CLOSE-UP
Those
who… are
Only an illusion
Visions at
the Maurizio Costanzo Show. Some weeks ago, on his nightly Italian talk show,
the “High Mass of Tele-nullity,” the Great High Priest Costanzo
took as his theme, “The Sects and the Gurus.” And what did he
do? A very simple and convincing experiment. He had the audience
concentrate on an “abstract” drawing. When the people were
asked to turn away and look at the wall, they all seemed to see the outline
of Jesus. Et voilà! “You can be as unbelieving as you like, but when Jesus
appears from a black and white smudge, you wet yourself,” the Italian
daily newspaper Libero commented in its
columns. Never mind the fact that any two-bit psychologist could explain it
without recourse to the supernatural, but it’s clear what
they’re hinting at: there’s nothing wrong with believing in
Jesus; its an illusion like any other. Pick your own…
The martyrs
of Allah. We could choose a rather more serious illusion. In Carlo Panella’s book,
The Little Martyr Murderers of Allah, we read of a transmission on Palestinian
television. They
interview Wala, a young aspirant suicide-bomber. He says, “Martyrdom
is very, very nice. What could be better than to go to heaven?” And
so far it’s all too familiar. But then Wala adds, “We want to
be children for ever,” adding to the horror a veneer of modernity
that seems borrowed from television, the one in which there is always
someone who has “seen the light” and goes to tell it to
Costanzo. On the other hand, as Jovanotti and Sirya sing to us, “Love
is the light that you have inside you.”
God Without
Christ
“
The first consequence of rationalism can
be summarized in the formula, God without Christ. It’s the denial of
the fact that only through Christ is it possible for God, the Mystery, to
reveal Himself to us for what He
is. God without Christ, or fideism,
characterizes all the positions that, by eliminating the reasonability of
faith, presume to define God as the idolatry of a particular, felt or
inherited from a particular ethnic or cultural tradition, or fixed by
one’s own imagination” (L. Giussani, The Miracle of a Change,
p. 32).