FROM DOCTRINAL DISORIENTATION OF THE CHURCH TO THE SIN OF PRIESTS AND THE RECYCLING OF THE LAITY. PROSPECT OF AN UNTRANSIGENT CULTURE WHILE SENTENCING SANCTIFIES AND SANCTIFYING SENTENCES

The “tolerant” modern, instead, he does not sacrifice himself for his ideas as the idealist would, on the contrary, one does not scruple to sacrifice those who have ideas contrary to his, just as a dictator would do towards his opponents. How many martyrs of tolerance and rights exist today? But perhaps the most numerous martyrs are those who are held up as unwitting sowers of hatred precisely because they diverge, carriers of a hatred that cannot be seen because it is present only in the gaze of the tolerant on duty who has an interest in using hatred as an ideological tool to control the masses.

- The Theological Pages -

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Author
Ivano Liguori, Ofm. Capp.

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I. A QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE

I guess I don't reveal secrets untrustworthy if I say that keeping Christian Christians, nowadays, it is not a simple undertaking at all. It is not so much a question of preserving only an apparent traditional identity - at least as far as the European continent is concerned - but of showing that God still has a certain right of citizenship in the life of men and that Christ is recognized as the founding and definitive event of revelation divina.

the collapse of the vault of the basilica of San Francesco in Assisi in 1997 [click on image to open the video]

According to a survey the Pew Research Center [cf. WHO] conducted in 2017 on a sample of 1.804 respondents, 80% of Italians declare themselves Christian, the worrying fact concerns the frequency, in fact the 23% participates in religious services at least once a week, the 20% once a month and on 34% has a much less assiduous practice. According to other data relating to an Ipsos research of 2017, always in Italy, his 60.000 respondents, Catholics are decreasing. It goes from 85.4% of 2007 al 74,4% the 2017. A more recent study from the 2018 dell 'European Values Study 84.4% of Italians generally say they believe in God without further useful specifications.

Data in hand we are undergoing a drastic decrease in the Christian faith but what a survey can never say concerns the theological motivation which represents the real reason for this decrease. The theological motivation that becomes a scandalous stone on which the pitiless statistics are broken lies in the fact that one is no longer in possession of the specificity of Christianity, so that we are often lost, at the mercy of a form of Alzheimer's that makes us unable to recognize the faith and to recognize ourselves as believers ready to give reason, as St. Peter expresses in his first epistle [cf.. 1PT 3,15-16].

I give an example to be clearer. No Jew, of yesterday as of today, one would never dream of disavowing the covenant between God and Abraham and above all the founding event that unified the chosen people during the liberation Easter in Egypt. No Jew, sane, would doubt that God is the Goel liberator and redeemer of the people and who in Moses made possible salvation against the dominion of the pharaoh of Egypt. Although this faith has been severely tested in the face of the terrible events of Auschwitz, the faith of our brothers in Abraham has remained substantially unchanged for centuries and becomes a reason for ethnic and religious identity to be celebrated with pride in every family.

For us Christians, instead, having a certain faith is not a matter of pride but of embarrassment, we are often the first to consider ourselves uncompromising and fanatic when we try to rise above mediocrity. Then, to be more digestible in the eyes of the beholder, rather we prefer to turn pink and show off a universal love that we can beautifully justify through Matthew's eschatological discourse 24,31-46 which - incidentally - according to correct exegesis, it should never be divorced from the subsequent passages — narrated by the Holy Evangelist Matthew, first the parable of the Ten Virgins [cf.. Mt 25,1-13] and then that of Talents [cf.. Mt 25,14-29] — with the risk of making the sacred text say what it really doesn't intend to say.

As evidence of this, I bring an example in support of my words. How many times have we heard of preaching about love from the pulpits? How many times has love been used as a slogan and master key to justify everything even the unjustifiable and the unreasonable? How many times in the name of love have been made completely wicked choices, expression of the most emotional sentimentality and the most seductive passion? The Christian term of charity refers to God, according to the teaching of the apostle John: "Dear, let's love each other, because love is from God: anyone who loves was born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love has not known God, because God is love " [cf.. 1GV 4,7-8]. Sad is the awareness in verifying that this "love" so strongly publicized today is deprived of the presence of God Trinity and used as an alibi through which sin is normalized until it runs out in an exclusively philanthropic and utilitarian attitude. This attitude of impoverishing charity in fact, it is not a modern vice from the person of God, strong of that wisdom saying Nothing new under the sun [nothing new under the sun] the history of Christianity has already known this degeneration of the concept of love since its first centuries.

