The difficult but possible march of the saints in the song of the Negroes of New Orleans ― The difficult but possible march of the saints in the song of the blacks of New Orleans

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LA DIFFICILE MA POSSIBILE MARCIA DEI SANTI NEL CANTO DEI NEGRI DI NEW ORLEANS

La santità non è il premio riservato a chi non ha mai sbagliato, ma il punto d’arrivo di chi non ha mai smesso di lasciarsi raggiungere da Dio.

— Catechesi —

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A New Orleans, nei primi decenni del Novecento, i funerali avevano un rito tutto loro. La banda accompagnava il feretro verso il cimitero a passo lento, suonando marce funebri. Al ritorno, sepolto il defunto, la stessa banda attaccava a ritmo pieno un vecchio spiritual dei negri d’America: When the Saints Go Marching In.

Chi vi assisteva per la prima volta poteva scambiarlo per irriverenza. Era invece una professione di fede suonata con tromba e trombone: la morte non ha l’ultima parola. Reso celebre in tutto il mondo da Louis Armstrong nel 1938, il brano è divenuto tanto familiare da essere cantato negli stadi e nelle feste, dimenticandone del tutto l’origine. Il suo ritornello dice:

«Oh, when the saints go marching in, / Oh Lord, I want to be in that number, / when the saints go marching in» («Oh, quando i santi entrano in corteo, / man, voglio essere in quel numero, / quando i santi entrano in corteo»).

Due parole meritano attenzione. La prima è «in». I santi non sfilano per le strade come una parata qualsiasi: entrano, varcano la soglia della Gerusalemme celeste. La seconda è «that number», quel numero. Gli schiavi e i figli degli schiavi che cantavano questo spiritual conoscevano la Bibbia meglio di non pochi teologi: quel numero è quello dell’Apocalisse, dove dopo i 144.000 appare «una moltitudine immensa, che nessuno poteva contare, di ogni nazione, tribù, popolo e lingua» (AP 7,9). È la prima lettura della Messa di Ognissanti. In un canto nato tra i negri ridotti in schiavitù e poi discriminati dalla segregazione razziale, ai quali veniva negata perfino la dignità di persone, la speranza aveva i tratti precisi della liturgia della Chiesa: entrare in quel numero.

Una chiamata rivolta a tutti

"Be holy, why me, the Sir, your God, I am holy" (Lv 19,2). «Voi, so, siate perfetti come è perfetto il Padre vostro celeste» (Mt 5,48). «Questa infatti è volontà di Dio, la vostra santificazione» (1Ts 4,3). La Scrittura non conosce una santità per pochi specialisti dello spirito, né una carriera riservata a chi indossa un abito religioso. Il Concilio Vaticano II lo ha ribadito senza ambiguità: «tutti i fedeli di qualsiasi stato o grado sono chiamati alla pienezza della vita cristiana e alla perfezione della carit໹. È una santità che non abita soltanto nei chiostri e sugli altari, ma nelle case, nei luoghi di lavoro, nelle corsie degli ospedali, dovunque un uomo o una donna vivono con fedeltà, day by day, ciò che Dio ha loro affidato.

Se la santità fosse qualcosa di irraggiungibile, Dio ci avrebbe comandato l’impossibile. E Dio non prende in giro le sue creature.

Che cosa è davvero la santità

Nell’immaginario comune la santità coincide con l’impeccabilità, con i prodigi, con le estasi, con i digiuni prolungati oltre ogni ragionevolezza. Tutte cose che possono accompagnare la vita di un santo, ma che non ne costituiscono l’essenza. San Tommaso d’Aquino lo dice con la consueta sobrietà: la perfezione della vita cristiana consiste essenzialmente nella carità². Il santo non è anzitutto colui che non ha peccato, ma colui che ha amato Dio e il prossimo fino in fondo, lasciando che la grazia lavorasse in lui fino a trasformarlo.

Questo non significa che la santità sia una conquista morale, il frutto di una ginnastica della volontà. È anzitutto un dono che Dio offre e che l’uomo è chiamato ad accogliere. Ma l’accoglienza non è passività: «Il cammino della perfezione passa attraverso la croce. Non c’è santità senza rinuncia e senza combattimento spirituale»³. La santità non è il premio riservato a chi non ha mai sbagliato, ma il punto d’arrivo di chi non ha mai smesso di lasciarsi raggiungere da Dio.

Basta scorrere le vite di non pochi santi per rendersene conto: Agostino d’Ippona visse per anni con una concubina, dalla quale ebbe un figlio, Adeodato, prima di arrendersi alla grazia. Maria Egiziaca, secondo la Vita scritta da Sofronio di Gerusalemme, si prostituì per diciassette anni ad Alessandria d’Egitto⁴. Margherita da Cortona fu per circa dieci anni l’amante di un giovane nobile di Montepulciano, al quale diede un figlio. Mosè l’Etiope, prima di diventare uno dei grandi Padri del deserto, era stato capo di una banda di briganti. Camillo de Lellis, soldato di ventura, era schiavo del gioco d’azzardo al punto da perdere tutto ciò che possedeva, fino alla camicia. Ignazio di Loyola, per sua stessa ammissione, fino a ventisei anni fu un uomo dedito alle vanità del mondo⁵. Charles de Foucauld, giovane ufficiale di cavalleria, si fece notare più per i bagordi e le amanti che per la disciplina. Bartolo Longo, prima di fondare il santuario di Pompei, frequentò i circoli spiritisti di Napoli fino a dichiararsi consacrato sacerdote di Satana; Leone XIV lo ha proclamato santo nel 2025. Nessuno di loro nacque santo. Tutti lo diventarono, passando non accanto al peccato, ma attraverso di esso, finché la grazia non li raggiunse e non li trovò, Finally, disposti a lasciarsi raggiungere.

Dai martiri ai confessori

Nei primi secoli i santi venerati dalla Chiesa erano i martiri. Sulle loro tombe si celebrava l’Eucaristia nel giorno anniversario della morte, named dies natalis, giorno della nascita al cielo. Il sangue versato per Cristo era il segno inequivocabile della santità. Ma quando con la pace di Costantino le persecuzioni cessarono, si pose una domanda nuova: si può essere santi senza versare il sangue? La risposta ha un nome: Martino di Tours, soldier, monaco, bishop, d. 397. Fu tra i primi, se non il primo, in Occidente a ricevere un culto pubblico pur non essendo martire. Il suo biografo Sulpicio Severo lo spiegò così:

«Sebbene la condizione dei tempi non abbia potuto offrirgli il martirio, egli non sarà privo della gloria del martire, perché con il desiderio e con la virtù poté e volle essere martire»⁶.

Nasceva così la figura del «confessore», colui che testimonia Cristo non con la morte violenta, ma con il dono quotidiano della vita. Va detto, per esattezza storica, che al tempo di Martino la canonizzazione non esisteva: il culto nasceva dal basso, dalla fama di santità presso il popolo e dall’approvazione del vescovo locale. La prima canonizzazione formale pronunciata da un Romano Pontefice è quella di Ulrico di Augusta, proclamato santo da Giovanni XV nel 993.

Santi non si nasce

Nel corso dei secoli abbiamo idealizzato i santi fino a renderli inimitabili. Quel simpatico e fantasioso domenicano che fu Jacopo da Varazze, arcivescovo di Genova, in its Legenda aurea racconta senza alcun timore di cadere nel ridicolo che San Nicola, ancora lattante, il mercoledì e il venerdì prendeva il latte materno una sola volta al giorno, per osservare il digiuno⁷. Un neonato già osservante del calendario penitenziale, in conclusion. L’agiografia barocca ha moltiplicato santi che fin dalla culla mostravano virtù eroiche e i santini devozionali hanno fatto il resto, consegnandoci figure angelicate, dagli occhi rivolti al cielo, senza un’ombra di lotta interiore. Il risultato è stato paradossale: proprio perché perfetti fin dall’inizio, i santi sono divenuti modelli da ammirare a distanza, non da imitare. E così ci siamo sentiti dispensati dal provarci, proprio grazie ai vari Jacopo da Varazze.

La realtà è ben diversa. Paolo di Tarso perseguitava la Chiesa entrando nelle case e trascinando in carcere uomini e donne (cf.. At 8,3) e fino alla fine si definì il primo dei peccatori (cf.. 1TM 1,15). Francis of Assisi, prima di abbracciare madonna Povertà, era il re delle gozzoviglie della gioventù assisana⁸. I santi non nacquero tali: lo diventarono, spesso dopo lunghi anni vissuti anche nei peccati più gravi.

Ciò che molti non sanno, o forse non ricordano, è che il primo santo proclamato tale fu un criminale condannato a morte. Crocifisso accanto a Gesù, a differenza dell’altro malfattore che lo insultava, gli si rivolse dicendo: "Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom ". And Jesus answered him: "Verily I say unto thee: today you will be with me in paradise" (LC 23,42-43). Se mai c’è stata una canonizzazione, la celebrò Cristo stesso, dalla croce, senza processo, senza postulatore e senza miracoli accertati. Il dettaglio più sorprendente è un altro: secondo Matteo e Marco, anche quel ladrone, At first, insultava Gesù insieme al suo compagno (cf.. Mt 27,44; MC 15,32). Il santo che la tradizione chiamerà Disma⁹ è venuto fuori da chi, fino a poco prima, bestemmiava. È tutta la teologia della grazia racchiusa in pochi istanti: nessuno è troppo lontano per essere raggiunto, neppure all’ultimo respiro.

L’esercito senza nome

La festa di Ognissanti ha una storia lunga. In 609 il Pontefice Bonifacio IV dedicò il Pantheon di Roma alla Vergine Maria e a tutti i martiri. Nel secolo successivo Gregorio III consacrò nella Basilica di San Pietro un oratorio a tutti i santi e fissò la celebrazione al 1° novembre, data che Gregorio IV estese poi a tutta la Chiesa nell’835.

Ma il senso profondo di questa solennità sfugge a molti. Non è anzitutto la festa dei santi canonizzati e inseriti nel calendario, ciascuno dei quali ha già il proprio giorno. È la festa di quella «moltitudine immensa, che nessuno poteva contare» (AP 7,9): l’esercito sterminato di santi ignoti che nessun Dicastero delle Cause dei Santi ha mai esaminato, né mai esaminerà. La nonna che ha recitato il rosario ogni sera per un nipote lontano dalla fede. Il padre di famiglia che ha lavorato onestamente per quarant’anni senza mai rubare un euro. Il parroco di un paese di montagna dimenticato da tutti, fuorché da Dio. Il malato che ha offerto la propria sofferenza senza farne un vessillo. Nessuno di loro avrà una statua, an image, una festa. Eppure sono loro, in grandissima parte, «quel numero».

Lo scrittore francese Léon Bloy chiuse uno dei suoi romanzi con una frase rimasta celebre: «Non c’è che una tristezza, quella di non essere santi»¹⁰. Ognissanti ci ricorda che questa tristezza non è una condanna, perché la porta resta aperta fino all’ultimo istante, come ha sperimentato quel ladrone sulla croce. La marcia dei santi è difficile, nessuno lo nega. Ma è possibile, perché a camminare davanti a noi non c’è un modello irraggiungibile, ma una folla innumerevole di uomini e di donne che, peccatori come noi, si sono lasciati salvare.

Quando la banda di New Orleans tornava dal cimitero, la gente scendeva per le strade e si univa al corteo ballando. Non si limitava ad ascoltare: entrava nella fila. È questo l’invito di Ognissanti. E la preghiera più sincera che possiamo rivolgere a Dio in questo giorno è forse proprio quella dello spiritual dei negri d’America: «Oh Lord, I want to be in that number»: man, voglio essere in quel numero.

From the island of Patmos, 1November 2026

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NOTE

¹ Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church The light, n. 40.

² Cfr. Thomas Aquinas, QUESTION, II-II, q. 184, a. 1.

³ Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2015.

⁴ Cfr. Sofronio di Gerusalemme, Vita di Santa Maria Egiziaca.

⁵ Cfr. Ignazio di Loyola, Autobiografia, n. 1.

⁶ Sulpicio Severo, Letter (II), 9. Traduzione nostra.

⁷ Cfr. Jacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea, cap. «San Nicola».

⁸ Cfr. Thomas of Celano, Vita prima di San Francesco, I, 1-2.

⁹ Il nome compare nel Vangelo di Nicodemo (O Acts of Pilate), 10, scritto apocrifo.

¹⁰ L. Bloy, La femme pauvre (1897), ultima pagina.

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THE DIFFICULT YET POSSIBLE MARCH OF THE SAINTS IN THE SONG OF THE NEGROES OF NEW ORLEANS

Holiness is not a prize reserved for those who have never gone wrong, but the destination of those who have never stopped letting God reach them.

— Catechesis —

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In New Orleans, in the early decades of the twentieth century, funerals had a ritual all their own. The band accompanied the coffin to the cemetery at a slow pace, playing funeral marches. On the way back, once the deceased had been buried, the same band would strike up, at full tempo, an old Negro spiritual: When the Saints Go Marching In. Anyone witnessing it for the first time might have mistaken it for irreverence. It was instead a profession of faith played on trumpet and trombone: death does not have the last word. Made famous throughout the world by Louis Armstrong in 1938, the song has become so familiar that it is sung in stadiums and at parties, its origin entirely forgotten. Its refrain goes:

«Oh, when the saints go marching in, / Oh Lord, I want to be in that number, / when the saints go marching in».

Two words deserve attention. The first is «in». The saints do not file through the streets like any ordinary parade: they go in, they cross the threshold of the heavenly Jerusalem. The second is «that number». The slaves and the children of slaves who sang this spiritual knew the Bible better than not a few theologians: that number is the one in the Book of Revelation where, after the hundred and forty-four thousand who were sealed, there appears «a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue» (Rev 7:9). It is the first reading of the Mass of All Saints. In a song born among Negroes held in slavery and later discriminated against under racial segregation, who were denied even the dignity of persons, hope bore the precise features of the Church’s liturgy: to enter that number.

A call addressed to all

«Be holy, for I, the LORD your God, am holy» (Lev 19:2). «So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect» (Mt 5:48). «This is the will of God, your holiness» (1 Thes 4:3). Scripture knows no holiness for a few specialists of the spirit, nor a career reserved for those who wear a religious habit. The Second Vatican Council restated this without ambiguity: «all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity»¹. It is a holiness that dwells not only in cloisters and on altars, but in homes, in workplaces, in hospital wards, wherever a man or a woman lives out faithfully, day after day, what God has entrusted to them.

If holiness were something unattainable, God would have commanded us to do the impossible. And God does not make fools of his creatures.

What holiness really is

In the popular imagination, holiness is identified with sinlessness, with miracles, with ecstasies, with fasts prolonged beyond all reason. All things that may accompany the life of a saint, but that do not constitute its essence. Saint Thomas Aquinas puts it with his usual sobriety: the perfection of the Christian life consists essentially in charity². The saint is not first of all the one who has never sinned, but the one who has loved God and neighbour to the very end, letting grace work in him until it transformed him.

This does not mean that holiness is a moral achievement, the fruit of some gymnastics of the will. It is first of all a gift that God offers and that man is called to receive. But receiving is not passivity: «The way of perfection passes by way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle»³. Holiness is not a prize reserved for those who have never gone wrong, but the destination of those who have never stopped letting God reach them.

One need only glance through the lives of not a few saints to see this. Augustine of Hippo lived for years with a concubine, by whom he had a son, Adeodatus, before surrendering to grace. Mary of Egypt, according to the Life written by Sophronius of Jerusalem, lived as a prostitute in Alexandria for seventeen years⁴. Margaret of Cortona was for some ten years the mistress of a young nobleman of Montepulciano, to whom she bore a son. Moses the Ethiopian, before becoming one of the great Desert Fathers, had been the leader of a band of brigands. Camillus de Lellis, a soldier of fortune, was so enslaved to gambling that he lost everything he owned, down to the shirt on his back. Ignatius of Loyola, by his own admission, was until the age of twenty-six a man given to the vanities of the world⁵. Charles de Foucauld, as a young cavalry officer, was known more for his carousing and his mistresses than for his discipline. Bartolo Longo, before founding the shrine of Pompeii, frequented the spiritualist circles of Naples to the point of declaring himself consecrated a priest of Satan; Leo XIV proclaimed him a saint in 2025. None of them was born a saint. All of them became saints, passing not alongside sin but through it, until grace reached them and found them, at last, willing to let themselves be reached.

From martyrs to confessors

In the first centuries the saints venerated by the Church were the martyrs. The Eucharist was celebrated over their tombs on the anniversary of their death, called the dies natalis, the day of their birth into heaven. Blood shed for Christ was the unmistakable sign of holiness. But when the persecutions ceased with the Peace of Constantine, a new question arose: can one be a saint without shedding one’s blood? The answer has a name: Martin of Tours, soldier, monk and bishop, who died in 397. He was among the first, if not the very first, in the West to receive public veneration without having been a martyr. His biographer Sulpicius Severus explained it thus:

«Although the circumstances of his time could not offer him martyrdom, he will not lack the glory of a martyr, because by desire and by virtue he both could have been and wished to be a martyr»⁶.

Thus was born the figure of the «confessor», one who bears witness to Christ not by a violent death but by the daily gift of his life. For the sake of historical accuracy, it should be said that canonisation did not exist in Martin’s day: veneration arose from below, from a reputation for holiness among the people and from the approval of the local bishop. The first formal canonisation pronounced by a Roman Pontiff was that of Ulrich of Augsburg, declared a saint by John XV in 993.

Saints are not born

Over the centuries we have idealised the saints to the point of making them inimitable. That likeable and imaginative Dominican, Jacopo da Varazze, archbishop of Genoa, relates in his Golden Legend, without the slightest fear of looking ridiculous, that Saint Nicholas, while still a nursing infant, took his mother’s milk only once a day on Wednesdays and Fridays, so as to keep the fast⁷. A newborn already keeping the penitential calendar, in short. Baroque hagiography multiplied saints who displayed heroic virtue from the cradle, and devotional holy cards did the rest, handing down to us angelic figures with eyes turned heavenwards and not a shadow of inner struggle. The result was paradoxical: precisely because they were perfect from the start, the saints became models to be admired from afar, not imitated. And so we felt excused from even trying, thanks precisely to the likes of Jacopo da Varazze.

The reality is quite different. Paul of Tarsus persecuted the Church, entering house after house and dragging men and women off to prison (cf. Acts 8:3), and to the very end called himself the foremost of sinners (cf. 1 Tim 1:15). Francis of Assisi, before embracing Lady Poverty, was the king of the revels among the young men of Assisi⁸. The saints were not born such: they became saints, often after long years spent even in the gravest sins.

What many do not know, or perhaps do not remember, is that the first saint ever proclaimed as such was a criminal condemned to death. Crucified beside Jesus, unlike the other wrongdoer who reviled him, he turned to him and said: «Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom». And Jesus replied: «Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise» (Page 23:42-43). If there was ever a canonisation, Christ himself celebrated it, from the cross, with no trial, no postulator and no verified miracles. The most surprising detail lies elsewhere: according to Matthew and Mark, that thief too at first reviled Jesus together with his companion (cf. Mt 27:44; Mk 15:32). The saint whom tradition would call Dismas⁹ came forth from a man who, moments earlier, had been blaspheming. The whole theology of grace is contained in those few moments: no one is too far away to be reached, not even at his last breath.

The nameless army

The feast of All Saints has a long history. In 609 Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs. In the following century Gregory III consecrated an oratory to all the saints in Saint Peter’s Basilica and fixed the celebration on 1 November, a date that Gregory IV extended to the whole Church in 835.

Yet the deeper meaning of this solemnity escapes many. It is not first of all the feast of the canonised saints listed in the calendar, each of whom already has a day of his or her own. It is the feast of that «great multitude, which no one could count» (Rev 7:9): the countless army of unknown saints whom no Dicastery for the Causes of Saints has ever examined, nor ever will. The grandmother who prayed the rosary every evening for a grandchild who had drifted from the faith. The father who worked honestly for forty years without ever stealing a single cent. The parish priest of a mountain village forgotten by everyone except God. The sick man who offered up his suffering without turning it into a banner. None of them will have a statue, an image, a feast day. Yet it is they, for the most part, who make up «that number».

The French writer Léon Bloy ended one of his novels with a sentence that has become famous: «There is only one sadness: not to be saints»¹⁰. All Saints reminds us that this sadness is not a condemnation, because the door remains open until the very last moment, as that thief on the cross discovered. The march of the saints is difficult; no one denies it. But it is possible, because what walks ahead of us is not an unattainable model, but an innumerable crowd of men and women who, sinners like us, allowed themselves to be saved.

When the New Orleans band came back from the cemetery, people poured into the streets and joined the procession, dancing. They did not merely listen: they fell into line. This is the invitation of All Saints. And the most sincere prayer we can address to God on this day is perhaps precisely that of the old Negro spiritual: «Oh Lord, I want to be in that number».

