CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S PRESSWATCH
‘The key words were scandal, politicians, law of God, marriage and male, meaning evil’
Celebrating 25 Years of Priestly Renewal
Before the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, in those long-gone days of last week, Italian press coverage of events in Egypt seemed a parable for troubles in their own country. Indeed, two days after Mubarak took the hint, the piazzas of Italy were full of women demanding that Silvio Berlusconi should do likewise. “We are more than a million,” the actress Angela Finocchiaro told the Corriere della Sera optimistically. While on a trip to Ravenna, I took a look at Risveglio, the Catholic weekly of the local Archdiocese (founded – the paper, that is – in 1902) which hit the church porches while Mubarak was packing his beachwear for Sharm el-Sheikh. Its headlines quoted a call for dialogue from the Coptic Catholic Patriarch of Alexandria (there is such a thing). “Hmm,” I thought for a moment, “This is timely.” But Cardinal Antonios Naguib was talking about a rift between al-Azhar and the Vatican, a story from January. Historically it may more important for al-Azhar University to talk to Christians than for one politician to stay or go, but it made Risveglio seem historical not newsy. Neither the million-women march nor the fall of pharaohs much disturbed the bicycle-infested streets of Ravenna. The regional daily, the Corriere Romagna, was having no truck with global affairs. It led on something more dear to many hearts – the price of a cup of coffee. It was going up in Ravenna bars from €1 to €1.10. This was news I could appreciate. Half the trouble with picking up a foreign newspaper is not that it is in a strange language, but that one comes in halfway through a political scandal, knotted tightly like sisal string, involving people far less famous than Angela Finocchiaro (who has made two dozen films, by the way, not that I’ve seen any).
Again, the problem is not that these affairs are foreign. Try coming back to Britain in the middle of the Megrahi imbroglio and picking up who said what when to whom. It is like switching on EastEnders.
14 | THE TABLET | 19 February 2011
Nothing anyone says seems to make any sense. As it happened I heard Mr Berlusconi being denounced from the pulpit at Sunday Mass, over at Bologna Cathedral. He was not mentioned by name, that I could hear, but the key words were: scandal, politicians, law of God, marriage and loudest of all male, meaning evil. Those tesserae make a perfect mosaic portrait of Berlusconi, from his fake hair to the teeth mended where a lobbed model of Milan Cathedral collided with them. But bishops denouncing Mr Berlusconi are hardly news. What they help to do is make the climate. Berlusconi’s politics do affect even the quiet streets of Ravenna. The local leader of his outfit, the Popolo della Libertà, last week denounced the building of a mosque in the city. “The right to pray is fundamental for all religions,” Eugenio Costa told the Corriere Romagna. Then came the but. “But a mosque is not necessary for prayer, still less a minaret.” He mentioned a poll in northern Italy in which 60.3 per cent opposed the construction of minarets in Italy. The next day, Corriere della Sera assumed its readers’ familiarity with David Cameron’s views. It used his remarks on the “failure of multiculturalism” as a peg to hang its report of an address by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi. I wonder what else in Mr Cameron’s Munich speech readers could recollect. Still, it made a half-page in a paper with contents one would seldom find in the British press. The cardinal’s hope was to “pass from multiculturalism to interculturalism, from the co-existence of cultures that don’t communicate to the experience of dialogue”.
So far so good, but here the cardinal invoked some dodgy etymology. “Dialogue, as this beautiful Greek word says, presupposes a dia-logos, the meeting of two logoi.” Beautiful the word may be, but the dia- doesn’t, of course, mean two anything. No matter. Cardinal Ravasi saw twin dangers: “On the one side fundamentalism, excess of identity, aggressive identity, of the sword, which can even be Christian; on the other, cultural syncretism, superficiality, banality, stupidity.” If anyone could have the worst of both worlds by waving a sword aggressively in favour of banality and stupidity, it would be a modern politician. Perhaps some already have.
■Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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