In 361 D.C.. the emperor Julian the Apostate, he strenuously opposes Christianity by implementing a policy of paganization of the people and a return to Neoplatonic thought. Christianity will retain only the charitable activity and the attention to the neighbor that tries to graft within the pagan anti-Church he designed. History tells us that the attempt was unworkable, decadent paganism, as well as modern atheism assumed by elite religiosity, he could not compete with the authentic love of God which in Christ consists of the characteristic of heroism until the sacrifice of life and in the Holy Spirit of the characteristic of missionaryness which is the primary cause of every virtuous action. The love, to be authentically Christian, it doesn't just have to do good, but it must lead to total self-giving, even with those people and in those unloving situations, by virtue of the fact that if the justice of the disciple does not exceed that of the world, there is no more that is an indication of perfection and a guarantee of the presence of the Spirit of the Father, as the Holy Evangelist Matthew indicates [cf.. Mt 5,20]. Christian love is that theological virtue which recognizes itself in God and leads to him, announces salvation to the soul, it converts from sin and opens the doors of paradise.

After this necessary digression on the relationship between God and love, let us return to the search for the questions of meaning that challenge our faith. Who is Jesus? What did he come to do in the world? These are the basic questions yet, in most cases, questions remain unanswered for many young people attending the catechism and for many young Christians. The situation does not change much if we were to submit this question to adults, to the parents of these kids, or to their grandparents who, tragic to say, they are moving towards a return to religious illiteracy which leads to a real practical atheism.

By now to know who Jesus Christ is we resign ourselves to questioning the various trendy secularists who are on social and on television with a subdued air they dictate the new Christology on page with the aggravating circumstance that the Church, the official one, the one assigned to the control of right doctrine, which should confirm the brothers in faith, is silent. And even when he speaks, trying to put together a botched and pale denial, he does so with little conviction so as to make one suspect that certain heretical affirmations have gained a certain sympathy even within the sacred palaces.

We can say, at this point, that dogma has gone into crisis? Absolutely not. Who has gone into crisis is a certain It'sestablishment ecclesiastical made up of pastors and theologians who have lost - yes - the compass of faith and who increasingly resort to the category of "mystery" trying to hide behind a screen, since they can no longer give reason for the faith and hope that is in them, everything is contained in the first and second epistles of St. Peter and in the Gospel of St. John [cf.. 1PT 3,15; 2PT 1,16-19; 1 Gv1, 1-4]. In this way, he lost the two theological virtues of faith and hope, what remains, the love, takes on the connotations of modernity and the search for consent at any cost. Have you ever noticed that the modernization of the person of Christ, of the church, of the Magisterium, of morality, of the formation of the clergy and its identity has always been carried out by the champions of love and in the name of love? We have arrived at the paradoxical, in which the doctrinal corruption of the Church is under the banner of love! That Love that, it is necessary to reiterate, he became flesh and gave his life for the sinful man, in short, insult to injury. At the height of this doctrinal confusion there is also the sacrilegious act of wanting to confuse or associate God with sin. But if we intend to remain faithful to Christ and the Catholic Church, as did St. Thomas Becket with his martyrdom, we have to resist and the Christian resistance is not realized in the singing of "Bella Ciao", but of 'let Pasquale ' which reminds us that Christ is God, Lord and Sovereign, conqueror of sin.

Are, ultimately, to be Christian it means entering into the intimate life of Jesus Christ, and let him reign as the undisputed ruler of my existence - truth reiterated every year on the solemnity of Christ the King at the end of the liturgical year - perhaps it is good to recognize that something has gone wrong or we are faced with a great misunderstanding. Faith is above all an adherence of man to God and at the same time and in an inseparable way, it is the free assent to all the truth that God has revealed and which finds fullness in Jesus Christ, definitive and complete revelation of the saving mystery of God [cf.. Lord Jesus].

