Fatima Perspectives #1258
In his column of December 9 (my translation), Antonio Socci notes yet another paradox in this epoch of the Church’s “opening to the world” at Vatican II. On December 8, before a capacity crowd in Rome’s Plaza of the People, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, elected in a populist revolt against the EU elites who are destroying Italy, “remembered the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, quoting De Gasperi [a leader of the Christian Democrats following World War II and Prime Minister of Italy from 1945 to 1953] and John Paul II…”
At the same time, however, Salvini has become “an ideal point of reference” for the bureaucracy of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI), which has “organized a crusade precisely against the League [Salvini’s party] and Salvini, so much so that according to an article in the Italian daily “Fatto Quotidiano,” the head of the CEI, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti — installed by Pope Francis as a man “cut from the same cloth” — is planning the Italian bishops’ “return to politics.”
Meaning, Socci notes, the politics of mass Muslim migration (excluding the Vatican, of course), “climate change” hysteria, wealth redistribution and the “More Europe” policy of Emma Bonino, who led the way to legalization of abortion and divorce in Italy and boasted of performing thousands of abortions herself. The mass-murderer Bonino, described here as “One of Italy’s best loved women,” and lauded by Francis himself as one of Italy’s “forgotten greats,” ran unsuccessfully against the populist coalition that crushed the Italian Left during the elections last March, heading a hastily created Più Europa, or More Europe party, before the vote on March 4.
But the Italian bishops, notes Socci, have never participated in Italian politics in the first place, except through the Catholic Action movement that opposed the Italian Communist Party back in 1948 at the direction of Pope Pius XII.
Today, however, Bassetti is mobilizing the Italian bishops to oppose Italy’s duly elected, radically anti-Communist government in keeping with the demands of “a laicist Europe that has denied its Christian roots,” whereas John Paul II and Benedict XVI had “harshly criticized this technocratic Europe for its laicisim [strict secularity] and its spreading of a mentality of political nihilism.”
This, says Socci, is a “colossal reversal of position (not declared) in comparison with the so-called ‘religious choice’ of Catholic Action in the Seventies” against the “spreading Marxist conformism” of that turbulent era.
But then almost the entire human element of the Church has undergone a “colossal reversal of position” since Vatican II. And the results are what Cardinal Ciappi has called an apostasy that “begins at the top.” Of which Mary Immaculate warned the Church at Fatima.
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