From The Island of Patmos, 1 November 2026

 

NOTES

¹ Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church The light, n. 40.

² Cf. Thomas Aquinas, QUESTION, II-II, q. 184, a. 1.

³ Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2015.

⁴ Cf. Sophronius of Jerusalem, Life of Saint Mary of Egypt.

⁵ Cf. Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, n. 1.

⁶ Sulpicius Severus, Letter (II), 9. Our translation.

⁷ Cf. Jacopo da Varazze, Golden Legend, chapter «Saint Nicholas».

⁸ Cf. Thomas of Celano, First Life of Saint Francis, I, 1-2.

⁹ The name appears in the Gospel of Nicodemus (or Acts of Pilate), 10, an apocryphal text.

¹⁰ L. Bloy, La femme pauvre (1897), last page. Our translation.

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LA DIFÍCIL PERO POSIBLE MARCHA DE LOS SANTOS EN EL CANTO DE LOS NEGROS DE NUEVA ORLEANS

La santidad no es el premio reservado a quien nunca se ha equivocado, sino la meta de quien nunca ha cesado de dejarse alcanzar por Dios.

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En Nueva Orleans, en las primeras décadas del siglo XX, los funerales tenían un rito muy particular. La banda acompañaba el féretro hacia el cementerio a paso lento, tocando marchas fúnebres. A la vuelta, una vez sepultado el difunto, la misma banda arrancaba a pleno ritmo con un viejo espiritual de los negros de América: When the Saints Go Marching In. Quien lo presenciaba por primera vez podía tomarlo por una irreverencia. Era, instead, una profesión de fe tocada con trompeta y trombón: la muerte no tiene la última palabra. Popularizada en todo el mundo por Louis Armstrong en 1938, la canción se ha vuelto tan familiar que se canta en los estadios y en las fiestas, olvidando por completo su origen. Su estribillo dice:

«Oh, when the saints go marching in, / Oh Lord, I want to be in that number, / when the saints go marching in» («Oh, cuando los santos entran en cortejo, / Señor, quiero estar en ese número, / cuando los santos entran en cortejo»).

Dos palabras merecen atención. La primera es «in». Los santos no recorren las calles como en un desfile cualquiera: entran, cruzan el umbral de la Jerusalén celestial. La segunda es «that number», ese número. Los esclavos y los hijos de los esclavos que cantaban este espiritual conocían la Biblia mejor que no pocos teólogos: ese número es el del Apocalipsis, where, después de los ciento cuarenta y cuatro mil marcados con el sello, aparece «una muchedumbre inmensa, que nadie podría contar, de todas las naciones, razas, pueblos y lenguas» (AP 7,9). Es la primera lectura de la Misa de Todos los Santos. En un canto nacido entre los negros reducidos a la esclavitud y después discriminados por la segregación racial, a quienes se negaba incluso la dignidad de personas, la esperanza tenía los rasgos precisos de la liturgia de la Iglesia: entrar en ese número.

Una llamada dirigida a todos

«Sed santos, porque yo, el Señor, vuestro Dios, soy santo» (Lv 19,2). «Por tanto, sed perfectos, como vuestro Padre celestial es perfecto» (Mt 5,48). «Esta es la voluntad de Dios: vuestra santificación» (1 Tes 4,3). La Escritura no conoce una santidad para unos pocos especialistas del espíritu, ni una carrera reservada a quien viste un hábito religioso. El Concilio Vaticano II lo reafirmó sin ambigüedad: «todos los fieles, de cualquier estado o condición, están llamados a la plenitud de la vida cristiana y a la perfección de la caridad»¹. Es una santidad que no habita solo en los claustros y en los altares, sino en las casas, en los lugares de trabajo, en las salas de los hospitales, dondequiera que un hombre o una mujer viven con fidelidad, day after day, lo que Dios les ha confiado.

Si la santidad fuera algo inalcanzable, Dios nos habría mandado lo imposible. Y Dios no se burla de sus criaturas.

Qué es realmente la santidad

En el imaginario común, la santidad coincide con la impecabilidad, con los prodigios, con los éxtasis, con ayunos prolongados más allá de toda sensatez. Cosas todas ellas que pueden acompañar la vida de un santo, pero que no constituyen su esencia. Santo Tomás de Aquino lo dice con su habitual sobriedad: la perfección de la vida cristiana consiste esencialmente en la caridad². El santo no es ante todo quien no ha pecado, sino quien ha amado a Dios y al prójimo hasta el final, dejando que la gracia obrara en él hasta transformarlo.

Esto no significa que la santidad sea una conquista moral, fruto de una gimnasia de la voluntad. Es ante todo un don que Dios ofrece y que el hombre está llamado a acoger. Pero acoger no es quedarse pasivo: «El camino de la perfección pasa por la cruz. No hay santidad sin renuncia y sin combate espiritual»³. La santidad no es el premio reservado a quien nunca se ha equivocado, sino la meta de quien nunca ha cesado de dejarse alcanzar por Dios.

Basta recorrer la vida de no pocos santos para comprobarlo. Agustín de Hipona vivió durante años con una concubina, de la que tuvo un hijo, Adeodato, antes de rendirse a la gracia. María Egipciaca, según la Vida escrita por Sofronio de Jerusalén, se prostituyó durante diecisiete años en Alejandría⁴. Margarita de Cortona fue durante unos diez años la amante de un joven noble de Montepulciano, al que dio un hijo. Moisés el Etíope, antes de convertirse en uno de los grandes Padres del desierto, había sido cabecilla de una banda de salteadores. Camilo de Lelis, soldado de fortuna, era esclavo del juego hasta el punto de perder todo cuanto poseía, hasta la camisa. Ignacio de Loyola, según su propia confesión, hasta los veintiséis años fue hombre dado a las vanidades del mundo⁵. Carlos de Foucauld, joven oficial de caballería, se hizo notar más por sus juergas y sus amantes que por su disciplina. Bartolo Longo, antes de fundar el santuario de Pompeya, frecuentó los círculos espiritistas de Nápoles hasta declararse consagrado sacerdote de Satanás; León XIV lo proclamó santo en 2025. Ninguno de ellos nació santo. Todos llegaron a serlo, pasando no junto al pecado, sino a través de él, hasta que la gracia los alcanzó y los encontró, at last, dispuestos a dejarse alcanzar.

De los mártires a los confesores

En los primeros siglos, los santos venerados por la Iglesia eran los mártires. Sobre sus tumbas se celebraba la Eucaristía en el aniversario de su muerte, llamado dies natalis, día del nacimiento al cielo. La sangre derramada por Cristo era el signo inequívoco de la santidad. Pero cuando, con la paz de Constantino, cesaron las persecuciones, se planteó una pregunta nueva: ¿se puede ser santo sin derramar la sangre? La respuesta tiene un nombre: Martín de Tours, soldado, monje y obispo, muerto en el año 397. Fue uno de los primeros, si no el primero, en recibir en Occidente un culto público sin haber sido mártir. Su biógrafo Sulpicio Severo lo explicó así:

«Aunque las circunstancias de su tiempo no pudieron ofrecerle el martirio, no carecerá de la gloria del mártir, porque con el deseo y con la virtud pudo y quiso ser mártir»⁶.

Nacía así la figura del «confesor», el que da testimonio de Cristo no con una muerte violenta, sino con la entrega cotidiana de la vida. En honor a la exactitud histórica, hay que decir que en tiempos de Martín la canonización no existía: el culto nacía desde abajo, de la fama de santidad entre el pueblo y de la aprobación del obispo local. La primera canonización formal pronunciada por un Romano Pontífice es la de Ulrico de Augsburgo, proclamado santo por Juan XV en el año 993.

Santo no se nace

A lo largo de los siglos hemos idealizado a los santos hasta hacerlos inimitables. Aquel simpático y fantasioso dominico que fue Santiago de la Vorágine, arzobispo de Génova, cuenta en su Leyenda dorada, sin el menor temor a caer en el ridículo, que San Nicolás, siendo todavía lactante, los miércoles y los viernes tomaba la leche materna una sola vez al día para guardar el ayuno⁷. Un recién nacido ya cumplidor del calendario penitencial, In short. La hagiografía barroca multiplicó los santos que desde la cuna mostraban virtudes heroicas y las estampitas devotas hicieron el resto, entregándonos figuras angelicales, con los ojos vueltos al cielo, sin sombra de lucha interior. El resultado fue paradójico: precisamente por ser perfectos desde el principio, los santos se convirtieron en modelos para admirar a distancia, no para imitar. Y así nos sentimos dispensados de intentarlo, gracias precisamente a los Santiago de la Vorágine de turno.

La realidad es muy distinta. Pablo de Tarso perseguía a la Iglesia entrando en las casas y arrastrando a la cárcel a hombres y mujeres (cf. Hch 8,3) y hasta el final se llamó a sí mismo el primero de los pecadores (cf. 1 Tim 1,15). Francisco de Asís, antes de abrazar a la señora Pobreza, era el rey de las francachelas de la juventud de Asís⁸. Los santos no nacieron tales: llegaron a serlo, a menudo después de largos años vividos incluso en los pecados más graves.

Lo que muchos no saben, o quizá no recuerdan, es que el primer santo proclamado como tal fue un criminal condenado a muerte. Crucificado junto a Jesús, a diferencia del otro malhechor, que lo insultaba, se dirigió a él diciendo: «Jesús, acuérdate de mí cuando llegues a tu reino». Y Jesús le respondió: «En verdad te digo: hoy estarás conmigo en el paraíso» (LC 23,42-43). Si alguna vez hubo una canonización, la celebró Cristo mismo, desde la cruz, sin proceso, sin postulador y sin milagros comprobados. El detalle más sorprendente es otro: según Mateo y Marcos, también aquel ladrón, at first, insultaba a Jesús junto con su compañero (cf. Mt 27,44; MC 15,32). El santo al que la tradición llamará Dimas⁹ salió de quien, poco antes, blasfemaba. Toda la teología de la gracia queda encerrada en unos pocos instantes: nadie está demasiado lejos para ser alcanzado, ni siquiera en su último aliento.

El ejército sin nombre

La fiesta de Todos los Santos tiene una larga historia. En el año 609 el papa Bonifacio IV dedicó el Panteón de Roma a la Virgen María y a todos los mártires. En el siglo siguiente Gregorio III consagró en la basílica de San Pedro un oratorio a todos los santos y fijó la celebración el 1 de noviembre, fecha que Gregorio IV extendió después a toda la Iglesia en el año 835.

Pero a muchos se les escapa el sentido profundo de esta solemnidad. No es ante todo la fiesta de los santos canonizados e inscritos en el calendario, cada uno de los cuales tiene ya su propio día. Es la fiesta de aquella «muchedumbre inmensa, que nadie podría contar» (AP 7,9): el ejército innumerable de santos desconocidos que ningún Dicasterio de las Causas de los Santos ha examinado nunca, ni examinará jamás. La abuela que rezó el rosario cada noche por un nieto alejado de la fe. El padre de familia que trabajó honradamente durante cuarenta años sin robar nunca un euro. El párroco de un pueblo de montaña olvidado por todos, menos por Dios. El enfermo que ofreció su sufrimiento sin hacer de él una bandera. Ninguno de ellos tendrá una estatua, una imagen, una fiesta. Y, however, son ellos, en su inmensa mayoría, «ese número».

El escritor francés Léon Bloy cerró una de sus novelas con una frase que se ha hecho célebre: «No hay más que una tristeza: la de no ser santos»¹⁰. Todos los Santos nos recuerda que esta tristeza no es una condena, porque la puerta permanece abierta hasta el último instante, como experimentó aquel ladrón en la cruz. La marcha de los santos es difícil, nadie lo niega. Pero es posible, porque delante de nosotros no camina un modelo inalcanzable, sino una muchedumbre innumerable de hombres y mujeres que, pecadores como nosotros, se dejaron salvar.

Cuando la banda de Nueva Orleans volvía del cementerio, la gente bajaba a la calle y se unía al cortejo bailando. No se limitaba a escuchar: entraba en la fila. Esta es la invitación de Todos los Santos. Y la oración más sincera que podemos dirigir a Dios en este día es quizá precisamente la del espiritual de los negros de América: «Oh Lord, I want to be in that number»: Señor, quiero estar en ese número.

From the Island of Patmos, 1 November 2026

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NOTES

¹ Concilio Ecuménico Vaticano II, Constitución dogmática sobre la Iglesia The light, n. 40.

² Cf. Thomas Aquinas, QUESTION, II-II, q. 184, a. 1.

³ Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2015.

⁴ Cf. Sofronio de Jerusalén, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca.

⁵ Cf. Ignacio de Loyola, Autobiografía, n. 1.

⁶ Sulpicio Severo, Epístola (II), 9. Traducción nuestra.

⁷ Cf. Santiago de la Vorágine, Leyenda dorada, cap. «San Nicolás».

⁸ Cf. Tomás de Celano, Vida primera de San Francisco, I, 1-2.

⁹ El nombre aparece en el Evangelio de Nicodemo (O Acts of Pilate), 10, escrito apócrifo.

¹⁰ L. Bloy, La femme pauvre (1897), última página. Traducción nuestra.

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The church building. Symbolic and initiatory space - The church building. A symbolic and initiatory space ― El templo cristiano. Symbolic and initiatory space

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Italian, english, español

 

L’EDIFICIO CHIESA, SPAZIO SIMBOLICO E INIZIATICO

Per comprendere l’identità del cristiano è opportuno ritornare al luogo dove egli è nato come tale, that is, at the baptismal font.

— Liturgical ministry —

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AuthorSimone Pifizzi

Author
Simone Pifizzi

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PDF print format article – article print format – article in printed format

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C’è una profonda relazione tra l’uomo e lo spazio che lo circonda. L’uomo vi si riflette e di conseguenza comunica qualcosa di sé agli altri. Lo spazio diventa quindi una porta che ci permette di entrare in qualche modo nell’universo dei pensieri e dei sentimenti di una persona, a group, of a people. Questo vale anche per lo spazio liturgico; in esso infatti la Chiesa peregrinante nel tempo riflette sé stessa e la sua storia quale incarnazione di quel Vangelo che, in modo del tutto speciale, viene comunicato attraverso le celebrazioni sacramentali, which, in turn, hanno “plasmato” lo spazio liturgico.

Dalla «casa della Chiesa» alla Chiesa di tutto un popolo

Il modo di comunicare e celebrare la fede ha dato vita nei secoli a vari tipi o stili di chiese, secondo le particolari esigenze di ogni tempo. Nei primi tre secoli, anche per motivi contingenti che non permettevano di fare diversamente, la comunità cristiana ha riflesso la propria immagine nella domus ecclesiae, cioè letteralmente nella «casa della Chiesa», del popolo convocato da Dio. Si trattava generalmente di un’abitazione privata capiente, messa a disposizione della comunità locale da parte di qualche cristiano facoltoso. In tale periodo la Chiesa ha espresso in modo particolare la sua dimensione domestica, che privilegiava il rapporto familiare caratterizzante la vita di Gesù con i suoi e la vita della prima comunità apostolica (cf.. At 2,46).

Con la pace di Costantino (313), che segna di fatto la fine delle persecuzioni e il riconoscimento giuridico del Cristianesimo da parte dello Stato, la comunità cristiana si ingrandì e, dovendo usare luoghi di culto più ampi, fece propria la struttura già esistente della basilica romana, cioè del luogo nel quale la società civile si riuniva per i momenti importanti della vita pubblica. Si trattava sempre e comunque di un luogo in funzione del popolo convocato; in questo caso non più da un re (in greco βασιλεύς, basileús, da cui il termine «basilica»), ma da Dio. E proprio perché l’assemblea cristiana è convocata da Dio, nasce dal battesimo, cresce alla mensa della Parola e del Pane di vita, la struttura della basilica pian piano si adatta alle esigenze del culto e si modifica mettendo in evidenza sempre più la sede o cattedra di chi presiede, il luogo del battesimo, l’ambone e ovviamente l’altare.

Uno spazio per evangelizzare e iniziare alla fede

Senza ripercorrere tutta la storia degli edifici sacri, è sufficiente pensare alle diverse forme di chiese per intuire che lo spazio liturgico non è solo funzionale, ma esprime un certo modo di essere Chiesa e possiede un’inevitabile dimensione iniziatica. Si pensi ad esempio alle cattedrali gotiche, che con il loro slancio spingono a guardare in alto, o alle chiese costruite in seguito alla riforma del Concilio di Trento, che mirano ad avere al centro l’Eucaristia. Lo spazio liturgico e il suo arredo hanno una grandissima importanza in vista di un’evangelizzazione corretta, nuova e adeguata al nostro tempo; ma questa sensibilità fatica ancora a divenire una componente dell’attività pastorale.

Battistero e fonte battesimale

Il fonte battesimale è il luogo — tra i più importanti in una chiesa — dove si celebra il battesimo, primo sacramento della Nuova Alleanza, in forza del quale gli uomini, aderendo nella fede a Cristo Signore, ricevono lo Spirito di adozione a figli e, uniti a Cristo nella sua morte e resurrezione (cf.. RM 6,3-5), entrano a far parte del suo corpo che è la Chiesa.

Quando si scrive la biografia di una persona, per meglio comprendere il personaggio descritto, è opportuno andare alle sue origini, alla terra che gli ha dato i natali, alla famiglia e all’ambiente sociale in cui è cresciuto… Anche per comprendere l’identità del cristiano è opportuno ritornare al luogo dove egli è nato come tale, that is, at the baptismal font. Per la verità oggi questo “pellegrinaggio” alle fonti potrebbe risultare alquanto deludente. Una lunga tradizione che ci sta alle spalle ha in qualche modo umiliato lo spazio dell’iniziazione cristiana e lo ha ridotto sovente a un angolo oscuro e abbandonato, con serie difficoltà ad esprimere le luminose origini pasquali della vita cristiana.

Il rinnovamento liturgico scaturito dal Concilio Vaticano II ha influito profondamente sulla prassi dell’iniziazione cristiana e, Consequently, anche sullo spazio cultuale riservato alla celebrazione del battesimo. Anche questo spazio, come del resto tutta la struttura architettonica della chiesa, è chiamato a rivelare l’identità del cristiano e la sua missione nel mondo contemporaneo. In primo luogo il fonte battesimale deve oggi esprimere la dimensione comunitaria della fede (e del battesimo); dimensione che per lungo tempo è stata oscurata. Per questo le norme, con soluzioni coraggiose e veramente nuove, prevedono uno spazio battesimale che prima di tutto permetta la celebrazione comunitaria¹.

A chi entra oggi in una chiesa deve apparire subito ben chiaro che il fonte battesimale non è un accessorio secondario, ma il simbolo di ciò che è il cristiano, cioè un “resuscitato”, un rinato nello Spirito (cf.. GV 3,5) per mezzo di quell’acqua che è simbolo di Cristo e della sua parola che rende puri e giustificati (cf.. GV 4,1-26; GV 15,3). È tutta questa ricchezza simbolica che oggi le chiese, soprattutto quelle di nuova costruzione, sono chiamate a esprimere attraverso lo spazio riservato all’iniziazione cristiana.

L’ambone: spazio della Parola

L’ambone è un elemento che non si trova nei templi pagani: è specifico del culto cristiano, che sviluppa la tradizione ebraica al centro della quale c’è la Parola del Signore. È però sintomatico che oggi tra i fedeli cattolici non ci sia una particolare sensibilità verso l’ambone, che è da tempo scomparso dalle nostre chiese, eccezion fatta per quelle antichissime o di recente costruzione. Nel frattempo ci si trova sovente di fronte a un leggio, qualche volta traballante e assai misero, che non esprime certo l’importanza della Parola di Dio².

Un po’ di storia

Il popolo di Dio nasce dall’ascolto della Parola. And Jesus, la Parola fatta carne (cf.. GV 1,14), ribadisce: «Chi ascolta la mia parola […] ha la vita eterna» (GV 5,24). Il cristianesimo non esprime un rapporto fiscale con una divinità che è placata e messa a tacere dai riti, bensì un dialogo d’amore con quel Dio che per sua natura intende stabilire un’alleanza con l’umanità. Fin dall’inizio infatti il culto cristiano si qualifica agli occhi dei pagani come profondamente legato alla Parola. Non senza ragione l’imperatore Diocleziano nel 303 scatenò una feroce persecuzione contro i cristiani con l’ordine esplicito di consegnare e distruggere i loro libri³. So that, quando la Chiesa ebbe la possibilità di edificare luoghi di culto, diede uno spazio tutto speciale alla proclamazione della Scrittura. Nacque così l’ambone (the greek anabáino, «salgo»), uno spazio elevato e nobile che, oltre ai vantaggi pratici dell’ascolto, esprimesse anche e soprattutto la centralità e l’importanza della Parola di Dio. L’ambone costituisce fin da subito un luogo santo, quasi come l’altare; in entrambi i luoghi è lo stesso mistero pasquale di Cristo che si unisce alla testimonianza dei battezzati.

