JESUS ​​CHRIST WAS POOR? THE PROBLEM OF A MISUNDERSTANDING «POOR CHURCH FOR THE POOR» AND THE GREAT PROBLEM OF ECCLESIASTICAL REAL ESTATE

Who out of crass ignorance, who for vulgar anti-clericalism, who for ideology or clerical pleasure speaks of a poor Jesus reduced to a penniless flower child, announces a false Christ who never existed and does not correspond to the historical chronicles narrated and transmitted by the Evangelists.

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Some Readers have pointed out that I write articles that are «interesting and clear, but too long". Someone clarified: "In the era of the social media most people don't read beyond the tenth line". Well I tell you that The Island of Patmos and a little’ a miracle. From October of 2014 to date, visitors have always increased without ever decreasing. In 2016 we had to buy one dedicated-server able to handle over twenty million visits a year. As ours explains webmaster success is not due to the number of visits but to the average time spent on the site, which is very high. Therefore, those who do not go beyond ten lines, I am not the audience to which the Fathers de The Island of Patmos they intend to contact.

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Now I will offer a long article for those who do not intend to explain and resolve complex and articulated themes on a historical level, ecclesial, pastoral, economic and financial with three “shot” lines up Twitter while walking down the street or in line at the checkout supermarket waiting to pay.

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In the episode of Report the 7 an interview with two Neapolitan presbyters was broadcast on Rai2 in November: Frank Cirino, Bursar of the Archdiocese of Naples e Vincenzo Doriano DeLuca director of the diocesan magazine January. The treasurer has demonstrated an extraordinary preparation on the ecclesial-pastoral and economic-financial level. We invite you to listen this interview, it is very interesting and clarifying for understanding how the difficult management of ecclesiastical assets really works.

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TI will address this theme on two different sides illustrating first, the current difficulties of managing the ecclesiastical patrimony, then the true and authentic meaning of "poverty" and of "poor Church" according to the Holy Gospels. The poverty of the Church is a concept dear to all hippies the Left radical chic with super-penthouses in Parioli and villas in Capalbio, pleasant resort of extra luxury in the lower Tuscan Maremma where, when he feared hosting a few migrants to be distributed to the various municipalities of Italy, the first to rise up were the Piddini with six-figure accounts who bivouac in that pleasant exclusive location, except to claim it right alone and the ports open to the disembarkation of anyone who arrives on our coasts, provided, however, that it does not arrive in front of the doors of their villas [cf.. WHO, WHO, WHO …].

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To understand we really need to take a step back, always addressing those who wish to know, then read, not to those who jump over on the tenth line. Let's start from 1850, year in which the Siccardi Laws were passed which sanctioned the separation between State and Church in the Kingdom of Sardinia, the number 1013 the 9 April and the number 1037 the 5 June, which suppressed the privileges previously granted to the Church, as already happened in other European countries in the period immediately following the French Revolution. Laws then extended to other Italian territories conquered by the Piedmontese between 1848 and the 1861. They followed the Rattazzi law n. 878 the 29 May 1855 and the subversive laws n. 3036 the 7 July 1866 e n. 3848 the 15 August 1867. After 20 September 1870 which marked the capture of Rome and the definitive unity of the Kingdom of Italy, were finally extended to the whole national territory.

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Needless to say: the person walking down the street or in line at the cash desk waiting to pay, send twett to pontificate in three lines on the most complex historical or historical-ecclesial questions, of the type "the Church is rich and owns half of Italian real estate" (!?), or "the Vatican has the largest deposits of gold in the world" (!?), he certainly cannot follow our discourse, because over time he would lose reading only one page, he will have already tweeted at least ten similar sage messages to spread his pearls of wisdom. And upon exiting the supermarket, always busy between a Tweet and the other, walking down the street you won't realize or wonder why certain historic buildings that were once abbeys, certose, monasteries and religious institutes, today they are barracks, schools, public offices. Simple to explain: those structures, between 1848 and the 1870 were confiscated from the Church, kicked out monks, nuns and priests, then transformed into barracks, hospitals, public offices. Many small churches owned by religious institutes or brotherhoods, once requisitioned they became warehouses, garage, workshops, pieces of private homes. And here an aside is in order, one of many among those you will never find in the history books, because the Italian Risorgimento is still today a myth built at the table by ideological propaganda. The confiscation work for the destination of those buildings for other use, throughout the Italian nineteenth century it constituted the greatest and most appalling destruction of the national artistic heritage. Soon said: transform a charterhouse or a 12th or 13th century monastery, enriched over time with works of art, sculptures, frescoes, fine worked marbles, to use it as a barracks, necessarily entails the irreparable destruction of a heritage of art. You have never found it written in history books for school use in which only the undisputed glories of the Italian Risorgimento are explained? Anyhow, even if it is not written in the books, the work of these immense havoc is still visible before our eyes, starting from Rome to follow with all the other big and small Italian cities, it would be enough to avert one's eyes from the social media and look around when walking the streets of Italian cities. Above all, as citizens, you should be aware, just out of pure civic sense, than most of the historic churches and religious institutes we see today, they are not owned by the Italian dioceses, but of the state. For their management there is also a special office managed by the Ministry of the Interior which is call FEC (Cult buildings fund). And here a parenthesis should be opened on another topic which, however, we cannot deal with here, to explain to certain secularists who thunder against the Otto per Mille to the Catholic Church that with this contribution, who really benefits, it is not the Church but the State. Try to think that the State should manage, conserve and protect certain large historic churches and basilicas that it owns, returned after confiscation to the Church on loan for use so that someone could provide for their protection and conservation. Stables today guarded by religious congregations or by the secular clergy of the various dioceses, who enlist the help of devoted Catholic faithful who provide free service as volunteers. Request: how much it would cost the State to have to conserve and guard certain great ones, precious and important historic buildings of high artistic value? How much salaried staff would it need, how many cleaners, how many guardians? So, the reckoning, on the much recriminated Otto per Mille, who is really making money?

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Just twenty years later, from 1890, the governments of the Kingdom of Italy, however fiercely anticlerical, they sent their officials holding the keys of many historic institutes and churches to beg the diocesan bishops, the monks and nuns, the men and women religious from whom they had been confiscated a few decades earlier, so that they could take them back on… free loan (!?). Indeed, the good liberal-Risorgimento-anticlerical State, he soon found himself having to deal with an enormous heritage of historical-artistic buildings that could not all be transformed into barracks, schools, hospitals, public offices, university locations … Many of these historic churches and former religious establishments were located in outlying areas, some abbeys, certose, monasteries and convents were in isolated areas and difficult to control. Once requisitioned and closed, first these were looted, then they began to pour into disrepair. Everywhere, in particular in Southern Italy, there had been great looting of works of art. The trade of thieves and art dealers with the United States of America was very dense, who in those years acquired most of the works still kept in their museums today. All this always as proof of the great unspoken historical glories of the Italian Risorgimento which must remain a myth, legend and ideology.

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The Italian nineteenth century it was also the century of the great saints of charity, educators and pedagogues, of which are emblem San Giovanni Bosco with the Congregation of the Salesians and the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. Also in Piedmont, Maria Enrichetta Dominici gave life to the Sisters of Providence under the patronage of the Marquis of Barolo, which will then take the name of Sisters of Sant'Anna, engaged in the assistance and education of orphan girls. The Roman St. Vincent Pallotti founded the Catholic Apostolate, before which all Roman nobles opened their wallets, just to get him out of the way, so insistent was he when he sought funds for charitable works for the benefit of orphans and the elderly. St. Joseph Benedict Cottolengo, founder of the work of Divine Mercy, she cared for children and the elderly with severe physical disabilities. The foundation of these institutes and works also continued during the twentieth century with San Giovanni Calabria who founded the Poor Servants and Servants of Divine Providence, to whom we owe the foundation of the Sacred Heart Hospital of Verona, today a center of excellence at European level. And many other founding saints and foundresses.

