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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

.

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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FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM?

«Being Christian means bearing witness and, if necessary, fight the worst tendencies of the Prince who governs this world with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speech and electoral vote. Baptismal faith is not something private, but how much more public can there be: active testimony. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion".

- Actuality -

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The 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the writing «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice - to celebrate the inclusion of the "right" to abortion in the French Constitution, first nation in the world to do so.

It's France itself, secular to the point of exasperation, never truly freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that remained smoldering like embers under the ashes, the same as in 1793 transformed Notre-Dame into the temple of the Goddess Reason and which in the last two years has found itself celebrating something completely different: an explosion of requests for baptism among teenagers, young people and adults which is unprecedented in its recent history. In 2025 they went further 17.800 the catechumens baptized at Easter: 10.384 grown ups, the 45% more than 2024, beyond 7.400 teenagers among 11 e i 17 year old.

I couldn't help but be happy, be clear, before an adult who consciously asks for this sacrament of grace that cleanses from original sin and opens up the path of Christian life. but yet, I confess this without any pessimism, something about this phenomenon doesn't convince me and with all my heart I hope I have to say, in a few years, that I was wrong. I really want it, I'm wrong.

To understand the phenomenon we must start from two French fears, both real and competing. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content with separating the State from the Church - something sacrosanct, which Catholics themselves are right to defend to protect both freedoms: of the State and the Church - but which has progressively risen to supreme truth, to a substitute civil religion: it is not the first time in the history of France, the Goddess of Reason installed on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 it demonstrates it with the strength of the previous one. The second, less declared but no less widespread, it is instead constituted by the fear of a growing number of French people faced with the expansion of Muslim communities who refuse any integration and who have transformed entire neighborhoods - even in the capital - into enclaves where the law of Great Republic matters less than the law of the square. Exasperating and aggressive secularism on the one hand, fear of Islamization on the other: two pressures they generate, together, fear and confusion in a nation that, no matter how hard he tries to deny it, it cannot erase its Christian roots, an anthropological baggage that constitutes it profoundly, even before its history.

It is in this scenario that I believe it is legitimate to ask an uncomfortable question: these conversions arise from a flash of lightning on the road to Damascus - as happened, over the centuries, to famous people and countless strangers — or they are a reaction, a form of identity defense, an escape from fear dressed up as a sacrament? It would not be the first time that Christianity acts as a bond of people and a refuge in a moment of collective confusion: the case of Poland, in Europa, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is also instructive: in fact the specter of communism has fallen, who had made faith an act of national resistance, Poland has embarked on a secularization as rapid as that of France. Participation in Sunday mass, than in 1981 it was still about the 52,7% of the Polish faithful, she went down to the 46,8% In the 2001, al 40% In the 2011, until the 28,3% the 2021. Almost like for many, the common enemy against which faith was a barrier has disappeared, Christianity had lost its subjective and social utility and purpose.

To understand this mechanism It is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and a return to faith - and conversely the link between widespread well-being and religious disaffection - is not an invention of the twentieth century. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which wiped out almost half the population in just a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of bordering on excess: the flagellant movement was born, who crossed the cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced that he was acting under direct inspiration from God; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, the cult of the patron saints from the plague grew enormously, San Rocco above all. It was such an exasperated religiosity that the Supreme Pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly prohibit its practices, a sign that the Church too, in the face of collective terror, he recognized the risk of a refuge-faith capable of bordering on fanaticism.

A case closer to us and in some ways Spain mirrors the Polish one. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country torn apart by the civil war - during which, between 1936 and the 1939, the anticlerical persecution in the areas controlled by the republicans cost lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, about 6.832 religious, thirteen bishops included, as well as thousands of lay people killed for their faith - first went through the economic boom of the 1960s and then, above all, the democratic transition and the decades of peace and growing freedom that followed: and it is precisely in those decades that the collapse came, sudden. In just twenty years Spain has gone from a country where the 92% of the population grew Catholic to one in which only the 66% still declares itself as such: over twelve million fewer people, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms have come down from 325.271 In the 2007 a 214.271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized and among young people come 18 to the 24 years ago, over half now declare themselves non-Catholic. The seminars emptied at the same time: -30% of seminarians in the last decade e 10.615 parishes up 23.286 — more than half — are today without a resident priest.

It is certainly no coincidence that Spain, in this same thirty years of galloping de-Christianization, has become the European laboratory from which they were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative changes on the continent: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, third country in the world after the Netherlands and Belgium, with adoption rights included from day one; the express divorce of the same year, which eliminated any obligation of preventive separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called ley trans of February 2023, which introduced the change of registered sex upon simple self-declaration, without any medical requirement, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I don't claim that there is a plan behind all this - it would be unprovable - but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains at least a fact to reflect on.