Mensa della Parola

«Nella celebrazione liturgica la Sacra Scrittura ha una importanza estrema»⁴. «Nell’ascolto della Parola di Dio si edifica e cresce la Chiesa»⁵. La riforma liturgica del Vaticano II ha recuperato la centralità della Parola e di conseguenza non solo l’Evangeliario ha ritrovato il suo posto nella processione d’ingresso subito dopo la croce, ma la proclamazione della Parola di Dio ha anche ritrovato, dopo tanti secoli, il suo spazio simbolico. «L’importanza della Parola di Dio esige che vi sia nella chiesa un luogo adatto dal quale essa venga annunciata, e verso il quale, durante la liturgia della Parola, spontaneamente si rivolga l’attenzione dei fedeli»⁶.

A questa norma fanno eco anche le disposizioni della Commissione episcopale per la liturgia della Conferenza Episcopale Italiana: «[L’ambone] è il luogo proprio della Parola di Dio. La sua forma sia correlata all’altare, senza tuttavia interferire con la priorità di esso; la sua ubicazione sia pensata in prossimità dell’assemblea (anche non all’interno del presbiterio, come testimonia la tradizione liturgica) e renda possibile la processione con l’Evangeliario e la proclamazione pasquale della Parola. Sia conveniente per dignità e funzionalità, disposto in modo tale che i ministri che lo usano possano essere visti e ascoltati dall’assemblea»⁷. L’ambone è quindi la mensa della Parola in stretta connessione con la mensa del Pane di vita. La sua importanza simbolica è in qualche modo riassunta nella preghiera prevista per la benedizione: "Hate, che chiami gli uomini dalle tenebre alla tua ammirabile luce, accogli il nostro inno di benedizione e di lode; tu non ci lasci mai mancare il nutrimento dolce e forte della tua parola e convocandoci in quest’aula ecclesiale continui a ricordare le meraviglie da te annunciate e compiute. Risuoni dunque, or Father, ai nostri orecchi la voce del tuo Figlio risorto, perché corrispondendo all’azione interiore dello Spirito, possiamo essere non solo ascoltatori, ma operatori fervidi e coerenti della tua parola. Da questo ambone i tuoi messaggeri ci indichino il sentiero della vita, perché camminando sulle orme di Cristo, possiamo giungere alla gloria eterna»⁸.

Fonte battesimale e ambone non sono dunque semplici arredi, ma tappe di un medesimo cammino: al fonte il cristiano nasce, all’ambone si nutre della Parola che lo ha generato. È questa la dimensione iniziatica dello spazio liturgico: prima ancora che con le parole, è l’edificio stesso a dire chi è il cristiano e da dove viene. E il cammino non si ferma qui, perché dalla mensa della Parola conduce alla mensa del Pane di vita, cioè all’altare.

Florence, 31 October 2026

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NOTE

¹ Cfr. Conferenza Episcopale Italiana – Commissione episcopale per la liturgia, La progettazione di nuove chiese. Nota pastorale, 18 February 1993, n. 11.

² Cfr. Ordinamento generale del Messale Romano, n. 309; Italian Episcopal Conference, Roman Missal, seconda edizione italiana (1983), Precisazioni, n. 16.

³ Cfr. Lattanzio, De mortibus persecutorum, 12-13; Eusebio di Cesarea, Storia ecclesiastica, VIII, 2, 4.

⁴ Concilio Ecumenico Vaticano II, Costituzione sulla sacra liturgia Holy Council, n. 24.

⁵ Ordo Lectionum Missae, Premesse, n. 7.

⁶ Ordinamento generale del Messale Romano, n. 309.

⁷ La progettazione di nuove chiese, cit., n. 9.

⁸ Blessings, Benedizione di un nuovo ambone.

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THE CHURCH BUILDING, A SYMBOLIC AND INITIATORY SPACE

To understand the identity of the Christian, too, it is fitting to return to the place where he was born as such: the baptismal font.

— Liturgical pastoral care —

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AuthorSimone Pifizzi

Author
Simone Pifizzi

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There is a deep relationship between human beings and the space that surrounds them. People are mirrored in it and, in so doing, communicate something of themselves to others. Space thus becomes a doorway that allows us to enter, in some way, into the world of thoughts and feelings of a person, a group, a people. This is true of liturgical space as well: in it the Church, on pilgrimage through time, reflects herself and her history as the incarnation of that Gospel which is communicated in a wholly special way through the sacramental celebrations, which in turn have “shaped” liturgical space.

From the «house of the Church» to the Church of an entire people

Over the centuries, the way of communicating and celebrating the faith has given rise to various types or styles of churches, according to the particular needs of each age. In the first three centuries, partly because circumstances allowed nothing else, the Christian community reflected its own image in the domus ecclesiae, literally the «house of the Church», of the people called together by God. It was generally a spacious private dwelling placed at the disposal of the local community by some well-to-do Christian. In this period the Church expressed above all her domestic dimension, which favoured the family relationship that marked the life of Jesus with his own and the life of the first apostolic community (cf. Acts 2:46).

With the Peace of Constantine (313), which effectively marked the end of the persecutions and the legal recognition of Christianity by the State, the Christian community grew and, needing larger places of worship, adopted the already existing structure of the Roman basilica, the place where civil society gathered for the important moments of public life. It was still a place at the service of a people called together; now, however, called together not by a king (in Greek βασιλεύς, basileús, from which the word «basilica» derives), but by God. And precisely because the Christian assembly is called together by God, is born of baptism and grows at the table of the Word and of the Bread of life, the structure of the basilica gradually adapted itself to the needs of worship, increasingly highlighting the chair or cathedra of the one who presides, the place of baptism, the ambo and, of course, the altar.

A space for evangelising and initiating into the faith

Without retracing the whole history of sacred buildings, it is enough to think of the different forms churches have taken to sense that liturgical space is not merely functional, but expresses a certain way of being Church and possesses an inevitable initiatory dimension. Think, for example, of the Gothic cathedrals, whose soaring lines draw the gaze upwards, or of the churches built in the wake of the reform of the Council of Trent, which aim to place the Eucharist at the centre. Liturgical space and its furnishings are of the utmost importance for an evangelisation that is sound, new and suited to our time; yet this sensitivity still struggles to become part of pastoral practice.

Baptistery and baptismal font

The baptismal font is the place, among the most important in a church, where baptism is celebrated: the first sacrament of the New Covenant, by which men and women, adhering in faith to Christ the Lord, receive the Spirit of adoption as children and, united with Christ in his death and resurrection (cf. Rom 6:3-5), become members of his body, which is the Church.

When writing a person’s biography, to understand the subject better it is useful to go back to his origins, to the land of his birth, to the family and social milieu in which he grew up… To understand the identity of the Christian, too, it is fitting to return to the place where he was born as such: the baptismal font. To tell the truth, this “pilgrimage” to the sources might prove rather disappointing today. A long tradition behind us has in some way humbled the space of Christian initiation, often reducing it to a dark and neglected corner that struggles to express the luminous paschal origins of Christian life.

The liturgical renewal that sprang from the Second Vatican Council has profoundly influenced the practice of Christian initiation and, consequently, the space set aside for the celebration of baptism. This space too, like the whole architectural structure of the church, is called to reveal the identity of the Christian and his mission in today’s world. First of all, the baptismal font must now express the communal dimension of faith (and of baptism), a dimension long obscured. For this reason the norms, with bold and truly new solutions, provide for a baptismal space that above all allows for communal celebration¹.

Anyone entering a church today should see at once that the baptismal font is not a secondary accessory, but the symbol of what the Christian is: one “risen”, one reborn in the Spirit (cf. Jn 3:5) through that water which is a symbol of Christ and of his word, which makes us clean and righteous (cf. Jn 4:1-26; Jn 15:3). It is all this symbolic richness that churches today, especially newly built ones, are called to express through the space set aside for Christian initiation.

The ambo: the place of the Word

The ambo is not found in pagan temples: it is proper to Christian worship, which develops the Jewish tradition, at whose heart lies the Word of the Lord. It is telling, however, that Catholics today show no particular sensitivity towards the ambo, which has long since disappeared from our churches, except for very ancient or recently built ones. Meanwhile we are often faced with a lectern, sometimes wobbly and rather shabby, that hardly conveys the importance of the Word of God².

A little history

The people of God is born from listening to the Word. And Jesus, the Word made flesh (cf. Jn 1:14), declares: «whoever hears my word […] has eternal life» (Jn 5:24). Christianity does not express a transactional relationship with a deity to be placated and silenced by rites, but a dialogue of love with the God who by his very nature wills to establish a covenant with humanity. From the very beginning, in fact, Christian worship appeared to pagan eyes as profoundly bound to the Word. It was not without reason that in 303 the emperor Diocletian unleashed a ferocious persecution against the Christians, with the explicit order that their books be handed over and destroyed³. So when the Church was able to build places of worship, she gave a wholly special space to the proclamation of Scripture. Thus the ambo was born (from the Greek anabáino, «I go up»): a raised and noble space which, beyond the practical advantages for hearing, was meant to express above all the centrality and importance of the Word of God. From the outset the ambo is a holy place, almost like the altar; in both it is the same paschal mystery of Christ that is united to the witness of the baptised.

The table of the Word

«Sacred scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy»⁴. «The Church is built up and grows by hearing the word of God»⁵. The liturgical reform of Vatican II recovered the centrality of the Word; consequently, not only has the Book of the Gospels regained its place in the entrance procession immediately after the cross, but the proclamation of the Word of God has also, after so many centuries, regained its symbolic space. «The dignity of the word of God requires that in the church there be a suitable place from which it may be proclaimed and toward which the attention of the faithful naturally turns during the Liturgy of the Word»⁶.

This norm is echoed in the provisions of the Episcopal Commission for the Liturgy of the Italian Episcopal Conference: «[The ambo] is the proper place of the Word of God. Its form should be related to the altar, without however interfering with the altar’s priority; its location should be close to the assembly (even outside the presbytery, as liturgical tradition attests) and should allow for the procession with the Book of the Gospels and the paschal proclamation of the Word. It should be fitting in dignity and functionality, and so arranged that the ministers who use it can be seen and heard by the assembly»⁷. The ambo is therefore the table of the Word, closely connected with the table of the Bread of life. Its symbolic significance is in some way summed up in the prayer for its blessing: “Oh God, who call all people out of darkness into your marvellous light, accept our hymn of blessing and praise. You never let us lack the sweet and strong nourishment of your word, and by gathering us in this church you continue to recall the wonders you have proclaimed and accomplished. May the voice of your risen Son resound in our ears, O Father, so that, responding to the inner working of the Spirit, we may be not only hearers but fervent and faithful doers of your word. From this ambo may your messengers show us the path of life, so that, walking in the footsteps of Christ, we may attain eternal glory»⁸.

The baptismal font and the ambo, then, are not mere furnishings but stages of a single journey: at the font the Christian is born, at the ambo he is nourished by the Word that gave him life. This is the initiatory dimension of liturgical space: even before words do, the building itself tells who the Christian is and where he comes from. And the journey does not end here, for from the table of the Word it leads to the table of the Bread of life, that is, to the altar.

Florence, 31 October 2026

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NOTES

¹ Cf. Italian Episcopal Conference – Episcopal Commission for the Liturgy, La progettazione di nuove chiese [The Planning of New Churches], pastoral note, 18 February 1993, n. 11.

² Cf. General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 309; Italian Episcopal Conference, Roman Missal, 2nd Italian edition (1983), Precisazioni [Clarifications], n. 16.

³ Cf. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, 12-13; Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, VIII, 2, 4.

⁴ Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Holy Council, n. 24.

⁵ Lectionary for Mass, Introduction, n. 7. Our translation.

⁶ General Instruction of the Roman Missal, n. 309.

⁷ La progettazione di nuove chiese, on. cit., n. 9. Our translation.

⁸ Blessings [Italian Book of Blessings], Blessing of a New Ambo. Our translation.

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EL TEMPLO CRISTIANO, ESPACIO SIMBÓLICO E INICIÁTICO

Para comprender la identidad del cristiano conviene volver al lugar donde nació como tal, that is to say, a la pila bautismal.

— Liturgical Pastoral —

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AuthorSimone Pifizzi

Author
Simone Pifizzi

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Existe una profunda relación entre el hombre y el espacio que lo rodea. El hombre se refleja en él y, de ese modo, comunica algo de sí a los demás. El espacio se convierte así en una puerta que nos permite entrar, somehow, en el universo de pensamientos y sentimientos de una persona, de un grupo, de un pueblo. Esto vale también para el espacio litúrgico: en él la Iglesia, peregrina en el tiempo, se refleja a sí misma y refleja su historia como encarnación de aquel Evangelio que, de un modo del todo especial, se comunica a través de las celebraciones sacramentales, las cuales, in turn, han “modelado” el espacio litúrgico.

De la «casa de la Iglesia» a la Iglesia de todo un pueblo

La manera de comunicar y celebrar la fe ha dado lugar a lo largo de los siglos a distintos tipos o estilos de iglesias, según las necesidades particulares de cada época. En los tres primeros siglos, también por circunstancias que no permitían hacerlo de otro modo, la comunidad cristiana reflejó su propia imagen en la domus ecclesiae, that is to say, literally, en la «casa de la Iglesia», del pueblo convocado por Dios. Se trataba por lo general de una vivienda privada amplia, puesta a disposición de la comunidad local por algún cristiano acomodado. En ese periodo la Iglesia expresó de modo particular su dimensión doméstica, que privilegiaba la relación familiar propia de la vida de Jesús con los suyos y de la primera comunidad apostólica (cf. Hch 2,46).

Con la paz de Constantino (313), que marca de hecho el final de las persecuciones y el reconocimiento jurídico del cristianismo por parte del Estado, la comunidad cristiana creció y, al necesitar lugares de culto más amplios, hizo suya la estructura ya existente de la basílica romana, that is to say, del lugar en el que la sociedad civil se reunía para los momentos importantes de la vida pública. Seguía tratándose de un lugar al servicio del pueblo convocado; en este caso, however, ya no por un rey (en griego βασιλεύς, basileús, de donde procede el término «basílica»), sino por Dios. Y precisamente porque la asamblea cristiana es convocada por Dios, nace del bautismo y crece en la mesa de la Palabra y del Pan de vida, la estructura de la basílica se fue adaptando poco a poco a las exigencias del culto, poniendo cada vez más de relieve la sede o cátedra de quien preside, el lugar del bautismo, el ambón y, naturally, el altar.

Un espacio para evangelizar e iniciar en la fe

Sin recorrer toda la historia de los edificios sagrados, basta pensar en las distintas formas que han adoptado las iglesias para intuir que el espacio litúrgico no es solo funcional, sino que expresa un determinado modo de ser Iglesia y posee una inevitable dimensión iniciática. Let's think, For example, en las catedrales góticas, cuyo impulso vertical invita a mirar hacia lo alto, o en las iglesias construidas a raíz de la reforma del Concilio de Trento, que buscan situar la Eucaristía en el centro. El espacio litúrgico y su mobiliario tienen una enorme importancia para una evangelización correcta, nueva y adecuada a nuestro tiempo; however, todavía cuesta que esta sensibilidad llegue a formar parte de la acción pastoral.

Baptisterio y pila bautismal

La pila bautismal es el lugar, uno de los más importantes de una iglesia, donde se celebra el bautismo, primer sacramento de la Nueva Alianza, en virtud del cual los hombres, adhiriéndose por la fe a Cristo Señor, reciben el Espíritu de adopción filial y, unidos a Cristo en su muerte y resurrección (cf. Rom 6,3-5), pasan a formar parte de su cuerpo, what is the Church.

Cuando se escribe la biografía de una persona, para comprender mejor al personaje descrito, conviene remontarse a sus orígenes, a la tierra que lo vio nacer, a la familia y al ambiente social en el que creció… También para comprender la identidad del cristiano conviene volver al lugar donde nació como tal, that is to say, a la pila bautismal. A decir verdad, hoy esta “peregrinación” a las fuentes podría resultar bastante decepcionante. Una larga tradición que tenemos a nuestras espaldas ha humillado en cierto modo el espacio de la iniciación cristiana y lo ha reducido a menudo a un rincón oscuro y abandonado, con serias dificultades para expresar los luminosos orígenes pascuales de la vida cristiana.

La renovación litúrgica surgida del Concilio Vaticano II ha influido profundamente en la praxis de la iniciación cristiana y, consequently, también en el espacio cultual reservado a la celebración del bautismo. También este espacio, como toda la estructura arquitectónica de la iglesia, está llamado a revelar la identidad del cristiano y su misión en el mundo contemporáneo. First of all, la pila bautismal debe expresar hoy la dimensión comunitaria de la fe (y del bautismo), una dimensión que durante mucho tiempo quedó oscurecida. Por eso las normas, con soluciones audaces y verdaderamente nuevas, prevén un espacio bautismal que permita ante todo la celebración comunitaria¹.

Quien entra hoy en una iglesia debe percibir enseguida con claridad que la pila bautismal no es un accesorio secundario, sino el símbolo de lo que es el cristiano: un “resucitado”, un renacido en el Espíritu (cf. Jn 3,5) por medio de aquella agua que es símbolo de Cristo y de su palabra, que purifica y justifica (cf. Jn 4,1-26; Jn 15,3). Es toda esta riqueza simbólica la que hoy las iglesias, sobre todo las de nueva construcción, están llamadas a expresar a través del espacio reservado a la iniciación cristiana.

El ambón, espacio de la Palabra

El ambón es un elemento que no se encuentra en los templos paganos: es propio del culto cristiano, que desarrolla la tradición judía, en cuyo centro está la Palabra del Señor. Resulta, however, significativo que hoy los fieles católicos no muestren una especial sensibilidad hacia el ambón, que desde hace tiempo ha desaparecido de nuestras iglesias, salvo en las muy antiguas o en las de reciente construcción. Meanwhile, nos encontramos a menudo ante un atril, a veces tambaleante y bastante pobre, que desde luego no expresa la importancia de la Palabra de Dios².

Un poco de historia

El pueblo de Dios nace de la escucha de la Palabra. Y Jesús, la Palabra hecha carne (cf. Jn 1,14), afirma: «quien escucha mi palabra […] posee la vida eterna» (Jn 5,24). El cristianismo no expresa una relación mercantil con una divinidad a la que se aplaca y se acalla con ritos, sino un diálogo de amor con el Dios que por su propia naturaleza quiere establecer una alianza con la humanidad. Desde el principio, indeed, el culto cristiano aparece a los ojos de los paganos como profundamente ligado a la Palabra. No sin razón el emperador Diocleciano desencadenó en el año 303 una feroz persecución contra los cristianos, con la orden expresa de entregar y destruir sus libros³. So, cuando la Iglesia tuvo la posibilidad de edificar lugares de culto, reservó un espacio del todo especial a la proclamación de la Escritura. Nació de este modo el ambón (from Greek anabáino, «subo»), un espacio elevado y noble que, además de las ventajas prácticas para la escucha, expresara también y sobre todo la centralidad y la importancia de la Palabra de Dios. El ambón es desde el principio un lugar santo, casi como el altar; en ambos lugares es el mismo misterio pascual de Cristo el que se une al testimonio de los bautizados.

La mesa de la Palabra

«La importancia de la Sagrada Escritura en la celebración de la Liturgia es máxima»⁴. «La Iglesia crece y se construye al escuchar la palabra de Dios»⁵. La reforma litúrgica del Vaticano II recuperó la centralidad de la Palabra; consequently, no solo el Evangeliario ha recobrado su lugar en la procesión de entrada, inmediatamente después de la cruz, sino que también la proclamación de la Palabra de Dios ha recobrado, después de tantos siglos, su espacio simbólico. «La dignidad de la Palabra de Dios exige que en la iglesia haya un sitio conveniente desde el que se proclame, y al que durante la Liturgia de la Palabra, se dirija espontáneamente la atención de los fieles»⁶.

A esta norma hacen eco las disposiciones de la Comisión Episcopal para la Liturgia de la Conferencia Episcopal Italiana: «[El ambón] es el lugar propio de la Palabra de Dios. Su forma esté en relación con el altar, sin interferir, nevertheless, con la prioridad de este; su ubicación se piense cerca de la asamblea (incluso fuera del presbiterio, como atestigua la tradición litúrgica) y haga posible la procesión con el Evangeliario y la proclamación pascual de la Palabra. Sea adecuado por su dignidad y funcionalidad, y esté dispuesto de tal modo que los ministros que lo utilizan puedan ser vistos y escuchados por la asamblea»⁷. El ambón es, therefore, la mesa de la Palabra, en estrecha conexión con la mesa del Pan de vida. Su importancia simbólica queda resumida, in a way, en la oración prevista para su bendición: «Oh God, que llamas a los hombres de las tinieblas a tu luz admirable, acoge nuestro himno de bendición y de alabanza; tú nunca dejas que nos falte el alimento dulce y fuerte de tu palabra y, al convocarnos en esta aula eclesial, sigues recordándonos las maravillas que has anunciado y realizado. Resuene, well, Dad, en nuestros oídos la voz de tu Hijo resucitado, para que, correspondiendo a la acción interior del Espíritu, seamos no solo oyentes, sino fervorosos y coherentes cumplidores de tu palabra. Que desde este ambón tus mensajeros nos indiquen el camino de la vida, para que, following in the footsteps of Christ, podamos llegar a la gloria eterna»⁸.

