The MO.CO.VA. (II Vatican Council Movement) and all the Italian Basic Christian Communities, in the 29th National Meeting of the Italian Basic Christian Communities, held in Chianciano, from the 23rd to the 25th of April 2005, titled “Community: signs of conviviality in history. Conciliar ways 40 years after the II Vatican Council”, stigmatise, with deep indignation, the persistent, defamatory, twenty-year-slander perpetrated by the Bishop Domenico Padovano (Diocese of Conversano-Monopoli, Bari, Italy), against the Priest Don Franco Ratti, founder of MO.CO.VA.; he has been accused of nervous breakdown, and his spiritual and prophetic experience has been despised and rendered ridiculous, both with the Holy See and privately with the believers.
This slander, actually, tends to destroy the character and the progressive ideas of his founder , in the eyes of unprepared believers. He has been accused of being anticatholic, and so all the secular culture and the world catholic progressism has been considered heretical, as well.
Bishop Padovano substituted the physical stakes with the psychic ones, the truth with the lie.
That is why we strongly protest against a bishop, who in the eyes of the whole diocese has been a simple officer for years.
We cry out for measures.
This press release will have wide diffusion, among Italian and foreign newspapers, secular and religious personalities, bishops and catholic centres, male and female religious orders, evangelical and Jewish circles, youth movements and political websites.
After its diffusion, it will be sent to the Congregation for the doctrine of the faith and to the Congregation of the bishops.
Monopoli (Bari-South Italy), 25th April 2005
This article is available in Italian too