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All these facilities dedicated to assisting orphans, children from poor families, sick elderly deprived of support and disabled, to follow along with the entire network of kindergartens and schools run by numerous religious congregations, above all they constituted a not indifferent service to the State, who mostly requisitioned only institutes of contemplative life after having declared them "parasitic". Obviously no one could explain to the legislator of the time - perhaps even more so to today's legislator - that certain apostolic works of active life were supported by the contemplative life of the monks and nuns who consumed their lives in prayer and penance in the cloisters and who constituted the fuel to run the engines of the great saints of charity.

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Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in an Italy in which the birth rate was much different and much higher, thanks to the donations of many wealthy benefactors huge institutes were built, some were real citadels. Between the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, marine and mountain colonies were built capable of hosting up to 3.000 children. Pharaonic structures erected in years in which not so much construction, but the maintenance and conservation of certain buildings had completely different costs. There are also numerous institutions for abandoned children, the so-called orphanages. Equally numerous were those in which disabled children were welcomed and assisted. All this was happening in years when we weren't yet civilized. When in fact in the 1978 there was the "great social conquest" of the law on legalized abortion which gave birth to this "great and intangible civil right" [cf.. Ivano Liguori, WHO], mothers could go directly to hospitals to legally impose the death penalty on their children. And so, to gradually, the orphanages were permanently closed, partly due to the drop in birth rates and partly due to legalized abortion. While children with Down syndrome or other forms of disability are increasingly rare to see, because they can be killed before being born, in this country of ours that repudiates war and the death penalty to the sound of rainbows, except, however, making war on life and inflicting the death penalty on their children, to unwanted ones and those deemed not physically perfect.

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Thanks to the impetus given by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) the Church had already experienced a similar happy season between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the birth of numerous institutes of so-called apostolic life. The birth of all those male and female religious congregations dates back to that period ― which then became numerous in the following three centuries ―, engaged in education, in childcare, in the care of the elderly, of the sick and disabled. New forms of religious life ranging from the Order of the Society of Jesus of Saint Ignatius of Loyola to the Hospitaller Order of the Fatebenefratelli of Saint John of God, from the Congregation of the Company of the Oratory of San Filippo Neri to the hospital ladies of San Vicenzo de' Paoli, the Daughters of Charity.

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To the decline in births joins that of vocations to the priestly and religious life. Many congregations of nuns, thriving until half a century ago, today they are increasingly reduced in number and made up of religious of an ever older age. The nuns are now disappearing from many medium and small Italian dioceses, with significant reductions in numbers even in the large ones and the consequent progressive closure of kindergartens, schools and institutes. Soon said: how to use certain prestigious historic buildings in city centres, or in singular or strategic places, for example facing the sea or in mountain tourist areas, or in hilly and countryside areas which have become particularly exclusive nowadays? Definitely selling them, or leasing them to hotel companies. To monetize or somehow make these structures profitable, no longer usable for the purposes for which they were built, it means obtaining the money necessary to support other kinds of charitable or welfare works of completely different dimensions, necessary and appropriate to the needs of contemporary society, which certainly is no longer that of the 1920s or 1930s.

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It takes a lot to understand this, instead of shouting at the "shameful real estate speculation of the Church", or instead of launching a feature in the weekly Espresso the totally false news about the Church, according to certain pseudo-investigative journalists would not pay taxes on real estate? Fake. The Church has always paid taxes on real estate from which only buildings of worship and those of welfare and charitable institutions are exempt [cf.. see in Future, WHO]. Or maybe they ignore, the signatories of these periodical published inquiries only one his Espresso, that even the Arcigay circles do not pay taxes because they are recognized as associations of public social utility as they are responsible for spreading the gender and instances of lobby LGBT? If certain congregations of nuns hadn't transformed some of their institutions that are no longer usable into more or less luxurious hotels, where would they get the money from to support other kinds of charitable and welfare activities in Italy or in various poor countries around the world? To the editors of Espresso, who over the years have bombarded us with articles bordering on anti-clerical ferocity, in addition to the gratuitous lie, understand this, it's just that hard?

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The topic covered in the episode of Report, made excellent by our Neapolitan brothers Franco Cirino and Vincenzo Doriano De Luca, as well as a wonderful Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe who, pressed insistently by a prurient journalist, sent him to fuck off [cf.. WHO] ― and he did very well to do it ― , it was partly about the number of historic churches in the historic center of Naples, about a thousand, of which only the 15% owned by the Archdiocese of Naples, partly on the case of the Apostolic Citadel founded after the war by the presbyter Gaetano Cascella with the donations of various benefactors and bequeathed to the Archdiocese of Naples in 1979. A huge charitable structure erected in Pozzuoli facing the gulf and changed into hotel facility. Soon said: enough to make the usual suspects scream together with the chorus of totally uninformed people against the dirty speculative Church: «The Church must be poor because Jesus was poor!».

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And now we move on to the second part: we are sure that "Jesus was poor", how those who do not set foot in church even for Easter and Christmas thunder and who when out of social duty have to participate in some wedding or funeral, during the liturgies they do not know what to answer, nor when to sit or stand up? And to the words "Our Father who art in Heaven...", total silent scene of almost all of certain assemblies convened out of duty towards the dear departed and his family, while the priest celebrant answers himself, or if an altar server or sacristan is present, at that point theirs will be the only voices to recite with him «… hallowed be your name, Come your kingdom …". but yet, it is precisely these people who cannot distinguish the book of the Holy Gospels from a manual of recipes for the kitchen, to raise the finger ― obviously above all on social media - to thunder and remind in a threatening tone: «Jesus was poor!».

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Sorry to disabuse these thirsting for poverty on the skin of others and of the Church in particular, except to seek and demand for oneself all the most expensive and even useless luxuries. Jesus was not poor at all. Both the Divine Master and his Apostles had enough to eat and live, despite having left work and homes. Simone known as Pietro was what today we could define as a wealthy fishing entrepreneur. As were James and John sons of Zebedee, certainly much more wealthy than the same Simon known as Peter, it would be enough to leave the club of the ignorant gods social media and read the chronicles of the Holy Gospels:

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«Passing along the sea of ​​Galilee he saw Simon and Andrew, brother of Simone, as they cast their nets into the sea; they were in fact fishermen. Jesus said to them,: "Follow me, I will make you fishers of men ". And immediately, leave the nets, they followed. Going a little further, he also saw Giacomo di Zebedèo and Giovanni his brother on the boat while they were rearranging the nets. He called them. And they, left their father Zebedee in the boat with the boys, they followed him" [MC 1, 16-20].

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I understand that today we are illiteracy is functional that digital, to the point of not even understanding what is imprinted in the Holy Scriptures. So let us try to understand this passage. First of all, the characters in this story about the calling of the Apostles, they owned not only “a boat”, but "of the boats", which at the time was no small thing, especially in that area considered one of the poorest provinces of the Roman Empire. Just like today it is completely different to be a lorry driver who owns a lorry for large transports whose cost can reach up to one million euros, and be a truck driver who drives a bulk truck owned by others as a salaried employee. The same thing still applies in fishing today, to both fishermen and fishing vessels, which are not always owned by those who are dedicated to fishing. The apostles were entrepreneurs who owned their own boats.