La pila bautismal y el ambón no son, well, simples elementos del mobiliario, sino etapas de un mismo camino: en la pila el cristiano nace, en el ambón se alimenta de la Palabra que lo ha engendrado. Esta es la dimensión iniciática del espacio litúrgico: antes aún que las palabras, es el propio edificio el que dice quién es el cristiano y de dónde viene. Y el camino no termina aquí, porque desde la mesa de la Palabra conduce a la mesa del Pan de vida, that is to say, al altar.

Florence, 31 October 2026

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NOTES

¹ Cf. Conferencia Episcopal Italiana – Comisión Episcopal para la Liturgia, La progettazione di nuove chiese [El proyecto de nuevas iglesias], nota pastoral, 18 February 1993, n. 11.

² Cf. Instrucción General del Misal Romano, n. 309; Conferencia Episcopal Italiana, Roman Missal, segunda edición italiana (1983), Precisazioni [Precisiones], n. 16.

³ Cf. Lactancio, De mortibus persecutorum, 12-13; Eusebio de Cesarea, Historia eclesiástica, VIII, 2, 4.

⁴ Concilio Ecuménico Vaticano II, Constitución sobre la sagrada liturgia Holy Council, n. 24.

⁵ Ordenación de las Lecturas de la Misa, Prenotandos, n. 7.

⁶ Instrucción General del Misal Romano, n. 309.

⁷ La progettazione di nuove chiese, cit., n. 9. Traducción nuestra.

⁸ Blessings [Bendicional italiano], Bendición de un nuevo ambón. Traducción nuestra.

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Words are important

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WORDS ARE IMPORTANT

Today everything is inhabited in the Church, we go from inhabiting the anxieties of time and relationships up to - and this is an expression that we like very much - to inhabiting the complexity, what Mina sang: «Words just words, words between us".

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AutoreMonaco Hermitage

Author
Hermit Monk

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PDF print format article

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Every human environment expresses itself with its own language, which on the one hand is useful for communicating and preserving one's identity, on the other, it risks precluding access to the uninitiated, even bordering on self-referentiality.

Linguists and sociologists have been studying the phenomenon for a long time, which in some ways can also be experienced by lay people: it is enough to come into contact with some of these environments to recognize a certain use of the language with its related phrasebook. Let's take the world of marketing for example. Anyone who hears experts in this sector speak will hear a flood of anglicisms such as target, mindset, performance, adopted not least to give a professional tone. Even fashions change: the meeting, which for many now only evokes the annual Meeting of Rimini of Communion and Liberation, has given way to call, which we have learned to use due to Covid, when many were forced to work remotely or, as they say today, in smart working. Do one call, enter call, see us in call it has become a habitual way of speaking and relating.

Apart from these lateral aspects of daily speaking, at the center remains the fact that the more closed the environments are, the more the language remains comprehensible only to the initiated, that is, to those who are part of the group and share the same verb. It also happens in the Church. If there is a definition for the language used and understood by parties and their representatives, the politician, one was also coined for those who frequent the ecclesial world: the ecclesiastical. Various publications and some newspaper articles have been published on the subject, since ecclesiastical, anything but declining, it spread underground but rampantly. Someone defined it:

«Weak in content and thought, rigid with its schematic repetitiveness but actually flexible in bending it to the most banal contingencies, prone to slogans and sensitive to the ephemeral; in conclusion, "liquid" enough to adapt perfectly to the needs of the "man of the world" (and power) clerical"¹.

Thus it happens that the word "atheist" prefer the more harmless "non-believer". "Loving your neighbor" we can say, but it sounds better to "exercise proximity". The "desirata" or "programs" of a bishop and his collaborators, better to call them "orientations" and "pastoral plan". And the results of the initiatives adopted? Defined, naturally, «pastoral implications». The doctrine, the catechism? Outdated words: better to talk about the "path of Christian initiation". They seem like jokes, but that's exactly how it is.

Even the words of ecclesialese have their seasons. Someone will remember that in a not very distant past the term "discernment" was in fashion, which could be spirits or charismas: situations could be discerned, vocations and all kinds of things. When Don Luigi Ciotti, founder of the Abele Group in Turin and then of Libera, he began to often use the expression "struggling", soon this term also spread in ecclesial circles dedicated to social issues and charity, to indicate those people who struggle to find money, work, a roof and stability in a life they live on the fringes of. Then there was a time when we only talked about projects, which of course could be educational, formative or pastoral: someone remembers the cultural project of the Italian Church, so popular in the nineties of the last century? Finally Pope Francis arrived on the scene, as a coiner of slogans that became trendy in ecclesial language, it was truly unbeatable. Only a few days ago I heard the homily of an Italian archbishop who in his incipit referred to the "existential peripheries", an expression that has had some success.

But what is the word that is most fashionable in the Church today?, at least in the Italian one or at least in a part of it? I'm going by my feet, as detailed research would require a lot of time and dedication. Yet it seems to me that the most recurring term is "living". Today everything is inhabited in the Church, we go from inhabiting the anxieties of time and relationships up to - and this is an expression that we like very much - to inhabiting the complexity, what Mina sang: «Words just words, words between us".

A priest friend sent me the leaflet, which was once called a program, of the festival in honor of the patron saint of his parish and among the various initiatives I see a conference entitled: Inhabiting history. To have proof of this belief of mine I opened the web page of a religious information magazine and, by typing the word «living» in the search box, dozens of articles popped up that all had that term in the title. So I discovered that wounds can be inhabited, the borders, the borders, hope, the tension, arte, the world and relationships again, the emptiness of the heart and fortunately also the gaze of Christ.

«When it's fashion it's fashion», sang Giorgio Gaber in 1978, in a song from his famous album Farmed chickens. But what can you do then to not be approved, just like battery animals, everyone using the same phrasebook and the same words just because they are the most popular at that moment or because the famous guy used them once? I'm not an expert, so to avoid making mistakes I aim high and Jesus' way of speaking comes to mind, his language.

In an interview released many years ago, the director and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini was asked who Jesus was for him. He replied,:

«As an archetype of every possible relationship with the world it is the highest I know» (cf.. who).

But immediately afterwards he clarified that this was true for him, born in the twenties of the last century and raised, on the mother's side, in the peasant world of Friuli, tied to the land and still able to understand the agricultural metaphors of the Gospel. The modern world, young people especially, they wouldn't understand them anymore; the hedonism that was already rampant in his time would even retain the beatitudes of alien realities. Without taking anything away from the scathing examination of the director The Gospel according to Matthew, what emerges from reading the Gospels is not so much the what - what exactly Jesus had to talk about in his time, if not of sheep and shepherds, of seeds and trees or of a woman sweeping the house? — as much as the how. He takes the material of the world around him and presents it in an absolutely new way, so much so that the same guards sent to arrest him are forced to say: «Never has a man spoken like this!» (GV 7,46). Even his interpretations of Scripture, despite all moving within the Jewish cultural and religious environment of the time, stand out for the originality of their solutions and proposals: "You have heard that it was said […] But I tell you" (cf.. Mt 5,21-48). So many listened to him weighing and remembering every word: among many also religious leaders and leaders, with whom he dialogued even though he clashed. Even the devil, surprised by his answers, he preferred to take his time and return at a more opportune time, for him (cf.. LC 4,13).

This way of Jesus I think it should illuminate our conversation: in his you never hear slogans or clichés and, if he quotes a traditional proverb, he does it to communicate more meaning without getting lost in verbiage. Yet Jesus had not studied at the Sorbonne. And it is precisely the Sorbonne that gives the title to a famous article that the Dominican François-Paul Dreyfus published in 1975 on the Bible Review, the magazine of the Biblical School of Jerusalem, comparing the biblical exegesis practiced in universities and the theological and spiritual exegesis cultivated within the Church²: the first aligned on the historical-critical and scientific side, the second less academic, but aimed at spiritually nourishing today's believers. The author hoped that the two worlds could meet; and it is the same risk that was mentioned at the beginning: every environment, closed in its own language, he ends up speaking only to his own initiates. But the Word that both worlds study came from the mouth of someone who didn't even have a doctorate in theology in Tübingen, as instead, albeit Honorary, the Antichrist of Soloviev's famous story. Nonetheless, his word was beautiful. When the high priest's servant slaps him, Jesus responds: "If I spoke badly, show me where the evil is. But if I spoke correctly, why do you strike me?» (GV 18,23); and that "good" in the Greek of the Gospel is kalōs, which means both well and beautifully.

If Jesus appeared to us to be too high an example to emulate, we could at least look at Francis of Assisi, another who had no titles or refined culture, yet exactly eight hundred years after its transit, occurred on the evening of 3 October 1226, continues to be present in the world. He is perhaps the most universal saint, in which even men of other spiritual traditions can recognize themselves and whose example speaks even to non-religious people. Not many people know that he loved speaking French even though he didn't know it very well. He'll let us know Legend of the three companions, attributed to Leo, Rufinus and Angelo, with a little involuntary coquetry on the part of those, like Rufinus, Chiara's cousin, he came from a very different background and background: «He willingly spoke this language although he was unable to use it correctly»³. The saint loved to express himself in French especially at the beginning of his change of life⁴, to witness the new way of being in the world. In this language he asked for alms, he responded to his blood brother Angelo who made fun of him by meeting him in Assisi and above all he expressed his joy and praise to the Most High God. Afterwards, Francis did not abandon this predilection for French, but apparently he reserved it for moments of solitude. He made quite an effort in public communication, in time, to give his Umbrian vernacular the quality and dignity of a literary and spiritual language, as demonstrated by Canticle of Brother Sun. The French, prestige language of the courts and chivalry, it had served to mark a break; to make himself understood by everyone he instead chose everyone's language, giving it beauty. And he adopted a new greeting, which he himself claims to have received from the Lord: «The Lord revealed to me that we should say this greeting: May the Lord give you peace!»⁵. The formula was so particular and unusual for the time that it was disturbing due to its novelty, to the point that some friars were ashamed to pronounce it⁶.

Small hints to underline, returning to our topic, that it wouldn't be that difficult to find words and languages ​​that people, even the most humble, are capable of understanding when speaking about the things of faith, of the Church and how it places itself in the world, without the need to resort to clichés, to standard expressions or to the fashion of the moment. Of course, sensitivity and greatness of soul are needed, as it was for Francesco, but also culture, good reads, ability to give dignity to one's language by putting care and attention into it.

«Words are important!», shouted Nanni Moretti in a famous scene of his film Red Palombella. And they are also and above all for those who have been called to be servants of a greater Word.

From the Hermitage, 23 October 2026

 

NOTE

¹ R. Beretta, The new little illustrated ecclesiastical book, Milan 2013.

² F.-P. Dreyfus, Exegesis in the Sorbonne, exegesis in the Church, in Bible Review 82 (1975), pp. 321-359.

³ Legend of the three companions, 10, in Franciscan Sources, p. 800.

⁴ S. Pear, Francis and his brothers. A biography, Sellerio, Palermo 2026, p. 75.

⁵ Francis of Assisi, Will, 23.

⁶ Assisi compilation, 101, in Franciscan sources, p. 968.

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That cancer that no surgeon has ever removed and the metastasis of homosexualism within the clergy – The cancer no surgeon has removed and the metastases of homosexualism within the clergy – The cancer that no surgeon has removed and the metastases of homosexuality within the clergy

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THAT CANCER THAT NO SURGEON HAS REMOVED AND THE METASTASES OF HOMOSEXUALISM WITHIN THE CLERGY

Avoiding the topic of clerical homosexualism, deluding themselves into thinking that they can speak and write in a serious and credible way about the crisis of the clergy and the training of priests, it's like talking about "priests on Mars".

- Church news -

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Around the social network There is an increasing number of characters who speak casually about the crisis of the clergy, to then enter straight into a sphere of such delicacy that - as reiterated several times in these columns - would make bishops and priests with several decades of experience in the spiritual care of the clergy tremble, in particular those who find themselves in situations of despair, suffering from frailty or actual depressive syndromes. What few people talk about - and here comes the element of that fear of priests towards other priests which sometimes turns into terror - is the problem of homosexuality which is increasingly widespread among the clergy and, what is worse, of a true homosexualist culture that is taking hold through what - again in these columns - has been repeatedly referred to as the rainbow Trojan horse. This culture, which the members of a large "brotherhood" have been trying to impose within the Church for years, it is the tumor mass that unfortunately, until today, no surgeon was able to remove it. Therefore, talk about the crisis of the clergy and its training without addressing the metastasis of this cancer, like those characters do, it's pure rhetoric, sometimes even aimed at diverting attention from a problem that is anything but marginal: the symptoms are described in detail - the fear of judgement, betrayed confidences, the brother perceived as an adversary — without ever mentioning the illness, that is, a clergy that appears increasingly homosexualized.

What is the object of this analysis? Not homosexuals, over whose free life choices no one has the right to question, but the aspirants to the priesthood or homosexual priests about whom it is entirely legitimate to question, sometimes even necessary, because - as explained several times in several of my themed articles - they cannot freely be themselves. And a priest must always be able to be himself, openly and freely, certainly not living a life of pretense and duplicity, within which the sexual disorder, if present, it is destined to multiply at maximum power, in a climate of concealment and repression.

I. From transgression to suspension of conscience

Sins against the VI commandment they do not constitute anything new in the history of the Church: have spanned the centuries, as ancient and authoritative texts crudely attest, including the Free Gomorrhianus that Saint Pier Damiani directed around the 1049 to the Supreme Pontiff Leo IX. That text remains an unequivocal testimony not only to the vice, but also of the network of complicity that already protected him then: clerics who confessed to each other to absolve each other without anything leaking out, superiors inclined to cover up and minimize, culprits kept in holy orders. The future Doctor of the Church asked that they be deposed and no longer admitted to the ministry. The presence of sin, also serious and widespread, or even an organized complicity to hide it, it therefore does not represent the distinctive element of the current crisis, nor does it allow speaking, by itself, of an unprecedented decline.

The clerics denounced by Pier Damiani they hid because they knew they were in sin: their complicity was the defense of a guilt recognized as such. Which makes the contemporary situation radically different, in many respects unprecedented in ecclesial history, it is the crossing of a threshold of no return, beyond which the very ability to recognize good and evil and perceive danger is lost. In previous times, even in times of greatest corruption, sin was experienced as such, that is, as a fall, as weakness, as conscious infidelity. Conscience, although wounded, remained operational; the subject knew he was wrong, sometimes he justified himself, sometimes he hid, but he could not completely erase the internal judgment that characterized the act as disorderly. In the current situation, instead, we are witnessing a much more serious qualitative change: the suspension e, In many cases, the annihilation of moral conscience, accompanied by a culture that does not simply hide disorder, but it claims to legitimize it and impose it as a good. The behavior is no longer perceived as a transgression of a recognized good, but as a normal and undisputed way of acting. Moral judgment is not removed due to conflict or weakness, but because it is no longer considered relevant. The action takes place, to take the title of a work by Friedrich Nietzsche which has become dramatically current, beyond Good and Evil, not as a tragic and conscious choice, but as an ordinary condition of existence.

This anthropological mutation it has profound consequences on the ecclesial level. Where sin is experienced as a fall, the possibility of conversion remains open; where it is experienced as normality without judgement, conversion is not simply rejected, but it becomes unthinkable. There is no internal conflict, there is no repentance, there is no question of truth. The conscience is not silenced: he doesn't speak at all anymore. It is in this context that we understand how a morally disordered condition can transform from personal fragility into a functional factor for clerical power. Subjects without moral friction, not crossed by the drama of limits, incapable of recognizing an objective good that judges the action, they are particularly suitable for inserting themselves into government mechanisms based on silence, on complicity and mutual exposure. Lack of conscience is no longer an obstacle, but an advantage.

The clerical homosexualist lobby it fits precisely into this fracture. It does not arise primarily from weakness or occasional inconsistency, nor from that human fall that, once recognized and crossed, it can even make man more aware and better than he was before. It is instead formed through the normalization of sin and lies as a condition of belonging, transforming what should be recognized and healed into an identity presupposition and system constraint. Where sin is no longer perceived as such, but experienced as acquired and shared data, it ceases to be a moral problem and becomes a constraint: what is hidden and common guarantees fidelity, what is unsaid and exchangeable ensures protection, what compromises everyone makes everyone controllable.

It is the distinction that the Holy Father Francis posed in unambiguous terms, responding to journalists on the flight home from Rio de Janeiro on 28 July 2013:

«The problem is not having this tendency, no, we must be brothers […]. The problem is lobbying this trend […]. This is the most serious problem for me" (cf.. who).

Not the fragility of the individual, so, but the organization, let lobby. In this scenario it is not the amoral clerics who are problematic for the system, but those who, despite living faithfully, maintain a vigilant conscience and refuse to enter that circuit of complicity, of silence and exchange on which clerical homosexualism is based and transformed into an organized structure of power. Consciousness frees, non-negotiable and non-blackmailable, thus becomes the destabilizing element, not for its polemical strength, but for its simple existence.

The current crisis it does not therefore consist in a resurgence of sin, but in its transformation into a criterion of governability, until reaching an even more serious drift: selection criterion for access to the priesthood e, subsequently, for the identification of candidates deemed suitable for the episcopate. When the selection process is affected at this level, the consequences do not remain limited, but they inevitably reflect on the entire ecclesial body. Yet the rule exists and is clear. The Instruction of the Congregation for Catholic Education approved by the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI and published on 4 November 2005 establishes that the Church, «while deeply respecting the people in question, cannot admit those who practice homosexuality to the Seminary and Holy Orders, present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support so-called gay culture" (cf.. who). The same provision was reiterated in 2016 from the Fundamental System of Priestly Institution (cf.. who). The problem is therefore not the absence of criteria, but their lack of application precisely where future priests and bishops are trained and chosen.

This is the passage that marks a decadence without historical precedent: not the fall of man, always possible since the dawn of time, starting from the irruption of original sin in history, but the construction of systems in which the fall is no longer recognized as such and consciousness, emptied of its judging function, it ceases to be a place of truth to become a neutral space, functional to power.

(II). Clerical homosexualism as a system founded on the normalization of lies

Every system of power that intends to preserve itself avoids, as much as possible, direct exposure. He doesn't act personally, he does not openly compromise himself, does not publicly take responsibility for its most controversial decisions. He prefers to operate through third parties, using subjects that act as a screen, by performers, from expendable tools. It's about the straw men and gods useful idiots: figures who don't really govern, but they act in place of power, carrying out what others decide, after having been neutralized by the illusion of belonging to power and gaining indirect recognition from it.

In the ecclesiastical context, these subjects are often clericalized lay people, permanently inserted in the Curia environments and in the administrative circuits, financial and media, or in any case in the places of greatest ecclesial influence. Even without formal institutional responsibility, they enjoy an operational freedom that the clergy cannot afford. They are the ones who intervene where clerical power does not intend to expose itself directly: intimidation, they delegitimize, they defame, they report, they accuse, they give rise to proceedings without any real basis. They act convinced that they count and have weight within the power structure, while in reality they are used precisely because they are replaceable, exposed and expendable, reduced to mere executive tools intended to absorb the impact of the dirtiest actions with which the clericals do not want to dirty their hands.

It is not uncommon for a lay person to become clerical, devoid of any formal mandate, suddenly becomes the promoter of "reports" motivated by an alleged zeal for the good of the Church. No explicit accusation, no concrete evidence: just allusions, suspicious, sentences dropped with apparent discretion. That's enough, however, that these voices reach the right environments that were already waiting for them in silent availability, for an assignment to be revoked, a broken collaboration, an isolated person. The layman exposed himself, did the dirty work; power remains in the background and conserves, as it were, clean hands.

This mode of action is not episodic, but structural. The clerical power thus maintains a safe distance and always maintains a plausible deniability. It is the same mechanism that is found in every organization that intends to exercise control without openly assuming the moral and legal weight. Responsibility remains invisible; the action, instead, it is very concrete, often devastating.

Alongside this first category, a second one emerges, even more aggressive and dangerous: that of ideologically clericalized lay homosexuals, characterized by bitter militancy, vindictive and sometimes openly violent on a moral and relational level. They don't just serve as passive tools of the system, but they become active actors, moved by the objective of clearing and legitimizing homosexualism within the Church, transforming it from a tolerated disorder into a criterion of recognition and belonging. These second subjects often act as the vanguard of the system: they say and write, also through blogs and social media, what certain poisonous clerics cannot afford to state publicly; they attack whom these clerics cannot attack directly; they exert constant pressure through accusations, insinuations, reports to ecclesiastical authorities and delegitimization campaigns. Their strength lies in the almost total absence of constraints. They do not respond to formal ecclesiastical authority, they do not risk canonical sanctions, they do not pay any institutional price and, in practice, they operate in an area of ​​substantial impunity, which renders any attempt at a proportionate legal reaction ineffective. For this reason they are extremely useful to certain clerical fringes who use them while maintaining an apparently neutral position: they are the ones who expose themselves, to talk, to write, to report, while the device remains in the background, pronto, if necessary, to declare himself extraneous to the facts. In this way they can strike, intimidate and delegitimize without suffering serious consequences.