Therefore, we candidly recognize that it is us priests, as well as the so-called committed Christians - those who, for example, militate in ecclesial movements, they recognize themselves as activists within the country's social and political life, who help in the parish, who practice a certain charity — at best we are pursuing a secondary Christianity, border or periphery which in the eyes of the most mischievous is revealed as a facade Christianity.

With this term we identify a certain extremely varied and complex Christian culture that neglects the ultimate and supernatural end of the faith which consists of the salvation of the soul, ignores the spiritual struggle against sin and openness to divine grace together with the need to remain within a divine Catholic faith observed within a community of faith that recognizes itself within the Church of Rome.

Tale secondary Christianity largely dissipates the figure of the priest by reinventing him as manager, a diligent museum curator and regularly paid social worker with variable working hours. The same dissipation is found among the laity, in those who no longer identify themselves in the category of the faithful (then faithful to who and what? mAh!) and for this reason they choose to hybridize into Christianity models that transform all of them into mythological figures that are difficult to reconcile within a journey of faith and a life that in baptism was handed over to God.

There is no doubt that there is an urgent need to reiterate a question of principle: the essence of Christianity lies within that little word that Jesus pronounces several times in the Gospel of John [cf.. GV 8,24; 8,28; 8,58; 13,19; 18,5] to designate himself: is that’I am — in greco ἐγὼ εἰμι, I took it —, which is a guarantee of divine identity [cf.. Is 3,14-15] and of salvation for every creature.

It is the totalizing choice of that divine self that puts in crisis and that, as can be seen from the reading of Jacob Neusner in his book "A rabbi speaks with Jesus", constitutes the great difference between Eternal Israel and New Israel made up of the people of the baptized redeemed by the Passion of Christ and his Resurrection.

Mine I identity he must be able to recognize the mystery of God, quell’I am who has the first place [cf.. LC 14,25-33] and that throws me to the ground [cf.. At 22,8] and it terrifies whenever I presume to own it and manage it as I please [cf.. GV 18,6], the whole, it is found enclosed in the Gospels of San Luca and San Giovanni.

Who is Jesus? Jesus is God, as various passages of the holy scriptures indicate to us, in particular the Holy Evangelist Luke, to follow with the Gospel of St. John and the Pauline correspondence [cf.. LC 22,70; GV 1,1.14; GV 5,18; GV 8, 58; Fil 2,6; With the 2, 9; With the 1,15; EB 1,3], is the Lord [cf.. RM 10,9; GV 20, 28; LC 23,39-43; Fil 2,11], he is the authentic revealer of the Father [cf.. GV 10, 30; GV 5,22-23; GV 14,8-11], and for these reasons no one can ignore these revealed truths without consuming a betrayal, make a denial, without feeling scandalized or starting a holy war; all always with reference to the Gospel of St. John. This Man-God came to save the world from sins [cf.. Mt 1,21], so that man has a beautiful life and not one good life [cf.. GV 10,10] and in living seriously be definitively deprived of the cancer of sin [cf.. EB 2,14-15] and made righteous in His blood [cf.. RM 5,9; 8,33]. There are no alternatives, the divine jealousy of the Old Testament [cf.. Dt 5,6-10] is combined with the totalizing choice of Christ and his person is the only possible communion choice that produces fruits of new life [cf.. Mt 12,30; LC 5,38].

Jesus Christ is so bulky that it is not possible to silence him, for two thousand years his name has resonated on earth and his faithfulness has proved to be as stable as heaven [cf.. Shall 89,3]. Everything still speaks of him: from the calendar to the holidays, from civil traditions to ethics, from art to music; the story, geography, the way of computing time and even the vast cosmos and nature testify that He is God and that he is Lord. Even before those who intend to perniciously deny it, refuse it, Until it disappears completely, involuntary merit must be admitted - just as it was for demons [cf.. MC 5,6; LC 4,34; At 19,15] - of an acknowledgment kerygmatic, in which his majesty and power are not in the least questioned.