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The Holy Gospel referred to here, he specifies in the story that the father of Giacomo and Giovanni also employed hired workers: «And they, left their father Zebedee in the boat with the boys, they followed him" [MC 1, 16-20].

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Young John and his brother James they therefore came from a family of wealthy entrepreneurs, so much so that the mother, in a fit of naivety born of his lack of understanding of the mission of the Word of God, he asked Christ the Lord: "Tell these sons of mine to sit one at your right and one at your left in your kingdom" [Mt 20, 21]. We wonder who, if not the mother of two children belonging to what today we would call the mercantile bourgeoisie, he would have dared to make such a request to a Master of such prestige? Only a woman belonging to a specific social class who wanted a due place of respect for her offspring could do it.

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The Twelve Apostles they received help from benefactors and when guests arrived in the houses, provision was made by offering them the best that could be offered, they had devoted women to attend to their care and needs.

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Blessed Patriarch Joseph he was not a salaried worker but an entrepreneur who carried out a noble trade, that of cabinetmaker; respectable and very lucrative profession. Therefore, anyone who says "Saint Joseph the worker", or anyone who claims that "St. Joseph was a worker", mystifies the figure of the blessed husband of the Virgin Mary, because Joseph was not a worker as we understand him today, because it was certainly he who employed hired workers at his company.

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The Blessed Virgin Mary he came from an even more affluent family than Joseph's, it is always evident from the Holy Gospels, for example in the story of his visit to his cousin Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist and wife of Zechariah, who was a member of the ancient priestly caste and a very cultured and wealthy person. Not only was Zacharias a priest, because as such it belonged to a very high level: he was a member of Abiah's class, which represented the VIII of the XXIV classes into which the priests serving in the Temple of Jerusalem were divided.

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All'era the culture was closely linked to economic well-being. Also in this case the Holy Gospels detail what was the cultural level of Zacharias by narrating how, not having at that moment the use of the word, removed from it by the Archangel Gabriel for not having believed the announcement that his wife would give birth to a son at an advanced age [cf.. LC 1, 5-25], he asked for a tablet to confirm his assent to the name Elizabeth intended to give to the unborn child, writing: "John is his name". [LC 1, 63]. In front of these stories, historians and anthropologists, but above all the theologians, they should explain how many people in ancient Judea at the time could read and even write. Not for nothing, when young Jewish males celebrated coming of age through the mtzva bar and they had to read and publicly comment on a passage from the Torah, as Jesus did at the age of twelve during the episode narrated by the Holy Gospels as his dispute with the Doctors of the Temple [cf.. LC 2, 41-50], most of it was pain, because the majority of Jewish teenagers could not read or write. So they memorized a verse and then, with the Sefer Torah open [the scroll of the Holy Law], they recited it. A bit like what happens today to the majority of more or less observant Jews, many of whom do not know Hebrew, several manage to read it, but they don't understand its meaning. And so the rabbi proceeds to write a verse transliterated from the Hebrew, puts it on Sefer Torah and the teenager reads it, sometimes without even knowing what it means.

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But here is the prompt reply of those who want a Jesus who is poor and strictly speaking the son of poor people at all costs: "Jesus was born in a poor stable". In this case too, however, things are different, in fact narrates the Blessed Evangelist Luke:

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«[…] at the time when a decree of Caesar Augustus ordered the census of all the land. This first census was made when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone went to be enrolled, each in their own city. Joseph also, from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, went up to Judea to the city of David called Bethlehem: in fact, he belonged to the house and family of David. He had to be registered together with Maria, his bride, that she was pregnant" [LC 2, 1-20].

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historical reality is that the power then in force had commanded a census for administrative reasons, thus forcing Joseph and Mary, then close to childbirth, to go to the city of David, Bethlehem. And here it is interesting to note that Bethlehem, in Hebrew, means "House of Bread". And right in that city, certainly not by chance, he was born who will later become the Living Bread descended from heaven [cf.. GV 6, 35-59], which is not "like what your fathers ate and died" because "whoever eats this bread will live forever" [GV. 6, 58].

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Forgetting all the tender readings with which popular piety has colored the text of Luke's Gospel, it narrates that the birth of Jesus takes place in a space that could be found in the houses of the time, those dug inside, presumably a room carved into the rock. Like the kind of houses that are still visible today in certain archaeological sites, those located in Sicily at the Necropolis of Pantalica in the Syracuse area [cf.. WHO], or in Basilicata at the so-called Sassi of Matera [cf.. WHO], or in the lower Tuscan Maremma in the city of Pitigliano dug into the tuff on the border between Tuscany and Lazio [cf.. WHO].

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In the Gospels there is no reference to the ox, the donkey and the presence of various animals around the Blessed Virgin Mary. Above all, this birth in an unexpected place, it didn't happen because Giuseppe was a penniless underclass, but because - as the Gospels narrate - both for the census, and for the large influx of pilgrims to Jerusalem, there was just not a single hole free.

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I use an example that always made me smile: the mother of my pupil and collaborator, today president of our Editions, Jorge Facio Lynx, she was about to give birth while she was inside a taxi. The taxi driver promptly diverted the ride to the hospital. But no one would ever argue, in case this other Maria ― Maria Ines, Jorge's mom ―, had given birth in a taxi, that the poor thing was so poor and penniless that she could not even afford to give birth to her child in an obstetrics-gynecology clinic.

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Jesus Christ was poor the same way he was born with very white skin, blond hair and blue eyes, in a city in Sweden - as we obviously read in the Holy Gospels - called Bethlehem, a few tens of kilometers from the capital of Stockholm. Among the various episodes that give the correct and real perception of how Blessed Joseph and the Virgin Mary were not poor penniless underclassmen, the story of the massacre of the innocents is certainly exhaustive. The fearsome Herod, having learned that astronomer magicians had traveled to Judea where a king was to be born, after trying to mislead them, he subsequently ordered to kill all newborn boys aged two and under. Blessed Joseph, warned in a dream by an Angel, takes the child and the mother and flees to Egypt, where the family remained until the death of Herod [cf.. Mt 2, 1-16]. Regarding this story it must be specified that in the wake of the Protestant Rudolph Bultmann, master of the demythologization of the Holy Gospels - to which many of our theologians and exegetes impudently refer, transmitting theories and teachings directly into our current ecclesiastical universities ―, many scholars question the historicity of the Flight into Egypt. Some of our biblical scholars intervened to give them a hand, arguing that the flight into Egypt of the story of the Blessed Evangelist Matthew would have been constructed to give a theological foundation to this Gospel directed mainly to the Jews, to whom it was thus exposed that Jesus Christ was the new Moses and that through him the prophecy of the Prophet Hosea was therefore fulfilled: "From Egypt I called my son" [Os 11,1]. According to others, the story of the Blessed Evangelist Matthew would be nothing more than a plagiarism of the Aggadah Hebrew that narrates how the Patriarch Moses was saved from death, after the pharaoh had decreed the suppression of children. In truth, the similarities between the Patriarch Moses and Christ God, they do not represent at all a solid element to deny the historicity of what is narrated by the Blessed Evangelist Matthew.

