cultural tendencies produced by the modern “Soul”. That’s enough with “ex cathedra”, with presumptuousness and position of whom thinks know truth and doesn’t limit himself to the Truth, to the Gospel, to God’s message as it has been made (Francesco could say “sine glossa”) and above all lived by God’s Son.

Regarding the encyclical, we haven’t the right to remove, with Manichean eye, cultural tendencies produced by the modern “Soul”. Enough with “ex cathedra”, with presumptuousness and position of those who think to know the truth and do not limit themselves to the Truth, to the Gospel, to God’s message as it has been made (Francesco could say “sine glossa”) and above all lived by God’s Son.

We must stay beside men like Jesus, the Resurrected, on the way to Emmaus. We must offer our faith and our love disinterestedly. This adverb is decisive and determines the credibility of the church in front of men. I think of this very inspired image that Father Tonino Bello, the Catholic-Evangelical priest, attributes to the church: ”little village fountain”. A fountain that offers water without requesting anything.

We don’t need popes involved in politics and mass media that are always infallible (against every historical evidence). We don’t need star popes gathering crowds and not converting anyone (if not to the papist religion). We don’t need popes feeling uneasy with a deprived Occident, considering the possibility to build without problems and without reforms an imperialpopist and clerical church, in the Third World and in the countless Third Worlds, hungry and lacking in discernment. We don’t need popes setting up their own and others’ Catholicism on the idolatry of his own person and of his office. (Amazed, the very devote catholic prophet Luther denounced the Antichrist). I image (but with prophetic rigour) a Pope appearing on television informally, with wife and children. Announcing: “I have nothing, neither Vatican State nor Papal nunciatures. But, in return I have everything because I believe in the Gospel”. Saying, above all: “Don’t call me Holy Father because just one is the Father and just one is Holy”.

II don’t cherish false hopes. I’m aware that Wojtyla has placed wojtylian bishops and cardinals everywhere. The succession is already established. At the same time I’m inspired to declare that just a church that has reached the climax of its historical blindness, running the risk of being refused by men as a ghetto and sect, will again be alive and blazing like in its origins. The considerations by Heidegger about dusk are excellent. Even if the twilight is evidently thin, the night will shelter it in order to elaborate it into the purest and triumphant light: that of dawn. The ecclesiastic night fall, according to God’s plan, has a strangely providential, singularly saving, function. This is my hope, this is my certainty. Holy certainty.

Priest. Dr. Franco Ratti

This article is available in Italian too