And while Christ proclaims and affirms himself, his majesty is reiterated, his key role that he plays in human history, although the latter most often hides from his presence as Adam did [cf.. GN 3,9-10] or desire like Nietzsche to carry out a parricide that breaks the anguished dependence on the divine partner, promising greater freedoms.

.(II). FAITH CRISIS, DOCTRINAL CRISIS, MORAL CRISIS

.The question of principle that I wanted to address in the first paragraph of this article helps us to better understand the condition of chronic crisis that for fifty years now has affected how solid the Church is. It is a crisis on several fronts that affects the aspects of believing in the current historical contingency. From doctrine to pastoral care, from morality to spirituality, from daily witness to the way of interpreting martyrdom, everything rests on a shaky faith, where Christ is no longer God and his role is no longer that of Savior. Attention well, to affirm the existence of an unsteady faith is not the same as saying that there is no longer any faith in general or that those who believe do it in a malicious or interested way. Statistics show us that still about 80% of people declare themselves Christian, but the fact of declaring oneself is not yet sufficient reason that leads to believing. The blessed apostles Peter, Andrew and John have seen themselves reproached several times by Our Lord for their faith in him not yet sufficiently mature and open to grace. And all the others, although identified as the disciples of the Nazarene, they did not hesitate to abandon him at the moment of the Passion, disavowing with works what they openly proclaimed. In other words we can say that the registration of the name in the parish baptismal register does not make us believers and credible Christians. These considerations lead us to understand how a faith of this nature and a belief of this kind add nothing and do not detract from the existence of man. With the words of the Gospel of John we can say that faith essentially leads to a dwell there where Jesus is present [cf.. GV 1,38; 15,4-ss]. In dwelling in Him there is more that leads to a Christification of life than, although work of grace, however, it needs human assistance and the exercise of free will.

How not to recognize Karl Rahner and in the invention of the "anonymous Christians" the masterly cunning of an apparent modern religiosity which, in the face of an open proposal of faith, it has led many to believe that it is much better to keep as far as possible from all that is Christian (and maybe even Catholic) preferring to spend time more fruitfully instead of resorting to a God who no longer knows himself by name and who has preserved himself only as a formal presence. These people are more than "anonymous Christians" - anonymous to those considering that God always calls everyone by name [cf.. Is 43,1; 45,4] — they should be called “dogmatic atheists”, since not feeling the need to believe in the God of Jesus Christ, they already live within an atheist faith that feeds and feeds on its own dogmatists. Pay attention to it, nobody is more dogmatic and uncompromising than a convinced atheist, who strenuously affirms what for him shouldn't exist, and fight what he no longer believes in. Just as no one is more attached to the Christian traditions of the one who has abandoned religious practice for years and lives on distant memories and nostalgia. dogmatism, rigidity, nostalgia and sclerotic styles of faith are the waste foods of which the secondary Christianity voraciously feeds, but since they are indigestible, they are regurgitated as soon as any evangelical novelty approaches.

We must reiterate that the Christian faith short it is a pious illusion, if it does not consist of a well-established theology of salvation. Christ is not only the God to believe in but he is the Savior and Redeemer of man, the one for whom salvation enters the world and man frees himself from the slavery of sin [cf.. Mt 1,21; MC 2,7]. Faith without salvation is mutilated and in order to survive it is directed and identified towards other disciplines of human knowledge, like philosophy, psychology, the sociology, anthropology, Medicine, towards a new humanism with an atheistic imprint that manifests its own hybris presuming to save the individual's physicality - fight against poverty, to hunger, to diseases, to wars - and to preserve creation - parallelism, environmentalism, pseudo communist Franciscanism - reconstituting a primordial virginity now lost, all at the expense of an immortal divine soul that was created by God and who will return to God after death. Indeed if we want to say it all, this fake hybris who fought original sin in the past and still fights it today, it takes away from man the sense of sin by introducing external control places in which to search for the good scapegoat to justify any adversity and opposition. Unfortunately, man is created for God and without him his heart cannot find peace [cf. Augustine, The Confessions, 1,1.5], with no sense of sin and no need for redemption, what is left is the guilt that crushes and depresses the poor modern humanity. Many deresponsabilizzati, they are incapable of carrying out a true and sincere examination of conscience - even in view of a sacramental confession - which leads to the recognition of guilt and the search for redemption from the only one who is able to provide it.

