\nAs of yesterday, the Italian bishops\u2019 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. <\/p>\n
Ruini\u2019s reign at the CEI has lasted for twenty-one years \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
This is also the same \u201cmission\u201d that Benedict XVI handed down to the representatives of the Italian Church gathered in Verona last October: \u201cto restore full citizenship to the Christian faith,\u201d \u201cto make visible the great \u2018yes\u2019 that God speaks to man and to life.\u201d <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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 \u2013 the reconquest of public space for the Church \u2013 had in his vicar Ruini, year after year, its victorious engineer. <\/p>\n
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 \u201ccultural project,\u201d his most precious creation, in Rome on March 2-3. <\/p>\n
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 \u201cdisgrace\u201d of the Church commanded by him. It was a soaring speech. He grappled with the German philosopher J\u00fcrgen 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 \u201cdefeatism\u201d that modern scientism harbors within itself. <\/p>\n
Habermas had expressed both appreciation and criticism of Benedict XVI\u2019s lecture in Regensburg. And Ruini entered as a third figure in this dispute between giants, criticizing Habermas in turn. Ruini\u2019s first vocation has always been the application of philosophy to theology, bringing both face to face with today\u2019s culture. Now that, coming off the seat of command, he has \u201cdescended back down to the audience\u201d \u2013 his own words \u2013 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. <\/p>\n
With Bagnasco as president, but not the pope\u2019s 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\u2019s predecessor in Genoa, cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. <\/p>\n
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\u2019t succeed. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s \u201cmaneuver\u201d 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\u2019s name didn\u2019t 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\u2019s successor. <\/p>\n
At Bagnasco\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
Betori is another man in Ruini\u2019s 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 \u201cJesus of faith\u201d from the \u201cJesus of history,\u201d reducing the latter to a mere man, a Jew of his time whose divinity was asserted only later by his disciples. <\/p>\n
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 \u00e9lite 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 \u201cbinding for those who follow the Church\u2019s magisterium, and clarifying for all,\u201d stirring up a hornet\u2019s nest of controversy. <\/p>\n
The Vatican congregation for the doctrine of the provided the CEI with a memorandum with guidelines on this matter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
..or something like that. Wrong language? Probably: Magister on the new head of the Italian bishops’ conference – taken as a sign of the Pope’s mind and heart, since the position is selected by the Pope: As of yesterday, the Italian bishops\u2019 conference, CEI, has a new president. He is Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}