The great Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853) said that behind every political problem there is a theological and metaphysical problem. Sometimes, however, behind a theological problem there is a political problem that explains it. This is what must be kept in mind in order to predict what will happen in the next Synod: a religious assembly, desired and organized by a pope for whom politics prevails over theological and moral doctrine. Some episodes that have happened in recent days help us understand this.
On September 22, 2023, Giorgio Napolitano, a leading figure in Italian political life for many decades, died at the age of 98. In his long life Napolitano combined an iron Communist militancy, which in 1956 led him to approve of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, with an equally iron loyalty to the Masonic fraternity to which he belonged, following in the footsteps of his father Giovanni (1883-1895), a leading figure in the Grand Lodge of Italy. On May 10, 2006, after Napolitano’s election to the presidency of the Republic, lawyer Gustavo Raffi, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge, pointed to this choice as “one of the highest moments in the democratic life of the country,” and on the day of the ex-president’s death the Grand Lodge displayed flags at half-mast at its national headquarters on the Janiculum Hill as a sign of condolence.
Within the Italian Communist Party, if Enrico Berlinguer (1922-1984) headed the wing of the “catho-communists,” who sought to reconcile the monstrance with the hammer and sickle, Napolitano was, after Giorgio Amendola (1907-1980), the most distinguished exponent of the “atheo-communists,” advocates of a meeting of communism and super-capitalism on the basis of a common rejection of the transcendent dimension of life. Ferruccio Pinotti and Stefano Santachiara, in their book The Dirty Clothes of the Left: Napolitano’s Secrets and the Democratic Party affairs (Chiarelettere 2013), claim that Napolitano was allegedly initiated, in distant times, into Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and recall various significant moments of his life that are understandable in this light, from the “mysterious trip” to the United States in 1978, in the days of the Moro kidnapping, to the meeting, in 2001, in Cernobbio, with Henry Kissinger, who greeted him with the words “My favorite communist.”
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