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After this dutiful digression let's get back to the problem, which is as follows: how two poor souls could afford to move to Egypt indefinitely? The lovers of today Jesus' poverty, have they ever wondered how much it cost, at the time, stay in Egypt? there, making both a parallel and a socio-financial conversion, we can argue that at the time, stay in Egypt, it cost what it would cost to stay in Dubai today, well-known destination of the greatest starving deaths of this world.

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Many times Jesus was honored with precious gifts, like the expensive nard oil with which Mary anointed his feet in Bethany [cf.. MC 14, 3-9]. Among the spectators present at the event was Judas Iscariot, who harshly criticized that gesture of loving devotion, lamenting such a waste. That oil was in fact very precious and expensive, it was worth three hundred denarii, as the Gospel account itself details. It's here, to explain what such an amount amounted to in Judea at the time, suffice it to say that a denarius was the daily wages of a Roman soldier and that oil, more expensive than gold, it corresponded to almost a year's pay. Before the episode of Judas who affirms that that money could have been given to the poor, John the Evangelist tells us that the Iscariot had no concern for the poor, but that he was a thief. In fact, the community of apostles had a chest from which he stole money [cf.. GV 12, 1-8]. A harsh judgement, the one enclosed in this story with which John condemns Judas, it does not condemn concern for the poor, but that hypocrisy that yesterday as today makes use of the poor when necessary and before which the Lord responds to Judas dispelling all doubts for the present and for the future: «You will always have the poor among you, but you won't always have me" [GV. 12, 1-11].

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Jesus also dressed elegantly, today we would say haute couture. In fact, he was wearing a precious tunic, fully woven and seamless, so much so that under the cross the soldiers didn't tear it to pieces as they used to do with the rags of the poor people, with which they then cleaned their spears and swords and polished their armor, but they played it with dice. The Synoptic Gospels limit themselves to narrating that the soldiers cast lots for his garment [cf.. Mt 27,35; MC 15,24; LC 23,34], while the Blessed Evangelist John hesitates to explain the value and value of that item of clothing: “Now that tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom. So they said to each other: “Let's not tear it up, but we cast lots for whose turn it is"» [GV 19, 23-24]. All because a piece of such quality and value, it certainly couldn't be ruined.

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Among the twelve apostles — as we said earlier — there was also a cashier, a kind of forerunner of the president of APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See). However, this primitive administrator was no gentleman, his name was Judas Iscariot and he was a subject to be wary of, not so much when he spoke of the poor, pretending they cared so much; you had to beware of him especially when he gave kisses [cf.. Mt 26,47-56; MC 14,43-52; LC 22,47-53].

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The body of the dead Lord was wrapped in precious linen and placed in a fine new tomb provided by a rich man who had become a follower of Christ: Joseph of Arimathea [cf.. Mt. 27, 57-60]. So Jesus, to make the idea, he was not buried in a mass grave or in a modest niche at the expense of the Jerusalem municipality, but in what today would be in all respects the elegant sepulchral chapel of a very high-ranking family.

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A separate explanation deserves the same penalty as crucifixion and the methods adopted. Indeed, it happened frequently, not to mention practice, that the executioners, to alleviate the suffering of the condemned and to hasten his death, their legs and arms should be broken to hasten their death which in this way occurred by suffocation. Once the corpses were placed on the crosses, the bodies followed this fate: or they were caught and thrown into a large mass grave, or they were hacked to pieces with axes.

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Come May, the Holy Body of Christ the Lord this fate did not follow, or rather this practice, after his crucifixion on Golgotha? The same name as that gloomy hill, it encompasses both its history and its meaning. A word of Aramaic origin, the place is called in Greek ολγοϑᾶ and in Latin Golgotha, literally means "place of the skull", or the "skull", due to the presence of ossified skulls and bones scattered on the ground. The corpses were in fact thrown, whole or in pieces, in pits that are not always deep, with the consequence that the various animals present in the area often unearthed and then scattered the remains of human bodies around. But this fate, which was the usual practice, instead it was not the turn of Christ the Lord, whose body was taken down from the cross, harvest, washed, anointed with precious oils and essences, finally wrapped in an equally precious shroud. Evidently Jesus of Nazareth, however condemned to that horrendous punishment, he wasn't exactly one of several condemned ordinaries, therefore his body and the care of the same followed a completely different fate. And these different fates denote that he wasn't exactly a poor man, nor an ordinary convict surrounded by just as many poor people, like the numerous convicts for whom the same family members did not even dare to go and ask for the bodies for a proper burial, also because they should have given a generous tip to the Roman soldiers. Some poor relatives of the crucified dead attempted to steal their bodies at night, with the risk of ending up subjected to harsh penalties if discovered. That said, I don't want to make hypotheses that could even cause scandal in some. But, posed these premises, I have a simple doubtful question: it is none other than Joseph of Arimathea, indicated by the Holy Gospels themselves as «rich» [cf.. Mt 27, 57-61] going in broad daylight to request the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, from the Roman soldiers he didn't exactly show up empty-handed to take the body and offering them many thanks for their sensitivity and understanding?

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A few days later, before the overturned stone of the sepulcher of the Risen Christ, the Capos del Popolo invited the Roman soldiers guarding the tomb to lie. To induce them to do so they gave them a good sum of money [cf.. Mt 28, 12-14]. This theme to which I have dedicated a video lesson to which I refer [see video WHO]. Come May, the Heads of the People, they did not simply tell the Romans: “Dear Soldiers, be kind and do us this favour, say that…”? They did none of this for the simple fact that in ancient Judea where everything was sold, was bought and traded, the Romans who had perfectly settled in and integrated into the culture and ways of doing of the place, for free they did nothing, not even killing quickly, because even a "merciful" spear to relieve the suffering of a condemned man had a price to pay.

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The Holy Gospel of the Nativity and that of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ they do not at all narrate the birth of a poor man nor the death and burial of an equally poor man. And all of us, be faithful devotees, both people who are also non-faithful and non-believers, on the basis of what is called intellectual honesty we must stick to the historical accounts of the Holy Gospels, which have nothing to do with the more or less daring ideological exegeses.

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If we don't get into this style of thinking we cannot understand certain passages of the Holy Gospels, but we can only twist them, consequently dirty and distort them. When in fact in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ the Lord announces the Beatitudes [cf.. Mt 5, 1-16], his reference to the poor is not a dry and lapidary "Blessed are the poor", as Cardinal Claudio Hummes murmured during the last conclave, or as for nine years now we have unfortunately heard enunciated from the increasingly faith-poor pulpits of our churches, with homiletic rants obsessively focused on immigrants and refugees. The Word of God has never uttered this lapidary sentence, but he enunciated a much more articulated expression: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven". He makes no reference to material poverty, much less indicating it as a virtue, rather than poverty, the misery, they are not cardinal virtues, they are misfortunes to get out of and help others get out of. We are invited to be poor "in spirit", that is, to enter into a precise inner disposition. In fact, being inwardly poor means first and foremost being aware of our limitations and our miseries as men born with the corruption of original sin. Being poor in spirit means recognizing our free and vital need to depend on the grace of God the Father. And the model par excellence of that poverty synonymous with humility and unconditional giving of love is Christ God who, as the Blessed Apostle Paul instructs us, despite being rich he became poor for us:

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«Cristo, while it is of divine nature, He did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness. He appeared in human form, humbled himself by becoming obedient unto death and death on a cross" [Fil 2, 6-11].

