On the eve of his funeral, Friday 26th at 3pm in Miola di Pinè, we publish this text by Don Vittorio Cristelli on the role of the diocesan weekly: he wrote it in 2006 on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the newspaper’s foundation.
I directed Vita Trentina from September 1967 to May 1989 and therefore for 22 years, more than a quarter of its entire presence in the Church and in the Trentino community. Called to take the reins of the weekly by the archbishop mons. Alessandro Maria Gottardi, taking on the new task was such that it made the veins tremble at the wrists also because it was a question of succeeding the legendary mons. Giulio Delugan who had directed it for the entire twenty years of fascism, also obtaining the medal for valor of the suppression by the regime and then in the terrible years of the war and in the exciting ones of the reconstruction and establishment of autonomy in dialogue with his friend and great statesman Alcide de Gasperi.
Mine was the time of the fervent application of the Council but also of the incipient youth student protest which in the Trento of Sociology had the main mouth of volcanic eruption and the “counter-Lenten” was a lava descent which directly challenged the Church. Then came the years of lead culminating in the assassination of Aldo Moro, followed by the years of the crumbling of the DC.
On the ecclesiastical level, significant stages in a proactive sense, but also in the distancing of the “spring of the Church” of the Council, were the Conference of Rome in 1976 and that of Loreto in 1985. The memories are many enough to be able to write a volume this big, but I limit myself to recalling the weekly project that we had in mind and which, together with the journalists who gradually followed one another, we tried to realise. Also because it is precisely this approach that sparked periodic discussions up until my departure, which I prefer to ignore.
I would like to start by saying that the recurring discussions found a point of support on which to leverage the “Open Dialogue” column which Vita Trentina was the first to introduce into the local press, also giving voice to those who were called “Christians of dissent”. But the entire weekly magazine was oriented towards listening and dialogue. As I had illustrated in a long report to the diocesan pastoral council, for me the proper and original space of a diocesan weekly was that of public opinion in the local Church.
Therefore not an official, apologetic, magisterial body, but rather one of information, research, voice and mirror of the community. And therefore not conditioned by the prudence of power, of economic interest, of political ideology, but rather free and – I was saying then – simply Christian.
If we look carefully, the function of public opinion in the Church has not been acquired even today and Pius XII, certainly not a relativist Pope, had already said: “The Church is a living body and something would be missing from its life if it were lacking in public opinion, a failure whose demerit would fall on posterity and the faithful”.
For the Dominican theologian P. Chenu, there are three titles from which the need for public opinion derives: 1) the Church is a community and as such cannot exist without communication and participation; 2) the Church is in history and therefore faced with events that continually visit it with respect to the event to be the foundations of the Incarnation;
3) the Church is in the world and the world provokes and challenges the conscience of Christians.
This is how I concluded my programmatic report to the diocesan pastoral council: «If you want a newspaper that is a mirror of the community and an instrument of public opinion in the Church, it is necessary to make it capable not only of reporting on the facts and problems that the hierarchy and the official bodies, but also to record the ferment, orientations and opinions that mature in the community; to point out the testimonies that have exemplary significance and the causes that require particular attention; to elicit and record local reactions to the facts and problems emerging on a national and global scale; to grasp, in a word, the “signs of the times” and stimulate a Christian interpretation of them”.
Those who criticized us often said that a diocesan weekly had to provide certainties, to which I responded by specifying that a press organ is not an “Enchiridion symbolarum”, that is, a list of dogmas. And to those who objected that they shouldn’t be interested in certain worlds of economics and finance, I responded with the words of Msgr. Iriburren, general secretary of the International Catholic Press Union: “The information vacuum is filled with rumors and rumors are the fog of truth.”
To say that in the 22 years of my editorship we have managed to make Vita Trentina a weekly magazine suited to the needs described above would be a presumption bordering on shamelessness. However, I can assure you that we tried hard to do so.
I deliberately and dutifully use the plural, including the many journalists and correspondents who have gradually followed and whom I take this opportunity to thank.
