In recent times, there has been a noticeable increase, including on social media, in those who speak about faith following what they themselves describe as a “strong conversion”. Conversions which, however, often lack the transparency of the Gospel and the patience of the journey: they emerge from a complex personal background, at times unresolved, and not infrequently are exhausted without any serious work of inner clarification. There is no recourse to competent support to work through wounds, knots, and fragilities; instead, there is an impulse that ends up pouring itself into religion with the same logic by which one might throw oneself into political militancy: totalising adherence, identity-based belonging, the need for taking sides.
I have always been wary of those who live faith as a flag to be displayed. I am not among those who argue that faith should be a private matter, to be hidden; but neither do I accept that it should be wielded against others, turned into a rhetorical weapon with which to measure, judge, and disqualify. The Gospel calls for closeness, not trenches; it asks us to become companions on the road, not sentries armed with slogans.
And indeed, almost invariably, these “communicators” – who even go so far as to deliver sermons to priests – choose topics that, on a social level, guarantee visibility and consensus: homosexuality, rights, family, women, and so on. Their positions, unsurprisingly, are what they are: clear-cut, simplified, calibrated to spark reactions rather than to enlighten consciences. The mechanism recalls that of certain politicians who appear on social media at Christmas and do not hesitate to instrumentalise even the Christ Child in order to gather support. What is striking, rather, is that there are still Catholics unable to grasp the obvious: for these people, more often than not, nothing matters except themselvesand their own seat.
The paradox is that they are often the chief promoters of theories they do not embody. They voice homophobic claims, behind which lies a repressed homosexuality, unacknowledged and converted into aggressiveness. They wave the banner of the “traditional family” while living broken stories, lacerated relationships, arrangements that are anything but reconciled. They speak about women and then reproduce the same old paternalistic rhetoric, maintaining that women “must be protected by men”, as though they were fragile objects to be guarded, property to be defended, rather than free persons to be respected. And so on. In the name of God, principles are proclaimed that never become flesh; this is why they are shouted: because they do not inhabit life and instead seek to dominate it.
The phenomenon is immediately recognisable: the convert who, instead of entering into communion, builds a trench. He speaks of “defence of the faith”, yet the language and tone resemble a permanent conflict: every interlocutor becomes an adversary, every difference a threat, every question an insinuation. It is a way of living Christianity that produces adrenaline and identity, but over time corrodes the person and poisons the Church. This is evident from the very grammar of the content: “reaction to…”, “So-and-so said, but I say to you…”, “against…”. Without someone to attack, many of these profiles would not exist. The enemy is not an accident; it becomes the condition for existence, even on social media.
Fr. Luigi Giussani warned against a subtle and dangerous drift: the word “reasoning” can slide into becoming “dialectic in the service of an ideology”. It is the sign of an age in which, rather than “learning from reality”, there is a claim to “manipulate reality according to the coherences of a scheme fabricated by the intellect”. In essence, the “little taliban” stops listening to existence and turns it into a terrain of conflict, useful only for confirming a mental grid already in place. In this way, faith loses the quality of encounter and is reduced to a procedure for identifying the enemy: what confirms is selected, what disturbs is expelled, what contradicts is censored. Giussani also explained that Christian maturity proceeds by a concrete method, not by polemical escalation. “It is not abstract reasoning that makes one grow… but finding in humanity a moment of truth attained and spoken,” he wrote, indicating “the experience of the encounter with his humanity” as the path that leads to recognising Christ. When a convert lives off disputes, faith remains stuck at an immature stage: it produces rapid judgements, but it does not produce a truer self. And when the self does not grow, hardness grows: it is the sign that one is not truly “clinging to Christ”, but to a system of protections.
In Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger observed that believing and understanding belong together “if [faith] is not to be degraded into fanaticism or sectarianism”. Ratzinger knew that fanaticism does not coincide with a temperament: it arises when faith detaches itself from the intelligence of reality and from the patience of understanding. When faith ceases to understand, it compensates with aggressiveness; when it cannot withstand engagement with complexity, it seeks salvation in violent simplification. At that point, witness disguises itself as crusade, truth becomes a club, and conversion an identity to be defended.
M.P.
Silere non possum