FROM THE RIGHT OF CRITICISM TO HUMILITY OF FRANCESCO D’ASSISI: MAYBE WE WILL NOT BE ASKED TO PLANT THE CABBAGE IN THE OPPOSITE BUT AT LEAST LET US FREE TO SAY WHAT WE THINK, NOT SO MUCH FOR US BUT FOR THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO DO IT AND CANNOT DO IT

- Church news - Mine previous article on pretini trendy in which I quoted a poem by the presbyter Luigi Maria Epicoco, it can be criticized or mocked with complete freedom. But it is beyond any reasonable doubt that in it we can find only and only a clear criticism of a well-determined priestly style that is gaining ground in the Church today., a way of being a priest that competes with the world and not opposed to it, certainly not an attack on individual people of some “image priests”.

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Author
Ivano Liguori, Ofm. Capp.

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PDF print format article

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St. John Mary Vianney, patron of presbyters and parish priests

I don't normally use appendages for clarification regarding the articles I write. And this for a very simple reason, I care a lot about the expository precision and I try to use the words in the right context and with the right sense, avoiding leaving to wild misunderstanding and personal interpretation conclusions that do not represent me and that I have never even thought in the least. The rest, as any editor knows perfectly well, you are only responsible for what you write, not for what others want to understand or misunderstand.

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Clarified this, although I do not consider it necessary to add superfluous clarifications to what I wrote and signed on the columns of The Island of Patmos both today and in the past, I wish to take a cue from my last article on pretini trendy to underline and deepen certain issues that seem to upset some of our fellow readers who feel hurt, or even offended by a healthy criticism that it is right and proper to introduce even and above all within ecclesiastical circles where the strange belief that the Holy Spirit is often present as a magical agent through which it is possible to fix everything and save everything.

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That it is right and proper to operate a healthy criticism we are told first of all by the freedom that we have received as a gift from God together with that capacity of sentient beings who have been given a head not only to divide the ears or rest the hat on them but also to exercise critical reasoning through the which one comes to the knowledge of things, therefore ultimately to the truth also incurring physiological errors. Criticism is therefore a sacrosanct right, even when exercised by a baptized Christian, and it is right to exercise it just to resize, contextualize or de-mythologize certain situations or people who would otherwise risk proceeding at full speed. All of this, in Catholic tradition and in ecclesiology it has a very specific name, is called: freedom of the children of God.

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First a question: exercising the freedom of the children of God and with it the right to criticize means harming one's neighbor? Absolutely not. In the right to criticism, attention is paid that abstains from personal judgment by sticking only to the facts. Indeed, the many beautiful souls who today read our articles de The Island of Patmos, they still confuse the right of criticism that touches ideas, the choices, the writings, the public positions of public individuals with contemptuous judgment on the person. And this is as dangerous as it is wrong, because by doing so, criticism is prevented from generating that gentle - sometimes pungent - touch which is essential for the personal improvement of the individual. Criticism is an indispensable factor for human growth - Sacred Scripture itself criticizes man - it leads to a healthy humility so as to preserve the individual from insidious drifts and transform difficulties into opportunities for growth.

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I would like to remind our readers that there is nothing wrong with expressing one's critical opinion towards any person and that we are all subject to criticism, including the writer. On the contrary, judging someone is always and only evil because a position is expressed that is not critical but which is detrimental to the life of the other, something that Christ has expressly forbidden in the Gospel [cf.. Mt 7,1; LC 6,37] and which was reserved for the Father, who is the only one who has a full and intimate knowledge of everyone's heart.

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If anyone claims: "I don't like Father Ivano's articles because they are banal and not at all in line with the theology of the outgoing Church desired by Pope Francis", as Author I cannot and must not feel offended, because I know that it is in the reader's full right to criticize what I have written and not agree with what I have expressed. The most appropriate thing would be to bring the evidence of the criticisms that have been made so that the Author can confront them and decide if these critical findings are well founded and can help him do better.

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If, on the other hand, one affirms: "I don't like Father Ivano's articles because they express the wickedness of a repressed person who became a friar to escape the fatigue of the world and live behind society", this is a malicious and malevolent judgment on my person who claims to have intimate knowledge of the heart and its intentions.

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In more than twenty years of convent I have personally met religious who certainly did not shine for personal hygiene, convinced that even a lack of personal care was an indication of poverty and adherence to evangelical simplicity. To make such a criticism of those friars: "You neglect your personal hygiene so much that your suit stinks" is not the equivalent of saying "you are a dirty and filthy bum".

