“There are Christians who seem to have a Lent without Easter”, Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii Gaudium.
In recent days, the Italian actor Roberto Benigni was received by the Holy Father Leo XIV, and on television he was a guest in order to speak about the figure of Saint Peter. This event triggered a series of reactions which, as usual, were amplified by social media. Many - especially among those who call themselves “practicing Catholics” - did not respond with grateful astonishment before an objective fact: a popular artist, with an enormous audience, speaks about faith without embarrassment, with passion, bringing the Apostle Peter to the center of the public scene. Instead of recognizing an opening - small or large, but real - we saw the old temptation spring to life: measurement. Other people’s faith is weighed; intentions and biographies are sifted; grace is audited: “how authentic is he?”, “how consistent is he?”, “which side is he on?”, “is he one of us?”. Here what is at stake is not serious discernment; what is at stake is religious jealousy, spiritual envy, the inability to rejoice when good happens elsewhere and perhaps through paths we do not control.
Let it be clear: the Christian must not be naïve: “Do not quench the Spirit… test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:19–21). Discernment must be done, and it is a duty. But discernment is an act of charity and truth; envy is an act of defense of one’s religious ego. Discernment seeks what builds up; envy seeks what tears down.
The Gospel, moreover, does not spare us: this dynamic is as old as discipleship. The disciples themselves fall into possessive jealousy when they try to stop someone who is doing good “because he was not following us” (Mark 9:38–40). It is not zeal for Christ: it is a need for exclusivity. And the scene repeats itself in different forms: the “righteous” who grumble because Jesus eats with sinners (Luke 5:29–32); the respectable crowd that whispers in scandal when he enters the house of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10); the refined indignation of Simon the Pharisee before the woman who weeps and loves (Luke 7:36–50). In each case, mercy is read as an injustice, and grace as an affront.
The parable that pins down this mechanism is that of the merciful Father: the elder son remains outside, unable to enter the feast (Luke 15:25–32). He is a man “in good standing,” but without joy. He cannot bear that the other’s good - the return, the life found again - becomes a reason for music. And here the Gospel is mercilessly realistic: one can be close to the house and far from the heart. Saint Augustine, reading that page, shows how easy it is to turn “fidelity” into resentment, when mercy no longer passes through me but surpasses me.
The same exposed nerve emerges in the parable of the workers in the vineyard: justice becomes rancor when it takes the form of comparison (“I worked more, therefore I am worth more”). And the master unmasks envy with a question that burns: if I am good, why are you saddened? (Matthew 20:1–16). It is the logic of the little scale: measuring others so as not to have to look at one’s own interior poverty.
Saint Thomas Aquinas calls things by their name: envy is “sadness at another’s good,” when another’s good is perceived as a diminution of one’s own. It is not a “noisy” sin; it is a silent poison. And the Catechism is just as clear: the tenth commandment requires that envy be banished from the heart, because it can lead to the worst misdeeds; it even recalls the cutting word of Wisdom: “through the devil’s envy death entered the world” (Wisdom 2:24).
When this sadness takes up residence in ecclesial life, something paradoxical happens: precisely those who should safeguard the joy of salvation become generators of suspicion. This is where Scripture becomes very concrete. Saint James links jealousy and a contentious spirit to disorder and evil deeds (James 3:14–16). Saint Paul places it in the catalogue of works that deform communal life (Galatians 5:19–26). And at the same time he defines the opposite criterion with a phrase that should be a daily examination of conscience for those who write, comment, judge: “love is not envious” (1 Corinthians 13:4–7).
There is then a collateral effect that we often do not consider: religious envy becomes scandal, that is, a stumbling block. The Gospel is drastic with those who place obstacles before the little ones (Matthew 18:6–7). And Paul asks for adult responsibility: do not put a stumbling block before a brother (Romans 14:13), seek what leads to peace (Romans 14:19). Here the issue is not “defending the institution” or “saving the image”; it is not turning Christianity into a barrier precisely when someone is trying to draw near.
Pope Francis described very well the pathology that arises when faith loses joy: Christians who seem to live a Lent without Easter. And in Gaudete et exsultate he recalls the corrosive dynamic of a world of gossip and demolitions, where criticizing and destroying becomes almost a satisfaction: it is not beatitude, it is enmity toward peace. If this logic enters ecclesial life, it does not remain only a bad communicative habit: it becomes a way of standing before another’s grace with the blunted weapons of sarcasm and insinuation.
And we see this modus agendi every day: people who set themselves up as judges without any moral or intellectual credibility. There are those who pontificate about alleged “departures” of others, while their own story is marked by expulsions, exclusions, and exiles; those who brandish the weapon of suspicion and delegitimization, even though they have neither authority nor credibility; those who build for themselves titles, roles, and licenses of orthodoxy and then use them to hurl invectives against those who, in their view, would be “less Catholic” than they are. It is a recognizable dynamic: it is not discernment, it is retaliation. And in this climate, even Benigni easily ends up in the crosshairs of those who need a target in order to live. “He has more followers than I do,” “too many people follow him,” “too many young people attend his school of community,” “he has more news than I have,” etc… The reasons can be countless: when you live with an inner unease, what others do becomes for you a cause of anxiety.
And yet, someone is not clear that faith is not a patent, nor a performance. It is not born from willpower, nor from moral superiority. Faith is a gift. Paul writes it with no margin for doubt: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8–9). Jesus says it in even more radical terms: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father” (John 6:44). And John places the key in prevenient love: it is not we who love first; we love because we have been loved first (1 John 4:10, 19). Even our “willing” is put into perspective: it is God who works in us both to will and to act (Philippians 2:13).
If faith is a gift, then the good that happens in the other is not a threat to my identity: it is a reason for gratitude. This is where the parables of mercy become a thermometer: in heaven there is more joy over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:7, 10). If I cannot rejoice in what makes heaven rejoice, perhaps I am not doing discernment: perhaps I am defending a version of myself. And here Benedict XVI offers a decisive passage: prayer as a “school of hope” is also a place of purification of intentions. In prayer, he writes, man must learn that he cannot pray against the other; he must purify desires and hopes. It is a flash of light: religious envy, even before social media or comments, is healed on one’s knees, because there the pretense of innocence falls and the root becomes visible—the sadness at another’s good that we do not want to confess even to ourselves.
For this reason, returning to Benigni and his show: the criterion is not to canonize an artist, nor to seal off a broadcast as if it were an act of magisterium. The criterion is more humble and more evangelical: to recognize that God can open passages where we see only “categories.” That he can draw hearts through side roads. That he can awaken questions even from an evening on television. And that the Christian’s task is not to guard the threshold with distrust, but to accompany the possibility of a question with the charity that does not envy.
The elder son was not an atheist: he was a believer without a feast. The parable does not say that he was wrong about everything; it says that he missed the most Christian thing: joy. The Gospel does not ask us to extinguish reason; it asks us to extinguish resentment. And to make room for this truth, which saves us too: faith is not a possession to defend, but a gift to receive—and, when we see it happening in another, to celebrate.
fr.S.R.
Silere non possum