ENZO BIANCHI AND THE DEATH OF CAMILLO RUINI: PLEASE PRAY IN FRONT OF A DECEASED, THE ACCOUNTS ARE NOT SETTLED

«Even the card. Ruini is dead! A clergyman who caused many in the church to suffer. She gave the face of her stepmother to the church, the face of the church seeking authority, influence and seat among the powerful. But he did not have approval from the card. Martini nor by Pope Francis" (Enzo Bianchi).

- Church news -

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Author
Simone Pifizzi

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When the Church accompanies one of its children to death he does not convene a historic tribunal, it does not open a political debate and does not proceed with an ideological verification of the life of the deceased.

The Church does something much simpler e, at the same time, infinitely deeper: pray. He does so because he looks at death in the light of the victory of the risen Christ, according to the proclamation of the Apostle: «Death was swallowed up for victory. Where, death, your victory? Where, death, your sting?» (1 Color 15,54-55). For this reason, the general premises of the Funeral Rite remind us that the deceased remains a brother in the faith and that the entire ecclesial community gathers around him to accompany him with prayer, offering the Eucharistic sacrifice and raising suffrages. In fact, the Church prays for the deceased because it believes that corporal death does not interrupt their belonging to Christ and that, for this, the prayer of the Church can still benefit them.

It is from this faith that we must start when looking at the death of a Christian, not first of all by the role he held in the Church, from the battles he fought or from the judgments that history will formulate on his person and his work. All this belongs to legitimate historical judgment and can be discussed and even severely criticized. In the face of death, But, the Church looks first of all at the baptized person. It is not without significance that, in the official verification of the death of the Roman Pontiff, he who bore that pontifical name for years was called three times by his baptismal name: in the face of death, in a sense, everyone returns to the origin. This is why the first word of the Church is not judgement, but prayer, because the deceased is first and foremost a child of the Church entrusted to the mercy of God and accompanied by the intercession of his brothers.

It is in the light of this faith that what happened after the death of Cardinal Camillo Ruini must be considered. It is not of interest here to establish whether he was right or wrong in the great ecclesial battles of recent decades, nor discuss the historical judgment on his vision of the Church. The question is another and concerns the reaction aroused by his disappearance, because precisely at the moment in which the Church entrusts one of her children to the mercy of God and accompanies him with prayer, the Christian is called to measure his words and his judgments with the very meaning of Christian death.

They were not missed, in the hours following his death attempts to read this figure almost exclusively through political and ideological categories. The Daily, the 16 June 2026, published the article by Francesco Antonio Grana: «Cardinal Camillo Ruini has died. Interference in politics, proximity to the right, the relationship with Berlusconi: history of the Italian Richelieu»; The Manifesto was titled «Ruini, religion as a political instrument". Certainly legitimate readings on a historical and journalistic level, but which show how easy it is to continue discussing a person in terms of sides, influence and power even at the moment of his death. And so, in this same vein, a few hours after the death of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, Enzo Bianchi intervened on his X profile by writing:

«Even the card. Ruini is dead! A clergyman who caused many in the church to suffer. She gave the face of her stepmother to the church, the face of the church seeking authority, influence and seat among the powerful. But he did not have approval from the card. Martini nor by Pope Francis".

The question that emerges from those words it concerns Cardinal Ruini much less than it concerns Enzo Bianchi himself: which conception of Christian death manifests who, in front of a deceased person, first of all he feels the need to reopen an ecclesial controversy? It is a question that does not arise from controversy, but by the faith of the Church. A militant atheist who continues his polemic in front of a dead person acts according to the logic he professes, although he often avoids doing so because he shows the respect for death that some Christians do not have. Instead, by Enzo Bianchi, who for decades spoke of evangelical spirituality and eccentric monastic life, becoming a celebrity disputed by Italian bishops who competed to invite him to hold conferences in their cathedrals during the years of Cardinal Camillo Ruini's long presidency of the CEI, one would expect at least the elementary memory of what the Church does in front of a deceased person.

In this context the spiritual testament of Camillo Ruini takes on a meaning that goes far beyond the personal story of its author. Anyone expecting self-defense from a protagonist of Italian ecclesial life will be surprised, because those pages do not contain claims or attempts to justify their historical choices. What emerges instead is the confession of one's own insufficiencies, the request for forgiveness and the invocation of divine mercy. He acknowledges that he has sometimes acted harshly, he asks for forgiveness, confesses the smallness of his faith and presents himself simply as a man called to appear before God. This is where the contrast becomes evident. On the one hand there is a man who has reached the end of his life and entrusts himself to divine mercy; on the other who, in the face of that death, feels the urgency of reopening the accounting of ecclesial controversies. Which of the two is looking at death in a Christian way: Camillo Ruini or Enzo Bianchi?

Even more so it is not a question of establishing who was right in the controversies that have crossed the Italian Church in the last forty years. It is not a question of deciding whether this Cardinal was a great ecclesial protagonist or a questionable protagonist. Nor is it a question of denying Enzo Bianchi the right to radically disagree with his vision, but to understand what happens when a Christian dies. Because there is a substantial difference between historical judgment and the polemical use of death: the first is legitimate; the second instead reveals a loss of the Christian meaning of death. When a man's coffin becomes the latest battlefield of a decades-long ecclesiastical war, when the body of a deceased is used as polemical material and the death of a brother in the faith becomes an opportunity to settle scores that have remained open, It's not just the respect due to the dead that is damaged: the very faith in God's judgment is called into question, in mercy, in the communion of saints and in eternal life. Because of this, in the end, the problem is not Cardinal Camillo Ruini. The problem is us. Because if faced with the death of a Christian we no longer know how to pray, if faced with a spiritual testament imbued with a request for forgiveness and mercy we only know how to reopen old processes, if we continue to think like faction militants at the very moment in which the Church invites us to pray for a deceased brother, then we have not simply lost our sense of proportion, but something essential about the Christian faith has been lost. When this happens, prophecy gives way to controversy, which ends up imposing itself even in the face of death.

It must be said that Cardinal Camillo Ruini, nicknamed “Cardinal Thin”, he did not fail to write in his will:

«When Pope Francis was elected I rejoiced and, as much as I could, I was immediately a supporter of his. Even today I rejoice and thank him for his extraordinary evangelizing enthusiasm. However, I must confess that I find myself in an uncomfortable situation, certainly not for personal reasons but because I struggle to understand some orientations that seem to me to reopen wounds, after the Council they were barely medicated. I humbly ask the Lord to convince me internally that the Church is his and that he himself takes care of it, beyond our human sights".

This is not the place to address issues that would require other spaces. However, it remains difficult not to observe that many of the most serious contemporary ecclesial problems have their roots in the long and complex pontificate of John Paul II, of which Camillo Ruini was one of the most influential figures, arriving gangrenous at the pontificate of Benedict XVI - under which he continued his mandate as President of the CEI and Vicar General of the Diocese of Rome for another two years - and in certain respects out of control during the complex pontificate of Francis, everything to be understood before even being studied in the face of a very difficult situation inherited by him from the two previous pontificates, which he tried to cope with in situations that were very difficult to manage. It is therefore striking to read in his will the confession of the difficulty in understanding some ecclesial orientations specific to Francis' pontificate. If the profound meaning of these events was not fully clear to him during his earthly life, it is reasonable to think that today, coming face to face with God, understand it with a fullness that remains closed to those who, like us living people, look at history from within its inevitable partiality.

Florence, 22 June 2026

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