RORATE CÆLI: Elisabetta Sala: Henry VIII, Gender and the Teaspoon Strategy

https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2021/02/elisabetta-sala-henry-viii-gender-and.html?m=1#more

Elisabetta Sala: Henry VIII, Gender and the Teaspoon Strategy

How were two dictatorial regimes like that of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I able to separate not only the kingdom of England, but also the people, from the Church of Rome?

Just fifty years ago it was generally thought that the Anglican "Reform" which  separated England from the Church of Rome had complied with the deep yearnings of the people, who, had painfully put up with the Roman yoke, and, at heart, would always have been anti-clerical, anti-monastic, anti-papal. Today, after years of meticulous research on this subject, we know for sure that it was not like that at all: the English for the entire Middle Ages were one of the most faithful people of all to the ancient faith, and, right before the Lutheran bomb exploded, English Catholicism experienced one of it phases of maximum splendor.

The question then is: how did two dictatorial  regimes – in a certain sense "antiquated", equipped by  a lingering primitive propagandistic system, as were those of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, manage to gain the upper hand over an entire nation?  It is true that the will of the sovereign at the time was law, but, it was known that an unhappy and exasperated population could give rise to frightening uprisings like those by the peasants in France (1358), England (1381) and Germany (1524-25).  If it is true that the people did not share the religious innovations dictated from the top, and cared about the salvation of the soul more than the caprices of sovereigns, how could they have accepted the schism? How could an entire nation have allowed itself to be led where it didn't want to go, to the point of forgetting its thousand-year-old roots and actually become what it is today, the cutting edge of secularism?

 Contemporary historians seem to agree about the multiplicity of strategies adopted by the English government,  mindful of the fact that the new doctrine took at least thirty-odd years to be formulated and at least seventy-odd to be digested by the people.

Naturally the first strategy was terror and the martyrdom of dissidents. It is true, martyrdom infuses courage in ardent souls, but terrorizes the faint-hearted. There were several revolts, including one on a huge scale, but they were all bloodily suppressed. 

The second, which was perhaps even more effective, was to hit people in their wallets. Penal laws and fines for recusants did away with the Catholic resistance's aura of heroism, which had covered the blood of the martyrs, and people began thinking that perhaps the future of their children needed a circumstantial visit to the parish church where the State administered the service.   

All of this resounds today.  In these dangerous times, it is good at the very least to ask ourselves some questions. How would I react if my beliefs are outlawed? (To give a concrete example – what  if a crime of opinion is introduced?)

The 'hitting the wallets' strategy is always fundamental in wearing down the opposition and  imposing the will of a minority in power, even in a hypocritical and antiseptic time such as hours, where we think we are living in a democracy merely because we don't risk ending  up swinging from the gallows. How many of us would heroically allow ourselves to be arrested rather than retract words we retain sacrosanct?  Many without doubt.   But how many of us  would be willing to bleed out slowly, our heroism not making the headlines, by dint of poverty-inducing fines? How many of us would be willing to lose our jobs, home and goods because we have "wrong-thinking" in regard to the totalitarian system?

Let us return to our Anglicans: the third strategy, the most important, was that of establishing the Reform (/NEW SETTLEMENT) step by step, by constantly making a mockery of the opposition, as if such  little steps would not merit a decisive resistance.  Let me put it in the words of a great historian, Christopher Haigh: "… the meal was more manageable when fed in tiny morsels, and the English ate their Reformation as a recalcitrant child is fed its supper, little by little, in well-timed spoonsful – 'one for Cardinal Wolsey [a worldly prelate], one for Queen Katherine [of Aragon], one for the pope, one for the monks, one for pilgrimages…' - until the plate had been emptied and Reformation had happened"*. Now, the strategy of the spoonful, or rather, the teaspoonful, is used  in our times and the most important are the ones administered  by the schools.   

