That Donald Trump’s success is in part the fruit of a popular reaction in rejection of the “politically correct” language and “woke” ideology imposed by progressive elites, particularly on gender and sex, is a view widely embraced.
Less evident, however, is how seriously this defeat is perceived by these same elites. As well as by the Catholic Church, to the extent that it takes part in them.
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In Italy, among the intellectuals, some prominent voices have begun to be raised with self-critical tones.
On March 6, in an interview with “la Repubblica,” which is the leading newspaper of progressive culture, Giuliano Amato, 86, a jurist and statesman on the left, former head of government, former president of the constitutional court, and several times a candidate for the presidency of the republic, attributed the responsibility for the defeat also “to staunch democrats like me, who in the last fifty years have backed any progressive battle without taking into account over time the growing distance, sometimes excessive, from the traditional values that keep our societies united.” Without understanding, that is, that “a liberal democracy is not diminished if we accept more limited freedoms and a certain coexistence with traditional values.”
Amato was seconded, with even more explicit tones, in a March 12 editorial in “Corriere della Sera” by Ernesto Galli della Loggia, 82, a professor of contemporary history:
“Whether the issue was the reproduction of life and the means of death, the characteristics of parenthood or of sexual morality, the meaning of the family, of peace and war, of turning every need into a right, invariably all of Italy that wanted to be progressive embraced the party of the ‘ideologically correct,’ in an attitude of smug superiority, if not of aggressive hostility, toward those who thought differently.”
All this without realizing that “for a large part of the popular classes this hegemony of ‘newism’ has meant a painful break with their identity, for a thousand reasons still very much rooted in the past.”
Like Amato, Galli della Loggia also warned the elites “not to close themselves off, that is, to remain open and listen to all the voices of society, not silencing those they don’t like.” Otherwise, the vote “will punish them sooner or later,” as has happened in the United States with Trump, regarding whom “it is chiefly up to the European elites to stand with their own people, in order to upset his plans.”
A third statement along the same lines was that of Giuliano Ferrara, 73, in “Il Foglio” of March 13. His is not a new voice, in criticizing “the cultural silence of progressives,” but this time he also made a point of recalling that Amato – although not a believer like Galli della Loggia and Ferrara himself – “had expressed himself doubtful and something more on abortion,” when the demand of the progressive elite was to make it “an effective and unconditional right.”
“Because of these ethical objections,” Ferrara went on to recall, “Amato had a bit of trouble, because moral progressivism can be aggressive and censorious, but he kept his conduct prudent, as is his style, and came out alive.” And moreover he “frequented the Courtyard of the Gentiles, a magnificent cultural institution created under Ratzinger and Ruini, to discuss with non-confessional openness, in the Church and in the outside world, the great ethical questions, among these the end of life, which is the discreet or euphemistic term for another ‘right’ that will soon end up in some European constitution, the right to die.”
With an important warning, which Ferrara presented in a subsequent statement in “Il Foglio” on March 22, taking up the theses of the famous essay “La rebelión de las masas” published in 1930 by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.
Because if it is true that in the United States Trump has leveraged the rebellion of the masses against the ideologies of the progressive elites, it is also plain for all to see how this popular support for him has become the tool of an excessive demagogy.
In the 1930s in Europe, the rebellion of the masses opened the way for terrible authoritarian solutions. And today? It is crucial, Ferrara writes, “to find a way to re-establish the culture of the elites and to launch new models of association for the masses that are compatible with the liberal structure of political democracy.”
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And in the Church? Here too there is no lack of positioning subordinate to the ideology of the progressive elites, even if contradicted in words or opposed by widespread rebellions.
The go-ahead given by the Holy See at the end of 2023 to the blessing of homosexual couples raised protests from all the episcopal conferences of black Africa, as well as of significant portions of the Churches of other continents.
But although Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken out against “gender” ideology, the fact remains that public opinion perceives him as much more inclusive than exclusive. His image is that of a pope who opens the doors to “todos, todos, todos,” and abstains from any admonition or condemnation, in the name of his “Who am I to judge?”
Moreover, Francis’s profoundly anti-Western vision – well reconstructed in the recent book by the historian of Latin America Loris Zanatta: “Bergoglio. A political biography” – makes him sensitive to the theses of that “cancel culture” which wants to remove whole centuries of history, branding them as guilty en bloc. His ferocious wallops at the traditionalists also go toward building up his image as the initiator of an immaculate new course for the Church, hostile to a dark past for which the only thing to be asked is forgiveness.
One sensational surrender by the pope to “cancel culture” occurred during his trip to Canada in July 2022 (see photo).
The year before in that country there had been noisy speculation over the existence of mass graves with hundreds of indigenous children buried near Catholic and Anglican schools where they had been coerced and mistreated, separated from their families and tribes, in order to be “re-educated.” The graves had yet to be found and dug up, and a committee of inquiry was formed to ascertain the facts, but right away demands were put forward for the bishops and the pope to publicly ask forgiveness for the misdeed. Which promptly took place, with a repentant and contrite Francis speaking the harshest of words in Canada against colonialism and racism, of which the Church was also declared an accomplice, and even branding the massacre of those children as “genocide.”
All this without any proof of the real existence of those burials, to the point that after three years of research as dogged as it was totally fruitless, at the beginning of this month of March the government of Justin Trudeau closed the committee of inquiry. But shelving too the acts of arson and devastation carried out against more than a hundred churches, in retaliation for that presumed criminal behavior.
Another serious surrender to “cancel culture” was seen at work in the synod of the Amazon, in October 2019, this time as well against the colonialism in which the Church was supposedly complicit.
For Francis, in fact, one of the aims of that synod was to bring esteem to the tribes of the Amazon in their original innocence, in their bygone “buen vivir” in happy symbiosis between men and nature, before this was corrupted and tainted at the hands of the civil and ecclesiastical colonizers.
Except that in some tribes this paradisiacal “buen vivir” has been discovered to be made up even now of infanticide and of death inflicted on the elderly, carried out with the declared aim of ensuring a balance “in the dimensions of the family and in the size of groups,” and of “not forcing the spirit of the elderly to remain chained to the body, without being able any longer to spread its benefits to the rest of the family.”
Words spoken with imperturbable, non-evaluative detachment by an Amazonian bishop and by a Brazilian expert called in for consultation, at two of the press conferences that accompanied the synodal work.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