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In the Holy Gospels the Lord does not tell us “You must be poor”, quite the opposite: he exhorts us by saying clearly «Be careful and keep away from all greed because, even if one is in abundance, his life does not depend on what he possesses" [cf.. LC 12, 13-21]. The intimate meaning of the Lord's words is: don't worry about anything, because it's worth worrying about, but it is good to worry about that all understood as cosmic Christocentrism, for being present projected towards an eternal future becoming, certainly not for nothing.

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Material goods are necessary and they can be very useful for transforming them into a collective good in various ways. Invest in studies, for instance, or in certain studies in a particular way, it is very costly, but thanks to the use of large sums of money some talented men became surgeons who then invented new operating techniques, others of the scientists who have discovered new molecules or created new vaccines. And all this was possible through that instrument called money, through which - some say - the world moves. Let's also assume that money moves the world, the important thing is that its movement does not make the man a slave trapped and unable to see beyond matter, something unacceptable for us Christians who in the profession of faith proclaim our Trinitarian belief in eternity: "Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi".

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In the pages of the Holy Gospels, more than an invitation to a surreal poverty, or worse to an ideological poverty, the Lord invites us to make a healthy and generous use of riches, using them for the better development of ourselves and for the good of others, for example through those money flow mechanisms that create jobs and collective welfare. All this with all due respect to the great sharks of the worst wild liberal capitalism, who affirm that «the Church must be poor», while the poor non-EU African needs a free Cuba on the edge of their swimming pool in memory of Fidel Castro, in the sweet memory of Ernesto Guevara said Che, also known as The pig, i.e. the Pig, it was notoriously dirty both inside and out. If not, to those animated by selfishness who think only of filling their barns and then say to themselves: "Relax, it eats, drink and have fun and give yourself joy» [LC 12, 19]. The Lord remembers: "Careful, you who accumulate treasures only for yourself and do not worry about getting rich in the presence of God" [LC 12, 21].

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Wealth and well-being are not bad, quite the opposite, they can be sources of great good and as such serve to create wealth and superior well-being. The material means, starting with money, they have always been useful tools, indeed indispensable for the very proclamation of the Word of God and for evangelization. The Twelve themselves, who left family, home and work to devote himself to the apostolate, they had means of support. Their apostolic mission was supported by faithful benefactors and very wealthy widows. Let us therefore ensure that wealth can truly produce true wealth, for ourselves and for the good of others, so that everything is not only "vanity of vanities", as Qohelet admonishes by opening his speech with an invective against vanity [cf.. q 1,3].

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We should not wish or pray to create a "poor Church for the poor" [cf.. WHO]. The Church belongs to everyone, of the poor and the rich and all are called to salvation. Also because it is not written in any page of the Holy Gospels that poor equals good and that rich equals bad. There are poor people endowed with wickedness and appalling wickedness, as there are rich people who live with great respect for their neighbor, especially for the less well-off. And often only after the death of several of them did it become known how much charity they did and how many families they helped in total hiding. Just as there are poor people capable of depriving themselves of what is necessary to give glory to God, think of the evangelical account of the poor widow who throws the only two coins she possessed into the treasury of the temple [cf.. Mt 12, 41-44]. This is why I have always prayed and will continue to pray, not for an ideological «poor Church for the poor», but for a Church of men and women rich in faith, leaving the supreme to others ideology of the poor, which has never constituted a truth, much less a dogma of the holy Catholic faith. Assuming, however, that the first not to have been born of two poor people, not to have lived poorly, not to have eaten poorly, not to have dressed like a poor man, finally not even being buried as a pauper, it was really Our Lord Jesus Christ. And whoever tells you the opposite speaks to you of a completely different Christ from the one described in the Holy Gospels, therefore he announces to you a false historical Christ, a Christ who never existed and could not even exist. Therefore, who out of ignorance due to the total lack of knowledge of the Holy Gospels, (c)hi out of crass ignorance, who for vulgar anti-clericalism, who for ideology or clerical pleasure speaks of a poor Jesus reduced to a penniless flower child, announces a false Christ who never existed and does not correspond to the historical chronicles narrated and transmitted by the Evangelists.

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Christ is away, Truth and the Life [See. GV 14, 6], it is in its absoluteness and totality. Christ cannot be reduced to a pretext to legitimize our way and our questionable truths, finally leading the flock entrusted to us to shepherd by the Divine Shepherd towards a different path from the one given and offered by the Supreme Giver of life. For in that case the outcry will hang over us:

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"Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the flock of my pasture". Therefore says the Lord, God of Israel, against the shepherds who are to shepherd my people: "You have scattered my flock, and you are driven them away and have not you worried; behold, I will deal with you and with the wickedness of your doings. Oracle of the Lord. I myself will gather the rest of my sheep from all the regions where I let them drive and bring them back to their pastures; they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will appoint shepherds over them who will graze them, so they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed; of them did not even miss a » [Gives 23, 1-4].

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And upon us that the sheep we have scattered them, because they are committed to imposing the ideologies of our "I" rather than the truths of God, condemnation will hang over the "slacker servant"., then we will be “thrown out into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" [Mt 25, 30].

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Both to evangelize and to help the poor the Church needs the rich, many of whom have often been generous to the same extent that they have traveled far and wide through all the worst deadly sins. Without the money of the rich the Church could never have helped the poor. This is why the Church has accumulated goods, trying over time to increase them and put them to good use by making them pay. With all due respect to what we could define as the so-called "property benefactors" who thunder: "The Church must sell its goods and give them to the poor". That would be a nice idea. But, traveling one day to southeastern Sicily and talking to a wise farmer who raised cows - and who incidentally earned in a week what a high-ranking bank official earned in a month -, I understood from his sharp words that doing such a thing would be quite harmful, especially for the poor. In fact, if we take a cow and slaughter it - said the wise farmer -, giving roasted meat to the poor to eat for a week, when then the poor come to ask for milk, we will have to answer that there is no milk because they ate the cow. But, butchering it and offering it as food, we would have made a gesture of extraordinary "generosity" and "absolute donation". One of those gestures that people like so much hippies of the lefts radical chic. So we could send the poor to knock on the doors of their super penthouses in Parioli, or those of their villas in Capalbio, where you can even find them if you want 24.000 euros inside the dog's kennel, as happened to Senator Monica Cirinnà. Promptly defended by La Repubblica-L'Espresso Publishing Group [cf.. WHO] which complete with a filing decree from the competent court of Grosseto explains how much the interested party was a stranger. The same weekly Espresso who over the years has treated the Catholic Church in several reports as something between a mafia and a criminal association [cf.. WHO, WHO, WHO, etc…]. And when their investigations turned out to be bogus and the data false or distorted, no one has ever explained how unrelated we were to certain allegations, because we are not members of the left radical chic and why aren't we called Monica Cirinnà. That's why the doghouses of the Church for Espresso they always stink a priori, even when they smell of lavender and orange blossom and don't contain money of mysterious origin left in the dog's custody.

the Island of Patmos, 15 November

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THE PROBLEM IS NOT THE SHIT OF PRIESTS BUT THE LACK OF SUPERVISION OF BISHOPS WHO SEEM TO WANT THE HONORES OF THE EPISCOPATE BUT NOT THE EXPENSES

Not a day goes by without some priest leaping into the limelight for feats ranging from Eucharistic sacrilege to the grotesque. All facts before which, take it out on the priest or on priests in general, that would be the easiest, forgetting that we priests are only the tip of theiceberg and that the fault lies entirely with our bishops.

