The article by Prof. Antonio G. Fidalgo CSsR, published on the Blog of the Accademia Alfonsiana
We accept, as some like to do, that the great enemy of faith and humanity is the devil. Well, in our opinion, this enemy, not at all invisible, very present at all levels of human existence, is always masked and dressed in various clothes. We would now like to focus on one in particular, perhaps the most common, the one that fits him best, the one with which he subverts all possible human clothes, to the point of using it to support his greatest impostures.
Unmasking the devil means looking for the presence of every type of Manichean dualism that subverts human realities. There are human choices that, burdened by this diabolical choice, continue to divide, oppose, and tear apart our human existence.
A seductive temptation of this way of going through history is to make most people disinterested in various ways in political events, and not only in formal and active politics. Disinterest in the choices and ways in which our personal and social life is organized is its greatest victory.
Seen from a theological perspective, it can be dramatic that politics and politicians deal with questions of faith and theology, and that theology continues to believe that questions of faith and theology have nothing to do with the whole of political reality, but only in a derivative way. In fact, its main object would be God as such and his clear and distinct doctrinal derivatives, and everything else would in principle be only consequences derived from high-sounding theological principles, elaborated with a universal and absolute character, valid for everyone and in every time and place. Yes, this is a great demonic victory, which has always tempted and subverted the sense of religion and in particular the sense of the Christian faith embodied in history.
We are not referring only to the so-called political theology or theology of the political, which was undoubtedly a significant contribution at the time. We mean rather that political reality had to be not only the starting point but also the horizon of understanding within which human reality should be assumed and compared and, therefore, theology could not develop outside of this horizon, having to consider in a principal and transversal way the political events and events, general and particular, within which human history develops, for better or for worse.
As in the case of some scientific works, theology itself could not fall into the trap of carrying out its task only by describing and analyzing history as a simple becoming in which certain discoveries and actions occur that enrich or impoverish knowledge, without also and first of all understanding the real transformations of human understanding and its concrete declinations, through concrete political actions (here we include politics in the broad sense and its socio-cultural and economic extensions).
In this sense, a constant (pre)occupation should be to unmask all the relations of political power that control, oppress, and repress the social body. And from there, to be interested in how to collaborate in an inter and transdisciplinary way to bring about a complex and collective transformation of the practices and rules of understanding and concretizing the sociopolitical options and adoptions of human beings in their respective local and global contexts.
In our academic context, one would expect this service to be exercised in a peculiar way in and by social morality, but not only that. All disciplines should take on this imprint, so as not to be seduced by the dualistic demon that continues to separate, directly or very subtly, faith and life, faith, and commitment in history.
At every moment of our history, we must learn and take on the hard and fascinating task of walking with creative fidelity, seeking new horizons of understanding and new alternatives for human fulfillment. The Christian faith, starting from its incarnational and liberating inspiration, takes on this challenge as central.
This is why no academic environment, which boasts of being such and which wants to be at the service of a constant humanization, can abandon and/or renounce to follow the path of creative research, developing through personal and collective creative work, through creative investigation, allowing a free creation to emerge without the arbitrary limitations of any type of coercive institutionalization. Only in this way, in fact, can an educational institution create a dignified space from which to maximize the possibilities of realizing this fundamental human characteristic. This means, moreover and above all, facing the constant overcoming of every type of destructive, oppressive, repressive and coercive element that in a thousand ways, as a historical residue of a humanity that cannot fully spread its wings of real dignity and freedom, continues to operate as part of the diabolical Manichean action.
In this line, perhaps the first thing to assume is that nowhere in our world today exists a real democracy as such, not even in those countries that claim to present themselves as the best democratic countries, because even reaching more or less levels of democratic concreteness with a certain plausibility, at the same time humanity in one way or another remains imprisoned, dualistically tense, denigrated by excess or by defect, between excesses of poverty and excesses of wealth, and many other contradictions. Justice remains imprisoned in the lie of various injustices, so the truth of our humanity remains imprisoned in diabolical schemes, structures, and systems.
Without wanting to enter into a detailed analysis to better exemplify what has been said, we will only point out a phenomenon that should make us reflect.
When people (including believers) limit themselves to following certain political or religious leaders, it is already worrying. Because the need for leadership, not of the kind that in our language we would call pastoral, but rather command in action, as an impulse to give one’s life for the proclamations of leaders and their ideologizations, is doubly worrying. As a brief premise, let us say that, according to the logic of Jesus and his kingdom, no party option will ever be the immediate realization of this logic, even if it can come very close. This does not relativize political commitment, but it situates it and does not make it absolute, which is already a lot. We will have to know how and to what extent to get our hands dirty, because remaining with clean hands would not only be inauthentic, but also anti-Christian and much more complicit than any other position .
