Those covered in the article that appeared on the front page of this newspaper on Wednesday, signed by the professor. Agatino Cariola (“The weight of words, from the Vatican to Caltanissetta”), are two different “events”, as the author of that interesting piece appropriately warns. In any case, he proves to be truly able to seize the opportunity from one to critically review the other.
Regarding the first – the now well-known equivocal expression used by the Pope during a meeting with the CEI on the criteria of discernment to be applied in seminaries – it would be out of place to formulate final sentences: we do not have in detail the sentences which formed the “private” context of the infamous word revealed not by chance by a tabloid web magazine like Dagospia, we don’t even know the tone with which the Pope pronounced it and, on the other hand, we have his timely and heartfelt apologies, asked of the people and associations that have expressed it feel offended. If anything, we can agree that it is an anthropological-cultural question, with significant linguistic and communicative implications, but whose peculiarly biblical-theological implications are often lost sight of in our late-modern culture.
I want to say that the topic of homosexuality, or non-binary gender identities, should not be debated – at least by Christian observers – only by placing itself in dialogical harmony with current culture, but also by maintaining hermeneutic continuity with the biblical message, starting from Genesis “male and female God created them”.
The biblical description of God’s creative act makes man and woman a living merism, that is, a totality held together in a posture of relational reciprocity. That archetypal face to face frontally configures the interpersonal relationship between man and woman, giving it a specifically agapic and – ultimately – Trinitarian creaturely character (in the divine Agape, the Father stands face to face with his Son and this spiritual frontality of theirs constitutes them as one “one thing”, we read later in the Gospel of John). How much and what coherence with all this should exist (and I ask this not rhetorically, both from a homo and heterosexual perspective) in the exercise of an ecclesial ministry such as that of priests, which also serves to remember precisely such a biblical message?
Regarding the issue of the bishop of Nisse, however, we have the exact sequence of his words, we know the “public” context, we can even recover – in the audio-visual recording placed online – the tone with which those words were uttered. What matters most is that we can and must underline that it is an ecclesiological question: that is to say that what is at stake is the vision of the Church that the bishop has and intends to realize. An issue that is much less socially and media-scandalous than the other, but much more decisive for ecclesial life.
What, therefore, is there in common between the “faggotness” clumsily called into question by the Pope and the masterful presumption of the bishop of Nisse which negatively impressed Cariola and not a few listeners of those strange declarations on the paradoxical right to beat a bride because of what love would you have for her?
The first, in reality, is a word which, pronounced by a high-ranking ecclesiastic who discusses with other ecclesiastics, does not necessarily have the same meaning that it can register in the varied common speech, that of films, newspapers and vulgar insults. that drunks – resistant to political correctness – exchange when they argue on the street or in the bar. I believe that that word, which sounds very ugly and particularly strident on the lips of a Pope, stigmatizes – when it occurs in a discussion like the one held behind closed doors by the Pope with the Italian bishops – the hysterical tendency to gang up, to subtly entrench oneself in lobbies, protecting themselves from all censorship and discipline, becoming members of a faction through which one can illegally be arbiter in interpreting the rules and regulations that apply to everyone except those who manage to maneuver power.
That term, not at all beautiful, in the ecclesiastical context expresses not so much a judgment on a way of experiencing sexuality but also and above all the unbearable clerical arrogance of those who manage to command over others only by virtue of their own unctuousness, their own mellifluity, their their own servility, their own courtliness. And I use this last term deliberately, considering it a probable synonym of the word that escaped the Pope’s lips: courtiership, by its nature, is the self-interested and chameleon-like attitude of acclimating oneself in the court of a “monarch”, even at the cost of selling off one’s one’s conscience, one’s intelligence, one’s energies, one’s passions (except those for lace, lace and tricorns).
If, reasoning in this way, I hit the mark and guess the exact meaning of the term that involuntarily resonated in the unhappy situation in which the Pope was the protagonist, then it is easy to understand the multiple echoes that that evidently cacophonous expression rebounds in the mentality and behavior of those who claims to own a diocese and, in it, all the people who constitute it as a free and responsible subject, animated by the Spirit of Christ.