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Many bishops they are burdened with pastoral duties: meetings with the elders of the city, with politicians who with one hand offer funding for Catholic schools and the activities of the Diocese and with the other ten hands shut the mouth of the local Church on all the most sensitive issues that it would be his concern to deal with and bring to light. Their presence as religious authorities at the various official holidays is mandatory, at ribbon cutting and inauguration. Recently we even witnessed the case of a bishop who participated in the ribbon cutting on the occasion of the opening of the new headquarters of a Masonic Lodge [see articles WHO, WHO]. All in an incessant succession of «Excellence … Excellence … Excellence!». Title pronounced obsequiously by people so deeply rooted in the Catholic culture as to be convinced that the stoups of churches are bidet formerly made available by the charity of the Church to poor people who did not have running water at home, after which they remained there only because they are part of historical and artistic assets. And how well you understand, faced with this kind of mass of pastoral commitments, which to define burdensome is a small thing, the Blessed Apostle Paul, with all its tortuous journeys, including a shipwreck with a fortuitous landing in Malta, to then leave for Syracuse to reach Reggio and from there resume the journey to arrive months and months later in Rome, in comparison they are very little, rather: I'm really nothing [history in Acts of the Apostles: 27,1-28,16]. Or maybe you want to compare that joyful character of the Apostle of the Gentiles obsessed with the physical line, then from diets, that for this reason he didn't even eat every day, with our poor bishops forced to food gourmet prepared by the best chef on the occasion of official dinners together with the prefect, quaestor, district politicians and so on to follow? Those yes, which are penance. And let's not talk about their residences, inside which devoted nuns look after them, they serve them, li lavano e li stirano … because this is the charisma and vocation of certain religious: be waitresses. The work of some of our Bishops in what has been defined as a "field hospital Church" is certainly much more onerous than it was for the trench doctors of the First World War to treat wounded and dying soldiers. Then, to keep up with the times, among a triumph of iron pectoral crosses and pastoral staffs now forged by carpenters with pieces of raw wood, every time they take the chair they give their sermon on the poor and migrants, without it being of much interest to him that the world is always poorer in Christ and more and more faithful are emigrating outside the Catholic Church.

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Also for these reasons many of our Bishops receive their priests after a long wait. Sometimes after demanding that a septuagenarian priest answer the questioning of a peevish lay secretary, if anything, even divorced and living with his partner, who peremptorily asks why the priest intended to bother His Most Reverend Excellency, so that he himself could evaluate whether to tell him to contact the Vicar General or the Episcopal Vicar. Perhaps this was what some destroyers of the ecclesial structure meant with their cry: «Make way for the laity in the Church?». If then the Bishop, having heard the invaluable favorable opinion of the lay secretary, grants the grace to receive a priest who dares to have big problems to solve and for which he conscientiously believes he should hear from the Pastor of the local Church who has given him the mandate to exercise the sacred ministry and in communion with whom he exercises the priesthood, here is that after glaring at him he often begins: "I felt, I don't want problems!». To one of these Bishops, to which I went to present a situation with a high risk of public scandal explosion, I replied to this joke: "Think about, instead I became a priest aware that I would have had a life of great problems, while she, who has received the fullness of the apostolic priesthood, he became bishop precisely in order not to have problems, accepting honors but rejecting all the great and onerous burdens of the episcopate. But look how strange life is!».

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This is indeed the point: most of the new generation Bishops, ready to tear their clothes faster than Kaifa in front of an unknown illegal immigrant who drowned in the sea before reaching Lampedusa, they don't want pain in the ass, especially by their priests. And shortly after they declare to you in a theologically pleasant way to say the least that «the poor are the flesh of Christ». Indeed, as known, during the last supper Christ took a poor man and showed him to the Apostles telling them «this is my body, this is my blood", all after having washed the feet of the prisoners and whores of Jerusalem.

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In many of our cathedrals the Mass of the Lord's Supper seems to have become the catwalk of whores. It is even rumored that an agency specially set up by the Nigerian Mafia provides the hire of whores to the Bishops for a fee, when on Maundy Thursday they have to put on their play: wash and kiss the feet of the whores. All with the applause of the local sections of the PD and the whole gotha the Left radical chic which magnifies the new «Church outgoing», so good and efficient at self-destructing itself, that it is no longer even necessary to oppose and strike it, we do everything by ourselves. And while this is happening, in the geriatric wards lay abandoned holy priests over eighty years old, with a life entirely given to the Church and to the People of God, to whom His Most Reverend Excellency takes care not to hand over the parrot to piss or wash the shit off, as I have done several times and similarly other brothers of mine, variously singled out by certain new generation bishops as "problematic priests", simply because they are faithful to the priesthood, to the doctrine and perennial magisterium of the Church. That's why we don't fear getting our hands dirty with piss and shit. Which the Bishop understandably cannot do, because he is too busy rinsing and kissing the feet of Nigerian whores on the day when the institution of the ministerial priesthood and the Holy Eucharist is solemnly commemorated, a solemnity now reduced for years to the theater of whores and prisoners, better if muslim. Or maybe he didn't choose Our Lord Jesus Christ, as Apostles consecrated priests of the New Covenant, a bunch of convicts and sluts?

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As you can see from the chronicles not a day goes by without some priest leaping into the limelight for feats ranging from Eucharistic sacrilege to the grotesque [I refer to the articles by Father Ivano Liguori: WHO]. All facts before which, take it out on the priest or on priests in general, that would be the easiest, forgetting that we priests are only the tip of theiceberg and that the fault lies entirely with our Bishops and with that visible Church which in the name of a badly understood "spirit of the Council" - which completely distorted and distorted the last Council celebrated by the Fathers of the Church - has favored and even stimulated the laicization and the worldliness of the clergy. I've been repeating and writing about it for years: a crisis of doctrine arose within the Church which generated a great crisis of faith which finally gave rise to a serious moral crisis widespread among the clergy.

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To say that priests should always wear a cassock by strict obligation and live their interior and exterior priestly life with great decorum and dignity, unfortunately it is a losing battle, totally. We have witnessed some scenes that to say indecorous is a small thing, think of the Paduan presbyter Marco Pozza who interviewed the Supreme Pontiff several times sitting in front of him with his legs crossed dressed in jeans, sneakers and cheeky open shirt, in a triumph of slovenliness like never before [cf.. video WHO, WHO, WHO]. But it gets worse, because he was the first to mock the cassock by rashly combining it with clericalism, to worldliness and rigidity, it was the Supreme Pontiff himself [cf.. WHO, WHO, WHO], unaware that the clericals of the worst kind are by no means the few priests who continue to wear the cassock as a clear sign of their inner and outer life, but some of his favorites politically correct from whom you get interviewed in jeans, sneakers and legs crossed. Of course, court ruffians can never be missing, for example the Archbishop of Catania who in violation of all ecclesiastical norms forbids his priests to wear the cassock outside churches, relegating it to liturgical dress [cf.. WHO], the whole, it goes without saying, to avoid unspecified forms of "rigidity".

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Soon said: from the priest in civilian clothes who interviews the Supreme Pontiff to the priest with the red loincloth, o al tattooed priest doing bodybuilding and who posts photos of his pumped-up physique from the gym and anabolic steroids social media, the step is very short. Therefore, take it out on the Brescian presbyter Giuseppe Fusari, bodybuilder priest who publishes his own half-naked photo, more than a simple thing would almost be a cowardly thing, at least for us aware that "fish stinks starting from the head". It is therefore useless to blame the tip of the fish's tail, than the reckoning, more than guilty, he is only the victim of an ill-formed and totally deformed priesthood, all with the blessing of the new generation Bishops.

