Sandro Magister reflects on the state of the Church in Tuscany, reprinting a recent article by a professor of the sociology of religion in Florence, who in turn (are you still with me) uses a recent letter from some Catholics in the area, a letter decrying the Ratzinger/Ruini way:

And this “Letter,” too, has little to say. It is a text that – except for a couple of references to the present day – could have been written indifferently ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. For decades there have been the same quotes from Vatican Council II, unfailingly paired with the teachings of the “secular masters.” In Florence, furthermore, there is a constant rehashing of the theses of Fr. Ernesto Balducci, who arrived in the end at a real and genuine worship of modern man. I ask: Can one truly believe that the rhetoric about modern man, a rhetoric inherently hostile to any Church that exercises authority and acts as a guide, is capable of meeting the challenge of the third millennium, after the progressive vision of the twentieth century has been overturned? Apart from the fact that modern man was and remains, in progressive discourse, a convenient paradigm. He can be exalted and pitted against the teaching Church, for internal use, and can then be rejected as a fetish of the West if one is speaking of the Other and of the developing world.

For the Catholics of the “Letter,” the Church is “authentic” when it recognizes that which is “genuinely human,” when it accepts modern freedom as unquestionable, when it exhibits its incompetence in the moral-social order. A Church that is dispersed in tiny communities and confined to the realm of conscience. I oppose two more observations to this vision.

The first: if some Christians are not able to face the disapproval of the secular intelligentsia, they should leave this confrontation to those who have the strength and the mandate to undertake it, without presuming to block them. In my opinion, today the Church’s opposition to modernity would receive no help from procedures of the synodal sort. Neither in the line of doctrine nor according to the logic of charismatic action can the exercise of pastoral authority be reduced to finding a point of balance with ecclesial opinion and pressure groups. The “sacra potestas” is not a matter of accounting.

The second: if Catholicism cannot be reduced to a morality, as the “Letter” legitimately maintains, it nevertheless has a morality. This is an extraordinary human-divine means of making sense of our actions. So it is more necessary than ever to propose publicly the commandments of the Christian law. These celebrate God the creator and protect creation. The so-called “contemporary man” does not need, and does not ask, to be flattered or confirmed, but to be alerted, stopped, blocked in his drifting. This is an exercise of “agape,” and it is the original and unchangeable task of the “City of God.”