..or something like that. Wrong language? Probably:
As of yesterday, the Italian bishops’ conference, CEI, has a new president. He is Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa, twelve years younger than his predecessor Camillo Ruini, who has left his post at the age of 76.
Ruini’s reign at the CEI has lasted for twenty-one years – five as secretary, and sixteen as president. And now, his reign becomes a dynasty. Bagnasco, the heir, has sharp features and a sharp way of speaking like him, and like him he loves philosophy and has taught it for years, but above all he has an identical vision of the Church in Italy and in the world.
This is also the same “mission” that Benedict XVI handed down to the representatives of the Italian Church gathered in Verona last October: “to restore full citizenship to the Christian faith,” “to make visible the great ‘yes’ that God speaks to man and to life.”
It was Benedict XVI in person who installed the new president of the CEI. In all other countries, that appointment is decided by a vote among the bishops, but in Italy it falls to the pope.
In 1991, John Paul II went even further: he placed at the head of the CEI his own vicar, the man to whom he had entrusted the governance of his diocese of Rome. The symbiosis between Karol Wojtyla and Ruini was very intense. The revolution to which the Polish pope gave voice in 1985, in Loreto, before a hostile audience of bishops, priests, and laity – the reconquest of public space for the Church – had in his vicar Ruini, year after year, its victorious engineer.
Ruini was so victorious that he is not at all disappearing from the stage, even now that he is no longer president. His last year as head of the CEI was a constant crescendo, right until his last public appearances during the two days of the Forum for the “cultural project,” his most precious creation, in Rome on March 2-3.
In the introductory address, before an audience of intellectuals, theologians, scientists, physicists, and mathematicians, Runi did not devote even a single word to the barbed polemics of the dissenting Catholics, to those like Giuseppe Alberigo and Alberto Melloni who wrote and signed a manifesto against the “disgrace” of the Church commanded by him. It was a soaring speech. He grappled with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the last great figure of the school of Frankfurt, a professed atheist but a proponent of an alliance between secular reason and religion, against the “defeatism” that modern scientism harbors within itself.
Habermas had expressed both appreciation and criticism of Benedict XVI’s lecture in Regensburg. And Ruini entered as a third figure in this dispute between giants, criticizing Habermas in turn. Ruini’s first vocation has always been the application of philosophy to theology, bringing both face to face with today’s culture. Now that, coming off the seat of command, he has “descended back down to the audience” – his own words – this is the teaching that he will continue, unyieldingly, to impart. With the explosive political effects that bring such discouragement to his opponents, outside of and within the Church.
With Bagnasco as president, but not the pope’s vicar as before, the CEI exits its exceptional phase as personified by Ruini, and returns to normalcy. Very soon, perhaps in June, Bagnasco will be made cardinal, but he will in any case remain in Genoa as archbishop. His relationship with the pope will be less symbiotic, and Italian politics will no longer be focused solely on what the CEI says and does, but also on the Vatican secretariat of state. This, curiously, is now directed by Bagnasco’s predecessor in Genoa, cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.
Bertone would have preferred for the CEI to have a less prominent president. He had tried to convince Benedict XVI to opt for the bishop of a moderately important diocese, and his candidate was Benigno Papa, of Taranto. He didn’t succeed.
But another longstanding hypothesis also fell by the wayside: that cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, would rise to the presidency of the CEI. Bertone’s “maneuver” was interpreted as hostile toward Ruini. But the conclusion refutes this: Bagnasco is a staunch follower of Ruini, more so than Scola, and his appointment was, in the end, recommended to the pope by Bertone himself. It was an epilogue that would have been difficult to imagine even a few months ago. Bagnasco’s name didn’t even appear in the survey conducted one year ago among the Italian bishops by then-secretary of state Angelo Sodano and by the nuncio to Italy, Paolo Romeo, in order to ascertain whom they would like as Ruini’s successor.
At Bagnasco’s side, bishop Giuseppe Betori remains in the central role of secretary general of the CEI. He was confirmed by the pope one year ago for another five-year term.
Betori is another man in Ruini’s close confidence; he has a solid formation as a biblical scholar, and lately he has made great efforts in opposing the exegetical currents that divide the “Jesus of faith” from the “Jesus of history,” reducing the latter to a mere man, a Jew of his time whose divinity was asserted only later by his disciples.
With Bagnasco and Bertone in the two key posts, the CEI will not give up on any of the initiatives undertaken in the Ruini era. Scheduled for next March 26 is the spring session of the permanent council, the élite group of thirty cardinals and bishops representing the entire body. And from there, in short order, will emerge the statement from the CEI in defense of the family and against the legalization of de facto heterosexual and homosexual unions, which Ruini preannounced on February 12 as “binding for those who follow the Church’s magisterium, and clarifying for all,” stirring up a hornet’s nest of controversy.
The Vatican congregation for the doctrine of the provided the CEI with a memorandum with guidelines on this matter.
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