The Witnesses

Uprooted: Dialogues on the Liquid Church

By Aldo Maria Valli and Aurelio Porfiri

Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino

Chorabooks, Hong Kong, 2019

To comprehend the great events and trends of our time do we not turn first to the witnesses, even the direct participants,  for the most immediate and elemental insights? Didn’t Whittaker Chambers’s Witness and the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn bring about a long term change in the world’s understanding of communism –  regardless of what the American establishment and the European intelligentsia had been pontificating? The same holds true for the Church of today.

Witnesses of what is going on in the Church whose testimony I value have come from many perspectives and schools of thought. The witness of Catholic novelists (e.g., Alice Thomas Ellis, Martin Mosebach) has proven over the years to be particularly valuable. Then, we have the testimony of the “conservatives,” politically right-wing yet stalwart defenders of the Catholic establishment until confronted by developments that could no longer be swept under the rug (Mgr. George Kelly in the 1970’s, Philip Lawler and many others in the age of Bergoglio).  There are even those who started out in the camp of Catholic progressivism and moved to Traditionalism (Malachi Martin).  We have the “searchers,” the outrageous, the atheists and even the dedicated enemies of the Church who nevertheless offer important insights ( M. Houellebecq, M. Onfray, O.Fallaci, F. Martel).

Finally we encounter in Uprooted Aldo Maria Valli – a Catholic journalist, (born 1958) – and Aurelio Porfiri, a writer and musician (born 1968), cradle Catholics who have recently emerged from the heart of mainstream Italian Catholicism. For years they were closely associated with the ecclesiastical establishment.  Aldo Valli worked as a journalist for Avvenire, the mouthpiece of the Italian episcopal conference, and even was on close terms with Cardinal Martini, archbishop of Milan, the patron saint of Catholic progressivism. Aurelio Porfiri performed widely as a church musician. This slim book is a dialogue between them on the state of the Church and how they came to their current views of it.

Now for the not totally insignificant minority of Italian Catholics who still practice their faith, loyalty to the Papacy was and is of preeminent importance. Each Catholic country has, after all, its own personality. In complete contrast to France or Germany , but like pre-1988 United States Catholicism, being a Catholic in Italy was synonymous with loyalty to the pope, the hierarchy and the establishment. For until recently, the controversies among Catholics on the right over liturgy, pro-life witness and the state of the Church made no impression in Italy except for a tiny elite (Count Neri Capponi, Augusto del Noce). Only the far left of the Church could speak out loudly and distinctly. Both Valli and Porfiri speak emotionally of  the cult of the papacy and of the prior individual popes they had known who had meant so much to them even in their private lives.

Under Bergoglio, this state of mind ended. Indeed, Valli speaks of a “conversion,”  of the falling of a “veil” that had obscured his vision. In the case of Valli, reflections on Amoris Laetitia led to a sudden break with the ultramontane culture. Porfiri,  a church musician, had had a more gradual development of his views based on what he saw and heard week after week. Once he had the experience of a choir singing more traditional church music and asked himself: “Why has this music been forbidden to us”?  In both cases, our authors  suddenly realized that within the one institution of the “Church” there were in fact two entities: one modernist, the other still Christian. This insight led them to a re-evaluate their understanding of a whole series of topics.  Their exchange of ideas makes up the bulk of Uprooted. Let me quote from it!

The first topic they have to address is the ultramontane papacy. “The reigning popalatry was largely born with Pope John XXIII.” (From the opening of the Second Vatican Council) “the Pope was no longer simply head of the Catholic Church but a media personality whom the mass media bent to the logic of emotions and entertainment.” (With Pope John Paul II) ”…we had a pope who was praised more and more in his personality and less and less followed in his faith.” “…the consequences are devastating. Emotion prevails over reason, images over words…the World Youth Days were the triumph of this sort of narration. And yet while all this was happening, the churches were emptying, the faithful were falling prey to relativism imposed by the prevailing culture, traditions were being abandoned….” Then there is the cult of obedience associated with ultramontane papalism. “The insane papism we are witnessing in our days is the child of ignorance and manipulation.” (The cult of blind obedience) “means there is an absolute identification between the faith and the institutional church, which instead is meant to be at the service of faith.”

The liturgy? Aldo Valli speaks of  the innumerable “sloppy liturgies” with their “sentimental songs and music, liturgical abuses, exaggerations, excessive focus on the celebrant’s personality, misinformed laity, a lack of respect towards Our Lord, the absence of a sense of the sacred, contempt for silence, no reverence and all getting progressively worse over the last few years.” All features almost universal in the liturgical life specifically of the Italian Catholic Church! “In the course of a few decades we Catholics have allowed ourselves to be despoiled of a spiritual, religious and liturgical inheritance which was guarded and handed down for centuries and centuries.”

On the Church today: “Sometimes, even often, I no longer feel at ease in the Church, I feel like I am out of place and frequenting Catholic circles does me no good. I feel uprooted. …I understand that if you want to be accepted…you must uncritically embrace the narrative of a Church that is now liquid, as Vittorio Messori has said. But I don’t feel this way, it is not for me, I prefer a self-imposed exile living at the margins of official Catholicism, where what is exalted is charismatic and. Pentecostal religiosity, emotionalistic in the extreme, and clearly coming from a Protestant background. This is not the Church in which I feel my faith grows and becomes stronger.” Do I need to mention that both authors have paid a steep professional price for the positions they have taken? For the “Church of Mercy” is unforgiving!

Regarding clerical sexual abuse: “many maintain it is a question of discipline, when in fact it is a question of faith!”  “[O]nly if I believe in God who became man and died and rose for me, for the forgiveness of my sins, can I live in the light of divine law.” Both authors have very strong words about the current state of the Catholic clergy – both their lack of faith and their lack of knowledge –  and the terrible responsibility of these priests for the disastrous situation in which the Church finds itself.

An interesting chapter deals with homosexuality in the clergy and  the famous “gay lobby.” The authors perceive its influence in the recent “Synod on Young People” and in “a certain type of religious sentimentalism, deprived of virility and extremely feminized.” “Responsibility for this must be identified at different levels, from seminaries up to the highest levels of the Roman Curia.” Here the thoughts of our authors seem to confirm what Frederic Martel describes in his In the Closet of the Vatican – obviously from an entirely different perspective! 

There is so much more! Almost every sentence of this short book seemed to me a succinct summary of a feeling or an impression most of us have undoubtedly experienced. As I have noted, our authors have paid personally for “daring to name these things with a raised voice.” And they confess they are unable to offer any immediate solution for the Church. They do have a chapter on the positive role of social media –  indeed,  in the last ten years, Traditional Catholic Italian sites have achieved worldwide prominence.  But nevertheless Valli and Porfiri have to ask themselves the stark question: “Will we die as Catholics”? But, by telling the truth, by becoming witnesses, have they not gone far in laying the foundation for recovery at some time in the future in some way unknown to us?   For is not truth the prerequisite, the indispensable foundation,  for  everything else?