Here's how it goes:

'Let me tell you a story.  Meantime here's another  teaspoonful: get it down you -    good!  Now I'll tell you the story of A COUPLE yearning for a child but couldn't have one… Another spoonful?  OK! Swallowed that?  Now one for Law 194 ** one for law 40*** one for "rent-a- uterus", one for homophobia… Ah you don't like that very much – do you ? But now I'll tell you the story of two people who loved each other very much, so, so very much…  Ah so here's another teaspoon for 'homosexual marriage' one for adoptions by homos, one for A BOY WHO FELT HE WAS LIVING IN A GIRL'S BODY …   Ah yes – and this one: once upon a time there was a sick little boy who was very, very unhappy…  So one for child euthanasia, one for adult euthanasia, one for the abandoned, suffering old people…. Ah good …you've emptied the plate!'

 

* C. HAIGH (ed.), The English Reformation Revised, CUP 1987, p. 15.

**The Abortion Law

***In-Vitro Fertilization Law

Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana

                                          

De Mattei: The Genealogy of the Italian Communist Party on the Centenary of its foundation (January 21,1921)

De Mattei: The Genealogy of the Italian Communist Party on the Centenary of its foundation (January 21,1921)


Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
January 20, 2021


The Italian Communist Party was founded at Livorno on January 21, 1921, as a result of a split in the Socialist Party. Its principal founders were Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Palmiro Togliatti (1893-1964) and Amedeo Bordiga (1889-1970) subsequently expelled and subjected to damnatio memoriae, according to the typical internal dialectic of every Communist Party.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The Italian Communist Party was the Italian section of Komintern, the international organization founded in Moscow in 1919 with the aim of propagating the Communist Revolution in the world.

In the history of Communism, the Russian Revolution was a more important event than the publication of the Communist Party Manifesto when Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, in February 1848, launched an appeal to the proletariat of the entire world to bring down the bourgeoisie and create a "classless society".


Marx and Engels were commissioned [to write]The Communist Manifesto by the League of the Just, a secret revolutionary society and a subsidiary of The Sublime Perfect Masters created by Filippo Buonarroti and Adam Weishaupt's Illuminists of Bavaria. Among the direct precursors of Communism, Engels counts the Anabaptists, the Levellers of The English Revolution, the Illuminists of the 18th century and the Jacobins (L'evoluzione del socialismo dall'utopia alla scienza, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1958, pp. 15-17). Marx and Engels put together the legacy of these sects, but in order to achieve their goals, they heralded a new method of action, called "scientific socialism".

In the "eleventh thesis" of his comment on Feuerbach's philosophy, Marx sustains that the role of philosophers is not to interpret the world but to "transform it." (Materialismo dialettico e materialismo storico, La Scuola, Brescia 1962, pp. 81-86). This would seem to have been achieved in 1917, in Moscow, where, for the first time in history, Communism came to power and began its diffusion in the world. Stalin succeeded Lenin (after his death in 1924) eliminating Trotsky's dissidence which accused him of "betraying" the Revolution. In Italy, while Gramsci - imprisoned by Fascism - was elaborating his "philosophy of praxis" in his Quaderni dal carcere, Palmiro Togliatti, the most faithful among the Stalinists, led the Communist Party clandestinely and there after during the postwar period. With the help(even financial) of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party became the second Italian party after the Christian Democrats.

According to Gramsci, the success of the Communists was not possible in Italy without the collaboration of the Catholics. The betrayal of the "Catholic Democrats" was necessary not so much to gain power, but to keep it. "Catholic Democracy does what Communism could never do: it amalgamates, orders, vivifies and commits suicide (…) The working class is to the socialists what Kerensky was to Lenin (I popolari, in L'ordine nuovo, 1 novembre 1919). Togliatti applied Gramsci's lesson, in particular, when the election of John XXIII, and the Second Vatican Council opened by him on October 11, 1952, created an unexpected window of opportunity.

