by Alessandro Gnocchi
[Italian daily] Il Foglio
November 6, 2014
[Notre-Dame de Chartres Cathedral, June 28, 2014]
***
Traditionalist, yes, but not distant from the world,
as some of us would like to be in times of ruin and destruction.
Talking about the Traditionalist is a little like seventy years ago when Leo Longanesi said “Let’s talk about the elephant.” (1) The intellectual bad habits of Italy straddling between fascism and anti-fascism were always the same; anyway, Italy was a little Catholic, Apostolic and Roman, greatly resembling the Church of today, which anyway, is always a little Italian. At that time, Longanesi made mockery of the quirks and hypocrisies of an intellectual class that liked showing off in exotic discourses and loved “talking about the elephant” instead of the destruction of which it was both the victim and the perpetrator. Similarly, a great show is put on in today’s Church, by those who prefer “talking about the traditionalist”, instead of acknowledging the superficial atmosphere of self-demolition, in which, as the saying goes, “they are both singing and carrying the cross.”(2)
It’s easy to say “traditionalist” with the same levity as Longanesi said: “Gentlemen, let’s talk about the elephant” - said the ineffable gentleman - “it’s the only animal of a certain importance that we can safely talk about without risk, these days.”
Yet the traditionalist, if we really want to know him, is not an animal you talk about resorting to banality. He is not the one reviled in the sermons and tischreden [little speeches at the table] of [the papal household of Casa] Santa Marta; he is not the one of the windbags in the press reviews of the mass-media; he is not the one of the sociology-lovers hanging onto the fleeting instant of doctrines which are in continuous evolution; he is not the one of the bishops who issue pitiful decrees of excommunication against the faithful who dare to attend the Mass of Ages. He is not any of these things and others more besides.
The traditionalist is not at all what he seems. He is in ‘mysterious and inalienable intimacy’ with the thing he no longer possesses, he is a haven for the bond between heaven and earth in times of an oblivion dictated by worldly desires that infiltrated into the temple: it is his very own poverty and his very own solitude that create a place for soul and flesh to encounter greatness and wretchedness, salvation or perdition. The rock on which he can save himself or be shipwrecked is the evangelical life in the world - without being of the world.