Some prefer to download to the Devil the fault of all personal reversals, naively dismissing the question on the shoulders of the spirit of evil - which is here assumed as a place of external control - without remembering that the tempter [cf.. GN 3, ss] to consume the fall of man he needed his consent. In short, attenuating on attenuating, easy and unlikely for a humanity beyond the limit of disarray.

To divert attention from this sad truth which leads to a pessimism that defining Leopardi would sound like an understatement, oppositions are invented, mass distractions fighting each other. And as in the time of the ancient Romans, people competed in the Colosseum to keep the hungry people good, so today you compete between opposing factions to digress your minds: traditionalists versus progressives, the papists against the sedevacantists, the Lefebvrians against the modernists, the Guelphs against Ghibellines, right-wing Christians against left-wing Christians, secular priests against regular priests, in short, the list could still lengthen and continue indefinitely with the inclusion of ecclesial movements that compete to win the palm of the best if the question was not in itself sufficiently tragic.

In front of this panorama the hierarchical Church, that of shepherds with the smell of sheep, the priestly poor, lobbies speculating on migrants, integration and welcome what it does? The exercise of leadership more validated today by the clergy, it no longer rests on the authoritativeness of reasonable faith, which brings motivations based on the need to believe and why it is necessary to believe. The leadership of many of us priests - it is enough to listen to some homily or catechesis to realize this - is filled with democratic do-goodism and a style that I would define as "parliamentary" in which things are decided by election through the authority of the majority and if something endangers the dominant thought, a motion or interpellation is immediately ready to reverse the situation in one's favor.

Parliamentary political style is also that of our bishops who are ready to dissociate themselves from their priests, seen as inquisitive hitters, when they try to educate the faithful to the principles of doctrine and morals, even simply by citing the catechism. Next to the acts of dissociation pushed there are easy excuses towards all those categories of people who do not coincide with the thought of the Gospel. The technique of turning the enemy into a friend through a love bombing [bombing of love] that takes on the assumption of easy and non-existent faults is the new paradigm for being inclusive in charity. It matters little if the apostle reminds us that charity must flee fictions [cf.. RM 12,9] and practice the Truth even when it is uncomfortable and inappropriate for most.

We priests 3.0 in the new updated version, absorbed by the managerial role of museum curators with a fixed salary, without fatherhood from our shepherds and without a solid faith that distinguishes us as prophets before the world, we are easy prey to the fomite of sensuality. The senses clouded by a life more in tune with the world than with Christ the Savior of the world, they expose us to critical issues that are identified through the exercise of disordered sexuality, of a possessiveness that expresses the worst of itself in money management, and in the inability to carry out meaningful relationships with people not to mention the despotic maintenance of power that comes very close to the preservation of the privileges of the worst caste.

Speaking of sexuality, a distinction must be made. I talked about sexuality just to diversify it from genitality, in fact the two terms in Christian morality are ascribed to two different aspects. Although the adjectives sexual e genital they are used today as synonyms, they are not. We identify the person in his male or female being with the sexual term, in his male or female behavior, in her way of expressing masculinity or femininity and in the different and original style of communicating love. With the term genital, instead, we mean what refers more properly to the genital systems, to their anatomy and physiology, to the unitive and procreative task which Catholic doctrine resolutely continues to consider united.

Genital reality, so hailed by modernity, it is included in the sexual one which is wider, complete and typically human. We are too concerned to catch the priests at fault for an abuse regarding genitality that we do not realize that there is a great disconnect in the practice of that sexuality which is an integral and essential part of the figure of the presbyter. So much so that the term "father", with which we commonly call the priests of the regular clergy, it is an indication of the exercise of healthy male sexuality as a demonstration of a spiritual fatherhood which is aimed at the accompaniment and sanctification of the people of God. This is why priests are required first of all for a proven and proven masculinity that allows them to better express the exercise of their sexuality in being loving and authoritative fathers.