On March 7, 1963, John XXIII received in the Vatican, Alexis Adjubei - Khrushchev's son-in-law and Director of the Izvestija Agency. A few days later, Togliatti, in full election campaign, officially proposed a collaboration between Catholics and Communists (Rinascita, March 30, 1963). In the elections of April 29, The Italian Communist Party increased by a million votes, coming mainly from Catholic environments. Togliatti died in Yalta, in 1964, while the Christian Democratic Party was forming the first "centre-left" governments, with the blessing of the new Pontiff, Paul VI. The Second Vatican Council closed on December 8, 1965, not uttering a single word about Communism, although almost 500 Council Fathers had asked for its official condemnation.

In 1973, after the rise and fall of the Socialist-Communist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, the new Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984), published in the Party's magazine Rinascita, a series of Reflections on Italy after the events in Chile, wherein he put forward a proposal of "historical compromise" that would bring the Communists to the government painlessly, with the backing of the Christian Democrats. Berlinguer's main contact was Aldo Moro, who enjoyed the complete trust of Paul VI and who [subsequently] began constructing ground for a government with the Communists.

The years between 1974 and 1976 were the most successful electorally for the Italian Communist Party, and in the elections of June 21, 1976, it gained 34.4% of the votes expressed. However, in 1978, the tragic death of Aldo Moro, followed a few months later by that of Paul VI, slowed down the realization of the historical compromise, while in the Soviet Union, struck by a colossal economic crisis, Mikail Gorbachev's perestroika was being formed. In 1989, there was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union began its auto-dissolution. "The way the decomposition of the Soviet Union and accordingly its empire happened, remains mysterious" writes Francois Furet in his study on Il passato di un'illusione (Mondadori, Milano 1995, p. 354). With no bloodshed, between 1989 and 1991, the Soviet nomenclature disbanded the old company, and put itself at the head of the new one. Communism freed itself of its bureaucratic apparatus, in Russia and in the World, giving the impression that the Communist idea could have its say in new forms and modalities of action.

On February 3, 1991, also the Italian Communist Party deliberated its own disbandment, consequently promoting the constitution of the Leftist Democratic Party (PDS). On February 14, 1998, The PDS, at the end of the States General of the Left, again changed its name to Democrats of the Left (DS), a team that was, in turn, the founder of the Ulivo, created under the initiative of Romano Prodi, who finally got the Communists into the government in 1996. The Ulivo then merged into the Democratic Party (PD) founded in 2007 and today now governs.

The ideological roots of these groups and parties following one another over the last thirty years is Marxist-Leninist, refined by the teachings of Antonio Gramsci and the Catho-Communist praxis of Enrico Berlinguer, which still enjoys great popularity even among those that should be its enemies. Eugenio Scalfari, in commemorating the 35 years since Berlinguer's death, wrote that "Enrico Berlinguer had a role in Italian politics (and not only there) in some way similar to what Pope Francis is having today in the Catholic religion (and not only there). Both have followed a path of such radical reformism, producing revolutionary effects; both have been loved and respected even by their adversaries: both have the charisma that grasped reality and fostered a dream." (La Repubblica, June 9, 2019).

For Pope Francis, likewise for Berlinguer, praxis is more important than doctrine, action more than thought, the result more that the means of reaching it. In an essay on Lenin and Our Party, published in the May 1960 edition of Rinascita, Palmiro Togliatti summed up the essence of Marxist-Leninism in a quotation by Marx and Engels: "Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action".

Communism is not theory, it is revolutionary praxis, and the Revolution doesn't create but destroys. All that matters is to bring down the enemy, which is always: the family, private property, the State and the Church. Any metamorphosis, any alliance is licit. Those who collaborate in this enterprise are welcome and whatever means necessary are used to attain the goal. The genealogical research of the Italian Communist Party, helps us to understand the continuity that still exists today among its forefathers and their descendants.

Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana

Puer natus est nobis

https://spectator.org/the-biden-bergoglio-reset/

The Biden-Bergoglio Reset | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

George Neumayr

As the party of secularism, the Democrats pride themselves on keeping "religion out of politics." But they don't mind if liberal politics seeps into religion. Nor do they mind taking direction from politicized religious figures. Recall the pope's visit to Congress during the Obama-Biden administration. The Democrats were all ears, as Pope Francis delivered an address touting their favorite left-wing causes, from open borders to climate-change activism.

Both men are products of a hopelessly politicized era in the history of the Church, in which a generation of faithless bishops gave rise to a generation of faithless pols.

John F. Kennedy had promised not to let a pope influence his politics. But today's Catholic Democrats make no such vows. Indeed, Joe Biden has reversed JFK's pledge, as he brags about his political alliance with Pope Francis. In the closing days before the election, Biden has been courting the Catholic vote by aligning himself with the pope's political musings, quoting from his encyclicals, and playing up their friendship.

Where Kennedy said that the pope did "not speak" for him on political matters, Biden loudly invokes Francis in his politics. This, of course, points up an enormous and maddening irony: the same Joe Biden who throughout his career has said that he will not "impose" his faith on non-Catholics is happy to dump the pope's personal politics on them.

Many such twisted and bewildering ironies would define his administration, if he wins the presidency. He would at once preside over the most anti-Catholic presidency in American history — renewing the Obama-era harassment of the Little Sisters of the Poor and expelling Catholics from public life — while forming a globalist juggernaut with the pope on non-religious matters.

Biden takes his politics from the pope and his religion from the political zeitgeist. It all makes, should it happen, for a very combustible presidency. That it could come not against but with the Catholic vote and the support of the hierarchy only adds to the farce.

In Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's latest letter to President Trump, he warns in effect of a Biden-Bergoglio reset in global politics:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

Whatever form this reset takes, if it happens, Biden and Bergoglio can be counted on to join forces to promote it. What binds them together is not Catholicism but leftism. Both are products of a hopelessly politicized era in the history of the Church, in which a generation of faithless bishops gave rise to a generation of faithless pols. A Biden-Bergoglio partnership would seal that unholy alliance, causing both the Church and the world to spiral downward.

Just as the Church bred a destroyer in Barack Obama — the devious Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin paid for part of his training as an Alinskyite community organizer — so she bred an even worse one in Joe Biden, whose persecution of Catholics would pick up where Obama left off and intensify. A Biden presidency would obliterate the religious freedom of Catholics, driving them into the narrowest of sectarian shadows. Anyone who doubts this need only look at who Biden chose as his running mate, Kamala Harris, an anti-Catholic bigot so extreme that she considers mere membership in the Knights of Columbus a disqualification for government service.

Under the coercive edicts and decrees of the Biden administration, the Church in America would face a future either of secularist hijacking or ostracism and oblivion. All of the destructive currents within the Church would accelerate. The left's goal is to remove faith from politics while politics swallows up the faith.

In the alliance between faithless bishops and faithless pols lies a mutual mission to secularize the Church. What explains the deafening silence (and sometimes overt support) from the bishops about Biden is not just that they share his politics. They also share his dissenting theology. They, too, would like to see Church teaching dissolve. Having already surrendered most of their institutions to secularism — just look at Catholic academia, which is almost indistinguishable from its secular counterparts — they don't mind if Biden finishes them off for them. Like Obama, Biden can even expect to receive honorary doctorates from Catholic colleges while doing so.

In Pope Francis's visit to America, one can already see the pitiful character of that depleted faith. He came and conformed almost perfectly to his host's secularist expectations. In his speeches before Obama and Biden, he said nothing about their anti-Catholic policies and instead bolstered their politics. Progressives noted with glee that the only example he gave of an attack on life was not abortion but the death penalty, while conservatives sadly noted his omissions of any mention of Jesus Christ. Religion barely figured into his visit. It was the consummation of a Democratic dream: not religion in politics but politics stuffed so thoroughly into religion it became nothing more than useful propaganda.

In Biden and Pope Francis, the very alliance JFK promised to prevent may come to pass, ironically enough, but with a perverse twist — a Catholic president and pope united against America in all things except religion.