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I also met pretini which perfumed themselves exaggeratedly enough to impregnate the consecrated particles of Hugo Boss and of Giò water while distributing Communion to the faithful that not even a Puerto Rican prostitute of the late nineteenth century could have done better. Well, It is one thing to tell him "friend you suck like a prostitute" equating him with a woman of easy virtue, another is to say "try not to overdo the care of yourself so that it is exaggeratedly vain". In short, the examples are clear and there is nothing to add.

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In my previous article a few days ago [see WHO], I was inspired by a reflection made by the presbyter Luigi Maria Epicoco on the figure of the priest. This writing of mine was not born primarily as an article but as a personal critical opinion given to a dear reader of The Island of Patmos who asked me for light on this reflection on the priesthood that, to say of this same Reader, it was considered valid even if with too many redundant rhetorical phrases of circumstance. For this reason, I felt compelled to exercise my right to criticize and answer the question, going to read the text by Luigi Maria Epicoco and then draw conclusions about it.

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Less than two hours after the publication of my article resentful and sorry comments flocked to the page Facebook of Father Ariel in which the grievances for my article were expressed that, according to some, he targeted his confrere for free, exposing him to public derision in a merciless way. This reminded me of the classical high school years, when as a boy I saw my classmates complain because they had received a failure from the literature teacher on the subject of Italian, justifying themselves by saying: “He did it because he doesn't approve of my person, is mad at me ".

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Mind you well, in my article I answered on the merits of that text on the priesthood of Luigi Maria Epicoco, for its content, for its ecclesiological and social value and for what a text like that can mean today, in a context of the Church and the laity very often burdened by conformism and that omnipresent patina of clerically correct which is none other than that attitude that, in lay sauce, it is reintroduced within the political life of the country, in the social realities we are experiencing and in post-pandemic interpersonal relationships. No hint, so, of personal attack on the person of the brother or initiative aimed at discrediting his good reputation.

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After having had the opportunity to respond to our Reader who had asked me for clarification regarding those scattered thoughts on the priesthood, I also had the opportunity to think about a new ecclesial category which is that of pretino trendy - an adjective that does not constitute a criminal or canonical offense and is therefore exempt from any sanction - within which today many priest confreres, right or wrong, they have centered their ministerial style to relaunch the Gospel message with some success.

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Nowadays, in the media era of Big Brother, everything can be traced back to the trendy, to feel fashionable: any pretino image with a clean face who wears his handsome flawlessly clergyman sartorial as well as the former disco throne player who from the cube and the ball glitter passes to the rectory. We are often tickled by bewitching stories in which a former TV host enters the seminary, or fascinated by the events of a former drug addict converted to monasticism who, from the peace of the cloister, become a viral evangelizer of cry through YouTube O TikTok. In short, wanted characters, fashionable, in a word trendy.

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They will tell me, Luckily there is someone like that, we need these examples of hope. Yes and no. I wouldn't be so thrilled, in fact, it has been seen that over time many of these subjects remain trapped within their previous lives, in what has been their past and which becomes the pedometer to mark and evaluate the present condition even when this coincides with the priest or consecrated choice.

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But that is not all, you can be trendy even within the Catholic Church. This is the case, for example, of those priests who immediately after sacred ordination begin the climb that will lead them to a doctorate in a prestigious pontifical academy., then towards a dazzling career that could begin as rector in seminaries or institutes of religious sciences, as an animator of important university chaplaincies such as the Gemelli in Rome or the Cattolica in Milan and then continued as a writer, lecturer and finally speaker of spiritual exercises with some hosted in broadcasts cult - the episcopal TV2000 - and all this as soon as you cross the canonical threshold of forty years. I don't know about you, but for me all this borders on exaggeration.

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This priestly style today it is more present than ever in many dioceses where we see the bishop asking for everything and more from these priests child prodigy deemed the not any more of the presbyteral order. And precisely in the name of this intellectual value, the poor priest sees himself burdened by ever more intense diocesan offices, from the formation of permanent deacons to conferences to the monthly retreat of the clergy. Obviously, also the pretino trendy child prodigy, which remains like everyone else burdened by the wound of original sin and concupiscence, he will soon feel like Romeo er mejo cat of the Colosseum. He will come to justify himself in conscience for what he has become, done and obtained, recognizing their personal merit and self-denial to studies. The esteem he will have of himself will be ascribed above all to his mentor, to that good devil who was able to lead him to certain goals by instilling in him the veiled illusion that within all this there is the permission of God who has placed around the pretino trendy a hedge of protection as we see happening in the life of good old Job before his calamities [cf.. Gb 1,10].