The thread that binds the Black Death, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, mirror bed: in moments of great fear and collective uncertainty the churches fill up, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in moments of peace and widespread prosperity they become empty, with them diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also emptying. In the poorest countries in the world, the bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, Meanwhile, they gradually closed their own, going so far as to sell most of the buildings and concentrate the few seminarians from all the dioceses of an entire ecclesiastical region in a single seminary. How authentic certain vocations are and how many aspiring priests are young people who are only looking for a better state of life and a role of maximum respect in their civil societies? All this is not a mechanical law, nor can grace be reducible to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with enough regularity to impose caution on anyone looking at the today 17.800 French catechumens and would certainly like to read in it a new springtime of faith, because this can only be assessed in several years.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, it needs strong and well-considered reasons, it cannot be the result of emotion alone, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity loss. Augustine, first a pleasure-loving libertine, then a Manichaean, he didn't convert to defend himself from something, but why something, or rather someone had reached him to the point of undermining all his intellectual and moral resistance. The same applies, in times closer to us, for conversions like that of Edith Stein, Jew and eminent philosopher, or by André Frossard, atheist and communist, later appointed member of the French Academy, all inspirations that arise from an encounter, not from a siege, I am the conscious and free fruit of that love that chases away fear (cf.. 1 GV 4,18). The risk, in France, is that a part of these 17.800 people found not Christ in the baptismal font, but a trench: a solid identity to oppose to a world - secularist on the one hand, Islamized on the other - perceived as hostile. This is not necessarily the case and it would be ungenerous and even dishonest to assume this a priori for everyone. S. AND. Mons. Olivier Leborgne, Bishop of Arras and former vice-president of the French Episcopal Conference, he explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by wounds and experience entry into faith as a healing experience. And this is the language of authentic grace, not trenches, even more so, time will confirm or deny it.

So it takes time to distinguish one thing from another. Time is what is always missing from Easter statistics and what the Church instead, of always, to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the number and verifies the quality of the "yes" pronounced at the baptismal font, exactly what I had the opportunity to write in a forthcoming article of mine regarding the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, massive entry without adequate discernment has already shown that it can betray, in other contexts, within a generation.

If in a few years France dei 17.800 catechumens the 2025 it will be a more Christian France and not just a more frightened France that has looked for a fort, then I must have been wrong. And it will be, per me, the greatest joy. If not, we will have witnessed: one part, to the Eiffel Tower illuminated to celebrate the inclusion of “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, on the other to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means bearing witness and, if necessary, fight the worst tendencies of the Prince who governs this world with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speech and electoral vote. Baptismal faith is not something private, but how much more public can there be: active testimony. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion.

From the island of Patmos, 28 September 2026

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FRANCE. BAPTISMS OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISMS?

«Being Christian means bearing witness and, when necessary, fighting — with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speak and vote — against the worst excesses of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public thing there can be: active witness. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion».

— Contemporary ecclesial affairs —

.

On 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the words «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice — to celebrate the enshrining of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, the first nation in the world to do so. This is the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, never truly freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that has gone on smoldering like an ember beneath the ash, the same France that in 1793 turned Notre-Dame into the temple of the Goddess Reason and that in the last two years finds itself celebrating something altogether different: an explosion of requests for baptism among adolescents, young people and adults with no precedent in its recent history. In 2025 more than 17,800 catechumens were baptized at Easter: 10,384 adults, 45% more than in 2024, and over 7,400 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17.

I could only be glad, let it be clear, before an adult who consciously asks for this sacrament of grace that washes away original sin and opens the path to the Christian life. And yet, I confess without any pessimism, something about this phenomenon does not entirely convince me, and with all my heart I hope to have to say, a few years from now, that I was wrong. I truly wish to be wrong.

To understand the phenomenon, one must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content merely to separate Church from State — a sacrosanct principle, which Catholics themselves are right to defend in order to safeguard both freedoms, that of the State and that of the Church — but that has progressively set itself up as supreme truth, as a substitute civil religion: it is not the first time in the history of France; the Goddess Reason enthroned on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates this with the force of precedent. The second, less openly declared but no less widespread, consists instead in the fear felt by a growing number of French people before the expansion of Muslim communities that reject all integration and that have turned entire neighborhoods — even in the capital — into enclaves where the law of the Great Republic counts for less than the law of the street. Exasperated, aggressive secularism on one side, fear of Islamization on the other: two pressures that together generate fear and bewilderment in a nation which, however hard it tries to deny it, cannot erase its own Christian roots, an anthropological inheritance that constitutes it at its depths, even before its history does.