George Neumayr is author of The Biden Deception.

Replacing the WASPS - Catholicism.org

https://catholicism.org/replacing-the-wasps.html

Replacing the WASPS

Most of what we consider institutional America — its governmental, academic, cultural, and even religious — structures were created by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Of course, there were many of Dutch, German, French Huguenot, Scandinavian, and other Northern European nationalities in their makeup; moreover, although tied to them by blood and religion, such folk as the Swamp Yankees of New England and the Rednecks of the South were not really part of the magic circle. Instead, we are here talking about what passed for Aristocracy in these United States — a combination of the descendants of the earlier settlers and fighters of our first two major internal conflicts (call them revolutions or civil wars as you will) and those of the 19^th century robber barons, such as the Vanderbilts, Fords, and Rockefellers. Bear in mind also that our native gentry were far from monolithic: each major city and its hinterlands boasted their own: Boston's Brahmins, the Old Philadelphians, and the listees in the country's various Social Registers. For better or worse, they created everything from the Smithsonian Institution to the Boy Scouts of America.

It is important to bear in mind that at its best the WASP ethos was not all about cocktails at the club and yachting. There was an ethic of hard work, of being useful, and of civic-mindedness — noblesse oblige in the case of the wealthier among them. From California's San Simeon to Massachusetts' Hammond Castle, the country is dotted with the grand houses they built — some of which, as with those two examples, were intended to be museums for the edification of the general public after their owner/builders passed away. To them also, we owe the Colonial Revival Movement, beginning with the Centennial in 1876 — tied up with which were the nascent Conservation, Historic Preservation, Arts-and-Crafts, and City Beautiful movements. Even as regards their manners and etiquette, these were seen as restraining selfishness. As Richard Duffy put it in his introduction to the first edition of Emily Post's classic book on the subject, "Selfishness is at the polar remove from the worldly manners of the old school, according to which, as Dr. Pusey wrote, others were preferred to self, pain was given to no one, no one was neglected, deference was shown to the weak and the aged, and unconscious courtesy extended to all inferiors. Such was the 'beauty' of the old manners, which he felt consisted in 'acting upon Christian principle, and if in any case it became soulless, as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there, into which the real life might re-enter.'" But these natural virtues were built upon a shaky spiritual foundation, that in great degree morphed over time into our current "wokeness."

Thus it is that most of the institutions they built are caught up in masochistic seizures of self-incrimination since the Floyd death in Minneapolis. Structures of WASPery ranging from the Sierra Club to the American Antiquarian Society to the Ivy League are busy attacking the memories of their own founders and pillorying their own histories in pursuit of any taint of "systemic racism" — while ignoring their current racist attitudes of implied Black inferiority. Most distasteful of these pitiful displays, perhaps, was the support of Theodore Roosevelt's own great-grandsons for the removal of their forbear's statue from New York's American Museum of Natural history. Despite their long-term antipathy to Catholicism and Catholics, the widespread disdain of the WASP's progeny toward their ancestors is pathetic — truly painful to watch.

Back then, of course, Catholic response to the WASPs was varied. A quiet disdain married to melancholy over being superseded by them was the lot of the old colonial Catholic aristocracies in the Southwest, Louisiana, and Maryland. The bulk of Catholic Americans and their descendants, however, were post-independence immigrants. For some, "being accepted" became all important; this meant aping WASP ways as much as possible up to — and in some cases, including — outright shedding of the Faith — in a word, the Kennedy Solution. The other was to disdain WASP ways and manners, and those of our religion who imitated them — the "Jiggs and Maggie" school, if you like. But neither imitation nor ridicule could conceal the fact that the one thing Catholics were not doing was evangelising. At the very time when the Episcopalian, Presbyterian. Congregational, and other favoured WASP denominations were beginning to collapse doctrinally — and so perhaps in a more receptive mood, had our message been preached energetically — we were at first more interested in getting "one of our own" elected. Afterwards we were too busy with our own post-Vatican II implosion to worry about our own souls, let alone those of outsiders.

