Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
June 4, 2019
On June 2, in
Italy, the traditional military parade celebrating the birth of the Republic,
took place under the sign of “inclusion”.
“The theme of inclusivity, which has
characterized this event, represents well the values engraved in our
Constitutional Charter, which stipulates that no citizen may feel they are abandoned,
rather, that the full exercise of their rights be guaranteed,” declared the
President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella.
The same day
in Blaj, Romania, Pope Francis offered a “mea
culpa”, in the name of the Church for the discriminations suffered by the
Roma [gypsy] community: “I ask
forgiveness – of the Lord and you, in the name of the Church, whenever, in the
course of history, we discriminated against you, maltreated or looked at you in
the wrong way, with the look of Cain instead of Abel, and weren’t able to
recognize, appreciate and defend your uniqueness.”
Over the course of history,
there have been no traces of persecution or maltreatment of gypsies by the
Church. With these words, however, Pope Francis wanted to reaffirm the
principle of “inclusion”, of which he today is the theorist par excellence, and to which the European Union subjects its
politics.
The insistence
with which Pope Francis returns continuously to themes like inclusion, non-discrimination,
hospitality and the culture of encounter, may appear to some like an expression
of love for one’s neighbor and - to use
Pope Bergoglio’s metaphor - are part of “the Christian’s identity card”. Those who think this, are however, making the
same error in perspective as the one the progressive Catholics in the late 20th
century did, in saying that Marx’s attention for the proletariat was born of
his love for social justice.
These
Catholics recommended the decomposing of Marxism, by refusing its materialist
philosophy and accepting, instead, its economic and social analysis. They
didn’t understand that Marxism constitutes an indissoluble block and that
Marxist sociology is a direct result of its dialectic materialism. Marx was not
a philanthropist, bent over the misery of the proletariat in order to alleviate
their sufferings, but was a militant philosopher who made use of these
sufferings as an instrument in achieving his revolutionary goal.
In a similar
way, Pope Francis’s attention towards the peripheries and the last [or least],
is not born of an evangelical spirit or even secular philanthropy, but is a
choice, which, prior to being political, is philosophical and can be summed up with
the term ‘cosmological egalitarianism’. In his encyclical Laudato si, Francis utilizes the buzzword: “inequality”, which, in
substance, indicates every form of unjust social disparity. “What we want is the fight against
inequalities; this is the greatest evil that exists in the world”, he
declared to Eugenio Scalfari in “La Repubblica” of November 11, 2016.
In
the same interview, Pope Bergoglio endorses the concept of “mixed race”,
suggested by Scalfari. And Scalfari, in an editorial from the same daily
newspaper of September 17, 2017, affirms
that, according to Pope Francis: “in the
global society we live in, entire populations are moving to this and that
country, and little by little, as time passes, an increasingly integrated sort
of “mixed race” will be created. He
thinks this is a positive thing, where individuals and families and communities
become more and more integrated, the various ethnicities will gradually
disappear and a great part of our Earth will be inhabitated by a population
with new spiritual and physical connotations.
We will need centuries or even thousands of years for a phenomenon of
this kind to happen, but according to the words of the Pope – the tendency is
this. It is not without reason he preaches the One God, namely, the One for all
people. I am not a believer, but I
recognize a logic in Pope Francis’s words: one people and one God. There has
never been until now a religious leader who has preached this - his [own] truth
to the world.”
The term
“mixed race” , like that of inclusion and hospitality, occurs frequently in Pope Francis’s ministry. On February 14,
2019, in his intervention at the event of the International Fund for
Agricultural Development (FAD) in Rome, Francis, met representatives of
indigenous populations and, in defining these communities as “a living cry of hope” he expressed his
hope for a “cultural hybridization”
among the “so-called civilized
populations” and native populations, who “know how to listen to the earth, see the earth and touch the earth”.
“Cultural hybridization” , he
explained is the route to follow, by working “to safeguard those who live in the poorest, rural zones of the planet,
but richer in wisdom in their coexistence with nature.”
On January
19, 2018, at Puerto Maldonado, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, Pope
Francis while meeting the natives, had said to them: “the treasure that encloses this region” cannot be grasped or
understood, without “your wisdom” and
“your knowledge”.
In order to understand better his reference to the “wisdom”
and “knowledge” of the natives, we need to turn to the work of an author dear
to Pope Francis: the former Franciscan, Leonardo Boff. The Amazon, Boff
explains, has “an exemplary universal
value”, since it represents the antithesis of the modern, development model “fraught with capital and anti-ecological sins; it is “the ideal place to experiment a
possible alternative, in harmony with the rhythms of that luxuriant nature, by
respecting and enhancing the ecological wisdom of the natives who have lived
there for centuries.” (The cry of
the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Cittadella, Roma
1996, p. 183). For Boff, “we need to move from the modern paradigm to the post-modern, global “holistic”
paradigm that offers ‘a new dialogue with the universe’ and a new form of
dialogue with the totality of beings and their relationships” (The cry of the earth and the cry of the
poor, pp. 26-27).
The Amazon
then, is not only a physical territory, but a cosmological model in which
nature is seen as a living whole that has a soul i.e. a principal of internal
and spontaneous activity. By means of this nature impregnated with divinity,
the indigenous people of Latin America are maintaining a relationship that the
West has lost. The wisdom of the natives should be recuperated, asking
forgiveness for the discrimination committed against them, without expecting
them to ask forgiveness for the cannibalism and human sacrifices their
ancestors practiced. The bridges that must substitute walls are unidirectional.
And this is the
cultural background of the Synod opening in the Vatican next October 6. Inclusion
is a philosophical concept prior to being a social one: it means the
affirmation of a hybrid, indistinct, “mixed race” reality, in which everything
is fused and confused, like the theory of gender - the theory of inclusion par excellence. LGBT people, like
migrants and the natives of South America, should be accepted and respected not
because they are people, but because of the cultural and orientations they convey.
This cosmology
recalls the Deus sive natura, of Spinoza
which preaches the identity of God with the infinite substance from which all
beings derive. God should be included in nature and nature should be included
in God, ‘who’ is not the transcendent cause, but immanent in the world with
which ‘he’ coincides. There is no
qualitative difference between God and nature, as there is no qualitative difference
among diverse societies, religions or cultures, and not even between good and
evil, which, in Spinoza’s view, are “correlative” (Ethica, IV, prop. 68).
The doctrine of inclusion
is not the view of Leo XIII’s Aeterni
Patris or St. Pius X’s Pascendi. On the contrary, it goes against these documents.
Few, however, dare say this openly. How long will this ambiguous silence go on
- so convenient for many – but particularly
for whoever is using it to achieve purposes other than those supernatural of
the Church?
Translation:
Contributor Francesca Romana