It is in this scenario that I consider it legitimate to ask an uncomfortable question: do these conversions arise from a Damascus-road revelation — as has happened, over the centuries, to celebrated figures and to countless unknown ones — or are they a reaction, a form of identity self-defense, a flight from fear dressed up as a Sacrament? It would not be the first time that Christianity has served as a people’s bond and refuge in a moment of collective disorientation: the case of Poland, in Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came afterward is instructive too: once the specter of communism had fallen — communism that had made faith an act of national resistance — Poland embarked on a secularization every bit as rapid as France’s own. Sunday Mass attendance, which in 1981 still involved 52.7% of Polish faithful, fell to 46.8% in 2001, to 40% in 2011, and down to 28.3% in 2021. As though, for many, once the common enemy against which faith had stood as a bulwark was gone, Christianity had lost its own usefulness and its subjective and social purpose.

To understand this mechanism, it is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and a return to faith — and, conversely, the link between widespread prosperity and religious disaffection — is no invention of the twentieth century. In the Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which cut down nearly half the population within a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of excess: the flagellant movement was born, processing through cities practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced they were acting under God’s direct inspiration; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, and the cult of the saints who protected against plague grew beyond measure, Saint Roch above all. It was a religiosity so overwrought that Pope Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly forbid its practices — a sign that even the Church, faced with collective terror, recognized the risk of a refuge-faith capable of sliding into fanaticism.

A case closer to us, and in certain respects a mirror of the Polish one, is Spain. National Catholicism in the post-war Francoist era, which had made faith an identity pillar in a country torn apart by civil war — during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution in the zones controlled by the Republicans cost the lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, of roughly 6,832 clergy and religious, including thirteen bishops, in addition to thousands of laypeople killed for their faith — passed first through the economic boom of the 1960s and then, above all, through the democratic transition and the following decades of peace and growing freedom: and it is precisely in those decades that the collapse arrived, sudden. In barely twenty years Spain went from a country where 92% of the population grew up Catholic to one where only 66% still declares itself so: more than twelve million people fewer, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms fell from 325,271 in 2007 to 214,271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among young people aged 18 to 24 more than half now declare themselves non-Catholic. Seminaries have emptied at the same pace: a 30% drop in seminarians over the last decade, and 10,615 out of 23,286 parishes — nearly half — are today without a resident priest.

It is surely no coincidence that Spain, in this same thirty-year span of galloping dechristianization, became the European laboratory from which, in sequence, some of the continent’s most radical legislative turning points were born: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, the third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, with the right to adoption included from the very first day; express divorce that same year, which eliminated any requirement of prior separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, the seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called ley trans of February 2023, which introduced the change of legal sex on simple self-declaration, with no medical requirement whatsoever, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I am not claiming that behind all this lies a design — that would be impossible to prove — but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains, at the very least, a fact worth pondering.

The thread linking the Black Death, post-Francoist Spain and post-communist Poland is the same one, read as in a mirror: in moments of great fear and collective uncertainty, churches fill up, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in moments of peace and widespread prosperity, they empty, and with them diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates empty too. In the world’s poorer countries, bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, meanwhile, have been progressively closing their own, going so far as to sell off much of the property and to concentrate in a single seminary the few seminarians from every diocese of an entire ecclesiastical region. How many of certain vocations are genuine, and how many aspiring priests are instead simply young men seeking a better state of life and a position of the utmost respect within their own civil societies? None of this is a mechanical law, nor can grace be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with sufficient regularity to counsel prudence to anyone who today looks at France’s 17,800 catechumens and is tempted to read into them, without further thought, a new springtime of faith — because that can only be judged several years from now.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and well-examined reasons; it cannot be the offspring of mere emotion, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity disorientation. Augustine, first a hedonistic libertine and then a Manichaean, was not converted in order to defend himself from something, but because something — or rather, someone — had reached him, dismantling every intellectual and moral resistance he had. The same holds, in times closer to our own, for conversions such as that of Edith Stein, a Jewish woman and eminent philosopher, or of André Frossard, an atheist and communist who was later made a member of the Académie française — all of them revelations born of an encounter, not of a siege, the conscious and free fruit of that love which drives out fear (cf. 1 Jn 4:18). The risk, in France, is that some of these 17,800 people may have found at the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench: a solid identity to set against a world — secularist on one side, Islamized on the other — perceived as hostile. It need not be so, and it would be ungenerous, even dishonest, to presume it a priori for everyone. His Excellency Bishop Olivier Leborgne, Bishop of Arras and formerly vice-president of the French Bishops’ Conference, has explained that the new catechumens often come from complicated lives, at times marked by wounds, and experience their entry into the faith as an experience of healing. And that is the language of authentic grace, not of a trench — all the more so as it will be time to come that confirms or disproves it.