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For little it may be worth, know that my experience makes my discomfort and pain particularly strong. Unease and pain that I share with many of my other confreres who, like me, had the grace from God to know as children, adolescents and young people of authentic holy priests, who then became our models of priestly life. We have met truly holy bishops, ready at any moment of their day to bend over backwards for their priests, none of whom died forgotten in the depths of a hospital without receiving a visit from the Bishop several times, who himself provided to comfort them with the Sacraments. I remember a Bishop who canceled two very important appointments that had been scheduled for months for that day: the sacred ordinations of four priests that should have been held in the morning and his participation in an important public event of a local-historical nature in the afternoon. One of his priests was dying in hospital, where the Bishop ran, canceling sacred ordinations an hour earlier with this lapidary phrase: «The four who are to become priests can also wait a few days, they have before them a whole priestly life. My task and duty is to assist a dying priest of mine, who gave his entire existence to the Church and to the service of the People of God". And we are not few who have come to the priesthood through these models of Bishops and Priests who remain fixed in our memories, but not as figures of a past time that was, but as holy models of what a bishop and presbyter ought to be, always and at all times.

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We have known Bishops who did not speak at all in an obsessive-compulsive way about the poor and migrants and who, when they appeared in public, manifested in their outward form all the ineffable dignity of the episcopate, especially when they celebrated Holy Mass. Only when they died did we later discover that they hadn't even left any money for their funeral expenses, after giving everything they had to poor families who found it difficult to clothe their children. None of them would ever have dreamed of transforming their cathedral churches into taverns and being filmed by photographers and cameraman as they served meals to the poor, as if the Church - in particular the Italian one - did not have an abundance of buildings to set up lunches, avoiding desecrating churches.

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Our decline is irreversible because we have crossed the threshold of no return for years now [cf.. my article WHO]. We must therefore witness the painful images of a Supreme Pontiff who is interviewed by a pretino-trends in indecorous attire and in perfectly rude poses, we have to put up with the antics of our Bishops who hire whores to rinse and kiss their feet Mass of the Lord's Supper reduced to a painful little theater of the grotesque, we must feel alone, strangers and even unwelcome in our Holy House increasingly similar to the hall of the Great Sanhedrin and the Praetorium of Pilate, aware that the passion of Gethsemane has begun for the Church. And after the crucifixion, death and burial, the mystagogical experience will conclude with the resurrection. At that point we will begin to rebuild with enormous effort on the ashes of the great destruction. And to do so we will be four cats, but animated by true faith, true hope and true charity.

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the Island of Patmos, 29 October 2022

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THE LATEST BOOK BY ARIEL S. LEVI of GUALDO – TO ACCESS THE BOOKSHOP CLICK ON THE COVER

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Dear Readers,
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WHEN THE PRIEST WANTS TO PROMOTE THE RIGHTS OF LAICISM, BISHOPS HAVE THE DUTY TO DEMAND A PRIEST WHO PROMOTES THE CHURCH

For some priests today, living in the Church is a bit like receiving citizenship income, allows you to live on a salary without giving absolutely anything. Removing the fairness from these subjects would be the first necessary action, together with the ban on holding representative ecclesial positions in the name of a Church with which they do not feel in communion.

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The audio version will be available on Monday

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After the celebration of the Holy Mass on the mat [you see who, who, who, who] and the one in cycling gear [you see who, who, who, who] the kermesse of the clerically correct has added a new piece towards the completion of the great mosaic of Church outgoing, poor for the poor, in which the only true poverty perceived by all is that in doctrinal matters which ends up conditioning pastoral practice.

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So in beautiful Liguria, on the border with the Cinque Terre, in Bonassola the priest Giulio Mignani of the diocese of La Spezia-Sarzana-Brugnato earned the honor of ambassador for the rights of secularism, so much so that he had none other than the fierce Marco Cappato as his attendant [you see who, who, who, who]. I have to say we missed it, for the "joy" of the priest and the promoter of euthanasia, a safe one performance of our Father Ariel S. Levi di Gualdo, promptly invited to debate with them at the program Straight and Reverse airing Thursday 13 October on the Internet 4. However, our brother did not intend to miss the funeral of one of his great teachers, il Gesuita Peter Gumpel, distinguished theologian and historian of dogma [see who], celebrated in Rome on Friday morning at 10 at the chapel of the general curia of the Society of Jesus. This made it impossible for him to go to the studios in Cologno Monzese. Whether it was good or bad is unknown, perhaps we would have witnessed who knows what fireworks.

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Both clear, all this hubbub is not the result of a summer coup but is the reasoned and meticulous work of several years of parish ministry in which this pro-euthanasia priest presented himself as the exponent of a pro-German theological thought that outlines him as a breakthrough priest, as indeed he did, the priest Ettore Cannavera is doing and will continue to do so in Sardinia [you see who].

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From Crotone to Mazara del Vallo passing through Bonassola, including islands, here is the new sacred way created in which the new inclusive presbyters, resilient and champions of love proudly show off their iridescent vestments until they tread the fence of the Temple of Rights in which they can offer the first fruits of their zeal and reiterate that the only true existing dogma is the Resistance.

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Yup, resistance and vigilance, as we believe the Italian Episcopal Conference is already doing after the last political elections [you see who, who]. In front of a Church deemed homophobic and allergic to civil policies on abortion and the end of life, there is a need to resist: resist before the Truth, resist common sense, resist the obvious, resist even in the face of the blameless innocence that is embodied in the features of a fetus, of a disabled or terminally ill person, resist above all before Jesus Christ who no longer informs the life of numerous priests, which wink at civil militancy. Worker priests were once fashionable, today those activists and resisters!

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As we know, the best resistance it is the one that is consumed to enter, among fifth columns who operate within the archbishop's curiae, in the parish halls, where priests can freely do theirs coming out of thought and manifest the true intentions that are combined with the very respectable a-theological and a-Catholic reasoning that is passed off as the architecture on which an alternative spirituality is built (not “backwards” some would say), as the pro-euthanasia priest is quick to clarify to the Iene interviewer [see video who by the minute 4,30].

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If it is true that the mouth speaks of the fullness of the heart [Mt 12,34], the mouth of this priest and many others like him has spoken abundantly in recent years, consciously and proudly placing himself outside the teaching of the Church. But this time, in the well-oiled machine of the fight for civil rights, something went wrong, a bishop wanted to have his say and got in the way as an evangelical stumbling block so that it was known to everyone that the militancy of that priest of his was and is not only wrong, but it had to get to the end of the line.

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I am absolutely convinced that the news of the canonical provision of the suspension from the gods arrived without too many surprises: certainly not for the priest who had already been thinking about leaving the Church for some time [you see who] but also for the La Spezia diocese accustomed to the priest's constant declarations of rights. For his part, the bishop S. AND. Mons. Luigi Ernesto Palletti he behaved like a great gentleman, he did nothing more than an authentic successor of the apostles should do, something that today defines him as a white fly in the Italian episcopal panorama. Not only did he truly prove himself to be a patient father in the face of the whims of this prodigal son - a disruptive priest who had quite broken the orthodox presbyteral gonads of others - but he also knew how to promote paths of recovery and reconciliation with this priest of his who was more intent on defending civil rights than on loving the Church of Christ of which he was appointed minister.

