Editorial : When You Die You Die Alone
There were workers on the top of a building very close to Saint Peter’s square, yesterday. They didn’t seem very concerned about what was going on below them . I guess when you’re fixing a roof about six floors above the street level, you’d better be careful. But the entire rest of the world was certainly focused on that big square yesterday. At twelve o’clock I asked a tourist family with two kids were they were coming from, they said that they had just come to Rome from Venice to see what would happen with the pope.
On Friday afternoon Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said that the pope was not in a coma, that he is still able to speak and undestand and he was lucid and tranquill. But apparently, "As of dawn this morning, the start of a compromised state of consciousness was observed." The first thing the pope said after the celebration of the Friday Mass was directed to the crowd in Saint Peter’s square: "In fact, he seemed to be referring to them when, in his words, and repeated several times, he seemed to have said the following sentence: ‘I have looked for you. Now you have come to me. And I thank you,"’ the vatican spokesman said.
Being in Rome during these days is like being in the same house with millions of people, as they are all talking about the pope’s imminent death. Just turn on a radio, choose a random station and listen...
The Roman “On the Air” community is usually 90 % devoted to soccer, but right now no one even dares to speak about their teams, that would be blasphemy, horrible, they say.
The truth is that there is a “provincial” mindset that is virtually unbeatable and I am very sorry to say that about my city. These “soccer radios” programs are usually meant to last for four-five hours and they are filled with ex-soccer players talking about the same thing again and again, to the point where you know that “the game is not going to be easy”, or, “this team is well prepared”, or an even worse, “I hope that the best team will win”. In about five hours there are of course at least two and a half hours of advertising, always with the same jingles, characterized by a humiliating level of culture. It seems like they are talking with lobotomized people.( I mean no offence for those who are really suffering for this).
This is a good example of what’s happening around the pope’s figure right now, everyone is talking about it, even those who are usually out of touch with his reality. The same “soccer radios” never ever mention what’s happening in Iraq, for example, so that if a bomb explodes in Baghdad killing hundreds of people, they will just, as usual, talk about that player or the other one, that game or that stadium.
I was listening to Ersilio Tonini, a well known Monsignor here in Italy, talking to a national news radio station. The journalist asked how we could pray for John Paul II in his agony and what would be a good prayer to say for him. Tonini took a moment to answer, as he is old and his voice has that tone that only a priest can achieve, almost chanting. I heard this priest saying “This is an astonishing moment” and “ In this marvelous event”, or “ This beautiful moment of connection between the actual world and the holy world”. He was talking in his own religious language in a very distorted way, using these totally inapropiate words and descriptions about the death of a man.
Yes, a man, just like those who are exploding and splattering their organs all around the Middle East, in a daily endless and hopeless war. But they don’t really fit the news today, as they did yesterday. What ‘s “hot” now is this single man suffering to his last breath, and the entire world is there to watch the show. I saw women standing in Saint Peter’s Square dressed as medieval citizens praying and crying for hours (I wonder who they are in the real life), thousand of people staring at the same empty window, children playing in the square completely carefree with their parents chatting and smoking cigarettes, waiting for the condition of Karol Wojtyla. The all scene reminded a medieval execution.
Tonini was the perfect example, in my opinion, of how not to behave in such circumstances. There is nothing “Marvellous” or “Beautiful” or “Astonishing” in what was going on with the Pope. He is dying, period. He is suffering (holy morphine), period. I am as sorry as everyone about his death and his agony, but please let him die in peace.
Fabrizio De Andrè said in a song, “Dear brothers from the other side of the river, we chanted together on the earth, we all loved the same women, we left in a thousand together for the same war, you dont’t have to feel relief by this memory, when you die you die alone”.
Please leave this pope a moment to die alone.
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Il Romanaccio at 3:24 PM