Time is therefore needed to tell one thing from the other. Time is precisely what Easter statistics always lack, and what the Church, as ever, knows how to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the numbers and that verifies the quality of the «yes» spoken at the baptismal font — exactly what, as I have had occasion to write in an article of mine soon to be published concerning the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, a massive intake without adequate discernment has already shown itself capable of betraying, in other contexts, within the space of a single generation.

If, some years from now, the France of the 17,800 catechumens of 2025 turns out to be a more Christian France and not merely a more frightened France that went looking for a stronghold, then I will have been wrong. And that, for me, will be the greatest joy. If not, we will have witnessed: on one side, the Eiffel Tower lit up to celebrate the enshrining of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, and on the other an army of reactive newly baptized who will not have understood that being Christian means bearing witness and, when necessary, fighting — with all the political means granted to anyone with the right to think, speak and vote — against the worst excesses of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public thing there can be: active witness. If not, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotion.

From The Island of Patmos, 28 September 2026

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FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM ?

“To be a Christian means to bear witness and, if necessary, fight — by all political means recognized to anyone who has the right to think, of speech and vote - the worst excesses of the Prince who governs this world. Baptismal faith is not a private thing, but what is most public there is : active testimony. Otherwise, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotionality”.

— Church news —

.

the 4 mars 2024, the Eiffel Tower lit up of the inscription “My body, my choice », to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, France thus becoming the first nation in the world to do so. It's the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, never really freed from the revolutionary anticlericalism that remained smoldering like an ember under the ashes, the same one who, in 1793, transformed Notre-Dame into a temple of the Goddess Reason and which, the last two years, finds himself celebrating something completely different : an explosion of baptism requests among adolescents, young people and adults, unprecedented in its recent history. On 2025, more than 17 800 catechumens were baptized at Easter : 10 384 adults, either 45 % more than 2024, and more than 7 400 adolescents aged 11 at 17 ans.

I could only be happy, let us understand it well, in front of an adult who asks in full conscience this sacrament of grace which cleanses from original sin and opens the path to Christian life. And yet, I admit it without the slightest pessimism, something about this phenomenon doesn't quite convince me, and I sincerely wish I had to say, in a few years, that I was wrong. I really wish it, cheat on me.

To understand the phenomenon, we must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism which has never been content to separate the State from the Church – a sacrosanct thing., that Catholics themselves are right to defend for the protection of the two freedoms, that of the State and that of the Church - but which has gradually established itself as the supreme truth, a religion civil de substitution : this is not the first time in French history, the Goddess Reason installed on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates it with the force of the precedent. The second, less reported but just as widespread, is due to the fear of a growing number of French people facing the expansion of Muslim communities who refuse any integration and who have transformed entire neighborhoods – including in the capital – into enclaves where the law of the Great Republic weighs less than the law of the street. Exasperating and aggressive secularism on one side, fear of the Islamization of others : two pressures which together generate fear and dismay in a nation which, despite all his efforts to deny it, cannot erase its own Christian roots, an anthropological background which constitutes it in its depths, even before its history.

It is in this context that I believe it is legitimate to ask a disturbing question : Are these conversions born from a flash on the road to Damascus – as happened?, over the centuries, to famous people and countless unknowns — or are they a reaction, a form of identity defense, a flight from fear which is clothed in the Sacrament ? It would not be the first time that Christianity has served as national glue and refuge in a moment of collective dismay. : the case of Poland, a Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is just as instructive : the specter of communism once fallen - it which had made faith an act of national resistance -, Poland is engaged in secularization as rapid as that of France. Participation in Sunday mass, which still concerned 52,7 % Polish faithful in 1981, fell to 46,8 % in 2001, at 40 % in 2011, until 28,3 % in 2021. As if, for many, the common enemy having disappeared - the one against whom faith was a bulwark -, Christianity had lost its usefulness and purpose, both subjectively and socially.

