Delpini’s unforgettable lesson on pettiness of petty moralism

Mario Delpini, archbishop of Milan, has large, vast hands, a timbre of voice and body language of a great parish priest who will not make an eminent curial career, will not have the purple, the subtleties of the Consistory and the manners of cardinals are not for him, his Church smacks of Manzonian flour more than religious ideology. I met him some time ago in Milan and he made a good impression on me. Completely confirmed by the homily in front of Silvio Berlusconi’s coffin in the Cathedral. I was hoping for one happy ending Hollywood for my beloved statesman and stand-up comedian, and I wrote about him over and over confident that beatification was inscribed in his personal destiny. I never doubted it, not even when they convicted him of tax fraud, a laughable pretext of petty injustice, and sent him to assist the old men of Cesano Boscone. Not even when stalked, eavesdropped, recklessly investigated for an attack on the common sense of decency, did he have to resort to that stupendous, truly immortal fiction of Mubarak’s niece, to rescue from the clutches of vice a little friend of his who was compromised or trapped by her lap dance relationship with a a statesman and affected, according to the torquemadesco magistrate, by Levantine cunning. Not even when they ignominiously kicked him out of the Senate to which he will return to the bosom of a political majority he created many years ago, and he was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver by so many spectators at his funeral. But Delpini’s words go far beyond the wisdom of the Church which knows sins and mercy.