The way of loving that he knows in sexuality and masculinity your own language, it can express itself in two different and antithetical ways: through an asphyxiating possessiveness that wants to consume the other and operate it or through a dialoguing freedom that does not fear the other and proposes to love him as he is, enough to mature and grow as we see it happen in the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman [cf.. GV 4,1-26]. In relating to the female sex, Jesus is different from the majority of the men of his time who use, they abuse and objectify the woman to get something from her in return. In Christ, that free and liberating love of the Father which testifies to true love for every created reality is concretized. The priest, come old christ, it cannot mortify this liberating and free love which is constitutional to one's sexuality and nature. Compromises that alternate between compensatory sublimations must be avoided, pathological disorders and deviations. The freedom of the priest in love, which is an explanation of a celibate life, caste, poor and obedient in the image of the Redeemer, it is a theological and prophetic condition that cannot be understood except in function of the Kingdom and of that full eschatological life in which all relationships will be assumed and transfigured in God [cf.. Mt 19,12; MC 12,25].

Even in the use of money and in the exercise of power it is possible to trace an expression of human sexuality that can prove to be balanced, mature and informed by grace or despotic, narcissistic and subjected to the selfish desires of the world. The way of managing and safeguarding the goods entrusted to us - from the care of creation to the way of working within creation - communicates or not the all-encompassing encounter with God who loves and serves starting from everything that exists. was entrusted for the common good. Flaunt success and power, through an inhuman and instrumental use of wealth, it is a constant that we find quite widespread in human history, sometimes it is an immediate gratification, other times of a real idolatrous cult towards things and towards one's self. Among the disciples of Jesus Christ, But, the logic of the human kingdom does not apply, but the imperative is undisputed: "It's not like that among you" [cf.. MC 10,43]. We must not be so naive as to think that wealth and power objectively constitute evils in themselves - as happened in some pauperistic movements or in certain ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -, it is necessary to carefully evaluate the use made of it. The Gospel never accuses the rich man as such, if not in reference to a non-sharing and a solipsistic use that forgets the groans of the poor [cf.. LC 16,19-31], and the hardships of the widow [cf.. MC 12,41-44]. Like this, while human wealth becomes functional to honest sustenance and maintenance, the wealth of the Kingdom opens the doors of paradise and ensures the possession of God [cf.. LC 12,16-21].

All power and authority derives from God and is his gift [cf.. Sir 33,23; Gives 1,10; GV 19,10-11; RM 13,1-2; AP 2,28]. This concept was quite well known in ancient times, so much so as to support the thesis - which some authors have supported [cf.. S. Paul, S. Augustine, Of the State of God, Jacques-Benigne Bossuet] — according to which it was possible to build a real legal principle that legitimized rulers to govern over men by taking the place of God. In both civil and religious government, obedience to the one who held power was interpreted as direct obedience to God. This thesis thus formulated consists of two inaccuracies. The first consists in not considering the fact that any earthly power and authority is not immune from that wound of original sin which corrupts all power and authority in despotism and dictatorship. The second inaccuracy consists in neglecting the Trinitarian aspect of the question considering only the person of the Father as the exclusive holder of authority and power excluding the participation of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Only by becoming obedient to the Father, just as Christ was, it is possible to find the safe way to avoid corruption of power and deviations of authority [cf. Mt 4,1-11]. The priest, participating in the authority of Christ deriving from sacred ordination, it is also admitted to the government and to the exercise of a power that expresses an authority. As well as, after baptism, Christ is led into the desert by the Holy Spirit to become a messiah of salvation according to the Spirit of the Father and not according to the spirit of the world, thus the priest in the exercise of power and authority is called to imitate the Master who in serving the other made himself a servant, culminating his diaconate with the sacrifice of his life in favor of men [cf.. MC 10,42-45] and placing all power in the hands of the Father in the garden of olives [cf.. Mt 26,39; 26,42; MC 14,36; LC 22,42] giving fulfillment to that kenosis which started with the incarnation. Priestly authority traces the diakonia of the Son, feeds on the will of the Father and possesses the anointing of the Holy Spirit for the sanctification of the brothers and for the confirmation of the faith received with baptism.