To understand this mechanism, it is appropriate to take a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and return to faith — and, conversely, the link between widespread prosperity and religious disaffection — is not a 20th century invention. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, which decimated almost half the population in a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of sinking into excess : the flagellant movement was born, who traveled through cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced of acting under the direct inspiration of God ; pilgrimages and vows multiplied, the cult of saints protecting the plague experienced disproportionate growth, Saint Roch at the head. It was such an exacerbated religiosity that the sovereign pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn its excesses and publicly prohibit its practices - a sign that the Church itself, in the face of collective terror, recognized the risk of a faith as a refuge likely to sink into fanaticism.

A case closer to us, and in some respects the mirror of the Polish case, is that of Spain. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country emerging from a civil war - during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution carried out in republican-controlled areas cost lives, according to the reference study by the historian Antonio Montero Moreno, approximately 6 832 religious, thirteen bishops included, as well as thousands of lay people killed for their faith —, first went through the economic boom of the 1960s, Then, Above all, the Democratic Transition and the decades of peace and increasing freedom that followed : It was precisely during these decades that the collapse occurred, suddenly. In barely twenty years, Spain has gone from a country where 92 % of the population grew up in Catholicism in a country where only 66 % still declare themselves Catholic : more than twelve million fewer people, the largest contraction in Europe in absolute value ; baptisms fell from 325 271 in 2007 at 214 271 in recent years, today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among the young people of 18 at 24 ans, more than half now declare themselves to be non-Catholic. The seminars emptied at the same rate : -30 % of seminarians over the last decade, and 10 615 parishes on 23 286 — almost half — are today deprived of a resident priest.

It is certainly no coincidence that Spain, during these same thirty years of galloping dechristianization, became the European laboratory from which were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative turning points on the continent : same-sex marriage, introduced the 30 June 2005, third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, with the right to adoption from day one ; the express divorce of the same year, which removed any obligation of prior separation ; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so ; the so-called trans law of February 2023, who introduced the change of civil status upon simple declaration, without any medical requirements, one of the most permissive laws in Europe. I am not saying that there is a design behind all this – that would be undemonstrable –, but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the ground made available for these transformations remains, at the very least, a fact worth reflecting on.

The thread that connects the Black Death, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, read in mirror : in times of great fear and collective uncertainty, the churches are filling, often beyond the measure of authentic faith ; in times of peace and widespread prosperity, they empty themselves, and with them the diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also empty.. In the poorest countries in the world, bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, in the meantime, gradually closed theirs, going so far as to sell a large part of their buildings and to concentrate in a single seminary the rare seminarians from all the dioceses of an entire ecclesiastical region. How much, among certain vocations, are they authentic, and how much, on the contrary, are young aspiring priests only seeking a better standard of living and a role of the greatest respect within their civil societies? ? All this is not a mechanical law, and grace cannot be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that repeats itself with sufficient regularity to impose caution on anyone looking at the 17 800 French catechumens and would like to read there without further delay a new spring of faith, because this can only be judged in several years.

An authentic conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and carefully considered reasons ; she cannot be the daughter of emotion alone, fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity disarray. Augustin, first libertine enjoyer then Manichaean, does not convert to defend himself from something, but because something – or rather someone – had reached him to the point of shaking all his intellectual and moral resistance. It is the same, in a time closer to our own, for conversions such as that of Edith Stein, Jewish and philosopher badge, or André Frossard, atheist and communist, later elected member of the French Academy : all these fulgurations are born from an encounter, not a seat, and are the conscious and free fruit of this love which banishes fear (cf. 1 Jn 4, 18). The risk, In France, is that part of these 17 800 people found on the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench : a solid identity to oppose to a world – secularist on one side, Islamized by the other — perceived as hostile. It is not said that this is so, and he would be petty, even dishonest, to presume it a priori for all. Mgr Olivier Leborgne, bishop of Arras and former vice-president of the Conference of Bishops of France, explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by injuries, and experience their entry into faith as a healing experience. And this is the language of authentic grace, not that of the trench - all the more reason to let the time to come provide confirmation or denial.

So it takes time to distinguish one from the other. Time is precisely what is always missing from Easter statistics, and what the Church, elle, always knows how to give : a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment which is not satisfied with the number and which verifies the quality of the “yes” pronounced at the baptismal font – exactly what, as I had the opportunity to write in an article to be published soon on the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, mass entry without adequate discernment has already shown that it could betray, in other contexts, within a generation.

And, in a few years, the France of 17 800 catechumens from 2025 reveals itself as a more Christian France, and not only a more frightened France gone in search of a fort, then I would have been wrong. And it will be, In my opinion, the greatest joy. Otherwise, we will have attended, on the one hand, at the illuminated Eiffel Tower to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, and on the other hand to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, fight — by all political means recognized to anyone who has the right to think, of speech and vote - the worst excesses of the Prince who governs this world. Baptismal faith is not a private thing, but what is most public there is : active testimony. Otherwise, everything risks being reduced to fear and emotionality.