None of these entities could operate effectively if the truth were recognized and assumed as a common operational criterion, that is, as a concrete parameter to evaluate behaviors, make decisions, attribute responsibility and intervene when abuse or lies emerge. They thrive in a context in which silence is rewarded, discretion is elevated to a virtue, loyalty is not measured by righteousness, but on the ability not to undermine the system. Lying is no longer perceived as a deviation, but as a necessary condition to remain within the circuit.

It is in this environment that clerical homosexualism it ceases to be a sum of individual behaviors and takes the form of a system. Not because everyone participates, but because those who are part of it accept unwritten rules, but very rigid: don't see, don't talk, do not name. Private life becomes an instrument of control; the shared secret becomes a guarantee of reliability; mutual compromise becomes the basis of protection. Whoever accepts these conditions is integrated; who rejects them, even without reporting anything, is perceived as a dangerous destabilizing element, therefore as problematic. The lie, thus normalized, it is no longer a side effect of the system, but its operational foundation. It is the old technique of the Devil, capable of telling nine truths for later, finally reached the tenth, tell a colossal lie that completely distorts what was previously said. At that point the truth becomes distorted, by diabolical paradox, functional support for lying, which may also be an omission: not just not telling it like it is, but deny how things are.

To govern this system are not, ultimately, those who speak or act visibly, but those ecclesiastics who never intervene directly, who observe, they listen, they let it happen. They do not give explicit orders, they do not sign measures, they do not make formalized decisions, but nothing happens without their tacit consent. When the damage is done, they can always claim not to know, that they were not informed, that you have not authorized anything, sacrificing if anything, if necessary, the useful idiots sent to the office they used. The power, so practiced, it remains intact precisely because it is not exposed: governs by delegation, strikes vicariously, preserves one's position while others absorb the conflict and responsibility. It is within this degraded environment, degrading and opaque that the clerical homosexualist lobby finds the ideal conditions to consolidate and reproduce with incalculable damage.

It is on this basis that clerical homosexualism becomes a stable organism, capable of defending itself and influencing the structure of ecclesiastical government, at the same time preparing the ground for further forms of exchange and blackmail, in which sexual compromise becomes the currency of government. Avoiding the topic of clerical homosexualism, deluding themselves into thinking that they can speak and write in a serious and credible way about the crisis of the clergy and the training of priests, it's like talking about "priests on Mars".

From the island of Patmos, 22 October 2026

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THE CANCER NO SURGEON HAS REMOVED AND THE METASTASES OF HOMOSEXUALISM WITHIN THE CLERGY

To evade the issue of clerical homosexualism, under the illusion of being able to speak and write seriously and credibly about the crisis of the clergy and the formation of priests, is like talking about «priests on Mars».

— Contemporary ecclesial affairs —

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All over the social networks there is a growing number of characters who speak glibly about the crisis of the clergy, only to go in feet first into a sphere so delicate that — as we have stated more than once in these columns — bishops and priests would tremble before it, even those with several decades of experience in the spiritual care of the clergy, particularly of priests in states of despondency, beset by frailty or by genuine depressive syndromes. What few people speak of — and here we come to that fear priests have of other priests, which at times turns into terror — is the problem of an ever more widespread homosexuality among the clergy and, what is worse, of a genuine homosexualist culture that is gaining ground through what — again in these columns — has repeatedly been called the rainbow Trojan horse. This culture, which the members of a large «confraternity» have for years been trying to impose within the Church, is the tumorous mass which, sadly, no surgeon has so far managed to remove. Therefore, to speak of the crisis of the clergy and of its formation without addressing the metastases of this cancer, as those characters do, is mere rhetoric, at times even aimed at diverting attention from a problem that is anything but marginal: they describe its symptoms in abundant detail — the fear of judgement, betrayed confidences, the brother priest perceived as an adversary — without ever naming the disease, namely a clergy that appears ever more homosexualised.

What is the object of this analysis? Not homosexuals, whose free life choices no one has any right to sit in judgement on, but candidates for the priesthood or homosexual priests, whom it is entirely legitimate, at times even a duty, to scrutinise, because — as I have explained more than once in several of my articles on the subject — they cannot freely be themselves. A priest must always be able to be himself, openly and freely, not live a life of pretence and duplicity, in which sexual disorder, where present, is bound to multiply to the highest power, in a climate of concealment and repression.

I. From Transgression to the Suspension of Conscience

Sins against the Sixth Commandment are no novelty in the history of the Church: they have run through the centuries, as ancient and authoritative texts starkly attest, among them the Free Gomorrhianus which Saint Peter Damian addressed around 1049 to the Supreme Pontiff Leo IX. That text remains an unequivocal testimony not only to the vice, but also to the network of complicity that already protected it: clerics who confessed to one another so as to absolve each other without anything leaking out, superiors inclined to cover up and play down, culprits kept in sacred orders. The future Doctor of the Church demanded that they be deposed and no longer admitted to the ministry. The presence of sin, even grave and widespread, or indeed of an organised complicity to conceal it, is therefore not the distinguishing feature of the present crisis, nor does it, in itself, allow us to speak of an unprecedented decadence.

The clerics denounced by Peter Damian hid because they knew they were in sin: their complicity was the defence of a guilt recognised as such. What makes the contemporary situation radically different, in many respects unprecedented in ecclesial history, is the crossing of a point of no return, beyond which the very capacity to recognise good and evil and to perceive danger fails. In earlier ages, even in moments of the greatest corruption, sin was experienced as such, that is to say as a fall, as weakness, as conscious infidelity. Conscience, though wounded, remained operative; the subject knew he was doing wrong, sometimes justified himself, sometimes hid, but could not entirely erase the inner judgement that qualified the act as disordered. In the present situation, by contrast, we witness a far graver qualitative shift: the suspension and, in many cases, the annihilation of moral conscience, accompanied by a culture that does not merely conceal the disorder, but claims to legitimise it and impose it as a good. Behaviour is no longer perceived as the transgression of a recognised good, but as a normal and unquestioned way of acting. Moral judgement is not set aside through conflict or weakness, but because it is no longer considered relevant. Action is situated, to borrow the title of a work by Friedrich Nietzsche that has become dramatically topical, beyond good and evil, not as a tragic and conscious choice, but as the ordinary condition of existence.

This anthropological mutation has profound consequences on the ecclesial plane. Where sin is experienced as a fall, the possibility of conversion remains open; where it is experienced as normality devoid of judgement, conversion is not simply refused, but becomes unthinkable. There is no inner conflict, no repentance, no demand for truth. Conscience is not silenced: it simply no longer speaks. It is in this context that one understands how a morally disordered condition can turn from personal frailty into a factor serving clerical power. Individuals devoid of moral friction, untouched by the drama of limitation, incapable of recognising an objective good that judges action, prove particularly suited to fitting into mechanisms of government founded on silence, complicity and mutual exposure. The lack of conscience is no longer an obstacle, but an advantage.

The clerical homosexualist lobby takes root precisely in this fracture. It does not arise primarily from weakness or occasional inconsistency, nor from that human fall which, once acknowledged and worked through, can even make a man more aware and better than he was before. It is formed instead through the normalisation of sin and of lies as a condition of belonging, turning what ought to be acknowledged and healed into a premise of identity and a systemic bond. Where sin is no longer perceived as such, but lived as something acquired and shared, it ceases to be a moral problem and becomes a bond: what is hidden and held in common guarantees loyalty, what is kept silent and exchangeable ensures protection, what compromises everyone makes everyone controllable.

It is the distinction that the Holy Father Francis drew in unequivocal terms, answering journalists on the return flight from Rio de Janeiro on 28 July 2013:

«The problem is not having this tendency, no, we must be brothers and sisters to one another […]. The problem is in making a lobby of this tendency […]. For me, this is the greater problem» (cf. here).

Not the frailty of the individual, then, but the organisation, the lobby. In such a scenario it is not amoral clerics who prove problematic for the system, but those who, while living in fidelity, preserve a vigilant conscience and refuse to enter that circuit of complicity, silence and exchange on which clerical homosexualism rests and turns itself into an organised structure of power. A free conscience, non-negotiable and not open to blackmail, thus becomes the destabilising element, not because of its polemical force, but by its mere existence.

The present crisis therefore does not consist in a resurgence of sin, but in its transformation into a criterion of governability, to the point of an even graver drift: a criterion of selection for access to the priesthood and, subsequently, for identifying the candidates deemed suitable for the episcopate. When the selection process is compromised at this level, the consequences do not remain circumscribed, but inevitably affect the entire ecclesial body. And yet the norm exists and is clear. The Instruction of the Congregation for Catholic Education approved by the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI and published on 4 November 2005 establishes that the Church, «while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practise homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called “gay culture”» (cf. here). The same provision was reaffirmed in 2016 by the Fundamental System of Priestly Institution (cf. here). The problem, then, is not the absence of criteria, but their non-application precisely where future priests and bishops are formed and chosen.

This is the step that marks a decadence without historical precedent: not the fall of man, always possible since the dawn of time, from the irruption of original sin into history, but the construction of systems in which the fall is no longer recognised as such and conscience, emptied of its judging function, ceases to be a place of truth and becomes a neutral space serving power.

(II). Clerical Homosexualism as a System Founded on the Normalisation of Lies

Every system of power that intends to preserve itself avoids, as far as possible, direct exposure. It does not act in the first person, does not compromise itself openly, does not publicly take responsibility for its most controversial decisions. It prefers to operate through intermediaries, making use of individuals who serve as screens, as executors, as expendable instruments. These are the men of straw and the useful idiots: figures who do not really govern, but act in place of power, carrying out what others decide, after having been neutralised by the illusion of belonging to power and of drawing an indirect recognition from it.

In the ecclesiastical context, these individuals are often clericalised laymen, permanently embedded in Curial circles and in administrative, financial and media networks, or in any case in the places of greatest ecclesial influence. Though lacking any formal institutional responsibility, they enjoy a freedom of action that the clergy cannot afford. It is they who step in where clerical power does not wish to expose itself directly: they intimidate, delegitimization, defame, report, accuse, set in motion proceedings devoid of any real foundation. They act convinced that they count and carry weight within the power structure, while in reality they are used precisely because they are replaceable, exposed and expendable, reduced to mere executive tools destined to absorb the impact of the filthiest actions with which the clericalists do not wish to dirty their hands.

It is not uncommon for a clericalised layman, devoid of any formal mandate, suddenly to become the promoter of «reports» motivated by a supposed zeal for the good of the Church. No explicit accusation, no concrete evidence: only allusions, suspicions, phrases dropped with apparent discretion. It is enough, however, for such rumours to reach the right circles, which were already awaiting them in silent readiness, for an appointment to be revoked, a collaboration ended, a person isolated. The layman has exposed himself, he has done the dirty work; power remains in the background and keeps, so to speak, its hands clean.

This mode of action is not episodic, but structural. Clerical power thus keeps a safe distance and always maintains plausible deniability. It is the same mechanism found in any organisation that intends to exercise control without openly assuming its moral and legal burden. Responsibility remains invisible; the action, however, is very concrete, often devastating.

Alongside this first category there emerges a second, even more aggressive and dangerous: that of ideologically clericalised homosexual laymen, marked by a harsh, vindictive and at times openly violent militancy on the moral and relational plane. They do not merely serve as passive instruments of the system, but become its active players, driven by the aim of mainstreaming and legitimising homosexualism within the Church, turning it from a tolerated disorder into a criterion of recognition and belonging. These second individuals often act as the vanguard of the system: they say and write, also through blogs and social media, what certain venomous clerics cannot afford to state publicly; they attack those whom these clerics cannot strike directly; they exert constant pressure through accusations, insinuations, reports to the ecclesiastical authorities and campaigns of delegitimisation. Their strength lies in the almost total absence of constraints. They answer to no formal ecclesiastical authority, they risk no canonical sanctions, they pay no institutional price and, in practice, they act in a zone of substantial impunity that renders ineffective every attempt at a proportionate legal response. This is why they prove extremely useful to certain clerical factions that make use of them while maintaining an apparently neutral position: it is they who expose themselves, who speak, write and report, while the apparatus remains in the background, ready, if need be, to disclaim any involvement. In this way they can strike, intimidate and delegitimise without suffering serious consequences.

None of these individuals could operate effectively if truth were acknowledged and adopted as a common operative criterion, that is, as a concrete standard for assessing conduct, making decisions, assigning responsibility and intervening when abuses or lies come to light. They thrive in a context in which silence is rewarded, discretion is raised to a virtue, loyalty is measured not by rectitude, but by the ability not to put the system in crisis. Lying is no longer perceived as a deviation, but as a necessary condition for remaining inside the circuit.

It is in this environment that clerical homosexualism ceases to be a sum of individual behaviours and takes shape as a system. Not because everyone takes part in it, but because those who belong to it accept unwritten yet very rigid rules: see nothing, say nothing, name nothing. Private life becomes an instrument of control; the shared secret becomes a guarantee of reliability; being mutually compromised becomes the foundation of protection. Those who accept these conditions are integrated; those who refuse them, even without denouncing anything, are perceived as a dangerous destabilising element and therefore as a troublemaker. The lie, thus normalised, is no longer a side effect of the system, but its operational foundation. It is the Devil’s old technique: he is capable of telling nine truths and then, having finally reached the tenth, telling a colossal lie that utterly distorts whatever truth had been told before. At that point the distorted truth becomes, by diabolical paradox, a functional support for the lie, which may also be an omission: not merely failing to tell things as they are, but denying how things are.

Those who govern this system are not, in the final analysis, the ones who speak or act visibly, but those churchmen who never intervene directly, who observe, listen, let things happen. They issue no explicit orders, sign no measures, take no formal decisions, yet nothing happens without their tacit consent. When the damage is done, they can always declare that they did not know, that they had not been informed, that they had authorised nothing, sacrificing instead, when necessary, the useful idiots they had sent to the charge and made use of. Power exercised in this way remains intact precisely because it does not expose itself: it governs by delegation, strikes through intermediaries, preserves its own position while others absorb the conflict and the responsibility. It is within this degraded, degrading and opaque environment that the clerical homosexualist lobby finds the ideal conditions to consolidate and reproduce itself, causing incalculable damage.

It is on this basis that clerical homosexualism becomes a stable organism, capable of defending itself and of shaping the structure of ecclesiastical government, while at the same time preparing the ground for further forms of exchange and blackmail, in which being sexually compromised becomes the currency of government. To evade the issue of clerical homosexualism, under the illusion of being able to speak and write seriously and credibly about the crisis of the clergy and the formation of priests, is like talking about «priests on Mars».

From The Island of Patmos, 22 October 2026

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THE CANCER THAT NO SURGEON HAS REMOVED AND THE METASTASES OF HOMOSEXUALISM WITHIN THE CLERGY

Avoiding the issue of clerical homosexuality, with the hope of being able to speak and write in a serious and credible way about the crisis of the clergy and the formation of priests, It's like talking about "cures on Mars".

- Ecclesial news -

.

On social networks characters are multiplying who speak with ease about the crisis of the clergy, and then rush into a sphere of such delicacy that — as we have reiterated more than once in these columns — would make bishops and priests with several decades of experience in the spiritual care of the clergy tremble., particularly those who find themselves in situations of despondency, subject to frailties or true depressive syndromes. What few talk about - and here comes the element of that fear of priests towards other priests that sometimes turns into terror - is the problem of homosexuality that is increasingly widespread in the clergy and, what's worse, of a true homosexual culture that is gaining ground through what — also in these columns — has been repeatedly pointed out as the rainbow Trojan horse. This culture, that the members of a large "brotherhood" have been trying to impose for years within the Church, is the tumor mass that, unfortunately, To date, no surgeon has managed to remove. So, talk about the crisis of the clergy and their formation without facing the metastases of this cancer, How do those characters do?, It's pure rhetoric, sometimes even aimed at diverting attention from a problem that is far from being marginal: its symptoms are described at length — fear of judgment, confidences betrayed, the brother priest perceived as an adversary — without ever naming the illness, that is to say, a clergy that seems increasingly homosexualized.

What is the purpose of this analysis? Not homosexuals, about whose free life choices no one has the right to speak out, but aspirants to the priesthood or homosexual priests, about which, instead, It is completely legal, and sometimes even a duty, pronounce, because — as I have explained several times in different articles of mine on the subject — they cannot freely be themselves. And a priest must always be able to be himself, openly and freely: can't live a life of fiction and duplicity, within which sexual disorder, if present, is intended to multiply at maximum power, in a climate of concealment and repression.

  1. From transgression to suspension of consciousness

Sins against the sixth commandment They do not constitute anything new in the history of the Church: have passed through the centuries, as ancient and authoritative texts crudely attest, among them the Free Gomorrhianus that Saint Peter Damian directed towards the year 1049 to His Highness Pontiff Leo IX. That text continues to be an unequivocal testimony not only of the vice, but also from the network of complicities that even then protected him: clerics who confessed to each other to absolve each other without anything transcending, superiors inclined to conceal and minimize, guilty kept in holy orders. The future Doctor of the Church asked that they be deposed and no longer admitted to the ministry.. The presence of sin, serious and widespread, or even organized complicity to hide it, does not therefore constitute the distinctive element of the current crisis, not even allowed to speak, alone, of unprecedented decline.

The clerics denounced by Pedro Damián They hid because they knew they were in sin: his complicity was the defense of a guilt recognized as such. What makes the contemporary situation radically different, in many ways unprecedented in ecclesial history, is the exceeding of a threshold of no return, beyond which the very ability to recognize good and evil and to perceive danger disappears. In previous times, even in times of greatest corruption, sin was lived as such, that is to say, like fall, as weakness, as conscious infidelity. The conscience, although wounded, was still operating; the subject knew that he was doing wrong, sometimes it was justified, sometimes he hid, but he could not completely erase the inner judgment that described the act as disordered.. In the current situation, instead, we are witnessing a much more serious qualitative step: suspension and, in many cases, the annihilation of moral conscience, accompanied by a culture that does not limit itself to hiding disorder, but rather seeks to legitimize it and impose it as a good. The behavior is no longer perceived as a transgression of a recognized good, but as a normal and undisputed way of acting. Moral judgment is not eliminated by conflict or weakness, but because it is no longer considered relevant. The action is located, for taking up the title of a work by Friedrich Nietzsche that has become dramatically current, beyond good and evil, not as a tragic and conscious choice, but as an ordinary condition of existence.

This anthropological mutation It has profound consequences at the ecclesiastical level.. Where sin is experienced as a fall, the possibility of conversion remains open; where it is lived as normality lacking judgment, the conversion is not simply rejected, but it becomes unthinkable. There is no internal conflict, there is no regret, there is no search for the truth. Conscience is not silenced: he just doesn't talk anymore. It is in this context where it is understood how a morally disordered condition can go from personal fragility to a functional factor for clerical power.. Subjects lacking moral friction, not crossed by the drama of the limit, unable to recognize an objective good that judges the action, They are particularly suitable for inserting themselves into government mechanisms based on silence., complicity and reciprocal exposure. Lack of awareness is no longer an obstacle, but an advantage.

The clerical homosexualist lobby is grafted precisely on this fracture. It is not born primarily of weakness or occasional incoherence, nor of that human fall that, once recognized and crossed, can even make man more conscious and better than he was before. It is formed, instead, through the normalization of sin and lies as a condition of belonging, transforming what should be recognized and healed into an identity budget and system link. Where sin is no longer perceived as such, but rather it is lived as data acquired and shared, It stops being a moral problem and becomes a bond: what is hidden and common guarantees fidelity, what is kept silent and exchanged ensures protection, what compromises everyone makes everyone controllable.

It is the distinction that the Holy Father Francis established in unequivocal terms, responding to journalists on the flight back from Rio de Janeiro on 28 July of 2013:

«The problem is not having this tendency; no, we must be brothers […]. The problem is lobbying for this trend […]. This is the most serious problem for me." (cf. here).

Not the fragility of the individual, sino the organization, the lobby. In this scenario it is not the amoral clerics who are problematic for the system, but who, living in faithfulness, They maintain a vigilant conscience and refuse to enter that circuit of complicity, of silence and exchange on which clerical homosexuality is sustained and transformed into an organized structure of power. The free conscience, non-negotiable and non-blackmailable, thus becomes the destabilizing element, not because of its controversial force, but for its simple existence.