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At this point we return to the discourse on the right to criticize and let's associate it with the image of pretino trendy that I have just described. If I say that perhaps this confrere is burning his steps a little too quickly and that perhaps he needs a reshaping, also through serene criticisms of what it looks like, on the image he transmits of himself to others and on the things he says and thinks, this - in my view - can only help the pretino trendy because it will force him to keep an eye on the style of his priestly life and to take into due consideration the criticisms leveled at him. In other words, this is the style of humility of the saints that we usually magnify, only to then imitate and understand why such an example of humility is also reached through criticism, something that we poor sinners almost always struggle to accept, mistaking criticism for judgment.

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In the Fioretti the episode in which St. Francis of Assisi is narrated he asks Brother Leo to say the divine office in a singular way. Because they did not have the breviary, Francis orders Brother Leo to repeat prayers which are nothing more than the recognition of his own poverty and misery presented to God as hymns of humility and a request for help:

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«O Brother Francis, you did so many evils and sins in the century, that you are worthy of hell; and you, Brother Lyons, you will answer: It is true that you deserve the deepest hell " [cf.. FF 1837].

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This episode precedes the question of Friar Masseo who asks the Seraphic Father for the secret of his success:

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«[…] because the whole world is addressed to you, and each person seems to want to see you and hear you and obey you? You are not a handsome man of the body, you are not of great science, you are not noble; Where, so, to you that the whole world comes after you?» [cf.. FF 1838].

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Francesco does not disdain to answer Friar Masseo that God has seen no more cowardly among sinners, more insufficient and greater sinner than him. He has no problem confessing his human inadequacy, neither to affirm his own intellectual poverty nor to flee at the same time what could be a source of pride for him, because he lived the paschal experience of the risen Christ who transformed him by removing him from the condition of a son trendy of Pietro di Bernardone and making him a small and humble disciple of the Crucifix.

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I who am not San Francesco I can be touched with pride by a criticism, also offended by a judgment but this will have in me the only good merit of making me aware that I am still far from being humble as Christ commands me.

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In the history of the Capuchin Order I have heard from the elderly friars of the cabbage test. Some novices were subjected by the novice master to the test of cabbages planted upside down to test their humility and obedience. This evidence recalls what Saint Francis did at the Montecasale hermitage located in Sansepolcro in the province of Arezzo. Friar Bartolomeo da Pisa narrates:

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"Once, two young men came to Blessed Francis, begging him to be received into the Order. Blessed Francis, wanting to prove whether they were truly obedient and prepared to deny their will, led them to the garden saying: “Come on, let's plant cabbages and as you see me doing, so in that way you plant too ". While the blessed Francis, planting, it put its roots upwards towards the sky, and the leaves under the ground, one of them did everything like Blessed Francis, the other did not imitate him, but he said: "Not like that, Dad, cabbages are planted, but on the contrary ". And blessed Francis answered him: "Son, I want you to do like me ". But he does not want to do it, because it seemed wrong to him, Blessed Francis told him: "Brother, I see you are a great teacher, go your way, because you are not suitable for my Order "".

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The proof is certainly singular but it has its own profound and meritorious meaning. S. Francis has no intention of making fun of the young man's intelligence by commanding him something nonsense, it wants to contradict the reasonableness of the agricultural reality that foresees planting a vegetable according to the right direction. The Seraphic Father just wants to accustom that young man to deny his fashion mentality - trendy ―, which is the legacy of that worldly way of acting that one must necessarily leave behind to follow the crucified Christ as priests or consecrated persons.

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I conclude by saying that my article on pretini trendy it can be criticized or mocked with complete freedom. But it is beyond any reasonable doubt that in it we can find only and only a clear criticism of a well-determined priestly style that is gaining ground in the Church today., a way of being a priest that competes with the world and not opposed to it.

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No personal attacks then towards his brother Luigi Maria Epicoco who remains lovable as a popular national singer whom everyone loves, a sort of Gianni Morandi in short. But if for someone the reference to the priests with a clean face and Instagrammable or to the poems from Perugina chocolate kisses it could constitute an infamous offense to be prosecuted, well they can only be disappointed because all this is just a way to convey a message, a style, which I hope will produce some good in the future. For you see, perhaps to us Fathers de The Island of Patmos we will not be asked to plant cabbages with the roots in the air and the leaves buried but surely we will be required to continue to criticize, to use reasoning and to pursue the truth to give voice to those who think the same things we think and who for a thousand reasons or for reasons of high ecclesial and ecclesiastical office, unfortunately they cannot tell you.

the Island of Patmos, 22 February 2022

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