• Rating:
Rome, 4.I.2012.
Many users of the site have invited me, during the recent holidays, to sketch a portrait of Don Luigi Verze, a recently deceased prelate and founder of the San Raffaele Hospital, already the subject of a series of judicial inquiries relating to possible corruptive and extortionate phenomena developed in recent years.
I admit to having been caught off guard by the courteous invitation, both considering my substantial retirement from my activity as an essayist and reviewer for DeBaser, and given the delicacy of the subject matter, whether for its connection to Faith - always a source of controversy on a site essentially secular or agnostic like the one with which I had already collaborated - or for its proximity to news events on which the beneficent owl of Minerva has not yet alighted, even in the simplifying forms of criminal judgment.
It is indeed true that with the death of Don Luigi, such an investigation can never concern His person, and it is indeed true that the relationships between Faith, Science, and Morality are among the topics that, since my past collaboration with the site, I have tried to address for the interest of the site's users and any interested reader. Hence days of doubt, and I hung between writing and refraining from any intervention.
These days have been overcome also thanks to the contribution of a religious figure, who has made himself available to review a work by Don Verze through the technique, also unprecedented for the site, of an interview-dialog: a model of Platonic descent, as the most attentive will have noticed, here declined as a dialectical path to the knowledge of Truth.
I offer a report as concise as, in my opinion, it is full of meaning. Any further comment seems indeed superfluous to me, except for a general introduction to the theme of the book discussed: written by Don Verze a few years before his death, it is a reflection between theology and experience on the meaning of the Christian message in the contemporary era, where the Man of Faith - but in my opinion the Man as such - cannot act outside the World, and the economic world in particular, he himself needing to play a role in life to reveal a theology that is also an economic theology, where money is instrumentum fidei, namely the instrument of (and for) Faith.
PDL: From the reading of Don Luigi's book emerges a singular figure of a religious. He presents himself as a Man of Faith attentive to combining both the spiritual and material dimensions of Being, building a bridge between theology and economics: as if the vivifying mission of the man of Faith, in Italy in the last fifty years, cannot but pass through the man who becomes an entrepreneur, and who announces the Gospel as an entrepreneur.
R: Correct observation, at the base, but to be specified. The figure of Don Verze, certainly in his ambiguities, in his contradictions, is nothing but the figure of Man, of every man of our troubled era. There is scandal in becoming an evangelizing entrepreneur, especially where the Scriptures tend to deny that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the rich, those who do not strip themselves of all their possessions in the Franciscan sense; yet, the scandal, its contradiction, are only apparent if one considers how the encounter with the neighbor cannot disregard offering them one’s riches, assuming they exist, and can therefore be redistributed. The entrepreneur - in the Christian dimension of Don Verze - is, therefore, the one who makes it possible to distribute good by creating, facilitating, and accumulating it: accumulation that is not an end in itself, but a premise for collective and widespread well-being.
PDL: Isn’t the idea perhaps the same as Calvinism? Yet, in Don Verze and his circles, very little seems to emerge as Calvinist, almost ascetic. A figure of a religious emerges who involves himself to the point of losing the connotations of the Man of Faith, as one understands it or as we have inherited it from medieval, and in part modern, tradition.
R: The position you present seems correct on the surface but is ambiguous. In Calvinism, and more generally in Protestant thought well analyzed by Weber, the production and accumulation of wealth are always functional to a project of individual salvation, works that are an indicator of a salvific project in action, only partially governed by Man. Don Verze’s perspective is different: the work, the economic project, the entrepreneurship in the healthcare sector, the encouragement of scientific research are tools that emerge in the intersubjective dimension of Man aiding another Man, especially where the State - and with it ideologies oriented in a totalizing and secularist Marxist sense - demonstrate its economic-social, ideological, and ethical failure: if a public structure is unable to assist citizens, the - subsidiary - help of the private open to the evangelical announcement fulfills, at the same time, the objectives of the civitas terrena and the civitas divina, federating Man and Man, and uniting Man with the otherworldly dimension.
PDL: The reference to the failure of communist ideologies and their inability to organize the welfare state is stimulating. I emphasize this because in the original conceptions of totalitarian power - especially communist - Marx’s message seems a form of veiled theology, or rather a substitution of Christian theology with another theology, in the sense already widely criticized by Russian novelists of the mid ‘800s. In Verze, however, it is economic action that presents traces of a theology, as well as a presence of the divine in the world. In this perspective, can Don Verze’s proximity to reformers who opposed Marxian and Marxist false theology, like Craxi, and, more recently, catholic-integrals like Formigoni or liberal-democrats such as President Berlusconi, be better understood? In the book, the aspect does not emerge particularly, yet the tension that nurtures it makes it clear how for Don Verze the evangelical announcement could not be separated from an action that imposes compromises far from the “let your yes be yes and your no, no” well represented by the Scriptures, as a cost for his economic theology. Isn’t there a potential contradiction in this?