We ought to have kept in mind the first conversions in Rome, and the state of mind of such as Henry Adams. The first were among two classes: the slaves, to whom Catholicism gave hope and belief in the value of their difficult lives; and the old pre-Imperial nobility, whose adherence to the nearly extinct "Roman virtues" was supernaturalised from a mere clinging to worthy tradition to a preparation for the Gospel. In the period immediately preceding the coming of the Faith to Rome, one could well imagine them sharing Henry Adams' point of view regarding being superseded by pushier, more ignoble sorts: "Landed, lost, and forgotten, in the centre of this vast plain of self-content, Adams could see but one active interest, to which all others were subservient, and which absorbed the energies of some sixty million people to the exclusion of every other force, real or imaginary." Had evangelisation rather than respectability been the aim of Catholic America, folk like Ss. Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katherine Drexel, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Fr. John Thayer, and Orestes Brownson might well have been pioneers, rather than oddities.

Certainly, as the course of American Anglo-Catholicism shows, there was at least an influential element among the WASPs that came to be interested on their own in what the Church had to offer. As with that movement anywhere, this group produced some whose embrace of Sacramental Christianity led them to believe that theirs was an equal or better case to that of Rome: typical of these were such figures as Charles Chapman Grafton, who brought the Cowley Fathers to America and served as Episcopal Bishop of Wisconsin. But it led others such as Ralph Adams Cram (who actually felt the first stirrings of conversion at a Papal Mass in Rome) and T.S. Eliot to seriously desire reunion with the Catholic Church, under the Pope. That they did not convert perhaps says as much about the Church in their time and place as it does about them. In any case, in the United States as in the other parts of the Anglican Communion, the Anglo-Catholics revived such devotions as prayers for the dead and to the Blessed Sacrament and the Virgin Mary. They "Catholicised" the Anglican service into something resembling the Tridentine Mass in English, and revived religious communities among their co-religionists. As elsewhere, a network of Anglo-Catholic parishes propagated their views and practises across the country. Despite the general doctrinal wreck of Anglicanism over the past few decades, it was their revival, invention, or preservation of a unique religiosity that constituted the patrimony whose preservation Benedict XVI wished to accomplish through his creation of the Personal Ordinariates. But this patrimony was not merely to be retained as a sort of museum piece; rather, the Pope saw it as a gift to the whole Church and a means of evangelising the Anglosphere as a whole — and of which these United States are an integral part. If Anglo-Catholicism has any real future, it is within the Ordinariates.

Traditionally, the Episcopalians have acted as community sanctifiers, with such rites as Lessons and Carols, blessings of hounds, madrigal dinners, boar's head festivals, kirkin' o' tartans, and, indeed, all sorts of civic, musical, theatrical, and literary activities used to reinforce the community. Ordinariate communities in particular and Catholic parishes in general need to think about filling that role on the local level — according to circumstances. The same is true as regards nominal chaplaincies in local hereditary, veterans', and service organisations. But where the Episcopalians used these for primarily secular ends, for us they must be made means of evangelising. Moreover, we ought to emphasise, as they did for their heroes the various American Saints, Blesseds, Venerables, and Servants of God, celebrating their feasts and or memories as splendidly — and with as much civic involvement — as possible. This is particularly true of the patronal feast of the United States, the Immaculate Conception — and the various State and local patrons.

Similarly, to the Catholic laity in particular falls the task of taking up the WASP slack in areas that many of us never have given much thought to: local historical, conservation, preservation, and cultural organisations that while in and of themselves have limited goals, nevertheless serve to make the local community a better place in which to live. Again, not as an end in itself, but ultimately to evangelise — WHILE making things better.