The current crisis does not consist, therefore, in a worsening of sin, but in its transformation into a criterion of governance, until reaching an even more serious drift: selection criteria for access to the priesthood and, later, for the identification of candidates considered suitable for the episcopacy. When the selection process is damaged at this level, the consequences do not remain circumscribed, but they inevitably have repercussions on the entire ecclesial body. And yet, the standard exists and is clear. The Instruction of the Congregation for Catholic Education approved by the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI and published on 4 November 2005 establishes that the Church, "deeply respecting the people in question, cannot admit those who practice homosexuality to the Seminary and Holy Orders, "They present deeply rooted homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture." (cf. here). The same provision was reaffirmed in 2016 for the Fundamental System of Priestly Institution (cf. here). The problem is not, therefore, the absence of criteria, but its lack of application precisely where future priests and bishops are formed and elected.

This is the step that marks a decadence without historical precedents: not the fall of man, always possible since the dawn of time, from the emergence of original sin in history, but the construction of systems in which the fall is no longer recognized as such and consciousness, emptied of its judgment function, It stops being a place of truth and becomes a neutral space, functional to power.

  1. Clerical homosexuality as a system based on the normalization of lies

Any system of power that seeks to preserve itself avoids, as far as possible, direct exposure. Does not act in first person, does not openly commit, does not publicly assume responsibility for its most controversial decisions. Prefers to operate through an intermediary, using subjects who act as screens, of executors, of sacrificial instruments. It is about the straw men and of the useful fools: figures that do not really govern, but they act in place of power, executing what others decide, after having been neutralized by the illusion of belonging to power and obtaining indirect recognition from it.

In the ecclesiastical context, These subjects are often clericalized laymen, Stably inserted in the Curia environments and in the administrative circuits, financial and media, or in any case in the places of greatest ecclesial influence. Although they lack formal institutional responsibility, They enjoy an operational freedom that the clergy cannot afford. They are the ones who intervene where the clerical power does not want to expose itself directly.: intimidate, delegitimize, defame, betray, accuse, They launch procedures that lack any real basis. They act convinced that they count and have weight within the power structure., while in reality they are used precisely because they are replaceable, exposed and sacrificial, reduced to mere executive instruments intended to absorb the impact of the dirtiest actions with which the clericals do not want to dirty their hands.

It is not unusual for a clericalized layman, lacking any formal mandate, suddenly becomes a promoter of "complaints" motivated by an alleged zeal for the good of the Church. No explicit accusation, no concrete proof: just allusions, suspicions, phrases dropped with apparent discretion. That's enough, however, with those rumors reaching the right environments, who were already waiting for them with silent disposition, to have a charge revoked, a collaboration is interrupted, a person is isolated. The layman has exposed himself, has done the dirty work; power remains in the background and preserves, so to speak, clean hands.

This way of acting is not episodic, but structural. The clerical power thus maintains a safe distance and always maintains a plausible deniability.. It is the same mechanism that is found in any organization that seeks to exercise control without openly assuming its moral and legal weight.. Responsibility remains invisible; the action, instead, It is very specific, often devastating.

Along with this first category, a second arises, even more aggressive and dangerous: that of ideologically clericalized homosexual laymen, characterized by harsh militancy, vengeful and sometimes openly violent on a moral and relational level. They are not limited to acting as passive instruments of the system, but they become its active actors, motivated by the objective of giving a letter of citizenship and legitimizing homosexuality within the Church, transforming it from tolerated disorder into a criterion of recognition and belonging. These second subjects often act as the vanguard of the system: they say and write, also through blogs and social networks, what certain poisonous clerics cannot afford to state publicly; They attack who those clerics cannot hit directly; They exert constant pressure through accusations, advances, complaints to the ecclesiastical authorities and delegitimization campaigns. Its strength lies in the almost total absence of ties. They are not answerable to any formal ecclesiastical authority, they do not risk canonical sanctions, They do not pay any institutional price and, in practice, They act in an area of ​​substantial impunity that makes any attempt at a proportionate legal reaction ineffective.. That is why they are extremely useful to certain clerical factions that use them while maintaining an apparently neutral position.: they are the ones who expose themselves, they talk, they write and report, while the device remains in the background, willing, if necessary, to declare himself unaware of the facts. In this way they can hit, intimidate and delegitimize without suffering serious consequences.

None of these subjects could operate effectively if the truth were recognized and assumed as a common operational criterion, that is to say, as a specific parameter to assess behaviors, make decisions, assign responsibility and intervene when abuse or lies arise. They thrive in a context where silence is rewarded, discretion is elevated to virtue, loyalty is not measured by righteousness, but for the ability to not put the system in crisis. Lying is no longer perceived as deviation, but as a necessary condition to remain within the circuit.

It is in this environment that clerical homosexualism It stops being a sum of individual behaviors and is configured as a system. Not because everyone participates in it, but because whoever is part of it accepts unwritten rules, but very rigid: not see, not speak, do not name. Private life becomes an instrument of control; the shared secret, in guarantee of reliability; mutual exposure to blackmail, on the basis of protection. Whoever accepts these conditions is integrated; who rejects them, even without reporting anything, is perceived as a dangerous destabilizing element and, therefore, like someone problematic. The lie, so normalized, It is no longer a side effect of the system, but its operational foundation. It's the old technique of the Devil, able to tell nine truths and then, finally reached the tenth, tell a colossal lie that completely distorts everything that was true that had been said before. At that point the denatured truth becomes, by diabolical paradox, in functional support of lying, which may also be an omission: not just not telling things like they are, but to deny how things are.

Who governs this system? they are not, in last analysis, those who speak or act visibly, but those ecclesiastics who never intervene directly, what they observe, they listen, let them do. They do not give explicit orders, they do not sign provisions, they do not make formal decisions, but nothing happens without your tacit consent. When the damage is done, They can always declare that they did not know, that they had not been informed, that they had not authorized anything, sacrificing in any case, the time has come, to the useful fools that they had launched into the charge and of which they had made use. The power, exercised like this, remains intact precisely because it is not exposed: govern by delegation, hits by intervening person, preserves its position while others absorb the conflict and responsibility. It is within this degraded environment, degrading and opaque where the clerical homosexualist lobby finds the ideal conditions to consolidate and reproduce with incalculable damage.

It is on this basis that clerical homosexualism becomes a stable organism, capable of defending itself and influencing the structure of ecclesiastical government, at the same time preparing the ground for further forms of exchange and blackmail, in which what is sexually compromising becomes the currency of government. Avoiding the issue of clerical homosexuality, with the hope of being able to speak and write in a serious and credible way about the crisis of the clergy and the formation of priests, It's like talking about "cures on Mars".

From the Island of Patmos, 22 October 2026

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The Fathers of the Island of Patmos

Guerrilla warfare in Milan. Marco Rizzo and the pedagogical wisdom of a “old” communist

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GUERRILLA IN MILAN. MARCO RIZZO AND THE PEDAGOGICAL WISDOM OF A “VECCHIO” COMMUNIST

The police forces, in front of those who destroy, loots and throws stones, they must be able to intervene with all the necessary firmness, until they inflate the hooligans like bagpipes playing Christmas tunes and make them see Baby Jesus descending from the stars, without the fear of ending up on trial for doing their duty, even with truncheon blows.

— The Briefs of the Fathers of The Island of Patmos —

Author
Editors of The Island of Patmos

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Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October the center of Milan was set on fire by hundreds of boys with their faces covered, mostly minors, summoned up TikTok under the pretext of a demonstration against the cost of living, fought by robbing the Foot Locker of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the Carrefour of via Torino and the Decathlon of Piazza Castello.

The budget: 271 people accompanied to the police station, 80% minors, the youngest of eleven; injured officers; the faithful leaving the Mass of Archbishop Mario Delpini evacuated from an underground passage of the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In front of all this, the most sensible proposal did not come from inclusive television sociologists nor from evolutionary dialogue psychologists, but from an all-round communist: Marco Rizzo, former MP and MEP, for years at the helm of the Communist Party. What does he propose?? A simple and effective rule: Those who smash are stopped and only come out when mum and dad go with their wallets in hand to pay the bail. And he adds that his son will finally get the two slaps he should have received a long time ago, learning that actions have consequences and that consequences have a price that someone must pay.

The underlying problem is the destruction of authority. For decades it has been explained to us that authority is repression, the limit is trauma, "no" is psychological violence. We have thus raised a generation of unionist parents, ready to challenge the teacher's vote, to report the coach who left his son on the bench, to see every reproach as an attack on the child's self-esteem. The overprotective parent is not a loving parent: is an absent parent, who delegated the education of his son to impunity. The result is twelve-year-olds who fear nothing or anyone, because no one ever taught them to fear anything.

About this educational void the subculture of a certain music is grafted trap e drill who sings the robbery, the knife, contempt for the police, easy money and the designer brand as the only sign of value. It's not the only cause, but it's the soundtrack. And it is no coincidence that the shop windows attacked were those selling sneakers and sportswear: what is shown off in the videos is plundered.

Then there is a knot that no one wants to untie: these kids know very well that nothing can happen to them, than the policeman, fermandoli, risks more than them. Be an agent, to stop a minor who breaks a shop window to steal designer clothes, hits him with a rubber truncheon, he will end up in front of a judge, who will often come out convicted. And as long as the policeman is more afraid of the judge than the thug is of the policeman, delinquency will triumph.

Certain subjects, seeing the police from a distance, they should feel a shiver down their spine: our safety is entrusted to them and, if necessary, the use of legitimate force, protective and defensive, of which only the State holds the monopoly. And the police, in front of those who destroy, loots and throws stones, they must be able to intervene with all the necessary firmness, until they inflate the hooligans like bagpipes playing Christmas tunes and make them see Baby Jesus descending from the stars, without the fear of ending up on trial for doing their duty, even with truncheon blows. It is not an apology for violence, but the defense of the authority of the State: it is the request that the State stop leaving its agents alone and guaranteeing, in fact, impunity for offenders.

Strange fate that of us priests: to listen to a serious educational talk, we had to listen to an old and lucid communist, while the parody of the sinister salon bivouacs outside of reality between the super penthouses of Parioli and the villas of Capalbio.

From the island of Patmos, 20 October 2026

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The Fathers of the Island of Patmos

The head and feet of Christ: Saint Chromatius of Aquileia against the polarizations of contemporaneity

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THE HEAD AND FEET OF CHRIST: SAN CROMAZIO OF AQUILEIA AGAINST CONTEMPORARY POLARIZATIONS

Today the Church seems split between two paroxysmal factions, incapable of communicating except by mutual anathema: the priests of pure worldly praxis on the one hand and the Gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

— Theologica —

Author:
Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci, o.p.

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Polarizations have animated the geopolitical clash of the last century. Capitalism on the one hand, socialism on the other.

Portrait of the bishop in the Throne Room in the Patriarchal Palace of Udine

The Berlin Wall fell, we thought everything was solved. But no. In each of us there is a form of dualistic catharism that pushes us to feel like the good and pure and to turn ourselves against another, which would be evil and demonic. Not even social networks help with this. To try to delve deeper into this reflection, we draw on the sources of an ancient father of the Church: Saint Chromatius.

I. Aquileia at the end of the Empire: the profile of an integral shepherd

Ad Aquileia, hinge between East and West in late ancient Roman times, the mild but granitic figure of Saint Chromatius shone between the 4th and 5th centuries. Born around 335-340, grew up in the womb of that ascetic and clerical community that Girolamo praised as a "choir of the blessed", he was consecrated bishop by Saint Ambrose in 388 and led his Church until his death, In the 407 or in the first months of 408. Friend of Rufinus of Aquileia and of Girolamo himself, when the Origenist controversy divided them it was he who tried to mend their rift: a man capable of safeguarding communion without ever trading dogmatic truth. The manuscript rediscoveries of the twentieth century have given us his liturgical sermons, full of clear biblical exegesis, where mysticism merges with the most rigorous dogmatics.

(II). The scent of Bethany and the unity of the Christian mystery

Among the most wonderful pages of Chromatian homiletics, the exegetical investigation dedicated to the episode of the anointing of Bethany stands out, narrated in the chapter 12 the Gospel according to John (cf.. GV 12,1-8), in profound connection with what happens in the previous chapter (cf.. GV 11,33-35). It's the scene where Maria, sister of the resurrected Lazarus, takes a pound of genuine spikenard, very precious, he sprinkles Jesus' feet with it and dries them with his own hair, while the entire house is saturated with the aroma of that balm. Chromazio reads this gesture neither with sentimentality nor with the utilitarian calculation of Judas, that he wanted to sell that perfume for three hundred denarii (cf.. GV 12,4-6), but according to the allegorical and typological method dear to the patristic tradition, capturing a very dense synthesis of Christian dogma. He recalls first of all how it was Mary herself who mourned the death of her brother before Jesus, causing the Redeemer to cry. From this detail comes a dazzling Christological intuition:

«In the tears of the Lord the mystery of the Incarnation is shown; in the resurrection of Lazarus the power of his Divinity is proclaimed".

Mary tears tears from Christ of authentic human emotion and, next, offers the most sublime testimony of faith by prostrating himself at his feet to anoint them. For Cromazio, Mary is a transparent figure of the Church (figure of the Church): she prefigures the immaculate Bride who gives the Word the fullness of devotion and adoration. The exegesis here is done with millimetric precision. Recalling a symbolism also loved by Saint Jerome, Cromazio observes that the pound Romana is made up of exactly twelve ounces. The church, so, brings to Christ the full weight of the precious ointment because it has received the right doctrine from twelve Apostles. There is no perfume pleasing to God that does not come from the apostolic deposit. Moreover, that ointment is made up of the harmonious composition of multiple chosen aromas: so is the apostolic doctrine, which, despite being one and indivisible in the substance of faith, shines in the variety of spiritual graces, of the charisms and virtues that make the sweetness of Christ perceivable in the world.

The Redeemer, remembers the bishop of Aquileia, when he deigned to annihilate himself by descending from the bosom of the Father to assume a mortal body, went almost unnoticed in the eyes of the world; but yet, precisely in that kenosis, the scent of his Name - the Christ, that is, the "Anointed One" par excellence - filled the earthly orb. And the Church could never have known or reached the Redeemer except through the objective medium of this apostolic doctrine.

III. The head and the feet: the double saving confession

The theological fulcrum of the Chromatian homily lies in the spiritual anatomy of the body of the Lord: because the woman anoints the feet of Jesus and not the chief, as Matthew and Mark report (cf.. Mt 26,7; MC 14,3)? For Cromazio, the act contains a fundamental pedagogical and salvific order. The feet signify the abasement of the Incarnation: the eternal Word that touches the earth, who walks in our dust, who "in recent times deigned to be born of a Virgin". The head indicates the everlasting glory of his divinity: the eternal generation from the Father before all ages, light from light, True God from true God.

The church, explains Cromazio, it necessarily begins with anointing the feet. If man does not recognize and adore the humanity of the Savior - the assumed flesh, the wounds, the painful way, the historical concreteness of the Redemption - will never be able to rise to the contemplation of the divinity that resides in the head:

«We cannot save ourselves if we do not hold together these two truths about the dual nature of Christ, which are signified by the head and the feet. We have feet because we believe in the Incarnation of the Virgin; we have the head because we confess his Divinity which proceeds from the Father".

Salvation is not an abstract concept nor a social philanthropy: it is not given without the integral profession of the hypostatic union. To omit the feet is to fall into a disembodied spiritualism; to omit the head is to degrade the Lord to a mere teacher of human morality.

Cromazio finally focuses on the hair with which the woman cleanses the feet of the Lord. Taking up the Song of Songs (cf.. Ct 4,1), the holy bishop sees there the holy people of the Church and its virtues: pure prayer and the ardor of charity. The ointment of apostolic doctrine, poured at the feet of the Lord, it is thus translated into concrete works of piety and corporal and spiritual mercy. When the Christian helps the poor, cure the sufferer, defends the oppressed and spends himself for his brothers, he is pouring nard on the wounded feet of Christ and wiping them with his own life.

IV. The lesson of Chromatius in today's Babel: the antidote to extreme polarizations

If the pages of Saint Chromatius resonate today with a disarming freshness, it is because they strike at the heart of the ecclesiological and doctrinal tragedy of our time. On the columns of The Island of Patmos we have repeatedly denounced how the drama of the contemporary Church lies in the loss of Catholic harmony (the and-and) in favor of a partisan dialectic, ideological and destructive (l'aut-aut).

Observing the fragmentation ecclesial today, it emerges with clear evidence that we are witnessing the exhumation, and conscience of modernity, of ancient Christological heresies: the Arianism that Chromatius fought in his time and the Monophysitism that exploded a few decades after his death. Today the Church seems split between two paroxysmal factions, incapable of communicating except by mutual anathema: the priests of pure worldly praxis on the one hand and the Gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

V. The «horizontalist» and neo-Pelagian drift: the idolatry of feet without heads

On the one hand we encounter secularized progressivism, which transforms the Church into a gigantic non-governmental organization dedicated to sociological commentary or bureaucratic welfarism, deluding themselves into building the Kingdom with human strength alone: a returning Pelagianism. This current, imbued with modernism and sociologism, deals almost obsessively with the "feet", understood, however, not as the Incarnation of the Word that redeems the flesh from sin, but as a pure worldly immanence.

Christ is reduced to a noble social agitator, to a prophet of universal inclusion, to a Palestinian Socrates whose resurrection becomes a symbolic myth and whose divinity almost constitutes an obstacle to dialogue with the world. From this perspective, the ointment of apostolic doctrine is undersold or considered a divisive frill: only immediate action counts, the agreement with him Zeitgeist, adaptation to secular parameters. But if we forget the head - that is, the consubstantial divinity of Christ, of its absolute primacy, of uncreated grace and the eschatological purpose of man - the works of mercy lose their divine fragrance and decay into a sterile secularist philanthropy. Without the head generated by the Father, the feet do not walk towards eternal Life: they are groping in the mud of relativism.

WE. The «hyper-traditionalist» and gnostic drift: the fetishism of the head without the feet

At the other extreme, an equally poisonous temptation proliferates, though often cloaked in uncorrupted devotion: intellectualistic or formalist hyper-traditionalism. It is the faction of those who, like the ancient Gnostics, they claim to anoint exclusively the "boss", longing for a disembodied Church, squeeze, reduced to a museum of mummified dogmatic formulas, detached from any lively concern for the suffering members of Christ.

In among them the apostolic doctrine is no longer the aromatic ointment that heals the wounds of the soul and pushes towards mission, but rather a polemical weapon to measure the unworthiness of others from a pedestal of pharisaic untouchability. They fall into a practical monophysitism: Christ is so and exclusively "divine", distant and hieratic, that his Incarnation struggles to get his hands dirty with the misery of human history. Forgetting the "feet", they forget pastoral care, pedagogical patience, closeness to sinners, the tears shared with those who suffer mourning and the precariousness of existence. They overlook the fact that the truth, if it does not translate into the work of mercy and living charity, it is not Catholic orthodoxy, but Luciferian pride.

Conclusion: return to the scent of apostolic doctrine

Saint Chromatius warns us from the depths of the centuries: there is no redemption without full confession, simultaneous and indivisible nature of the two natures in the one Person of the incarnate Word. We cannot amputate Christ to satisfy the ideological fashions of the moment. This is the only cure for that dualistic catharism that lurks in each of us: it cannot be won by choosing one half of Christ against the other, but returning to confess it whole.

The authentic Church he does not choose between the mystical and the pastoral, between dogma and charity, between the teacher's desk and the hospital ward. Mary of Bethany performs the perfect act because she begins where the Church must begin: young in feet of the Savior with the ointment of apostolic faith and dries them with living virtue of their hair, opening the way up to the cape. Charity draws its lifeblood and its orientation from correct doctrine; the doctrine finds its fruitfulness and its glorification in the lived mystery of charity towards the members of Christ.

Against the delusions of progressivism which degrade Christianity to political moralism and against the shallows of exasperated traditionalisms which freeze faith in a gnosis devoid of the bowels of mercy, the voice of the bishop of Aquileia rises like a beacon of supernatural balance. It is time for the Church to regain awareness of its own spousal identity: to cling to the wounded feet of the Lord's humanity with the piety of works, without ever taking our adoring gaze away from the glorious Head who reigns in the heavens, from which all grace descends and towards which the entire history of salvation converges.

Convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, 19 October 2026

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THE HEAD AND THE FEET OF CHRIST: SAINT CHROMATIUS OF AQUILEIA AGAINST THE POLARIZATIONS OF OUR TIME

Today the Church seems split between two paroxysmal factions, unable to communicate except through mutual anathemas: the priests of pure worldly praxis on one side and the gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

— Theologica —

Author:
Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci, o.p.

.

Polarizations drove the geopolitical clash of the last century. Capitalism on one side, socialism on the other. When the Berlin Wall fell, we thought everything had been settled. Not so. In each of us there is a form of dualistic Catharism that drives us to feel we are the good and the pure and to set ourselves against someone else, whom we cast as the wicked and the demonic one. Nor do social networks help in this. To enter more deeply into this reflection, let us draw on the sources of an ancient Father of the Church: Saint Chromatius.

