An Easter of war is already an oxymoron in itself, moreover not the first and, I fear, not the last, in which the doves of peace are shot down in skies crowded with missiles, drones, bombers, fighters, and other deadly contraptions. But this has been, and is, a special Easter of war, in which it fell to an American Pope, the first in history, even after Francis who came from America yes but from the south, to invoke God to take Him away from a fellow countryman who in the White House and surroundings, Donald Trump, had somehow appropriated Him by proclaiming to have been inspired by Him in the search for new global or local balances, keeping old wars open, which he had proposed to close, and opening new ones.
Far from being anointed, protected, or anything else, almost as an equal in an omnipotent vision of his strength and role, capable of sending the current enemy back to the “Stone Age,” or sending him to “Hell,” which Pope Francis had too generously closed by even talking about it on television. God – warned Leo XIV, Prevost by birth American – will ultimately have to answer even Trump, like all others who wage war, sometimes thinking to prevent worse ones, in a race of deaths and ruins.
Who knows if Trump heard the Pope speaking from St. Peter’s, in Rome. Who knows if someone translated it into English for him, or rather into American, since Prevost had spoken and habitually speaks in Italian since he rose to the top of the Church. While Trump, I fear, knows only the plural of Giuseppe in Italian, reserved already in his first term for the then Prime Minister Conte transitioning from a yellow-green majority to a yellow-red one. And who knows, after the translation into American, what he might have said and thought about his fellow countryman in pontifical vestments. Let’s hope he doesn’t get the idea to shout it to the four winds, on a lawn or in a cockpit, which he often prefers, at high altitude, to keep his listeners breathless. And even insult him, if he dares to dissent.
Also the Italian one, on the political ground, has been and still is, despite having also had Easter Monday, a particular Easter, spirited rather than mild, peaceful. The winners of the referendum “no” to the reform of the judiciary and the government that promoted it, with the special parliamentary procedures prescribed by the Constitution, have not yet shaken off the “euphoria” that also annoyed Goffredo Bettini, who switched from yes to no to contribute to the result now celebrated too much. The defeated are licking their wounds, each in their own way, and bet on the revival of the center-right precisely on the mistakes of their opponents. Who still do not have a common program – and who knows if they will ever manage to have one, bulky or not like those of Romano Prodi in the days of the Olive Tree and the Union – and much less a common leadership. To define which Conte has demanded primaries after having snubbed them, evidently confident of prevailing over the PD secretary, albeit “stubbornly united,” Elly Schlein. Who, for her part, besides Conte, and perhaps even more, must also be seen from her party, where many, secretly, do not forgive her for having arrived where she is with primaries open to outsiders, let’s call them that.