Obviously, such a plan depends upon as many Catholics as possible — clerical and lay — putting the Faith first, above all other considerations. This seems like a tall order, the conversion of this country; but so was that of pagan Rome. Just as the Catholics converted and ultimately saved the Roman Empire as a noble idea (and often, a reality), so too would the gradual conversion of this country eventually transform our WASP-founded institutions into something far better than we can conceive of. It may be that our greatest efforts shall not succeed in the long run. But if we try our hardest to bring it about, it shall help our own personal salvation mightily. As with the old Roman nobility, those WASPs who convert redeem and baptise the work of their fathers. And who knows? Their descendants and ours may well see something wonderful arise on the soil of these United States.

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Aristocrazia dell’anima

La Chiesa cattolica
e un'Italia svanita
di Ernesto Galli della Loggia
17 ottobre 2020
È scomparsa una parte del Paese di stampo aristocratico e borghese delle cui competenze la Santa Sede in vari modi si è a lungo potuta servire

Le ennesime disavventure, chiamiamole eufemisticamente così, delle finanze vaticane mettono in luce indirettamente un fatto importante: la scomparsa di una certa Italia cattolica di stampo aristocratico e borghese delle cui competenze fino a tempi non troppo lontani la Chiesa in vari modi si è servita, e che ha servito la Chiesa e le sorti del cattolicesimo all'insegna di un forte impegno etico e di un sostanziale disinteresse personale. Aveva, quell'Italia cattolica, le sue roccaforti soprattutto nel Lombardo-Veneto e negli Stati Pontifici (nelle antiche e meno antiche famiglie dei Gallarati Scotti, dei Casati, dei Valmarana, dei Falck, così come in non pochi ambienti borghesi delle professioni e della cultura), e benché la fede legasse tradizionalmente quell'Italia alla Santa Sede, all'indomani dell'Unità — essendo predominante nelle sue file un orientamento cattolico-liberale — essa non mancò di fornire importanti servigi anche al nuovo Stato. La Democrazia cristiana di Alcide De Gasperi, ad esempio, fece ampio ricorso a non pochi dei suoi esponenti per una serie di incarichi importanti e generalmente con ottimi risultati. Vien fatto di pensare a tutto ciò quando si apprende dai giornali di come venivano abitualmente gestiti i cospicui fondi della Santa Sede da parte di prelati di ogni rango.