That being the case, if one considers the phenomenon that is taking place in some Western “democracies”, where some (far) right political ideas or groups are winning at the polls, one should be concerned not so much with the fact itself, which could belong to the necessary political game of options exchanges, but rather with the attitudes of imposition on human beings and their free choices and life options. It is true that these elements have not always been sufficiently guaranteed by the so-called left and/or similar. Often there have been more speeches than reality, and it is largely this that triggers dualistic oppositions every time.
In this sense, the issue of a victory like Trump’s is significant and representative of many similar options to come, which will now feel even stronger. Beyond the political validity and many other possible positive elements, it is urgent to highlight the issues that are not only not received in a more complete and serene way, but are also repeatedly manipulated, contradicted, ideologized and put at risk of being overturned. To name just a few: fundamental human rights, in which people and their dignity must have priority over all political and economic systems, the reality of migrants, questions of sexual and gender identity, the exercise of power over natural “resources” (goods) and “resistance” to global environmental policies and integral socio-cultural changes in lifestyles, the continued exploitation of the poorest countries for the benefit of the so-called first world or industrialized countries, and so on. In this way, the necessary overcoming of every type of colonialism, patriarchalism and supremacy of economic, information and armed power seems to be abandoned – if not even denied.
Furthermore, we continue to give life to figures who, while championing the classical values of a certain Christian-Western imposition, are nevertheless ambiguous if not contradictory characters, from their personal life choices to their very ways of claiming to “defend” the serious side of life, presumably threatened if not ruined by their adversaries or dissidents.
The devil continues to win because by radicalizing the extremes, in a Manichean way, divide and conquer, whoever wins has the power and the reason, everything else does not count, it is simply a mistake to overcome and leave behind, without further delay. We do not learn from history, and we do not seek more harmonious integrations while respecting differences and divergences. The devil has won once again by conquering consciences with his luxuries and his promises of paradigms of progress and individual meritocracy, declined under the guise of machismo and patriarchalism (unfortunately assumed by both men and women, and many of them are young; this should make us question ourselves). We do not want plurality and diversity, but only the oligarchy of a certain power declined as self-security and self-protection. The devil has won if neoliberal policies continue to spread that propose the sacrifice of the logic of collective solidarity in the name of competition between people and the free market, marked by highly unequal and unbalanced competitiveness.
In a vision inspired by the practice of Jesus, it is necessary to remember that, although the devil and all his evils have been defeated, and therefore will never have the last word, in this story the battle to give primordial space to the wisdom of fraternal/sororal/solidarity coexistence is and will always be a passionate challenge. The defeated devil does not resign himself to last place in the course of history; for this reason, he always finds worshippers willing to serve him by trying to impose his unhealthy paradigms.
Everything passes and everything remains, but this is a passing of ours – says a poet – a civil year passes, a liturgical year, things happen, pains and joys, failures and successes, magnificent discoveries and disastrous choices, and so we make our way little by little, wanting to learn, wanting to retrace our steps and better direct our hope, to find and/or make something grow for which it is worth continuing to be human in this story.
When what happens and what remains are dark horizons, stubborn choices that hurt us so much, finding reasons to continue hoping, not only in another possible world, but simply that every morning it is worth continuing to walk, it becomes more difficult. But, starting from the human-Christian faith, here we are, and we continue to walk. Because Jesus taught us to have another look, one that, in the small and almost insignificant details, finds messages of high revelation and inspiration. Because, even if everything happens and everything happens, life as a gift is there, begun forever, its strength, in one way or another, requires our commitment, our care and our openness to receive it again.
Jesus made himself a permanent offering of new life, so that with him and from him we can generate new life, lifting ourselves from the dust, lighting lights from fallen darkness, making the wisdom of our history shine, bringing out actions of humanizing justice. May his words and his gestures always be that treasure that is not lost, that does not go out of fashion, that we never leave aside for other inspirations, even if good and necessary; and that we must equally know how to integrate so as not to subtract wisdom, so as not to lose ourselves and self-destruct personally and globally. It is not only or mainly a question of calculations, however necessary; it is, once again, a question of openness and generosity, of adventure and tenacity, of generating what is missing rather than complaining about what is lost before losing everything.