From the Island of Patmos, the 28 september 2026

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FRANCE. BAPTISM OF FAITH OR REACTIVE BAPTISM??

«Being a Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, combat - with all recognized political means those who have the right to think, word and vote — the worst deviations of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public that can exist: the active testimony. Otherwise, everything runs the risk of being reduced to fear and emotion.

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The 4 March 2024 the Eiffel Tower lit up with the inscription «My body, my choice» — my body, my choice — to celebrate the inclusion of the “right” to abortion in the French Constitution, first nation in the world to do so. It's the same France, secular to the point of exasperation, who never truly freed himself from revolutionary anticlericalism, and that continues to simmer like an ember under the ashes; the same as in 1793 transformed Notre-Dame into a temple of the Goddess Reason and that in the last two years has celebrated something very different: an explosion of baptism requests among teenagers, young people and adults unprecedented in recent history. On 2025 were more than 17.800 catechumens baptized at Easter: 10.384 adults, a 45% more than in 2024, and more than 7.400 teenagers from 11 and 17 years.

I couldn't help but rejoice, let it be clear, before an adult who asks with full conscience for the sacrament of grace that cleanses from original sin and opens the path of Christian life. And yet, I confess it without any pessimism, something that in this phenomenon does not convince me at all, and I wish with all my heart to have to say, in a few years: I made a mistake. I really want to be wrong.

To understand the phenomenon we must start from two French fears, both real and concurrent. The first is that of an aggressive secularism that has never been content with separating the State from the Church — a sacrosanct thing., and that Catholics themselves have reasons to defend to protect both freedoms: that of the State and that of the Church —, and that has progressively emerged as the supreme truth, as a substitute civil religion. It is not the first time in the history of France, the Goddess Reason enthroned on the altar of Notre-Dame in 1793 demonstrates with force the precedent. The second, less declared, but no less widespread, Instead, it is the fear of a growing number of French people who, faced with the expansion of Muslim communities that reject all integration and have turned entire neighborhoods — also in the capital — into enclaves where the law of Great Republic weighs less than the law of the street. Infuriating and aggressive secularism, on the one hand, fear of Islamization by another: two pressures that together generate fear and confusion in a nation that, no matter how hard you try to deny it, cannot erase his own Christian roots. An anthropological baggage that constitutes her in the deepest part, even before its own history.

It is in this scenario where I consider it legitimate to raise an uncomfortable question: Are these conversions born from a flash on the road to Damascus — as has happened, throughout the centuries, to famous people and countless strangers — or are they a reaction, a form of identity defense, an escape from fear that is clothed in Sacramento? It would not be the first time that Christianity serves as a mortar for the people and a refuge in a moment of collective confusion.: the case of Poland, in Europe, remains the most eloquent. But what came next is also instructive.: the specter of communism fallen, who had made faith an act of national resistance, Poland undertook secularization as fast as France. Participation in Sunday Mass, that in 1981 still reached 52,7% of the Polish faithful, descended to 46,8% in 2001, al 40% in 2011, until the 28,3% in 2021. As if, for many, the common enemy against which faith acted as a dam has disappeared, Christianity would have lost its own usefulness and subjective and social purpose.

To understand this mechanism It is worth taking a step back in history, because the link between collective fear and the return to faith — and, the other way around, the link between general well-being and religious detachment — not a 20th century invention. In Europe devastated by the Black Death of 1347-1351, that decimated almost half of the population in a few years, popular religiosity exploded to the point of bordering on excess: the flagellants movement was born, who toured the cities in procession practicing public self-flagellation as extreme penance, convinced of acting by direct inspiration from God. Pilgrimages and votes multiplied, and the cult of the saints who protected the plague grew disproportionately, like Saint Roque to first place. It was a religiosity so exasperated that the Supreme Pontiff Clement VI had to intervene with two bulls, in July and September 1349, to condemn their excesses and publicly prohibit their practices. A sign that even the Church, in the face of collective terror, recognized the risk of a faith-refuge capable of degenerating into fanaticism.

