On the occasion of the June 24th ballot in Perugia, the tone in the Catholic world was inappropriately raised. Regarding this, Prof. Mario Tosti, exponent of democratic Catholicism in Perugia and coordinator of PD Perugia, sends us the following text which we are happy to publish:
“Here we go again, one might say. Several decades have passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Republic of parties and punctually, at every electoral, political or administrative round, a part of the Catholic world is forced to remember the theological and ecclesial motivations that drive so many women and men to run for center-left parties and lists. Faced with the considerations, sometimes real accusations of heresy, by the exponents of the centre-right pole, we reiterate our profound convictions which make the Constitution of our Republic and the Second Vatican Council the obligatory references, the true and own watershed. The Constitution, the fundamental charter of the secular rules of our civil life, to which the ideas and values of the culture of liberal and social Catholicism have made a fundamental contribution, which all political forces in the field must recognize and respect, and the Second Vatican Council which The dawn of modernity overturned the image of the top-down and clerical Tridentine church into the people of God church, also recognizing the principle that an identical faith could lead to different political options. From the recognition of these watersheds comes a political attitude capable of addressing the problems of secularization, which reads the signs of reality, which does not underline the diversifying identity and promotes new research, new ways of walking. The result is an attitude that is not one of immobility, not of a conservative and defensive position, but of an attempt to understand the challenges, in the perspective of a progressive development of social justice and peace. The less the Christian community identifies with one of the poles, the more the Christian conscience will nourish the collective civil conscience. We have never judged or made appeals against something or someone and frankly we are tired of still finding, even authoritative exponents of the local Right or some parish priest or deacon on the outskirts, the reference to religion as an instrument of power, to the reduction of faith to politics or politics to faith. We therefore appeal to the entire Catholic world to lower the tone, to measure the language, aware that after 24 June the political conflict could leave divisions in the ecclesial fabric of our diocese. We, without carrying out a “Christian policy”, carry out a “Christian policy” aware that we work and will always work to build the city of man.”
