(from the Alphonsian Academy blog)
The weekend of January 7 and 8 was marked in Brazil as one of the saddest for our still young democracy (1889). In the capital city of Brasilia, the buildings of the three constituted powers were vandalised. As if the physical and symbolic attack on such important places for the political life of the country were not enough, the historic and artistic damage aggravated the situation even more, since the pictorial, documental and artistic heritage present there was practically all destroyed. True signs of barbarism caused by a rebellious group that seems to have lost basic signs of humanity and the minimum of civilisation. Irrationalized men and women.
I prefer to use the term irrationalized, in verbal form inflected in passive participle, because such a situation is the tip of a process of formation and destruction of the sense of common good and social life initiated and fomented by economic and political elements that have been active for some time, not only nationally, but also worldwide. In short, a mass of manoeuvres at the service of political, agrarian and market oligarchies who are not interested in the constant and healthy rupture of the status quo constantly promoted by the movement intrinsic to democratic regimes.
As the current head of the federal executive, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, well emphasized during a strongly symbolic face-to-face meeting with all 27 governors who make up the federative pact (coming from all spectrums of situation and opposition), such barbarous and rebellious movements lacked any concrete element of vindication in view of the common good.
Thus, unfortunately, the only thing that these rebels “ask” is a kind of vertical and unilateral intervention that would impose what they have been indoctrinated with manipulated information as the only possible vision of the world. This indoctrination was reinforced and symbolically reassumed in the legacy left by the last four of the ideological model of the outgoing government in various discourses: both in words, postures and “silences”. Such discourses loaded with a negationist, ahistorical, monocratic and manipulated character, are very close to that “aggressiveness without any modesty” (cf. FT, 44-46) described by Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti.
Finally, such elements allow us to understand that the genetic code of such anti-democratic movements that recently took place in the square of the Three Powers in Brasilia is very similar to that present at the base of so many modern radical terrorist movements, but with a fundamental difference: it is a “white”, “western”, falsely Christian matrix, coated with a superficial varnish composed of a fallacious discourse of alleged freedom of expression and demonstration.
Thus, we see that the problem generated by such a context is not simply found in the discussion between right and left, that is, in the healthy confrontation of ideas. In the face of such a crisis, it is necessary to rediscover the value of politics as that coexistence which goes beyond particular preferences in search of a pact for the common good, as a dialogical path of peace and of true “political charity” (cf. FT, 182) which rehumanises and does not segregate.
Fr. Maikel Dalbem, CSsR