R: An acute consideration, yours, but simplificatory. I abstain, as obvious, from political interpretations. The point is that Don Verze could achieve his objectives only in communion with political power holders in a certain historical period: if you like, it’s a realism well known to Men of Faith, as the whole history of Ecclesia testifies. This power, however one wants to judge it, was stably held by the statesmen you just mentioned, so much so as to make Craxi, Formigoni, and Berlusconi Don Verze’s natural interlocutors. It is probably incorrect to frame the issue on a Manichean and partial division between right and left, considering for example that Craxi himself was undoubtedly a Man of the left, and that Berlusconi himself has a secular and worldly dimension that emerged both in his entrepreneurial and political activity. In Verze, then, it was not so much the ideological dimension that counted, as the connection between politics and practice, between theoretical and pragmatic dimensions: and there’s no doubt that Craxi, Berlusconi, in some ways Formigoni, a pupil of Don Giussani, are all pragmatists. Add to this, topics like scientific research, euthanasia, and the like, Don Verze’s testimony moves away from certain Church positions, ending up bringing him closer to the thought of some libertarian left. Another proof of the paradox and contradiction of Man, not to be taken as disvalue, but as value and expression of Being There in history, beyond the flattening imposed by ideology and the connected dismissive judgments, which ultimately mask a prior and prejudicial adherence to ideologies with a sense opposite to the one being judged.
PDL: The book precedes the scandals of which Don Verze was accused in the last months of his life. However, in adhering to the evangelical message, many have seen a sort of acceptance of the risks of scandal, and of sacrifice itself as an undeniable consequence of scandal. I confess that when the site I collaborate with asked me to deal with Don Verze, the thought immediately sprang to the scapegoat theorized by Rene Girard: a sacrificial lamb on which popular humors offload all their guilt, to cleanse the conscience and make the conservation of society possible. Don Verze represented, in some respects, the joyous dimension of an era ended with the economic-social crisis we are going through these years. The economic difficulties of the San Raffaele seem like a mirror of his human affair, but also a political affair: once the alliance with major political referents ended, both the structure and the Man found themselves alone, and exposed to the vengeance of a society that no longer recognized them as its own members, condemning them even before the judges' investigations.
R. Your reflection touches on the heart of the problem directly but does not put it in the right focus. You eruditely cite Girard, but do not consider that in the sacrificial mechanisms connected to all anthropologies, the sacrificial lamb is offered, passively suffers his condition, but does not offer himself to it. And, at the same time, that the sacrificial victim is individual and individuated, and thus separate (separable) from the social context of reference: in essence, the role of victim implies a passive alterity that I do not find in Don Verze and his human experience. I emphasize - especially in light of this book - how in him sacrifice was somehow anticipated, I would say prepared, by immersing himself in the world and seeking the divine in the folds where no one suspects it: when he defined Silvio Berlusconi as a divine gift, Verze himself wanted to underline the dimension of encounter with the unexpected and the existence of fragments of good where the Pharisaic majority excludes it, even to the point of branding such a phrase as unclean. At the same time, Verze did not act alone: he was always a shepherd and not a lamb, where his lambs are all the men who had to work with him, excelling in the medicine of the bodies and that philosophy that is the medicine of souls, and the wool produced by his fold the fruits of his entire work.
PDL: A final reflection, to conclude. Assuming that Don Verze’s methods were unorthodox, Bulgakov’s portrayal of the demonic Voland comes to mind, another fine critic of totalitarian thought: one who desires evil but eternally accomplishes good, exiting the schemes, and creating discord, where there first is order, a product more of conservative tendencies and appearance, than of reality. Personally, I do not believe that Verze wished for evil, but I do not exclude that he accepted the evil in the means to accomplish a good of a higher order. Perhaps erring, not accepting the radicality of certain religious messages, but acting according to a design of morally superior order to what we mere mortals can grasp. The entire book we read together confirms this reading of the character, in my opinion, the key to understanding his actions.
R. I respond with a series of questions. How many lives has Don Verze saved, and how many hopes has he rekindled with his healthcare structure? For how many men of science and culture has his work been a haven? If he even contributed to saving a single life, and to making the research of a single man of science free, he would have done much more than many among those who are bustling, in these frantic weeks, to judge. Forgetting that judgment in its pure state is divine, while human judgments are only incomplete, partial, and born of momentary emotional states, if not of a Jacobin matrix.
PDL: I think so too. Perhaps judgment does not belong to men, but only to the Superior Order within which Don Verze also acted in History, for those who believe. For the secular, it remains good practice to weigh every judgment and to ask themselves, Kantianly, how they would have behaved in Don Verze’s place: to withdraw from the world into contemplation that does not save lives, but pleases the spirit of the contemplator, or to immerse themselves in it, possibly compromising with it, to help those in need? I thank you, also on behalf of my readers, for the stimulating reflections.
R: I thank you, and thank the site for the hospitality offered to me.
Having concluded the interview, and the meeting with the religious figure, I confess that my doubts about the figure of Don Verze have increased, they have not dissipated. But the path to the Truth is paved with such doubts, that do not disturb me. I hope this is also true for the average user of the site, often Manichean, but never as in this case called to weigh words before commenting in hasty and superficial ways, guided by prejudices and ideologies that this dialogue has tried to distance.
Loading comments slowly
