The Italian left and La Sapienza in Rome had better know they really blew it with the Pope, the press, and the Italian people when even radical anti-Catholic left-wing weirdos like Dario Fo say that an opportunity to listen to the Pope was lost.
Get this from the Roman daily Il Messaggero.
Dario Fo gets into the general attitude about how badly the radicals screwed up. However, throughout he cannot resist telling the Church how it ought to give into the ways of the world. But just enjoy that part!
My translation:
A chance to understand Benedict XVI… lost
by Dario Fo
"The faith must not be imposed in an authoritative manner, it can only be given in freedom". Pope Ratzinger surprises us yet again. The speech he would have given at La Sapienza, whose text I had occasion to read yesterday afternoon, not only recognizes (and it would have been a recognition coram populo, in a Roman University setting), the autonomy of science and the law concerning it, but adds also some "astonishing" clarifications. "… Pastoral ministry is to keep awake a sensitiveness about the Truth, to invite reason to place itself in the search for the true, the good, of God." Not enough. The Pope defines these things that "emerge through the history of the Christian faith" as ony "useful lights". No extremism, it would seem, in these words. More or less, obscurantism.
In other terms, the Pontiff seems to "propose" Jesus Christ and the Christian Catholic faith as one of those good routes (naturally, as far as concerns his ministry, the privileged route) to "find a way toward the Future)". All in all, in Rome an optima occasion was lost (and we have all lost it, really) finally to understand just who Ratzinger is: not the man whom many of us think he may be. He doesn’t want to impose, but counsel. He expresses hope, he doesn’t command. He helps, doesn’t constrain. In the end, he wants us all united and with a single desirable common objective: that celebrated Truth.
So, why, I ask myself as a secular layman, and I have been an admirer of the charismatic Wojtyla style, Ratzinger acts in an opposite way from what he says? Why the absence openness, his "no’s", his bans in the matter of procreation, of priesthood for women, his excommunications? Why the knack of snuffing out certain popular "concessions" made during the Second Vatican Council, just look at the position of the priest at the altar during Mass and the use of national vernaculars in place of the anachronistic Latin? It would be necessary to see it this way: the mystery of Faith. It is worthwhile reading over and over again the address the philosopher Pope would have given at Rome’s La Sapienza. There are openings in it, apparent or real as they may be, to which we haven’t been accustomed, at least not in concrete deeds. Perhaps the university environment, the city of studies, reconnects the Pontiff with the practice of freedom which even he, (I am sure) was used to before he took his throne.
UPDATE: 19 Jan 07 – 22:07 GMT
If you want to hear and watch Dario Fo speak on these same issues, there was an interview with him on RAI, Italian TV.
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Interesting indeed, and pretty balanced for Fo (which isn’t saying much). But significant that such a gadfly takes this point of view. The protesters seem to have badly overplayed their hand. We’ll see where it all leads, I suppose.
If Fo hasn’t already read Ratzinger’s homily preceding the conclave, it’d be good to review before postulating the Pontiff’s arrival at theological relativism.
http://www.zenit.org/article-12791?l=english
Mr. Fo is probably irked that the opportunity for him to write another atrocious play about the Supreme Pontiff mingling with the people was lost to him-for which we should all be eternally grateful.
Thanks for the guffaw, Father. I needed that!