Rome – This morning, in a half-empty hall on Via della Conciliazione, a Jubilee event took place that was more hyped than attended — and just as disappointing. The audience, made up of a few influencers who actually showed up — many others simply didn’t bother, out of sheer disinterest — listened to a parade of familiar, worn-out faces, clinging to roles whose credibility is as shaky as the chairs they sit on. The result? A tired display of empty rhetoric, so barren and self-referential it made one long for silence.
Pietro Parolin, the puppet master in the shadows
The event opened with His Eminence Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the man of the diplomatic smile and backroom deals. No one embodies the art of clerical ambiguity like he does: affable in public, ruthless behind the scenes. The case of Enzo Bianchi says it all. With the help of Amedeo Cencini — infamous for his pseudo-psychological crusades — Parolin engineered Bianchi’s ousting from Bose to install his protégé, Luciano Manicardi. The smears and defamation spread through friendly media were never substantiated by any official document. The result? Manicardi vanished into irrelevance. Proof, once again, that these “new beginnings” of Church diplomacy often lead straight to oblivion.
Antonio Spadaro, the digital illusionist
Then came Fr. Antonio Spadaro, a master of distortion, who outdid himself recently: he published a fake book cover, presenting an old interview with Cardinal Prevost as new and exclusive. When the truth came out? He asked the publisher to take the blame. Yet he had proudly promoted the cover on social media for weeks. That’s Spadaro’s idea of responsibility: forge, lie, deflect. Behind the operation was another veteran of the ecclesial circus: Alberto Melloni, self-styled historian, compulsive commentator, and irrepressible boomer. His posts on X resemble parish bulletins from the ‘60s, laced with clumsy insults and pseudo-erudition. He always reminds us how learned he is — though his writing reveals the opposite.
Ruffini, captain of the media Titanic
And then Paolo Ruffini. Head of the Dicastery for Communication, which seems more focused on confusion than clarity, concealment rather than truth. Blunders abound, errors are routine, and when a story becomes inconvenient, it’s promptly “reframed” — Ruffini’s favorite euphemism — until it’s unrecognizable. A slow-motion disaster, dressed up in sugary language and pointless, costly projects.
What can they possibly teach?
What’s the point of these self-congratulatory elites addressing influencers, if they have nothing to offer? True influencers should speak about truth, show the world as it is — not as the Church bureaucracy wishes it to be. Enough with storytelling and digital ministries. What’s needed are open eyes, upright spines, and an uncompromising rejection of lies. Because without truth, there is no evangelization. Without credibility, words are just noise.
And today, on the Jubilee stage, that’s all we heard: empty noise. Words that don’t pierce the silence but make it heavier. If the Church wants to speak to the world, it should start by not mocking it — and not mocking itself by putting power-hungry figures like Rodríguez Maradiaga, Nathalie Becquart, or Paolo Ruffini in the front row.
p.R.B.
Silere non possum