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Antiamericanism and Catholic Pacifism

di Fabrizio Gualco - 29 maggio 2003

The nihilist-says Frossard- is the one who shuts his ears when he hears the word God mentioned. Many Catholics shut their ears when they hear one talk positively about the United States. Softened during the period that followed the collapse of the totalitarian political system and the ideological religion that for many represented communisim, the ingredient of antiamericanism turns forcefully in fashion, not only in the antagonistic left, but also in that part of the Catholic world that expresses one way pacifism.

The historical memory reveals all of its importance, also, and above all, when it lives in the inside of a society that made of mediated communication and the abundance of information one of its fundamental characteristics. The nineteenth century marked the victory of the liberal democratic political form over totalitarianism. The United States, the most antique democracy on the planet, played a fundamental role in that sense.

And yet, above all after the tragedy of September 11, gradually but inevitably the memory of the event seemed deadened by the harvest of opinions related to the same event. We have passed FROM We are all Americans by Ferruccio De Bortoli (it is the title of his article in Corsera of 12-09-2001) to the equalizing of Saddam Hussein and George Bush, more or less the veiled work of many 'organic' intellecuals. With time, in the pages of the newspaper and in the television rooms, we passed FROM the solidarity for the victims of New York to the affirmation that, more or less indirectly, the responsibility of terrorism leads back to the United States, since it and it alone would be, in the last minute, the ones responsible for the world imbalance.

As well evidenced by Massimo Deodori in the pages of his Maledetti Americani (Damned Americans) (Mondadori, Milano 2002), the considerations of Catholic pacifism have the movements of a vision quite schematic of the economic, geopolitical and social reality of the third millenium. The antiamerican motivations indicate a position in which the negative values are predominant and decisive, directly or indirectly centered on the devaluation of the inseparabile binomial of personal freedom and the free market.

From this point of view, the United States incarnates the Spirt of Faust, one that searching for the good provokes always and, in any case, the bad. L'American Way of Life in reality more a stereotype than a concept since a recipe for the American existence does not exist- is judged short-lived and immoral. The American superpower, above all in the subject of foreign politics, is the mother of all injustice. Recently promoted by the Christian family and eloquent in the sense of its aut-aut style- or this or that- tertium non datur- the dry choice between Giovanni Paolo II (a spiritual leader) and George Bush (a political leader) is imposed, seeming to suggest again in the present, a past medioevil matter of Guelphs and Ghibellines.

Sometimes it happens that one finds oneself, in the name of peace, in a war against war. The mind frames grow red hot by the sun of good sense. The wind of passions increases by the intensity; in a frenzy of passion, it excites and makes noise. In the confusion it could happen that really noble beginnings become absolutized, exasperated, interpretated in a way that makes them become dogmatic ideologies. The multicolor banner of peace is contrasted to that of the stars and stripes. In this way the search for peace could assume an uncompromising, unequivocal, reductive tonality: To say no to the war without the necessary outfit of 'ifs and buts' is an expression of a categorical impression that reveals an unbending spirit, and that really disregards that testimony of peace that it would like to give.

One who is aware of the substantial imperfection of all human things- and Christianity teaches this- is the first to not expect more than one can realistically obtain FROM oneself and FROM others. On the other hand, the belief of one's own imperfection and of others is founded on the awareness of the possession, as human beings, of the limits made up of epistemology and the ontological order. This positively encourages the exersize of the vitue of attention, in ORDER to avoid that our judgements do not fall to prejudices, and that our sense of reality maintains itself and gives concrete form to an idea through intelligence and good will, without enveloping it in negative attitudes or, however sterile, attitudes based exclusively on the criticism of reality.

The ideological mentality that a certain antiamericanism expresses, born and raised on prejudices that derive FROM the pretenses that the human being is infinitely perfect like God that has created him, are questionable opinions errected on an unquestionable truth. Prejudices are not born by chance, they grow, strengthened by the taking of a stand decreed FROM the beginning as absolutely real and irremovable. The ideological mentality is a culture of the bias and of the negation of the existent truth. It is like the anticatholic mentality.

The antiamericanism present in the Catholic world is a vehicle for an element that is not catholic. The ideological attitude present in the antiamericanism of the Catholic pacifists is in fact the negation of the actual universality of Catholicism and the perpetual validity of that world vision that Romano Guardini calls christliche-katholische Weltanschauung: the personal capacity to see things to three-hundred and sixty degrees entirely FROM the Catholic view. A look that takes you back to a perspective not partial but global, intent on restoring to the sum of transcendental truth that which establishes and guarantees the inherent partial truth.

Fabrizio Gualco