The Pope and “peace”.
Anyone who has wasted two years studying an insignificant love novel, such as The Betrothed (famous only for being in fact the only decent Italian novel written in the period), I was saying anyone who has wasted all this time will surely remember the saying "truncate and to put to sleep, to put to sleep and to cut off”. This is a technique used in the Catholic Church when you have a problem that you prefer to hide rather than solve. Basically, every problem.
What's the point? The point is that the Pope has no say in the matter either when it comes to the Middle Eastern affair, where the Christian component is represented by the Orthodox, or in the Ukrainian one, due to a clear absence in the scenario. And then, the Orthodox again.
In order not to point out the fact that nothing matters in either area, he has to invent a role of moral authority in a scenario where he has NO moral authority.
And to do so, dust off the old "cut off and put it to sleep, put it down and cut it off", that is, making a problem fall into silence instead of solving it.
This culture, moreover, has passed from the Catholic Church to Italian institutions, including the educational one. The Italian school, for example, is specialized in the use of this technique, because it has valid "educational" use.
I'll give an example with the school, then I'll go back to the Ukrainian question.
You may have noticed (or remember) the school approach to bullying. The rule was:
- if the bully hurts you, let's pretend nothing happens. A case doesn't arise, your reputation is safe, and who cares if he beat you up.
- if you react to the bully, then you are punished with the excuse that "so you become like him". But in reality there is a gigantic moral difference between those who attack others and those who react to defend themselves.
This problem, then, has a ramification. When the bully attacks you, regardless of the need for legitimate defense due to physical beatings, the main problem is the defense of dignity, because the bully always tries to humiliate the victim. The victim's reaction is usually not just a reaction to the beatings, but is usually a reaction to a specific humiliation, or to a destruction of dignity.
The school, in punishing the victim who rebels against bullying (but never the bully), therefore tries to teach TWO things:
- As an Italian citizen, you do not have a dignity worth defending.
- As Italian citizens, you must never think of reacting to abuse.
The aim is clear: to obtain a sheep citizen who never rebels against abuse. The reason is that since the state commits abuses against citizens on a daily basis, if they rebelled it would be a serious problem for the state.
Furthermore, if citizens thought they had some dignity, the political debate would be very different, because no one would discuss the "IF" anymore, that is, the "IF" such an abuse requires a strong (when non-violent) response.
To give an example: when the police beat high school students, subjecting them to humiliating and degrading bullying, there is discussion about whether they did the right thing or not. If people in Italy thought they had dignity, there wouldn't be a discussion about it at all: at most we would be discussing how to punish those agents. But his guilt would be undoubted.
The idea of cutting off and suppressing, suppressing and cutting off is mainly part of an EDUCATIONAL principle, which aims to educate the citizen to be a subhuman devoid of dignity , or at least a subhuman whose dignity is the subject of discussion.
The very fact that we are here discussing whether it is necessary to punish policemen who beat a minor who did not pose a physical danger to them, and that there is a faction for and one against, and that we are not aware of this catastrophic situation, testifies to the devastating effects of this didactic principle on politics and culture.
Someone wrote that as Italians one cannot deny that they are also Catholic. It is true. One cannot deny being spiritually degraded to this point, or at least one cannot deny being raised and educated in a system that reduces man to a cowardly and resigned worm. If anything, we need to ask ourselves how to get rid of this legacy.
Some will object that “human dignity” has been the subject of great debates in the church, and this is precisely the problem. The Church does not discuss the existence of God. But it discusses the necessity and meaning of human dignity. This should raise suspicions in itself.
Personally, I never argue with anyone about the need for dignity, or its absolute priority: if the other party doesn't understand, as far as I'm concerned they just have to stay away and avoid speaking to me. I will do the same.
That said, the pope only applied the same pedagogical principle to the war in Ukraine. It matters little if the Russians broke through the borders with 100 armored battalions, it matters little if Ukrainian citizens were forced to save millions of women and children abroad, it matters little about the horrendous war crimes committed against the population, crimes that they have nullified his dignity. No, we can always discuss that, because for the Church human dignity is subject to infinite debate . We doubt it and we discuss it, we discuss it because we doubt it.
