HOW LAW ENFORCES RELIGION (IDIOTICALLY)
July 27, 2022 -Durt Fibo

The practices of one religion are typically abhorrent to another religion, which can lead to bad blood. But frequently any one religion can terrorize itself. Timely proof of this emerged this past Sunday, when a Catholic parish priest in Italy tried to find a cool enough place to hold an outdoor mass and ended up in the official register of suspects and at the mercy of the nearest prosecutor’s office.

The Italian news agency ANSA reports that the priest, Don Mattia Bernasconi, unable to locate sufficient tree-shade (100 Fahrenheit that day) for the young camp members he was shepherding, accepted from sympathetic neighbors a one-man inflatable mattress and used it for an ‘altar’ while he kept everyone fresh in the water. Some of the pious but joyful teenagers uploaded photos and videos of the celebration to the internet. Some pious but joyless coreligionists in turn celebrated with outrage.

The priest is now under investigation for “an offense to religious confession”. Don Mattia has already published apologies and clarified: “It was absolutely not my intention to trivialize [banalizzare -D.F.] the Eucharist or use it for other messages of any kind… it was simply the mass at the end of a week of work.” Giuseppe Capoccia, the chief prosecutor of the city of Crotone, has eagerly told the Italian press (interviewed in “la Repubblica”) that he will be deciding the course of of his case based on a thorough examination of all photos, videos and even articles –in all media– to measure the degree of offense to the Catholic religion. Astutely, the Crotone office has explained: “The prosecutor will go ahead, if there is a crime he will ascertain it.”

The site of the purported self-desecration was Capo Colonna in the province of Crotone, on the broiling southernmost heel of Calabria. The camp was for youth volunteers associated with Libera, established in 1995 as, in their own words: “a network of associations, social cooperatives, movements and groups, schools, unions, dioceses, parishes, and scout groups, involved in a commitment not only against mafias, corruption, crime and those who feed them, but also strongly for social justice, the search for truth, the protection of rights, transparent politics, a democratic legality based on equality.”
Somebody seems to have missed the boat –or materassino gonfiabile, to use the legal term.