It had already happened when the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa from Bergamo, who was also a candidate to become Pope before Robert Prevost emerged from the Americas, the entrance road had been blocked of the Holy Sepulcher by the Israeli authorities. It happened again in the last few hours, after Donald Trump insulted Pope Leo, teaching him how to lead Catholics in the world. In both cases, Giorgia Meloni distanced herself, criticized, told Israel and Trump that this is not done. The first incident occurred at the end of March, while the Prime Minister was still stunned by the referendum defeat and the consequences electoral outcome policies. The second, just yesterday, while Meloni was licking his wounds for the defeat of others, which however was also a bit his, that of his ally Viktor Orbán, and after the strategic and military choices of the father of all European patriots, Donald Trump, brought onto the dance floor in a dance with Netanyahu in which it is difficult to distinguish who is leading who, they are burning the Middle East and bills around the world.

The destruction of Gaza

The two situations are different. Suffice it to say that those who have been following ecclesiastical events closely for a while have been talking for months about a Pizzaballa who was exhausted by the political pressures suffered by the Israeli government, even going so far as to allude to the fact that the Latin Patriarch was no longer welcome, after having harshly criticized, with prudence and a long time of decanting, the destruction of Gaza. He was so tired and exhausted, someone imagines, that knowing full well that they wouldn’t let him enter the Sepulcher that day, he went there anyway to make the case explode in all the corners of the world where there is a Catholic Church: therefore the whole world, excluding North Korea, so that it would be known, from then on, that the State that guards the cradle of Christianity had managed to put in check a High Prelate who, until a few years ago, he had the reputation of being a pro-Zionist, and had studied more Hebrew than Arabic – an absolute rarity for the Catholicism guardian of the Holy Land, more inclined to the cause and language of the Palestinians, if only because the Arabs of Palestine have always, in good numbers, been Catholic.

Do not touch the leaders of the Church

The two situations are precisely different. Robert Prevost, Pope Leo, has long seemed like a Martian, a “non-political” being, with his mathematician’s shyness, his words measured to the millimeter, which certainly discounted the distance compared to his predecessor, to the heavy hand of Bergoglio’s twentieth-century South American. The differences disappear, however, in the somewhat schematic simplification of the Prime Minister’s behavior: Meloni gets everything, but not the leaders of the Catholic Church. You can raze the Gaza Strip to the ground, organize a coup in Venezuela, attempt another in Iran and also gather not exactly luminous figures: in those cases you will discover the subtle art of distinction, of pro-Atlantic real politik, of the calm reflection of those who do not have the elements. All ingredients, moreover, which are not abundant in the history of her political tradition of origin: almost proof that no, she has nothing to do with that rubbish of the twentieth century, and only the uneducated and traditionalists can think that this is not the case. But then, suddenly, if someone bothers and soils the cassocks at the top of the Church, then no, no joke. Cautiously, late, after they have more or less done it, in a single large church that unites several incompatibles, from the president of secularist France to the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, it also arrives. You might think that Giorgia is from Rome, and in short, you don’t touch the Pope to a Roman, a woman, a mother, a Christian and that’s not it, you will not take it away from him.

The Pope is always right

Meloni is rather a politician who feels the ground is falling beneath her feet: overwhelmed by defeat; prostrate by the scandals that plague a government whose staff is suddenly felt to be inadequate, and the staff is known to be political; crucified by a difficult economic situation, on which the choices of our friend Trump weigh like a boulder, beyond the contingent and structural difficulties of our country. And so, while the world becomes hostile and the people seem to turn their backs, what do they do? He’s with the bishop, he’s with the Pope. What is the only reason for abandoning friends who seemed unpresentable to the world, or banally very disadvantageous? that they do an injustice to the Catholic Church. Thinking that in that case yes we can, we must differentiate ourselves from them. Because Italians cannot tolerate insulting the Pope, and an Italian politician must always agree with the Pope.

Here, in this regard, it comes to mind that the most important Italian statesman of the twentieth century, a very solid Catholic like Alcide De Gasperi, openly argued with a Pope, Pius XII. His distance from that Pope, in the Italy of the time, about seventy-five years ago, did not cause such serious shocks, on the contrary: so much so that Christian Democratic hegemony in the decades to come does not need to be demonstrated. The reasons for that argument, between the Pope and De Gasperi, lay in the fact that the politician disdainfully refused to give in to the Vatican pressure who invited him to build an alliance between his DC and the monrachists and neo-fascists. History is sometimes ironic, but irony, as we know, is not for everyone.