The Communists the Pope Likes. And Vice-versa

L'Espresso ^ | 10/11/17 | Sandro Magister

[marshmallow]

In recent days a couple of surprising things have happened in Rome. And they are instructive in their way.

The first is the beginning of the collaboration with “Avvenire,” the newspaper of the Italian episcopal conference, of the satirical comics author Sergio Staino, with a Sunday strip entitled “Hello, Jesus!”

Here the surprise lies in the fact that Staino is an unwavering communist, was a “flower child” and a champion of free love, was until a few months ago the director of “L'Unità,” the defunct newspaper of the Italian communist party and then of the parties that succeeded it, and is the honorary president of the UAAR, the Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics.

The absentminded Jesus of his strips still lives in Nazareth with Joseph and Mary, gives his father a hand in the woodshop, but his head is already elsewhere, looking to the time when he will leave to finally become - in Staino’s words - “the first of the socialists, the first to fight for the poor.”

Interviewed in “Avvenire” on the day of his debut, Staino recounted that some time ago, when Pope Francis, during a “long telephone conversation” with Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, was told that back in 1948 Staino’s mother had been denied sacramental absolution for having voted for the communist party, the pope burst out laughing: “Tell the mother of this friend of yours that I will give her that absolution.”

This does not change the fact that his arrival has provoked a deluge of protests. Including that of the newspaper’s editor, in the person of the secretary general of the Italian episcopal conference, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, whose words were reported to the readers of “Avvenire” by the paper’s director, Marco Tarquinio: “I do not agree, because I do not.....

[MtnClimber]

What are the conservative Catholics going to do when the pope is clearly communist?

[reg45]

No real Pope since John Paul II died.