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I want to remind all our readers that every candidate for the priesthood, before ordination as a deacon and before ordination as a priest he pronounces a very clear and binding oath, which he then reiterates when he takes on official roles within the Church. Below I report the texts which you need to refer to:

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I N.N. I believe and profess with firm faith all the individual truths that are contained in the symbol of faith, that is: I believe in one God, Almighty Father, creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, only begotten Son of God, He born of the Father before all ages: God from God, light from light, True God from true God, generated, not created, of the same substance as the Father; through him all things were created. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the work of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried. On the third day he was resurrected, according to the Scriptures, he ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of the Father. It will come again, in glory, to judge the living and the dead, and his reign will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, who is Lord and gives life and proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified, and spoke through the prophets. I believe the Church, a Catholic and apostolic saint. I profess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. I await the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen. I also believe with firm faith everything that is contained in the written or transmitted Word of God and that the Church, both with solemn judgment and with ordinary and universal magisterium, proposes to believe as divinely revealed. I firmly accept and retain all the individual truths regarding the doctrine concerning faith or customs definitively proposed by the Church. I also adhere with religious obedience of will and intellect to the teachings that the Roman Pontiff or the College of Bishops propose when they exercise their authentic Magisterium, although they do not intend to proclaim them with a definitive act.

I N.N. in assuming the office of […] I promise to always maintain communion with the Catholic Church, both in my words and in my way of acting. I will fulfill with great diligence and fidelity the duties to which I am bound towards the Church, both universal and particular, in which, according to the rules of law, I was called to exercise my service. In exercising the office, which was entrusted to me on behalf of the Church, I will preserve intact and faithfully transmit and illustrate the deposit of faith, thus rejecting any doctrine contrary to it. I will follow and support the discipline common to the whole Church and will ensure the observance of all ecclesiastical laws, in particular those contained in the Code of Canon Law. I will observe with Christian obedience what the sacred Pastors declare as authentic doctors and masters of the faith or establish as heads of the Church, and I will faithfully lend aid to the diocesan Bishops, because the apostolic action, to be exercised in the name and by mandate of the Church, be carried out in communion with the Church itself.

So help me God and these holy Gospels I touch with my hands.

I will uphold the discipline common to the whole Church and promote the observance of all ecclesiastical laws, in particular those contained in the Code of Canon Law. I will observe with Christian obedience what the sacred Pastors declare as authentic doctors and masters of the faith or establish as heads of the Church, and in union with the diocesan bishops, without prejudice to the nature and purpose of my Institute, I will willingly lend my work for apostolic action, to be exercised in the name and by mandate of the Church, be carried out in communion with the Church itself.

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The La Spezia priest Giulio Mignani he certainly pronounced this demanding oath in front of his bishop and the officials of the Curia, although he actually claimed quite the opposite. It would therefore be time to reach a reckoning, not within the battle for the defense of civil rights, but in the heart and life of this brother priest. I'll explain: in Italy no one forbids anyone from pursuing a career as an activist in any field (as long as the law is respected), for this reason Giulio Mignani would do well in the future to discern what he intends to do. He has the full right to exercise parrhesia and tell his bishop that he is renouncing his priesthood to pursue the noble cause of being a pro-abortion activist., pro-euthanasia, pro-rainbow unions, thus leaving his single and respectable person to speak, not, however, that of the Church which as a priest he represents and of which he wants to be the spokesperson.

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I repeat: this is within his rights, as is the full right of the Church, of bishops and the faithful to have priests who know how to announce Christ, bear witness to the Gospel of life and defend the deposit of faith from the predatory wolves that insinuate error, even if weak and sinners. No one has ever demanded a certificate of impeccability from priests, we are the first to experience the contradiction, but a proportionate clarification of one's intentions freely assumed before the Church and the holy people of God at the moment of sacred ordination is necessary.

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I'll be mischievous but for some priests today, living in the Church is a bit like receiving a citizen's income, allows you to live on a salary without giving absolutely anything. Removing the fairness from these subjects would be the first necessary action, together with the ban on holding representative ecclesial positions in the name of a Church with which they do not feel in communion. After that we wait to see if the various associations promoting civil rights, those who do not skimp on publicizing and inciting this kind of priests, they would be able to take on their complete maintenance, perhaps as leafleteers in schools in favor of the RU486 pill, in some gazebo in the square to tell us how merciful and good euthanasia is or perhaps how barman at the Muccassassina in Rome. Because it must be clear that whoever preaches the Gospel, he will be supported in his needs by the Gospel. Who instead preaches civil rights, by civil rights must be equally supported, given that it is no longer possible to invoke error or mental confusion when one has come to make a clear and public profession of faith as an activist.

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I hope I'm wrong but from now to a few months we could still hear about this brother, perhaps because it was reduced to the lay state, at his request or as a canonical consequence for failure to repent. In front of a Church perceived as obscurantist and incapable of recognizing true love, he will be the new martyr of rights and inclusion. Carried in triumph among the various television salons of democratic thought, he will proclaim the beauty of being a priest: priest without any more mediation with the divine, priest mortified in his being a prophet against the current, priest emptied of that fortress of martyrs who know how to face the cross especially when they feel helpless.

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I conclude by expressing all my regret for those faithful who today cry scandal due to the suspension peep by Giulio Mignani, because they don't realize that this brother is not their property to use, just as it is terribly unfair to perceive him as a battering ram to force the door of the Church. I'm also sorry for all the homosexual brothers, for all women who have had abortions and for those who have wanted to end their lives: they missed a good opportunity to meet a Cyrenean capable of supporting their suffering without judgement, so much so that we were relieved for a stretch of the road, set off towards the only true liberation that arrives on the morning of Easter Sunday and which has the Risen Christ as its only true protagonist, not a man – even if animated by the best intentions – who plays at den free everyone.

Laconi, 15 October 2022

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AS WE HAVE ADVANCED: THE BISHOP OF TERNI WHO PARTICIPATES IN THE INAUGURATION OF THE MASONIC LODGES "HAS BEEN AGREED". FATHER ARIEL WILL ATTEND THE OPENING OF THE NEXT ONE EROTIC FESTIVAL. AND THAT NO ONE DARES MISUNDERSTANDING IT

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"No one tears a piece from a new cloak to attack an old one; otherwise he will rend the new, and the patch from the new will not match the old " [LC 5, 36].

- Church news -

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I had already anticipated in my article yesterday [see WHO], that the press release would arrive on time to clarify that "... the Bishop was misunderstood".

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And as anticipated, this happened: the Bishop of Terni filmed holding the ribbon during the cut for the inauguration of the new Masonic Lodge was just misunderstood. He was not an imprudent man who was poised between the imprudent and the idiot, but it was misunderstood, as the diocese's official communiqué says [see WHO].

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I take this opportunity to inform the President of the Italian Episcopal Conference and the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops who in the next edition of Erotic Festival they will be able to see me between two pornstars plus with breasts in the wind intent on holding the ribbon for the inaugural cut, exactly as the Bishop of Terni did, misunderstood and misunderstood. And it is clear: that no one dares to misunderstand me. Also because a priest between two is much better and far less harmful pornstars than a blatantly imprudent bishop holding the inaugural ribbon to the Masons, only to declare himself misunderstood and misunderstood.

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the Island of Patmos, 3 October 2022

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Remake of the historic film The Misunderstood, with the extraordinary participation of the Bishop of Terni

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THE LATEST BOOK BY ARIEL S. LEVI of GUALDO – TO ACCESS THE BOOKSHOP CLICK ON THE COVER

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Dear Readers,
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