I. Aquileia at the Twilight of the Empire: The Profile of an Upright Shepherd

In Aquileia, the hinge between East and West in late-antique Roman civilization, there shone forth between the fourth and fifth centuries the gentle yet granitic figure of Saint Chromatius. Born around 335-340, raised in the bosom of that ascetic and clerical community which Jerome praised as a «choir of the blessed», he was consecrated bishop by Saint Ambrose in 388 and led his Church until his death, in 407 or the first months of 408. A friend of Rufinus of Aquileia and of Jerome himself, when the Origenist controversy divided them it was he who sought to mend their rupture: a man capable of safeguarding communion without ever bartering away dogmatic truth. The manuscript rediscoveries of the twentieth century have restored to us his liturgical sermons, rich in a lucid biblical exegesis, in which mysticism merges with the most rigorous dogmatics.

(II). The Fragrance of Bethany and the Unity of the Christian Mystery

Among the most admirable pages of Chromatius’s homiletics stands the exegetical inquiry devoted to the episode of the anointing at Bethany, narrated in chapter 12 of the Gospel according to John (cf. Jn 12:1-8), in profound connection with what takes place in the preceding chapter (cf. Jn 11:33-35). It is the scene in which Mary, sister of the risen Lazarus, takes a pound of genuine nard, very costly, pours it over the feet of Jesus and dries them with her hair, while the whole house is filled with the fragrance of that balm. Chromatius reads this gesture neither with sentimentality nor with the utilitarian calculation of Judas, who wanted that perfume sold for three hundred denarii (cf. Jn 12:4-6), but according to the allegorical and typological method dear to the patristic tradition, discerning in it an extraordinarily dense synthesis of Christian dogma. He recalls first of all that it was this same Mary who brought before Jesus her grief over her brother’s death, moving the Redeemer to tears. From this detail springs a dazzling Christological insight:

«In the tears of the Lord the mystery of the Incarnation is shown; in the raising of Lazarus the power of his Divinity is proclaimed».

Mary draws from Christ tears of genuine human emotion and, immediately afterwards, offers the most sublime testimony of faith by prostrating herself at his feet to anoint them. For Chromatius, Mary is a transparent figure of the Church (figure of the Church): she prefigures the immaculate Bride who renders to the Word the fullness of devotion and adoration.

Here the exegesis attains pinpoint precision. Recalling a symbolism also dear to Saint Jerome, Chromatius observes that the Roman pound is made up of exactly twelve ounces. The Church, therefore, brings to Christ the whole weight of the precious ointment because she has received right doctrine from the twelve Apostles. There is no fragrance pleasing to God that does not come from the apostolic deposit. Moreover, that ointment is composed of a harmonious blend of many choice spices: so it is with apostolic doctrine, which, while being one and indivisible in the substance of the faith, shines forth in the variety of spiritual graces, charisms and virtues that make the sweetness of Christ perceptible in the world.

The Redeemer, the bishop of Aquileia reminds us, when he deigned to empty himself by descending from the bosom of the Father to take on a mortal body, passed almost unnoticed in the eyes of the world; and yet, precisely in that kenosis, the fragrance of his Name — the Christ, that is, the «Anointed One» par excellence — filled the whole earth. And the Church could never have known or reached the Redeemer except through the objective channel of this apostolic doctrine.

III. The Head and the Feet: The Twofold Saving Confession

The theological core of Chromatius’s homily lies in the spiritual anatomy of the Lord’s body: why does the woman anoint the feet of Jesus and not his head, as Matthew and Mark relate instead (cf. Mt 26:7; Mk 14:3)? For Chromatius, the act contains a fundamental pedagogical and salvific order. The feet signify the abasement of the Incarnation: the eternal Word who touches the earth, who walks in our dust, who «in the last times deigned to be born of a Virgin». The head indicates the imperishable glory of his divinity: the eternal generation from the Father before all ages, Light from Light, true God from true God.

The Church, Chromatius explains, necessarily begins by anointing the feet. If man does not recognize and adore the humanity of the Savior — the flesh assumed, the wounds, the sorrowful way, the historical concreteness of the Redemption — he will never be able to rise to the contemplation of the divinity that dwells in the head:

«We cannot be saved unless we hold together these two truths about the twofold nature of Christ, which are signified by the head and the feet. We have the feet because we believe that he was incarnate of the Virgin; we have the head because we confess his Divinity which proceeds from the Father».

Salvation is neither an abstract concept nor a social philanthropy: it is not attained without the integral profession of the hypostatic union. To omit the feet means plunging into a disembodied spiritualism; to omit the head means degrading the Lord to a mere teacher of human morality.

Finally, Chromatius dwells on the hair with which the woman wipes the Lord’s feet. Taking up the Song of Songs (cf. Sg 4:1), the holy bishop sees in that hair the holy people of the Church and its virtues: pure prayer and the ardor of charity. The ointment of apostolic doctrine, poured out upon the Lord’s feet, is thus translated into concrete works of piety and of corporal and spiritual mercy. When the Christian helps the poor, tends the suffering, defends the oppressed and spends himself for his brethren, he is pouring nard upon the wounded feet of Christ and drying them with his own life.

IV. Chromatius’s Lesson for Today’s Babel: The Antidote to Extreme Polarizations

If the pages of Saint Chromatius resound today with disarming freshness, it is because they strike at the heart of the ecclesiological and doctrinal tragedy of our time. In the columns of The Island of Patmos we have repeatedly denounced how the drama of the contemporary Church lies in the loss of Catholic harmony (the and-and) in favor of a factional, ideological and destructive dialectic (the aut-aut).

Looking at today’s ecclesial fragmentation, one sees with crystal clarity that we are witnessing the exhumation, in modern garb, of the ancient Christological heresies: the Arianism that Chromatius fought in his own time and the Monophysitism that erupted a few decades after his death. Today the Church seems split between two paroxysmal factions, unable to communicate except through mutual anathemas: the priests of pure worldly praxis on one side and the gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

V. The «Horizontalist» and Neo-Pelagian Drift: The Idolatry of the Feet without the Head

On one side we find secularized progressivism, which turns the Church into a gigantic non-governmental organization devoted to sociological commentary or bureaucratic welfarism, deluding itself that it can build the Kingdom by human strength alone: a resurgent Pelagianism. This current, steeped in modernism and sociologism, concerns itself almost obsessively with the «feet», understood, however, not as the Incarnation of the Word who redeems the flesh from sin, but as a pure worldly immanence.

Christ is reduced to a noble social agitator, a prophet of universal inclusion, a Palestinian Socrates whose resurrection becomes a symbolic myth and whose divinity is almost an obstacle to dialogue with the world. In this perspective the ointment of apostolic doctrine is sold off or regarded as a divisive frill: all that counts is immediate action, agreement with the Zeitgeist, conformity to secular standards. But if we forget the head — that is, the consubstantial divinity of Christ, his absolute primacy, uncreated grace and the eschatological end of man — the works of mercy lose their divine fragrance and decay into a sterile secularist philanthropy. Without the head begotten of the Father, the feet do not walk toward eternal Life: they grope in the mud of relativism.

WE. The «Hyper-Traditionalist» and Gnostic Drift: The Fetishism of the Head without the Feet

At the opposite extreme there proliferates a temptation no less poisonous, though often cloaked in incorruptible devotion: intellectualist or formalist hyper-traditionalism. It is the faction of those who, like the ancient gnostics, presume to anoint only the «head», dreaming of a disembodied, purist Church, reduced to a museum of mummified dogmatic formulas, cut off from any living solicitude for the suffering members of Christ.

In them apostolic doctrine is no longer the aromatic ointment that heals the wounds of the soul and impels toward mission, but a polemical weapon for measuring the unworthiness of others from a pedestal of Pharisaic untouchability. They fall into a practical Monophysitism: Christ is so utterly and exclusively «divine», distant and hieratic, that his Incarnation struggles to get its hands dirty with the misery of human history. Forgetting the «feet», they forget pastoral care, pedagogical patience, closeness to sinners, the tears shared with those who suffer grief and the precariousness of existence. They overlook the fact that truth, if it is not translated into the work of mercy and living charity, is not Catholic orthodoxy, but Luciferian pride.

Conclusion: Returning to the Fragrance of Apostolic Doctrine

Saint Chromatius admonishes us from the depths of the centuries: there is no redemption without the full, simultaneous and indivisible confession of the two natures in the one Person of the incarnate Word. We cannot amputate Christ to pander to the ideological fashions of the moment. This is the only cure for that dualistic Catharism that lurks in each of us: it is not overcome by choosing one half of Christ against the other, but by returning to confess him whole.

The authentic Church does not choose between mysticism and pastoral care, between dogma and charity, between the professorial chair and the hospital ward. Mary of Bethany performs the perfect act because she begins where the Church must begin: she anoints the feet of the Savior with the ointment of apostolic faith and dries them with the living virtues of her hair, opening the way that rises up to the head. Charity draws its vital sap and its orientation from right doctrine; doctrine finds its fruitfulness and its glorification in the lived mystery of charity toward the members of Christ.

Against the ravings of progressivisms that degrade Christianity to political moralism and against the shoals of exasperated traditionalisms that freeze the faith into a gnosis devoid of any heart of mercy, the voice of the bishop of Aquileia rises like a beacon of supernatural balance. It is time for the Church to rediscover the awareness of her own spousal identity: to cling to the wounded feet of the Lord’s humanity with the piety of works, without ever turning her adoring gaze away from the glorious Head who reigns in heaven, from whom every grace descends and toward whom the whole history of salvation converges.

Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 19 October 2026

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THE HEAD AND FEET OF CHRIST: SAINT CHROMATIUS OF AQUILEA AGAINST THE POLARIZATIONS OF OUR TIME

Today the Church seems divided between two paroxysmal factions, incapable of communicating except through reciprocal anathemas: the priests of pure worldly praxis on the one hand and the Gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

— Theologica —

Author:
Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci, o.p.

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Polarizations marked the geopolitical confrontation from the last century. Capitalism on the one hand, socialism on the other. Berlin Wall fallen, we thought everything was resolved. And yet, no. In each of us there is a form of dualistic Catharism that pushes us to feel good and pure and to put ourselves against another., who would be the evil and the demonic. Social media doesn't help with this either.. To try to delve deeper into this reflection, let us turn to the sources of an ancient Father of the Church: in Chromacio.

I. Aquilea at the twilight of the Empire: the profile of an upright pastor

In Aquileia, hinge between East and West in late ancient Roman times, between the 4th and 5th centuries the peaceful but granite figure of Saint Chromatius shone. Born towards 335-340, raised within that ascetic and clerical community that Jerome praised as a "choir of the blessed.", He was consecrated bishop by Saint Ambrose in the 388 and guided his Church until his death, in it 407 or in the first months of 408. Friend of Rufinus of Aquilea and Jerome himself, When the origin controversy divided them, it was he who tried to mend their rupture.: a man capable of guarding communion without ever undermining dogmatic truth. The rediscovery of 20th century manuscripts has given us back his liturgical sermons., rich in clear biblical exegesis, where mysticism merges with the most rigorous dogmatics.

(II). The perfume of Bethany and the unity of the Christian mystery

Among the most admirable pages of Chromatic homiletics, the exegetical investigation dedicated to the episode of the anointing of Bethany stands out., narrated in the chapter 12 from the Gospel according to Saint John (cf. Jn 12,1-8), in deep connection with what happens in the previous chapter (cf. Jn 11,33-35). It is the scene in which María, sister of resurrected Lazarus, take a pound of real tuberose, very expensive, She anoints Jesus' feet with it and wipes them with her hair., while the whole house is filled with the aroma of that balm. Chromatius reads this gesture neither with sentimentalism nor with the utilitarian calculation of Judas., who would have wanted to sell that perfume for three hundred denarii (cf. Jn 12,4-6), but according to the allegorical and typological method typical of the patristic tradition, discovering in it a very dense synthesis of Christian dogma. Remember above all that it was Mary herself who mourned the death of her brother before Jesus., provoking the cry of the Redeemer. From this detail springs a brilliant Christological intuition.:

«In the tears of the Lord the mystery of the Incarnation is shown; “In the resurrection of Lazarus the power of his Divinity is proclaimed.”.

Mary brings Christ to tears of genuine shock human and, immediately after, offers the most sublime testimony of faith by prostrating himself at his feet to anoint them. Para Cromacio, Mary is a transparent figure of the Church (figure of the Church): prefigures the immaculate Bride who pays to the Word the fullness of devotion and adoration.

The exegesis here reaches a millimetric precision. Evoking a symbolism also appreciated by Saint Jerome, Chromatius observes that the libra Romana is made up of exactly twelve ounces. The Church, therefore, offers to Christ the entire weight of the precious ointment because he has received the right doctrine of the twelve Apostles. There is no perfume pleasing to God that does not come from the apostolic deposit. Besides, That ointment is composed of the harmonious combination of multiple chosen aromas: this is the apostolic doctrine, which, even though it is one and indivisible in the substance of faith, shines in the variety of spiritual graces, of the charismas and virtues that make the gentleness of Christ perceptible in the world.

The Redeemer, remembers the bishop of Aquileia, when he deigned to annihilate himself by descending from the bosom of the Father to assume a mortal body, went almost unnoticed in the eyes of the world; and yet, precisely in that kenosis, the perfume of his Name—the Christ, that is to say, the “Anointed One” par excellence—filled the entire world. And the Church would never have been able to know or reach the Redeemer if not through the objective channel of this apostolic doctrine..

III. head and feet: the saving double confession

The theological core of the Chromatic homily lies in the spiritual anatomy of the body of the Lord: why does the woman anoint the pies of Jesus and not head, as Matthew and Mark refer instead (cf. Mt 26,7; MC 14,3)? Para Cromacio, The gesture contains a fundamental pedagogical and salvific order. The feet signify the abasement of the Incarnation: the eternal Word that touches the earth, that walks in our dust, that "in recent times he deigned to be born of a Virgin". The head indicates the imperishable glory of his divinity: the eternal generation of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, true god of true god.

The Church, explains Cromacio, necessarily begins by anointing the feet. If man does not recognize and worship the humanity of the Savior—the assumed flesh, the sores, the painful way, the historical concretion of the Redemption—can never rise to the contemplation of the divinity that resides in the head:

«We cannot be saved if we do not hold together these two truths about the double nature of Christ, which are signified by the head and the feet. We have feet because we believe that they were incarnated from the Virgin; "We have the head because we confess his Divinity that comes from the Father.".

Salvation is not an abstract concept nor a social philanthropy: does not occur without the complete profession of the hypostatic union. Omitting the feet means rushing into disembodied spiritualism.; omitting the head means degrading the Lord to a mere teacher of human morality.

Chromatius stops last in the hair with which the woman wipes the feet of the Lord. Returning to the Song of songs (cf. Cant 4,1), the holy bishop sees in them the holy people of the Church and its virtues: pure prayer and the ardor of charity. The ointment of apostolic doctrine, poured out on the feet of the Lord, It is thus translated into concrete works of piety and corporal and spiritual mercy.. When the Christian helps the poor, care for those who suffer, He defends the oppressed and gives himself up for his brothers, He is pouring nard on the sore feet of Christ and wiping them with his own life..

IV. Chromatius's lesson for today's Babel: the antidote to extreme polarizations

If the pages of Saint Chromatius resonate today with a disarming freshness, It is because they strike at the heart of the ecclesiological and doctrinal tragedy of our time. In the columns of The Island of Patmos We have repeatedly denounced that the drama of the contemporary Church lies in the loss of Catholic harmony (he and-and) in favor of a factious dialectic, ideological and destructive (he aut-aut).

Observing the current ecclesial fragmentation, It is crystal clear that we are witnessing the exhumation, with modern clothes, of the ancient Christological heresies: the Arianism that Chromatius fought in his time and the Monophysitism that broke out a few decades after his death. Today the Church seems divided between two paroxysmal factions, incapable of communicating except through reciprocal anathemas: the priests of pure worldly praxis on the one hand and the Gnostics of sacral abstraction on the other.

V. The "horizontalist" and neo-Pelagian drift: the idolatry of the feet without the head

On the one hand we find secularized progressivism, that transforms the Church into a gigantic non-governmental organization dedicated to sociological commentary or bureaucratic welfare, with the illusion of building the Kingdom with human forces alone: a revived Pelagianism. This current, steeped in modernism and sociologism, takes almost obsessive care of the "feet", understood, however, not like the Incarnation of the Word that redeems the flesh from sin, but as a pure worldly immanence.

Christ is reduced to a noble social agitator, to a prophet of universal inclusion, to a Palestinian Socrates whose resurrection becomes a symbolic myth and whose divinity constitutes almost a hindrance to dialogue with the world. In this perspective, the ointment of apostolic doctrine is undersold or considered a divisive adornment: only immediate action counts, harmony with Zeitgeist, adaptation to secular parameters. But if we forget about the head—i.e., of the consubstantial divinity of Christ, of its absolute primacy, of uncreated grace and the eschatological end of man—, works of mercy lose their divine fragrance and degenerate into sterile secular philanthropy. Without the head begotten by the Father, the feet do not walk towards eternal Life: they grope in the mud of relativism.

WE. The "hypertraditionalist" and Gnostic drift: fetishism of the head without feet

At the opposite extreme, an equally poisonous temptation proliferates., although often clothed in uncorrupted devotion: intellectualist or formalist hypertraditionalism. It is the faction of those who, like the ancient gnostics, They intend to anoint exclusively the "head", dreaming of a disembodied Church, squeeze, reduced to a museum of mummified dogmatic formulas, detached from all lively concern for the suffering members of Christ.

In them the apostolic doctrine It is no longer the aromatic ointment that heals the wounds of the soul and drives the mission, but a polemical weapon to measure the indignity of others from a pedestal of self-righteous untouchability. They fall into a practical monophysitism: Christ is so totally and exclusively "divine", distant and hieratic, that his Incarnation refuses to stain his hands with the misery of human history. Forgetting the "feet", they forget the pastoral, pedagogical patience, closeness to sinners, the tears shared with those who suffer grief and the precariousness of existence. They ignore the truth, if it does not translate into the work of mercy and living charity, It is not Catholic orthodoxy, but luciferian pride.

Conclusion: return to the perfume of apostolic doctrine

Saint Chromatius admonishes us from the depths of the centuries: there is no redemption without full confession, simultaneous and indivisible of the two natures in the one Person of the incarnate Word. We cannot amputate Christ to support the ideological fashions of the moment. This is the only cure for that dualistic catharism that resides in each of us.: You don't win by choosing one half of Christ against the other., but confessing it in its entirety.

The authentic Church does not choose between mysticism and pastoral, between dogma and charity, between the chair and the hospital room. Mary of Bethany performs the perfect act because she begins where the Church should begin.: unheard of pies of the Savior with the ointment of apostolic faith and wipes them with living virtues of their hair, opening the path that goes up to the head. Charity draws its vital sap and its orientation from right doctrine; The doctrine finds its fruitfulness and its glorification in the lived mystery of charity towards the members of Christ..

Against the delusions of progressivism that degrade Christianity to political moralism and against the shoals of exasperated traditionalisms that freeze faith in a gnosis lacking the bowels of mercy, The voice of the Bishop of Aquileia rises like a beacon of supernatural balance. It is time for the Church to regain awareness of its own spousal identity: embrace the wounded feet of the Lord's humanity with the piety of works, without ever taking away the adoring gaze of the glorious Head who reigns in the heavens, from which all grace descends and towards which all salvation history converges.

Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 19 October 2026

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Francis of Assisi mystical saint, not holy, It's a very complicated figure

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FRANCIS OF ASSISI MYSTIC HOLY, NOT SANTINO, IT IS A VERY COMPLICATED FIGURE

Francis is for theology, but he reassures his friar that this must not lead him to lucubrations, intellectualism ends in itself, or to a reality that could distance him from the Lord rather than bring him closer, that elevates him on an intellectual level but not on a mystical-spiritual level. This is why Francis can allow himself to correct and exhort even a very refined theologian like Saint Anthony of Padua; this is why Francis remains a very complex and complicated figure to understand, explain and convey, above all to follow.

— Theologica —

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Author
Ivano Liguori, Ofm. Capp.

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PDF print format article

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This article on the Seraphic Father - which in its own way could be defined as "reactive” as “inspired by” - I owe it to the expression of one of the various newly appointed young bishops, what's the weather like?, responding to an interviewer, he illustrated his personality and his pastoral perspectives by stating that he would be inspired by the "theology of Saint Francis of Assisi".

Undoubtedly the young bishop will have tried to say something engaging, with transport and sincere heart, perhaps, however, ignoring not so much Franciscanism, but Francis of Assisi himself is something quite complex, for us Franciscans first.

