Dear Don Stefano, it’s a good thing Umberto Bossi a month before dying he had an hour of conversation/confession with a priest, as Francesco Anfossi told us on the site.
We thank the Lord, always merciful to all of us. But we can’t help but talk about the oceans of hate that Bossi has poured into his career. With his friends from Varese – includingthe Maroni, Lions etc. – they lashed out first against the “southerners” and then against the migrants to find for themselves and their friends a luxury job in Parliament, in regional councils, in local authorities, in municipal companies, in banks, etc.
It has brought out the worst in the human soul, making us forget the basics of civil and Christian life. He cleared racial hatred by talking about ethnic replacement in the North by the South, issued proclamations of secession, he threatened the civil war. It has stimulated rudeness and vulgarity of language in institutions. After having proclaimed Rome a “thief”, they turned to normalized theft. Always demonstrating intolerance towards the State and the rules that regulate it, only to then become part of it anyway with opportunism and hypocrisy.
And what about the 49 million euros unduly stolen and not yet returned to the State which has always been very benign towards the League? And what about the dozens of road and motorway blockades that Lumbard farmers organized in the long war over milk quotas and, more recently, over unpaid but scrapped tax bills? And what about the scandal of BelieveNorth?
COSIMO URSO
Dear Cosimo, certainly one cannot attribute to Famiglia Cristiana a particular indulgence towards the League, to which we have dedicated numerous investigations, articles, comments and reports since its foundation.
I would say, in fact, that we were certainly not indulgent with him following the many evolutions of the movement, its protagonists starting with Bossi himself, his Pontida, the anti-Southernism, the hostility to immigrants, the secessionist egoism, the alternating current anticlericalism, the financial troubles and the investigations surrounding the party (starting with the infamous 49 million who disappeared), its syncretisms and religious paganisms, the cruets, the god Po and so on.
However, it is our duty – as reporters, Christians and men – not to silence a clear fact which was confirmed to us by Don Cesare Zuccato, the parish priest of Luino (Varese) who confessed it shortly before his death and who our Anfossi interviewed: in the last period of his life Umberto Bossi returned to the faith, he regularly went to Mass and it is presumable (and, as a Christian and a priest, I say: also hoped) that he died in the grace of God. It was news, also considering his past, and it is a comfort for him as for anyone who falls asleep in the hope of eternal life. And it is also a reason for reflection for many who believed in his clumsy paganism, restoring the Po to its true nature, which is that of a river and not of a “Celtic god”, and in other such nonsense.
The news of that hour of conversation and confession now on the threshold of death must therefore invite us to respectful silence and gratitude. Every return to God is a mystery of grace that is not up to us to measure. The mercy of the Lord is not the reward of the righteous, but the refuge of sinners: for this reason the Church never stops hoping for anyone.
But this same hope, as I was saying, cannot exempt us from a judgment on history. The public affair of Umberto Bossi has had a profound impact on the civil and cultural fabric of the country. It cannot be denied that, in decisive seasons, words and gestures have contributed to spreading harsh oppositions, to legitimizing divisive languages, to sowing distrust towards those who are different, first towards southerners, then towards migrants. Politics, when it renounces protecting the dignity of others, becomes a school of collective miseducation. And wounds remain from this, still calling for reconciliation.
Then there are dark pages, which belong not only to a person but to a system: judicial events, questionable management of money and power, contradictions between a thousand proclamations and behaviors. Here too it is not a question of abusing a man who has finished his journey, but of recognizing that the evil done – personal or structural – has real consequences and calls for truth, justice and, as far as possible, reparation.
And yet, if we stopped at this, we would betray the Christian gaze. The temptation is always to reduce a life to a definitive sentence: either acquittal without memory, or condemnation without appeal. The Gospel instead asks us to keep two needs together: clarity on evil and trust in the possibility of good. Even a history marked by serious errors is not deprived of the freedom of a final act, of sincere repentance, of an abandonment to mercy.
Perhaps, rather than judging a man’s conscience, this story questions ours. It asks us what language we inhabit, what fears we fuel, what divisions we tolerate or even encourage. It reminds us that hate does not arise suddenly: it grows when it finds fertile ground in indifference, in convenience, in silence. And he invites us to be vigilant because politics returns to being service, pursuit of the common good, exercise of responsibility. In the end, before God, everyone stands with their own truth and their own poverty.
If indeed, as we were told, there was a moment of reconciliation, then we can only entrust Bossi too to the infinite mercy of the Father. And together ask for us, for the Church and for the country, the gift of an honest memory and a heart capable of conversion. This is, ultimately, the Christian sense of judgment: not to erase evil but never to let it have the last word.
