Zuppi, Camaldoli's lesson against the unbearable levity of today's politics

Who used to think about the Cardinal Matteo Zuppi only as a religious and civil protagonist on the international scene, as he has been and has been since he became the envoy of Pope Francesco for the resumption of the peace dialogue between Russia e Ukraine and the opening of humanitarian corridors, must change his mind. The hope of promoting the exchange of prisoners and the repatriation of Ukrainian children deported to Russia is always at the top of the thoughts of the President of the CEI and the next scheduled trip to China after the visit to the American President Joe Biden, and before that a Kiev and Moscow, but the Cardinal never loses sight of his Bologna (he was among the very first to express satisfaction with the liberation of Zaki) nor Italy. And those who believed that Matteo Zuppi's distinctive feature was only that of meekness, which his image of him naturally conveys, had to take note that, when needed, the Cardinal also knows how to be biting. As it was on Friday in the hermitage of Camaldoli before the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, with which the harmony is very evident, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the famous Code, born in July 43 on the initiative of a group of Catholic intellectuals who - in the face of the incipient collapse of fascism - helped to lay the foundations of the future republican Constitution and economic reconstruction. The re-enactment of the likes of Ezio Vanoni, George The Pyre, Aldo Moor and Julius Andreotti prompted Zuppi to pronounce a keynote speech condemning the current one without appeal policy, rightly considered "epidermal, sometimes ignorant, of the day to day, with few visions, marked by modest but very emphasized and very polarized interests". The disaster of current politics arises, according to Zuppi, from the "divorce between culture and politics" and "we should be wary of such a policy but we end up victims, caught up in the deception of digital competition which does not at all mean ability and knowledge of the problems". More pungent than that but also more determined than that in giving a jolt to the dead mill of current politics in Italy and in Europe Zuppi really couldn't be. But – here is the third novelty – it is precisely this ability to speak clearly and to get to the heart of the problems on the wave of a very high ideal tension that makes Matteo Zuppi an unequivocal civil and moral point of reference not only for Catholics but also for the laity. Just a few days earlier, the Cardinal's words in memory of another great figure of democratic Catholicism like Monsignor Luigi Bettazzi (the older ones will remember his courageous letter of July 1976 to the secretary of the PCI, Enrico Berlinguer) were music to the ears of Catholics but certainly also of lay people, especially when Zuppi spoke of the deceased bishop emeritus of Ivrea as a "great witness to peace and a man of dialogue" and as a man "who never stopped dreaming". Impossible not to applaud Matteo Zuppi.