A case closer to us and, in certain aspects, speculate in Polish, it's Spain. National Catholicism in the post-Franco war, who had made faith a pillar of identity in a country that had been torn apart by a civil war — during which, between 1936 and 1939, anticlerical persecution in Republican-controlled areas cost lives, according to the reference study by historian Antonio Montero Moreno, to some 6.832 religious, thirteen bishops, and thousands of lay people murdered for their faith —, first went through the economic boom of the sixties, and above all, the democratic transition with the decades of peace and increasing freedom that followed: and it is precisely in those decades when the collapse came, sudden. In just twenty years, Spain has gone from being a country where 92% of the population grew in the Catholic faith to one where only the 66% is still declared as such: more than twelve million fewer people, the largest decline in Europe in absolute terms; baptisms have fallen from 325.271 in 2007 a 214.271 in recent years; Today more than half of Spanish children are not baptized, and among the young people of 18 a 24 years more than half declare themselves non-Catholic. The seminaries have emptied at the same rate: a decrease in 30% in number of seminarians in the last decade, and 10.615 of the 23.286 — parishes, almost half — today lack a resident priest.

It is no coincidence that precisely Spain, in this same thirty years of rampant de-Christianization, has become the European laboratory from which they were born, in sequence, some of the most radical legislative changes on the continent: same-sex marriage, introduced on 30 June 2005, third country in the world to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, including the right to adoption from day one; the quick divorce that same year, which eliminated any requirement for prior separation; active euthanasia, legalized in March 2021, seventh country in the world to do so; the so-called trans law of February 2023, that introduced the change of registered sex by simple self-declaration, without any medical requirement, among the most permissive regulations in Europe. I do not claim that there is a design behind all this — it would be unprovable —, but the chronological coincidence between the void left by faith and the terrain available for these transformations remains, at least, a fact to reflect on.

The thread that unites the black plague, post-Franco Spain and post-communist Poland is the same, reflected in time like a mirror: In moments of great fear and collective uncertainty, churches fill, often beyond the measure of authentic faith; in times of peace and widespread prosperity they are emptied, and with them the diocesan seminaries and religious novitiates are also emptied.. In the poorest countries in the world, The bishops ask for financial aid to build seminaries from European bishops who, meanwhile, they have been progressively closing theirs, going so far as to sell a large part of its buildings and concentrate the few seminarians from all the dioceses of an ecclesiastical region in a single seminary.. How authentic are certain vocations?, and how many aspiring priests are actually just young people seeking a better state of life and a role of maximum respect in their own civil societies? All this is not a mechanical law, nor can grace be reduced to a sociological cycle. But it is a pattern that is repeated with sufficient regularity to impose caution on anyone who looks at the 17.800 French catechumens and want to read in them, without a doubt, a new spring of faith, because this can only be assessed in several years.

A true conversion, especially in adulthood, needs strong and contrasted reasons; It cannot be the daughter of mere emotion, of fear, of the need to belong in a moment of identity confusion. Augustine, first happy libertine and then manichean, He didn't convert to defend himself from something, but because something - or rather someone - had reached him to the point of disarming all his intellectual and moral resistance.. The same goes, in times closer to us, for conversions like Edith Stein's, Jew and distinguished philosopher, or André Frossard's, atheist and communist, later appointed member of the French Academy: all of them fulgurations that are born from an encounter, not from a siege, conscious and free fruit of that love that expels fear (cf. 1 Jn 4,18). The risk, in France, is that a part of these 17.800 people have found in the baptismal font not Christ, but a trench: a solid identity to oppose a world — secular on the one hand, Islamized by another — perceived as hostile. It is not necessarily said that it is so, and it would be mean, and even dishonest, show it off a priori for everyone. Mons. Olivier Leborgne, bishop of Arras and former vice president of the French Episcopal Conference, has explained that new catechumens often come from complicated lives, sometimes marked by wounds, and live the entry into faith as a healing experience. And that is the language of authentic grace., not from the trench — all the more reason will be the time to come that will confirm or deny.

It is necessary, therefore, time to distinguish one thing from another. Time is precisely what is always missing from Easter statistics, and what the Church instead, since always, knows how to give: a serious catechumenate, an accompaniment that is not satisfied with the number and that verifies the quality of the “yes” pronounced before the baptismal font — exactly what, as I have had the opportunity to write in a soon-to-be published article regarding the vocational crisis in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, massive entry without adequate discernment has already proven to be able to betray, in other contexts, over the course of a generation.

If in a few years the France of the 17.800 catechumens from 2025 turns out to be a more Christian France, and not only a more frightened France that looked for a fort, then I must have been wrong. and it will be, for me, the greatest joy. Otherwise, we will have attended: on the one hand, to the illuminated Eiffel Tower to celebrate the inclusion of the "right" to abortion in the French Constitution; for another, to an army of reactive baptized people who will not have understood that being Christian means witnessing and, if necessary, combat - with all recognized political means those who have the right to think, word and vote — the worst deviations of the Prince who rules this world. Baptismal faith is not something private, but the most public that can exist: the active testimony. Otherwise, everything runs the risk of being reduced to fear and emotion.

