A long chat, between smiles, confidences – he bangs his knuckles on the table to underline “the bishop’s stubbornness” when he talks about ten years of work and 5 million spent to catalog all the works of art and high craftsmanship of the Diocese, 271,000 in the end — looks at the past, but also the present and the future. To what has now become his city, where he will remain as archbishop emeritus and where he wants to be buried. «In Florence – Giuseppe Betori immediately underlines in the meeting to greet the journalists – it is necessary to recreate the social fabric. The social fabric, the bonds, the sense of being united among us, even in our parishes, is disappearing, in the center in particular but also elsewhere. We need to reweave sociality, it is not up to me to say whether with a house plan, with roads, with other structures, these are political choices… A social fabric without which the city cannot simply be a showcase, cannot be the satisfaction of daily needs for those who come among us: it must be a city, reconquer itself as a city through the reconquest of bonds, relationships, the social fabric.”
The meeting with the press comes on the eve of the mass that the cardinal and archbishop will hold on Sunday afternoon in the Cathedral to greet his city and its priests and nuns — Betori’s coat of arms has already been removed from the façade of the archbishopric to make room for Gambelli’s — while on June 24th there will be the consecration of the new archbishop Gherardo Gambelli, the missionary priest. Betori does not deny himself the questions. Starting with the changes in Florence (and the Diocese) in the 16 years of his episcopal mandate. «Being a community – he explains – contains everything: the dignity of the human person, justice, work. There is also protection: we don’t know where little Kataleya is, behind an insurmountable wall, but we never want to forget her… My mantra is to recreate the social fabric: there are no easy solutions, I have no recipes, just as I don’t I have given to my priests, but I place reflections on a common horizon. All my esteem and deference goes to past and future administrators: they must do, they cannot remain on the horizon, they must materialize.”
And on the onslaught of tourism he says: «Even if the impact of tourism on the city today is becoming pressing, I don’t think we need to limit who comes to visit us: why deprive someone of beauty for the benefit of someone who perhaps has more money, with a tax? The problem is that we have not yet managed to identify a way to present the soul of Florence, and not just the external face which is reduced to an image, a selfie, to buildings to admire, to paintings to contemplate. It is necessary to restore the content to the form of Florence: this does not only apply to sacred art, I believe this is the future mission of Florence. THE you will never be able to chase tourists away, even if you had to select them they will come back here: but if we don’t know who we are, because we have done those works, and we don’t know how to tell others, what are we doing here? We are not in industrious Turin, or Milan, with their factories, we are here, our reality is made of this.” When he arrived – “16 years ago, not all simple” – Betori ordained 7-8 priests per year, now one or two at most: “There has been a collapse – he states – the same as in the West and in Italy . We have a less numerous, but good, valuable clergy, otherwise the pontiff would not have “fished” here to appoint 5 bishops in recent years. This reality spurs us to define a new community, a new way of educating young people.”
And on what to say to the new archbishop, he replies: «I’ve known him for a long time, I trust him. I told my successor “be yourself”. Be yourself, and be in the Florentine tradition, and he is Florentine and he will have no difficulty in doing so ». Finally, on the lack of presence of Pope Francis in 2022 at the Conference of Bishops on the Mediterranean, a controversial absence even if it was explained by a pain in his knee, Betori replies: «The conference was held by the CEI, not by the Diocese. There is a very beautiful relationship with him, with the frankness of adults and with mutual affection, and we hosted him as a Diocese in two very positive and important events, the CEI conference in 2015 and his prayer on the tomb of Don Milani in Barbiana”.
