The Pope on sex and food, the cardinal's inheritance and mattresses in the church

For some reason the transition from summer to autumn this year in Rome was terribly abrupt. It was if we went to bed on the night of Sunday 30th August, still in the days of lazy dogs, and the next morning someone pushed a switch and things started to march.

This is also true of the Catholic scene, where any number of plots are currently filtering out. Below are brief notes out of three that capture or reveal various aspects of the life of the Church in the XNUMXst century.

The pope on sex and food
Yesterday a new book of interviews with Pope Francis was presented in Rome by the Community of Sant'Egidio, one of the "new movements" in the Catholic Church and particularly appreciated by Francis for his work on conflict resolution, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue and service to the poor, migrants and refugees.

Written by an Italian journalist and food critic named Carlo Petrini, the book is titled Terrafutura, or "Future Earth", with the subtitle "Dialogues with Pope Francis on Integral Ecology".

No doubt it will be the pope's comments on sex that will spark more waves.

"Sexual pleasure is there to make love more beautiful and to ensure the perpetuation of the species," the pope said. Prudent views of sex taken to the extreme "have caused enormous damage, which in some cases can still be felt strongly today," he added.

Francis denounced what he called a "bigoted morality" which "makes no sense" and amounts to a "bad interpretation of the Christian message".

"The pleasure of eating, like sexual pleasure, comes from God," he said.

It doesn't matter that the thought isn't original at all - St. John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI said very similar things - but it's still "pope" and "sex" in the same sentence, so the eyes will be drawn.

However, it was the pope's comments on food that caught my attention, since planning, preparing, and eating meals is pretty much my favorite thing on earth besides my wife and a good baseball match.

“Today we are witnessing a certain degeneration of food… I am thinking of those lunches and dinners with countless courses where one comes out stuffed, often without pleasure, only quantity. That way of doing things is an expression of ego and individualism, because at the center is food as an end in itself, not relationships with other people, for whom food is a means. On the other hand, where there is the ability to keep other people at the center, then eating is the supreme act that favors conviviality and friendship, which creates the conditions for the birth and maintenance of good relationships and which acts as a means of transmission. values."

Over twenty years of living and eating in Italy tells me that Francis is right about the money… pretty much every friendship I have made here was born, raised and matured in the context of shared meals. Among other things, this probably says something about Catholic culture and what Father David Tracy calls "sacramental imagination," that tangible physical signs can indicate hidden grace.

I would add, however, that in my experience, gastronomic quantity and human quality are not necessarily at odds, as long as you are clear about your priorities.

The legacy of a cardinal
Next Monday will mark the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the reign of one of the most important Catholic prelates in the world in the last quarter of a century, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria. Schönborn, a Dominican, was a close ally and advisor to each of the last three popes, as well as one of the most influential intellectual and pastoral points of reference in the global Church.

It has been 25 years since Schönborn took over an Austrian church in crisis due to a bitter sexual abuse scandal involving his predecessor, a former Benedictine abbot named Hans-Hermann Groër. Over the years, Schönborn has not only helped restore calm and confidence in Austria - he has been called a skilled "crisis manager" by the Austrian national broadcast, ORF - but has also played key roles in almost every drama. global Catholics of his time.

It is too early to begin summarizing his legacy, especially since there is no reason why Pope Francis is in a hurry to accept the resignation that Schönborn was due to submit last January when he turned 75.

However, a very interesting aspect of that noteworthy legacy is the way Schönborn's perceptions have changed over the years. In the years of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he was seen as a staunch conservative (he campaigned assiduously for the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to Benedict XVI in 2005); under Francis, he is now more conventionally seen as a liberal who supports the pope on issues such as Communion for the divorced and remarried and contact with the LGBTQ community.

One way of reading this transition, I suppose, is that Schönborn is an opportunist who changes with the winds. Another, however, is that he is a true Dominican who tries to serve the pope as he wants to be served, and who is also smart enough to think beyond conventional ideological polarities.

In perhaps the most polarized moment the world or the Church has ever seen, his example of how to somehow manage to embrace both poles without being subsumed by either is undeniably fascinating.

Mattresses in the church
Given all that is happening in the world today, one might think that Catholics might find better things to argue about than the "mattress gate," but nonetheless believers in the small southern Italian town of Cirò Marina recently dedicated an extraordinary amount of energy to the debate on the wisdom of opening the Church of San Cataldo Vescovo to a mattress exhibition.

A photo from the event, which showed a mattress on the floor in front of the church with someone lying on it while another person spoke into a microphone, generated a wave of social media commentary and saturated coverage in the local press. Most people seemed to assume the church was hosting a mattress sale, which triggered endless references to the gospel story of Jesus throwing usurers out of the temple.

To aggravate the situation is that the event, which took place inside the church, was condemned for various structural defects. The parish priest has been forced to celebrate mass outside since Italy allowed public liturgies to resume in June, leading people to accuse the parish priest was also putting people's safety at risk.

In fact, the pastor told local media, there was no promotion going on. The event was intended to help people manage common illnesses by focusing on their sleep habits and patterns, and was presented by a doctor and pharmacist rather than a furniture company. Also, he said, the relatively small size of the gathering allowed it to take place safely indoors.

In itself, the kerfuffle over the mattress is not significant, but the reaction tells us something about the social environment of the 21st century greenhouse media, in which the absence of key facts is never an obstacle to expressing the possible. stronger opinion, and waiting for them to become clear is apparently never an option.

If we want to "go to the mattresses" for something, in other words, maybe it shouldn't be for what happened in San Cataldo il Vescovo, but for what happened next on Twitter and Youtube