From the Island of Patmos, 28 of September 2026

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EMMA BONINO AND THE DEATH OF A SAD WOMAN. PITY DOES NOT ERASE THAT TRUTH OF WHICH IT IS THE DAUGHTER, OTHERWISE IT WOULD JUST BE PIETISM

In Heaven there is an army of angelic creatures who owe the conquest of their eternal bliss to that baptism of blood in martyrdom called abortion.

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Before writing this article I questioned myself as a Christian, priest and theologian on the relationship between piety and truth.

A Senator of the Republic, who in his youth was very close to Marco Pannella and Emma Bonino, the first one described me as a sunny and cheerful man, beyond his provocative public performances in front of the cameras, that they had a purposeful reason, sometimes studied or even scientific: «Marco Pannella» he told me «had a laughing look and eyes». A completely different description regarding the second: «Emma Bonino was a sad woman, His eyes were melancholy even when he laughed.".

Inveterate smoker, she never stopped smoking even after being diagnosed with lung cancer which affected her for a decade, finally died after a long respiratory illness. On its coherence, or perhaps on the lack thereof, I think it's legitimate to question myself: why did the one who fought for years to get a law on euthanasia approved not call Marco Cappato, he has personally assisted others several times in the process of assisted suicide? On abortion, instead, we don't ask ourselves the same question: it was herself, in the seventies, to set an example first hand, immortalized with a bicycle pump in her hand used to perform clandestine abortions. Two battles, two different consistencies: its one, abortion, he chose the direct gesture, on the other, l'euthanasia, reached the moment of its end, he preferred the opposite path to the one he had fought for so that it became law for everyone.

We all remember this sad woman who never missed an opportunity to define abortion as a "great social achievement", defining law n. 194 the 1978, which regulates the legalized killing of a human being, «an example of civilization». And here the mind can only rush to a completely different figure: Daniele Capezzone, currently director of the Roman newspaper Time, in the past parliamentarian and secretary of the Italian Radicals since 2001 al 2007. Daniele Capezzone, who is a secularist and an all-round liberal, several times, debating in various television programs on Mediaset networks, defined abortion as "a tragedy" and law no. 194 "a necessity", stating that he felt "discomfort in hearing it defined as a 'great achievement'". Here is the difference that I would like to underline: with whom - despite disagreeing with me in the doctrine that considers life sacred from the moment of conception -, recognizes abortion as having the moral weight of a tragedy that must be contained, dialogue remains possible, even fruitful. With those who made it a source of pride and a trophy to show off as a "great achievement", the dialogue stops before it even begins: not for my closure, but because between those who mourn an evil that they consider necessary and those who instead celebrate it as a good there is no common ground on which to meet, especially when human life is at stake.

I who believe in the immortality of the soul and eternal life, I don't know what happened to Emma Bonino, when I closed my eyes to this life he reopened them before the immediate judgment of God. One thing is certain in my faith: in Heaven there is an army of angelic creatures who owe the conquest of their eternal bliss to that baptism of blood in martyrdom called abortion. And I am sure that these Angels, the first to be able to fully understand the weight of a life spent against their very existence, they will be able to intercede with God with a mercy greater than any human judgement, because He alone has the last word on this sad woman.

From the island of Patmos, 11 September 2026

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A DUE REPORT TO THE READERS WITH DUE TRANSPARENCY AND DEEP GRATITUDE

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Dear Readers,

the 26 August Father Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo, editor in chief of this magazine of ours, launched an appeal informing that by 7 September (then extended to 10 as later specified in the note) we had to pay the annual management costs for the site that hosts the Island of Patmos (cf.. who). The annual amount needed for living expenses: from the server dedicated to the various services and subscriptions the amount is equal to 8.000 Euro. Between the current account at Banca BPM and the PayPal account we had cash 2.135 euros in total.

 

The editorial Fathers they feared they had reached the end of this happy experience that had lasted 12 years and starting from October 2014 it has never experienced any declines but only a progressive increase in visitors.

We are happy to inform you that we currently have 3.189,97 to your PayPal account e 6.933,24 on the current account of Banca BPM for a total of 10.123,21 Euro. By subtracting what we already had we collected the 8.000 euros needed for the expenses of 2027, to be precise 7.988.

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Rome, 9 September 2026

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