Posted on 02/07/2019 9:07:33 AM PST by ebb tide
Very few took note of it. But right when Francis was ranging between Panama and the Arab Emirates, between Venezuela and China, in his own backyard, in Italy, a strange assault was being carried out against the leadership of the Italian episcopal conference, an assault of the kind that on the stock market is called a hostile takeover, by one of the characters closest and most listened to by the pope, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, director of “La Civiltà Cattolica.”
The first act of this assault is none other than a brief article by Fr. Spadaro in the latest issue of the historic magazine, entitled “The Christians who make Italy.”
The prompt for the article is the centenary of the appeal to the “free and strong” launched in 1919 by Fr. Luigi Sturzo, an eminent figure of Italian political Catholicism. For this appeal to become relevant again, Spadaro writes, “we think it is necessary to go back to the 5th Convention of the Italian Church, which took place in Florence in 2015,” and to the speech that Francis gave on that occasion, “prophetic” but unfortunately locked up in the drawers right away.
In effect the last half century of the Church in Italy was punctuated by five big conferences, almost general assemblies: in Rome in 1976, in Loreto in 1985, in Palermo in 1995, in Verona in 2006, and finally in Florence in 2015. The one in Loreto in particular went down in history for the turnaround imposed by John Paul on the Italian Church, so that instead of being invisible salt and leaven it would go back to being lamp on the lampstand and city on the hill, a “great social force,” a driving example for the other European Churches.
After pope Karol Wojtyla passed away and Cardinal Camillo Ruini made his exit, that grand plan completely fell apart. But the episcopal conference also changed shape. After the advent of Francis it became a shadow of the only one who came to dominate the scene, the pope. The conference in Florence was the emblem of this, with Bergoglio as the absolute protagonist and with the CEI at the mercy of the secretary general imposed on it by the pope, Nunzio Galantino.
Now Galantino has moved on to the presidency of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, and the CEI has gone back to having an effective president, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, in whom the pope shows he places trust. But this is a further reason that makes Fr. Spadaro’s move even more anomalous.
Where does it arrive, in fact, that article of his in “La Civiltà Cattolica”? At stating that there is only one way to pull the Italian Church out of its withdrawal into the “old forms of rhetoric” and into “clericalism”: to do what Francis wants, which means holding synod, with “a broad involvement of the people of God, in a synodal process not restricted to the elites of Catholic thought.”
This leads to the question that closes the article: “So what is in store for a synod of the Italian Church?”
This was the first act of the hostile takeover. Which was followed by two more.
The second act was the republication in full of the article by Fr. Spadaro, on January 31, in the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, “Avvenire.”
And the third act was, on February 2, the front-page interview in “L’Osservatore Romano” by the Vatican newspaper’s director, Andrea Monda, with Rieti bishop and former undersecretary of the CEI Domenico Pompili, brought onto the field precisely in order to endorse and reissue Fr. Spadaro’s proposal for a synod of the Italian Church.
From the presidency and secretariat general of the CEI - which would be responsible for the proposal and announcement of a synod - no comment has yet been recorded on the initiative of Spadaro.
An initiative that is all the more anomalous in that it clashes with a big conference to which CEI president Bassetti is devoting all of his energy, and which Spadaro instead is ignoring completely: a meeting “of reflection and spirituality for peace in the Mediterranean” that will assemble next November in Bari the bishops of all the countries bordering the Mediterranean, in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
It is a conference conceived by Cardinal Bassetti in the wake of the “Mediterranean conversations” organized sixty years ago by another great figure of Italian political Catholicism, Giorgio La Pira, whose cause of beatification is at an advanced phase.
The presidency of the CEI has staked a great deal on this conference, and would certainly not be thrilled to revolutionize its agenda on the basis of an article in “La Civiltà Cattolica.”
But this is precisely what Spadaro wants. The upshot of the story will decide who’s really in charge at the CEI.
Ping
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