The editorial team of the Fathers of The Island of Patmos it is also and above all a place of spiritual, pastoral discussion and theological discussion between brothers. And so, Father Ariel and Father Gabriele, both dogmatic theologians by training, Capuchin Friar Minor and Franciscan priest asked me:

«Which one would it be “the theology of Saint Francis"? Saint Francis was perhaps a theologian? And since when? It appears to us that the Franciscan theologians were Anthony of Padua, today doctor of the Church, who was able to exercise the teaching of theologian with the permission of Francis who gave it with no small initial reluctance; Bonaventura da Bagnoregio (doctor of the Church) who is the patron saint of theologians. To follow up with Arlotto da Prato e Matteo d'Acquasparta, but above all the great one fine doctor Duns ScotO, also known as doctor of the immaculate conception of Mary".

It is always our duty to explain with truthful historical and theological rigor what is real and what is surreal, what is historically authentic and what is adulterated to a legendary level, sometimes even ideological. This is why it is reasonable and realistic to say that today, many of those who are inspired by our Seraphic Father, they demonstrate that they know very little about St. Francis. Unfortunately the facts demonstrate - and the facts demonstrate it, not rash judgments - which more than others pauperismO certain subjects are very close to that poverty socio-political ideology that both Francis of Assisi and the wisdom of the Church have fought since the 13th century, openly disavowing it and opposing a concept of poverty that did not open up to transcendence and a relationship with God, but it became violent poverty, accusatory and punitive towards those who possessed material goods. Exactly what in the post-industrial and post-Marxist era will be defined and indicated by sociologists as social envy.

To be precise we should talk about old heresies returning, starting from that of Friar Dolcino, preceded by Gherardo Segarelli and many other more or less illustrious members of that heretical movement of the early 14th century known as Fraticelli. Francesco, followed by Franciscanism which took life and then form from him, they constituted the most striking disavowal and implicit fight against these heretical currents, in full adherence to the doctrine of the Church and obedience to its established authorities.

Francesco is extremely complicated, as a Saint and as a man, despite being the Saint recognized by all as simpler, in truth it is extremely complex. Often, the first to not understand it, It was really us Franciscans, that we have recycled it several times throughout history for our various use and consumption, or “mitigated” and “sweetened”, as Tommaso da Celano and Bonaventura da Bagnoregio did in different but fundamentally similar ways.

Complicated figures to understand and interpret they have always existed in the history of the Church, even if sometimes the populace has distorted them through their own more or less surreal devotions. One of these figures, which in this sense we can cite as an example, it is Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, to understand which it is necessary to interpret his figure in the light of mystical theology in which God attracts man to himself in the totality of his present and future being and becoming. Otherwise San Pio da Pietrelcina will become a superstitious popular figure whose image will be reserved for the place on the truck of the strictly southern truck driver, next to the erotic photos of the calendar of the current calendar year where the figures of twelve bewitching photo models stand out. I say "strictly Southern truck driver" for a purely sociological purpose, because the South Tyrolean one makes a coherent choice: or he puts San Pio da Pietrelcina on his truck or the erotic calendar of the current calendar year, but not both together.

Saint Francis of Assisi For about nine centuries it has aroused the interest not only of devout people, but also of scholars, historians, literati, theologians and of course artists, because of the extraordinary nature of his experience of Christian life; a testimony to the Gospel that has been able to inform and transform our society and, naturally, the church. The poor words that follow have no pretense as there are already many, was stated, and of great cultural standing spoke about Francis, highlighting all areas of his life and his singular personality. The simple intent of this writing is to highlight the single aspect of his mystical experience, angle of vision through which his entire existence as a Christian and saint could also be read.

It's the same Francesco to remember the beginning of his new life as a mystical experience and a gift from God. Twenty years later he describes the events of his conversion in Will that event is now dying, his life change, enclosing it within these few, very densely spoken:

«The Lord granted to me, Brother Francis, to thus begin to do penance, since I am in sin, it seemed too bitter to see lepers; And the Lord Himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of soul and body. Then, I stayed a little, and I left the world".

Francis is not a theologian, at least not as we are used to thinking. It does not elaborate a systematized conception of the Christian experience, nor does he write treatises or essays on faith and its truths. Nonetheless when Dante, in the Divine Comedy, talks about the mendicant Orders and specifically about Francis, his praise comes from the one who is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest theologian the Church has ever had: San Tommaso D’Aquino. On the other hand, the praise of San Domenico, founder of the Order of Friars Preachers, known as Dominicans, the other mendicant Order par excellence, it will come from the mouth of Saint Bonaventure, the theologian par excellence of the Franciscans, the one who forever stigmatized the image of Francis to the point of making him appear practically inimitable. The great Florentine poet, in the two twin cantos, l’XI and the XII of Paradise, painfully highlights that both movements have lost their initial luster, having deviated from the teachings and rules of their founders. Therefore Dante, through St. Thomas, tells the story of Francis' life by placing it all in a mystical and spiritual dimension, as demonstrated by the long preamble which moves entirely within the realm of metaphor. It talks about the union of the Assisi native with a woman who, despite its virtues, she had remained alone for more than one thousand one hundred years after the death of her first "husband" and no other man had wanted to take her as his wife and that for love of her he, Francesco, he faced his father's wrath. Saint Thomas unravels the long metaphor only in the tercet where he finally explains that the two spouses he speaks of are Francis and Monna Poverty.

This spiritual itinerary of his, made of meetings, embrace of poverty, extreme fidelity to the Gospel and lots of prayer, Francesco will read it, we have already mentioned it, as a gift from the Lord. There are three verbs in the Will which are indicative in this regard. Five times he will repeat that «The Lord gave it to me» to do penance, to have faith in churches and priests, to have brothers and to write the Rule for them. He will subsequently state that the Lord always «revealed to mei» what he had to do and introduce himself with the greeting that had become famous: «May the Lord give you peace». And finally «He hired me» among the lepers.

In this regard Francesco, as you know, it does not offer a political response to social injustices, to the problem of evil in the world. He has no plans for effective and concrete changes, he does not meditate on struggles and rebellions; Francesco, to be understood, it is neither a hippy nor a Che Guevara from the Middle Ages, nor a contemporary of certain so-called very social priests today. Francis responds with faith, when he manages to penetrate to the bottom, with total and impetuous adhesion, the sacrifice of Christ. Let's try to follow him in his thoughts: It gave, the Most High, the master of the universe, of all creation, he sacrificed his only and favorite Son so as not to lose his creature, the man, capable only of sinning. And if Christ who is God came to earth dragged by an immense love, and he became poor and a pilgrim, he suffered from hunger and cold, betrayal and abandonment of friends, to the point of giving his life on the cross to restore salvation to humanity, the eternal joy of Paradise, what else is left for man to do but follow, as much as possible, the footsteps of the Savior, the Gospel, if not to respond to divine love with poor human love, trying to love each other like brothers? And who, if not the poor and the derelict, repeating the earthly experience of Christ in suffering, can better understand the ardent divine charity and accept anguish and suffering with gratitude, recover, like Christ, to the will of the Father?

I Little flowers of Saint Francis, a wonderful collection in the vernacular from the last quarter of the fourteenth century of "miracles and pious examples" of his life, they make him say it, about what the virtue of perfect joy is:

«Above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit, which Christ grants to his friends, it is to conquer oneself, and willingly for the love of Christ endure punishments, insults and opprobriums and inconveniences; because we cannot boast in all the other gifts of God, but they are not ours, but of God, wherefore says the Apostle (Paul, in 1 Cor 4, 7 n.d.r.): “What's wrong with you, that you do not have from God? And if you got it from him, because I boasted about it, as if you had it yourself?”. But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we can glory, but what does the Apostle say? (always Paolo, in Gal 6,14 n.d.r): I do not want to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ".

And so the cross since the encounter with the lepers, at the beginning of his conversion, forms part of Francesco's experience, of his spiritual horizon. If we really wanted to identify a theology of Saint Francis, we could define it as a «Knowledge of the Cross». He embraces the cross as he embraces the leper because now what was bitter had turned into sweetness and he can hear the voice of Christ calling him from the cross, in the small church of San Damiano. There, the Redeemer, according to the iconography of the triumphant Christ, without signs of physical suffering, he stares at the observer with quiet sweetness. Francesco believed that the image was aimed specifically at him and spoke to him: «Francesco, can't you see that my house is falling down? So go and fix it.". But Francis misunderstands the symbolic meaning of the words, he believes he must save the material edifice from ruin, he doesn't suspect what task awaits him: save the spiritual building, the church. He comes out happy, it seems to him that life finally has a purpose. Now he knows what to do, the mysterious words of Spoleto's previous dream, that of the palace and the bride that will be his, they begin to clarify; because of this, he can see who is calling him for the first time and hear his name spoken. So that is the order he was waiting for. And so Francesco, "arming oneself with the sign of the cross", his mission began.

The mystical inspiration of Francesco traceable in many of his works, from the Unstamped rule, l’Epistle to the faithful O The praises of the Most High God they are combined from now on with devotion to the Cross of Christ. In the Lodi kept in Brother Leo's chart Let's read these very famous words addressed to the Lord:

«You are holy, o Lord, only God, who does wonderful things. You are strong, you are great, you are very tall, you are omnipotent, your Holy Father, king of heaven and earth. You are three and one, man, God of gods. You are the good, all good, the supreme good, the Lord God, living and true. You are love, charity; you are wisdom, you are humility, you are patience, you are beauty, you are meekness, you are security, you are stillness, you are joy, you are our hope and joy, you are justice, you are temperance, you are all our riches in superabundance. You are beauty, you are meekness; you are protector, you are our guardian and defender, you are fortress, you are refreshment. You are our hope, you are our faith, you are our charity, you are all our sweetness, you are our eternal life, O great and wonderful Lord, Almighty God, merciful savior".

As well as in the third chapter of Foils the profound devotion that the Saint from Assisi reserved for the Cross of Jesus is narrated:

«The day of the Holy Cross is coming, and Saint Francis early in the morning, before saying, he throws himself into prayer in front of the door of his cell, turning his face towards the east, and prayed in this form: O my Lord Jesus Christ, two thanks please do me, before I die; the first, that in my life I feel in my soul and in my body, as much as possible, that pain that you, sweet Jesus, you supported in the hour of your most bitter passion; the second, that I feel in my heart, as much as possible, that great love of which you, Son of God, you were fired up to willingly support so much passion for us sinners".

These aspects of Francis' spirituality they will then be figuratively represented by the artists, which was mentioned at the beginning. Many could be mentioned, including: Master of San Francesco, whose name derives from a panel with the Saint and two angels now preserved in the Museum of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi. We can remember him by the imposing crucifix in the Basilica dedicated to the Saint, in Arezzo. The painted Cross, takes up the typology of Christ Suffering, of Byzantine inspiration, where the pain and death of Jesus are underlined by the head reclining on the shoulder and the body arched. While most painted crosses were read from bottom to top and ended with an Ascension and Christ in glory, here the message must be read from top to bottom, according to the dictates of Franciscan spirituality. This dying Christ, not anymore Triumphant, it is a novelty introduced by the Franciscans who cultivate the element of the pathetic, in the sense of an invitation to compassion. Now the mysterious word, custodian of the secret of Christianity, it is no longer "loving" but "suffering". Instead of appearing standing on the Cross, Risen and triumphant as in San Damiano, Jesus is depicted with his eyes closed and his head leaning sideways on one shoulder. Without denying the resurrection, the faithful become more fond of the Man of suffering. The true message of this cross is therefore that Jesus came down from heaven and endured the passion inflicted on him by Pontius Pilate for men and for their salvation. Devotion leaves room for compassion, to everyone's participation in the suffering of Jesus. And the first of these devotees is Francis himself depicted as a small boy under the cross, which is what he liked to call himself, who takes a bleeding foot of the crucifix in his hands and kisses it. Another work in my opinion capable of describing the «Sknowledge of the Cross» Franciscan is the Saint Francis embracing the crucified Christ by Murillo. Painting created approximately in 1668 and preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville in Spain. The work was part of a cycle commissioned to the Spanish painter by the Capuchins for a chapel in the church of their convent in Seville. These works were to enhance the distinctive elements of Franciscan spirituality. The painting is of shocking beauty; it moves the spectator who remains silent in front of such a canvas, as in prayer. The painting symbolizes the culminating moment of Francis' life: the renunciation of one's material goods to embrace religious life. The composition is harmonious. Next to the cross, two angels hold an open book which contains the passage from the Gospel according to Luke in Latin: «Whoever of you does not give up all his possessions, he cannot be my disciple" (LC 14, 25-27).

At the feet of the Saint there is a globe, a terrestrial globe; Francesco seems to push him away with his foot, metaphor of his rejection of all vanity. But let's get to the most striking fact, and also the most controversial at least in the testimonies that report it, for whom the mystical inspiration of Saint Francis is combined with his profound devotion to the Cross of Christ Jesus. I'm talking about the La Verna episode in Tuscany, the vision of the seraph and the impression of the stigmata. To make the extraordinary nature of the event palpable, let's relive it through the words of the Saint's biographer, Thomas of Celano, someone who knew him personally, who was called by Pope Gregory IX to write his biography, collecting testimonies on the events. Also and above all on that of the stigmata, before than with the Major legend San Bonaventura da Bagnoregio replaced the previous ones Quickly, imposing its destruction. As Bonaventure is well known and known, general minister of the Order, he sent a precise and mandatory command to all the Franciscan convents: destroy all manuscripts on the life and deeds of the Seraphic Father. However, several of these manuscripts were also found in some Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys and monasteries, who were careful not to carry out such a command. It is to them that historians owe thanks if the manuscripts of the Quickly narrated by other authors before Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, considered by some Church historians as the second founder, or so-called re-founder of the Franciscan Order.

Thomas of Celano in Life before he certainly knew Friar Leone's version of the events in La Verna and obviously also Friar Elia's letter. The biographer could not afford to neglect either the Saint's closest friend and his confessor or the powerful head of the Order. How to connect two such divergent testimonies? He circumvented the difficulty by telling the miracle of the stigmata twice with clever adjustments, a first placing it on the Verna, a second at the time of the exposure of Francis' body. Let's reread what Tommaso da Celano writes:

«Two years before Francesco died, spending a period in the hermitage which is called Verna from the name of the place, in a vision sent by God he saw a man, almost as if he were a Seraph with six wings, stay above yourself, with hands open and feet together, stuck on a cross. Two wings rose above his head, two spread out on the fly and two finally covered the whole body. Seeing this, the blessed servant of the Most High was filled with great amazement but could not understand what that vision meant.. He enjoyed it very much and was delighted to feel himself looked at with a benign and sweet look by the Serafino., whose beauty was truly unimaginable, but at the same time he was terrified by his affixing to the cross and by the cruelty of his suffering. So he got up, as it were, sad and happy, and in Francesco joy and pain alternated. He continued to anxiously mull over what the vision might mean, and his spirit was terribly strained to try to grasp its meaning. Because by reasoning he did not arrive at any certain interpretation and he felt pervaded and very agitated in his heart by the novelty of that vision, the marks of nails began to appear on his hands and feet, as he had seen shortly before on the man crucified above him. His hands and feet seemed to be pierced in the center by nails: the heads of the nails could be seen on the inside of the hands and on the top of the feet, and on the opposite side the tip. Those marks were round on the inside of the hands and elongated on the opposite side and almost formed a fleshy and raised excrescence, as if it were the tip of the nails folded and clinched. Likewise, the marks of the nails protruding onto the rest of the flesh were imprinted on the feet. Even the right side, as if he had been pierced by a spear, he showed a large scar that often emitted blood so that his tunic and legcloths were frequently stained with his holy blood. Ah, how few as long as the crucified servant of God lived, they were lucky enough to be able to see the sacred wound in his side! But happy Elijah who while the Saint lived deserved to see her in some way and no less happy Rufinus who was able to at least touch her".

Still further ahead is Tommaso da Celano, speaking of the joy and sadness of the people and the friars in the presence of the now deceased body of the Saint, he reports as follows:

«Pure, an unprecedented joy tempered their sadness and the novelty of the miracle filled their minds with extraordinary amazement. Thus mourning was changed into festive song and crying into jubilation. In fact, they had never heard or read in the Scriptures what they now saw with their own eyes, and they would hardly have believed it if they hadn't had such probative and certain testimony before them […] The shape of the cross was perceived in him. In fact, he seemed to have just been taken down from the cross with his hands and feet pierced by nails and his right side wounded by the spear. They still saw his flesh, which was previously dark, now shining with a luminous whiteness and the superhuman beauty already demonstrated the reward of the blessed resurrection. His face, at last, it was like that of an angel […] While she shone before everyone with such wonderful beauty, his flesh became brighter and brighter. It was truly a miracle to see in the center of his hands and feet not the nail holes but the nails themselves formed from his own flesh., dark in color like iron and the right side purple with blood. And those signs of martyrdom did not inspire fear or horror in those who saw them, rather they conferred decorum and ornamentation, like black tiles on a white floor".

We could stop here and say nothing else in the presence of such a moving story. Suffice it to underline that in La Verna Francis finally experienced his personal and extraordinary identification with Christ and with him crucified. But in what context did this happen?? Towards the end of his life, Francis felt increasingly pressured by the Church concerned with normalizing a project of Christian life, practicing evangelical poverty and love, that, if actually implemented, it would have been revolutionary and dangerous for the ecclesiastical structure itself, if misinterpreted. He also felt misunderstood by a large part of the friars and this increased his discouragement. Having grown up out of all proportion, not everyone was capable of sharing such difficult choices, men sometimes of limited virtue or too cultured, far from the pure ideals of their spiritual leader. Like Christ increasingly alone at the finish line of the cross, at about forty-four years old Francesco took with him very few companions, intimate and involved, and moved, as we know, on the Verna, for a long retreat of solitary contemplation. He was counting on overcoming that profound crisis; he continually asked God to enlighten him, that would show him what the end of his life would be like. In fact, he began to see the darkness in his soul lift only when he understood that he had to leave the problems of the Order and its future to God's decision., enduring, writes Tommaso da Celano, that "the merciful will of the heavenly Father would be totally fulfilled in him". The biographer thinks of the founder as "another Christ" against the backdrop of the Mount of Olives. The Saint, however, he would have liked to at least know what end awaited him, despite now being sure not to rebel against it. A day, after praying for a long time, he resorted to the triple opening of the Gospels, who always showed the same pace or a very similar one. The gaze fell: «on the Passion of Christ, but only in the stretch in which it is predicted". When Tommaso da Celano wrote this part of the work he evidently already knew the sequel, he knew that shortly thereafter he would tell about the apparition of the Seraph and the stigmata. He deliberately constructed the episode of the triple opening with evangelical quotes that refer to the agony of Christ according to Luke (22, 43-45). Christ, at the height of suffering he asks the Father: «Put this cup away from me», but he understands that he must accept all the suffering of the imminent Passion. In the Gospel, after the vision of the angel Jesus felt momentarily consoled; but immediately afterwards he fell back into great anguish, enough to sweat blood. Francesco is also on the mountain, he comes up from La Verna; he sees the Seraph and finds consolation in the moment in which he accepts all the suffering that still awaits him before death. Anguish leads Christ to sweat blood; Francesco, the vision of the Seraph disappeared, feels the Mount of Olives so close to the point that the nails of flesh, copies of the nails of the Cross become visible. Like all the great mystical saints, Francis on La Verna is also immersed in the darkness of the so-called "dark night", not even supported by his dear friend and companion Leone who lived, himself, a moment of crisis. After a long period of spiritual retreat, Francis finally had an epiphany, sees the solution: be Christ, who is God, he submitted himself to the will of the Father, he will not have to do the same himself? Thus, that identification with the Model is achieved which is inscribed not only in the soul of the Saint, but also in his flesh. Jesus consoles Francis and reveals to him the rightness of his path which had its origin and first assurance from the other cross, that of San Damiano; and also gives him the gift of his love, now in the terminal moment of his Christian life and experience. From this profound knowledge, not intellectual, but mystical, of the cross of Christ, those words that we reported above and condensed here will flow from the heart of Francis. Testimony of that «science» of the Christian mystery that still moves us today for the way Francis understood and lived it:

«You are love, charity; you are wisdom, you are humility, you are patience, you are beauty, you are meekness, you are security, you are stillness, you are joy, you are our hope and joy, you are justice, you are temperance, you are all our riches in abundance".

In a letter from Francis to Anthony of Padua in which he addressed him as "Brother Anthony, my bishop", he said:

«Do theology too, but be careful that this does not extinguish the spirit of prayer and contemplation".

Francis is for theology, but he reassures his friar that this must not lead him to lucubrations, intellectualism ends in itself, or to a reality that could distance him from the Lord rather than bring him closer, that elevates him on an intellectual level but not on a mystical-spiritual level. This is why Francis can allow himself to correct and exhort even a very refined theologian like Saint Anthony of Padua; this is why Francis remains a very complex and complicated figure to understand, to explain and convey, above all to follow. This is also why it is not easy to talk about the "theology of Saint Francis".

 

Sanluri, 17 July 2024

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