III. A LIQUID COMPANY, WEAK AND IMPERFECT

The western society in which we live, where the Christian is called to make his earthly pilgrimage and where he manifests his courageous witness of faith, increasingly resembles a terrible Moloch who demands the fulfillment of continuous sacrifices and who self-attributes the right to be worshiped as a deity. It does not matter if these sacrifices are paid for through the price of inconclusive human lives and souls now fragmented and lost, lost in the non-sense of existence. A strange society, our, who is pleased to be narcissistically contemplated to resemble a terrible stepmother who demands far more from her children than she actually manages to give.

An anaffective stepmother, because of sterile womb, which is adorned with words as it would with jewels that sparkle with high-sounding meanings as in the case of love, of tolerance, of benevolence, understanding and rights. This bankruptcy view of the world had already been foretold by Christ to his disciples in the Gospel: "If the world hates you, know that it hated me before. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; because you are not of the world, but I chose you from the world, that's why the world hates you " [cf.. GV 15,18-19]. Christ and his disciples are not of the world, while experiencing the temporal dimension of the world but not its essence. The effective sign consists in the fact that the Word of God became flesh [cf.. GV 1,14], the divine Word became human, contrary to what happens today in which many of human words are divinized and absolutized. However, this apparently invincible and deified corporate Moloch already has an established term, just for the simple fact that the "prince and god of this world" [cf.. GV 12,31; 2Color 4,4] has been definitively defeated.

At this point in the discussion it is useful to introduce the theme of idolatry, this will help us understand some important company issues that we experience on a daily basis. Talk about idolatry, in the social fabric, it is by no means secondary, indeed we can say that this attitude recurs cyclically and systematically just when the sense of the "Sacred" diminishes which includes much broader and more diversified horizons than the simple reference to the divine. In this regard, it would be interesting to study the decline of peoples precisely in relation to the crisis and the disappearance of the "Sacred" from human life. For the moment it is sufficient to mention it pending a more punctual and competent future study.

Let's clear up a fact immediately: idolatry, in reality, it is one of the many masks with which atheism conceals itself before society and the world. Talking about idolatry and atheism seems a contradiction but it is not. In the Bible, for instance, the sin of idolatry is well known but not that of atheism, How come? The answer is simple: the ancient man as well as the biblical one is absolutely not an atheist. It is necessary to start from the self-evident finding that no man is naturally born an atheist, the spark of its divine origin prods man from his birth, until his death and pushes him to search for the meaning of his own existence and for a truth that transcends him.

Visible atheism, the one practiced these days, it is the degeneration of idolatry that gives up the vestments of the sacred. Atheism is the deceptive fruit that was formed within some historical periods and that through the French Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, Positivist thought has increasingly materialized through the philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together with well-defined Gnostic movements that have declared war on Christianity and specifically on Catholic Christianity.

Atheism, paradoxically, it feeds on that dissociated way of lifeO which is clearly visible in our day and which increasingly takes on pathological features, deluding himself that he is leading everyone towards unlimited progress. Modern Western man finds himself reeling in this corporate model - often and willingly deluding himself that he has achieved excellent achievements of civilization and humanization - a face of a human community that is increasingly defined as the face of a The imperfect society and that has already started to present a very high account.

This imperfect society who defines himself and makes himself known precisely from his dogmatists so intransigent and from his markedly fideistic awareness that they often turn out to be rash. The customs clearance of gnoseological and ethical relativism with which to read and interpret the reality that surrounds us, the widespread optimism of a certain type of science that claims to respond to the most intimate moans of meaning in the heart of man, revolutions in the field of technology and communication, together with the presumption to constitute a new world order that can unify every creed, lead inexorably to failure since in fact it traces in a modern key that ancient sin that the builders of the Tower of Babel committed [cf.. GN 11,1-9]. Atheism is thus the distillate of an idolatrous will deprived of the sense of the sacred that claims to make a name regardless of its Creator [cf.. GN 11,4].

