2023-05-17 13:07:06
Zuppi and Veltroni in dialogue on hope. Should we resign ourselves to the tyranny of the ego, to the continuous celebration of selfishness and appearance which translates into a sum of solitudes and passive acceptance of things as they are? The president of the CEI, cardinal Matteo Zuppi, and Walter Veltroni, founder of the Democratic Party, writer and director, discussed it in the book ‘Let’s not give up’ (Rizzoli editions)’. In a passionate discussion, the lay observer and the cardinal, who is also archbishop of Bologna, explain the reasons why not surrender to a world that appears increasingly inhumane, but which can be redeemed by our conscious action.
“The world is full of loneliness. – underlines Zuppi -. We have never been so interconnected, yet we have never been so alone, and this is because the networks in which we are immersed are actually weak and individualized. Every day we struggle with the crisis of family relationships, the difficulties in relating to others, the physical loneliness induced by virtual reality and the more ferocious one generated by social media. But we can and should be family for lonely people. Our challenge can and must be to transform the desert of loneliness, of fears, into a forest of relationships”.
Veltroni presses: “We need radical intentions and realism of implementation, because the utopia of a world without prisons is combined with the utopia of a world without the mafia; and to fight the mafia we probably still need the 41bis. At least, this is what everyone who deals with it tells us, and history seems to confirm it”.
The founder of the Democratic Party extends his reflection to the theme of peace: “The same goes for peace. The utopia of peace must be substantiated through each progressive and necessary step. After all, all the conquests we have mentioned were built by covering the road millimeter by millimeter, honoring every little space that opened up. Utopia has a rhythm, it has a score that must be played. Tearing away the score of utopia, imposing it without realism, generally produces a bloodbath. And we saw it when it happened.”
“Sometimes – observes Cardinal Zuppi in the volume – we give up, sometimes we feel we can’t make it and so we end up becoming cynical, too realistic. We settle down so as not to change anymore, indeed precisely so as not to change. We adapt or we destroy ourselves”. The point, says the cardinal, is “to be realistic, but never stop being radical, to think that the world needs to be changed; and for this very reason it is important to learn to measure oneself with one’s own contradictions”.
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