Tutti evidentemente digiunissimi di cose finanziarie (e alcuni senz'altro onesti, come io mi ostino a credere il cardinale Becciu), i quali per anni, come se niente fosse sono stati soliti affidare milioni e milioni a società con sede nei luoghi più sospetti, a personaggi tra i più improbabili, a banchieri di mezza tacca, a intermediari dal più che dubbio profilo, a tizi presentati da altri tizi, e così via. A una genia di figuri, insomma, che qualunque persona appena avvertita avrebbe messo alla porta all'istante guardandosi bene dall'affidargli sia pure un centesimo. Figuri che invece in Vaticano sembra che abbiano ricevuto ogni volta l'incarico di manovrare cifre da capogiro: com'è ovvio facendo regolarmente quello che qualsiasi persona ragionevole si sarebbe aspettata, e cioè che una parte di tali cifre restasse illecitamente nelle loro tasche. Che in alcuni dei mandanti in abito talare ci sia stata all'origine un'intenzione fraudolenta (affidarsi a degli imbroglioni per poter a propria volta imbrogliare e rubare) è più che possibile. Ma l'ingenuità, l'insipienza, e direi quasi la dabbenaggine nella scelta delle persone ai cui servigi rimettersi sembrano essere state così diffuse e costanti nel tempo da sfiorare l'inverosimile.
A petto di questa massa di imbroglioni di varia specie aggirantisi nei sacri palazzi come non ricordare, tanto per fare un nome la figura di un uomo come Bernardino Nogara? Ben pochi, credo, sanno chi fosse, ma proprio questo è forse il suo maggior titolo di gloria. Bernardino Nogara — proveniente da una famiglia del Comasco di ben dodici figli, di radicate tradizioni cattoliche — dopo una fortunata carriera nel mondo dell' industria e della finanza durante la quale ebbe modo anche di collaborare con Giolitti in importanti questioni di politica estera, fu colui al quale nel 1929 Pio XI conferì l'incarico con pieni poteri di riorganizzare le finanze vaticane. Che oltre comprendere l'Obolo di san Pietro proprio in quel 1929 si erano arricchite dell'astronomica cifra conferita ad esse dallo Stato italiano dopo i Patti Lateranensi. Ebbene, Nogara mise ordine, scansò pericoli, investì con oculatezza e lungimiranza, amministrò con la massima onestà, e al termine di venticinque anni di servizio lasciò la Santa Sede in condizioni di floridezza senza pari.
Nogara è solo un esempio che i fatti di questi giorni richiamano. Un esempio di quell'Italia cattolica di stampo aristocratico e borghese di cui dicevo all'inizio, la quale a livello di parrocchia come di diocesi e infine in Vaticano per lungo tempo affiancò in molti modi la Chiesa, e su cui la Chiesa sapeva di poter contare invece dei loschi sconosciuti a cui da troppo tempo si è abituata a far ricorso. Un'Italia che oggi appare scomparsa o lo è davvero. In parte perché probabilmente non è (o non si sente) più cattolica o perché i suoi figli hanno conosciuto il processo di secolarizzazione che ha conosciuto tutto il Paese. Ma in parte perché tanto al centro che alla periferia la Chiesa ha ritenuto di fare a meno di lei. Attuando una scelta dietro la quale è facile scorgere l'effetto di due processi concomitanti.
Il primo è stato l'atteggiamento diffusosi nella Chiesa dopo il Concilio. Un atteggiamento orientato comunque al rinnovamento in quanto tale, all'uscita dai vecchi schemi, al ripudio di tutte le antiche abitudini. Soprattutto volto ad allontanare da sé ogni sospetto di vicinanza al potere, di prossimità alle classi dominanti invece che agli «ultimi». Prima o poi tutto ciò che sapeva di tradizione e apparisse democraticamente ambiguo è stato così messo da parte. Non meraviglia che in questa atmosfera utilizzare i servigi di un antico nobiluomo o le competenze di un ricco professionista conosciuti per la loro fede preconciliare e la loro posizione sociale eminente abbia finito per sembrare quanto mai sconveniente e inopportuno. E infatti da allora ogni rapporto tra la Chiesa e figure sociali di questo tipo è venuto sostanzialmente meno.
Il secondo processo è stata l'internazionalizzazione del papato e insieme della Curia, avvenuto nell'ultimo mezzo secolo dopo l'elezione di Wojtyla: prodotto e accompagnato dalla diffusione nell'opinione pubblica cattolica mondiale e sempre più nello stesso ambiente papale da un tacito ma forte pregiudizio antitaliano.
L'effetto combinato di tutto ciò è stato a partire dagli anni 70 la progressiva internazionalizzazione anche della gestione delle finanze vaticane, il cui simbolo può essere considerato il ruolo ultraventennale esercitato da un uomo come il vescovo lituano-americano Paul Marcinkus. Un indirizzo, come si sa, fin dall'inizio all'insegna di legami più che sospetti con ambienti finanziari mondiali dalla grigissima reputazione quando non dediti a vere e proprie attività criminali. Tranne brevi parentesi da trent'anni tutto procede su questa strada, con il puntuale corredo di manigoldi, scandali e ruberie. La mancanza di vere competenze proprie di carattere extrareligioso, e al tempo stesso l'impossibilità di contare sulle competenze di una società civile cattolica ormai inesistente o lontana, condannano non solo la gestione finanziaria della Santa Sede ma più in generale tutti i suoi rapporti con il «secolo» a vivere pericolosamente, sempre sull'orlo della truffa o dell'illegalità o, quando va bene, della più sconfortante goffaggine.
17 ottobre 2020, 23:02 - modifica il 17 ottobre 2020 | 23:03
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