The problem, if anything, is to cut off and suppress, suppress and cut off. So, it takes the “courage” to give up. While on issues such as the non-existent "gender" there are no compromises, while no one discusses whether it would be advisable for Catholics to surrender to the fact that we are in 2024 and no one gives a shit about their opinion on abortion except them, when it's about mass kidnapping of children, Russian battalions entering a kindergarten and killing children through rape (see Bucha), and other things, we can discuss it. Rape isn't as bad as a kid changing sex. That's serious.
And so it can happen that a Pope says once that Russian crimes are tolerable and accepts their inevitability, and the day before that the "gender doctrine" is unacceptable and must be fought with all means.
That is, the Catholic Church's concept of human dignity is already visible from the list of priorities. First we look at whether it is legal to wear a bra, THEN we check, but if this is the case, whether you can die in your asylum raped by Russian soldiers. And the same church that fights against "gender indoctrination" seems to have nothing against it if hundreds of thousands of children are kidnapped and taken to Russia, mindwashed, and then indoctrinated in the patriotic use of weapons against Ukraine, that is, against their own parents. This is the Catholic Church's idea of human dignity.
Saying they suck is a compliment.
Likewise, understanding what “Peace” means for Catholics is quite complicated. As a rule, demonstrating that "Peace" is a positive value is simple, because it starts from the necessity of human dignity and it is easily demonstrated that war is a clear violation of it. Thus, if in this war children are raped, civilians in occupied areas are tortured, hospitals are bombed, missiles are launched on civilians, it is easy to understand that Peace is a situation in which all this does NOT happen.
For anyone with any concept of human dignity, it is EASY to think of peace as a situation where hospitals are not bombed, children are not raped, civilians are not tortured, and children are not kidnapped and deported, etc.
The Pope instead invented a concept of "Peace" that ignores dignity. According to him there can be a "Peace" that has THE SAME horrible consequences as war. Rape, war crimes, violence, oppression are, according to the Church, compatible with "PEACE".
The "peace" of the Church, therefore, is independent of human dignity . The important thing is to teach the world that it is wrong to rebel against invasion, against arrogance, against war crimes, against horror, because we want a world where a strong nation could invade another, commit horrendous crimes of war, and all there would be to do is to suppress that boring noise of missiles and bombs, to replace it with the placid flow of smoke from the crematoriums of corpses. Old people want to sleep in peace, after all, so stop making a mess at night. The fact that for the Ukrainian people the consequences of peace and those of war would be identically horrendous does not matter: who cares about human dignity? Certainly not the Church.
I don't want to ask myself whether it is a coincidence that this controversial statement hits the front pages covering the outbreak of a scandal over a pedophile network discovered in Rome. I'm not that conspiracy theorist. But anyway: the controversies of this discussion are, coincidentally, covering the news of a major pedophile scandal that began in Rome.
It will be a coincidence.
But what is the "courage" of raising the white flag? I know it will seem difficult to call it courage: if that's the case for you, you still have some idea of what the need to defend human dignity is.
For the Pope, "courage" consists in the heroic effort to keep at bay a conscience that would cry foul when seeing Russian soldiers rape to death and kidnap children for deportation, the courage to look the other way when missiles destroy hospitals, and the gigantic courage it takes to tolerate one of the greatest ethnic cleansings of recent centuries.
For the Pope, the only hero is the one who courageously turns the other way. Silencing the guns, whether this means leaving millions of people in the hands of a regime like the Russian one, well, it doesn't make much noise.
The Catholic pursues and practices what I define as "holy opportunism", the faculty of pursuing a lazy and miserable life, cultivating the claim of having followed the exalted example of Christ, if not the will of God himself. Human misery as sanctity, a small, miserable and indecent conduct passed off as divine will.
Catholics continue to say they have a clear conscience, because according to them those who ask for "Peace" are always pure. But those who have a conscience question not only the digestibility of their actions, but also the consequences of such actions.
Those who have a conscience never say they have cleansed it: we are all human and have made mistakes that have had bad consequences.
The only ones who say they have a clear conscience (typically those who talk about "Peace") are those who have kept their conscience inside the box. It's new. Clean.
Never used.