This social overview, so painfully concrete but nevertheless real, it can be explained through a phrase by the Dominican theologian Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange [1877-1964] that says: «The Church is uncompromising on principles, because he believes, it is tolerant in practice, because he loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant of principles, because they don't believe, but uncompromising in practice, because they don't love. The Church absolves sinners, the enemies of the Church absolve sins " [cf. Dieu, its existence and its nature, Paris 1923, p. 725]. What meaning should we give to these words of the good Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange in relation to a liquid and destabilized society like ours?? Which common thread unites the features of weakness, imperfection, dell 'atheist idolatry enough to produce an apparently liberal but secretly intransigent and at times ruthless and contradictory reality?

The reasoning of the Dominican theologian helps to understand how this society, before being an enemy of God and the Church, is first and foremost an enemy of itself. In fact, it is more inclined to undertake more easily the search for a tolerance that uniforms and flattens its fellow men than a search for truth that leads to different alterities, until reaching the transcendental otherness that represents the authentic core of faith and of the relationship with God. Today, if you have noticed how to conduct some debates and discussions, the safest way to put your opponent on the ropes and then silence him, it essentially consists in accusing him of intolerance. The charge of non-tolerance is that indictment that does not admit objective truth, that does not take personal experience into account, of the history and tradition of peoples. The charge of intolerance is declined through censorship, the ban on realities that cannot be said, known or simply testified. Today, it is possible to be considered intolerant in many ways and be provoked on different areas such as faith and religion, race and ethnicity, sexuality and genitality, customs and traditions, politics and the civilized world and much more.

In the game of contrasts, ploy which I have already analyzed in this article, professing faith makes me, for example, an intolerant and violent person. Affirming the natural moral law on marriage gives me visibility as a medieval fundamentalist fanatic, cultivating and enhancing the traditional and cultural roots of a people makes me a dangerous enemy of globalization and inculturation. Those who we call today with the appellation of intolerants are actually divergent, heroes who do not align with the single thought and therefore need to be seen as enemies to neutralize. If you notice the best exponents of liberal thought, tolerant and guarantor they sin countless times of illiberal attitudes, violent and uncompromising worthy of the best dictatorial despotic regime.

The “tolerant” modern, instead, he does not sacrifice himself for his ideas as the idealist would, on the contrary, one does not scruple to sacrifice those who have ideas contrary to his, just as a dictator would do towards his opponents. How many martyrs of tolerance and rights exist today? But perhaps the most numerous martyrs are those who are held up as unwitting sowers of hatred precisely because they diverge, carriers of a hatred that cannot be seen because it is present only in the gaze of the tolerant on duty who has an interest in using hatred as an ideological tool to control the masses. Modern tolerance therefore not only claims rights but also the dispersion of hatred. For less than a decade, tolerance contracted a happy marriage with the Greek term phobia. Through this term the best workhorses of the tolerant are generated The imperfect society such as homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia and others. I mention these three examples just because they are the ones most practiced by the social media, television, radio and newspapers … We realize that all this scaffolding does not make the slightest sense and that it is not possible to pursue a discourse of tolerance that is exclusively linked to a right deprived of duties and a fear that is an antidote to hatred? Invoking tolerance by leveraging rights and excluding duties constitutes a worldview based on self-centeredness, in which everything becomes lawful it is sufficient that it indulges true or presumed personal rights.

On the other hand, call into question the tolerance ahead to hate relying on the feeling of fear of the other is foolish, as this would mean that it is enough to generate an alarm to ward off evil. In this imposing zibaldone it is difficult to find the edge of the skein so as to bring everything back to a certain and safe origin. The prospect of an uncompromising social culture that while condemning sanctifies and sanctifying condemnation appears more like a paradox that reminds the Roman god Janus who, having a "double face", it is the perfect image of compromise, of transformism, of the union of opposites.

Today the mask of Janus triumphs over the faces of the world who travel the streets of our cities and towns, of our squares and shopping centers, of the buildings of power and churches. An ageless Janus who dresses in male and female clothes or, if necessary, neutral, wearing the veil, the cassock, the habit, the skirt threaded in purple or red but that is always him, the ancient snake that never tires of waging war with the impious pretense of proving that God was wrong in trusting man.

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Sanluri, 27 November 2023

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