Zuppi, the queer cardinal

."You have to understand what “queer” means in my opinion. A person whose name was Michela and whose surname was Murgia explained it to me. She told me about the children she had, with whom she had no blood relationship. She married a man because she loved him and so that she could continue to have that bond with these children. I think we should all learn this, that a bond can exist without there necessarily being a legal implication. The point is to love each other'. The person speaking whose name is Matteo and whose surname is Zuppi, is the Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and President of the Italian Episcopal Conference.

Speaking at the Giffoni Film festival (film festival for children and youth), currently in progress, the Cardinal demonstrated new aspects of his well-known doctrinal approximations. That the important thing is to ‘love each other’ is an assertion that is now a cliche and finds consensus in every corner of the planet: it is enough to give no content to the expression and let everyone fill it with the content they like best: from the woman who aborts a child with malformations to avoid it suffering in life, to those who helps others to die freely and painlessly, to the paedophile who has a ‘consensual’ relationship with a minor.

Now, Zuppi explains that even the ‘queer family’ is nothing other than one of these variants of ‘loving each other’ and he came to this knowledge thanks to the well-known perfectly mainstream Italian writer who died a year ago. In order to understand the seriousness of the Cardinal's assertions, it is necessary to recall what is Murgia's ‘baby’. Married in 2010 to Manuel Persico, a computer scientist from Bergamo, she separated from him four years later, explaining her decision as follows : ‘I never believed in the couple, I always considered it an insufficient relationship. I left a man after he told me he dreamed of growing old with me in Switzerland in a villa by the lake. A dreadful prospect'.

Hence the birth of the ‘queer family’: four ‘children of the soul’, as she called them, of whom little is known about their origin; the only certainty: they are not her children. The first Raphael Louis, of whom more is known, is a ‘shared child’ with his real mother, Claudia, with whom Murgia claimed to be a homogenous couple: ‘How did it happen that we became mothers together? Raphael made it happen when he was nine years old, taking my hand on the same evening I saw him for the first time and saying: I don't want you to ever leave (...). Over the next twelve years I got divorced, she got married, we experienced many things together, but one thing never changed: we remained Raphael's mothers‘ (see here). Then the presence of a man, the actor and director Lorenzo Terenzi, sixteen years her junior, whom Murgia married civilly ‘unwillingly’ shortly before her death, due to the lack of other legal instruments to guarantee mutual rights.

Murgia's ‘queer family’ is in essence a commune, in which there are no roles, despised as masks that would ruin the ‘love election’. ‘In the queer family I live, there is no one who has not heard the term groom/spouse addressed over the years,’ the writer explained. Son, groom, mother, father: totally liquefied terms that no longer stand for anything: ‘Inside this family everything has changed, the roles rotate. In the traditional family this does not happen, because it is blood that determines them. A father is always a father. And sometimes this is a life sentence. Both for the father and for the children‘ (read here).

So, faced with this complete subversion of the order that God has placed in the nature of the family, Cardinal Zuppi has nothing more to say except that ‘the point is to love each other. Just as the point was to love oneself in the case of the gay couple officially blessed in June 2022, well before Fiducia supplicans, by Don Gabrielle Davalli, director of the Pastoral Office for the Family of Zuppi's diocese, who had been informed of the blessing (read here), and then concocted justifications that were outright lies (read here).

Is it necessary to love each other to believe? ‘No,’ replied the cardinal. There are many people who give forms of altruism and attention to their neighbour, forms of generosity, without believing'. He adds: ‘Does it help to believe? Yes. It helps you not to use others, to really love them, but religions do not have the exclusive right to love'. There is nothing to prevent altruism and generosity existing even outside the faith, but one wonders whether a bishop received the episcopate to chat about the altruism of atheists. And above all, whether the sacred order was conferred to keep quiet about Jesus Christ and talk about Murgia. Because Zuppi always does this: for him, the world needs the Constitution, non-violence, generosity, inclusiveness, but never once does he remember - and recall - that man's problem is sin, which makes us slaves of the evil one and destined to eternal condemnation. And it is precisely from this that Our Lord - He and only He - came to set us free. And the family lived according to God's plan is a constitutive part of this liberation of the affections from passions, from ideologies, from false love of self and neighbour, of which the ‘queer family’ is a striking example.

Murgia's 'family queerness’, which Zuppi likes so much, is nothing other than the systematic deconstruction of every relationship that has its foundation in creation: sonship, paternity, maternity, spousal love. Relationships that God desired to be lived in their full truth, which also includes the much despised and misunderstood corporeity, so that they could be tangible and visible signs of the relationship between ourselves and God. Because Murgia - just to remind Zuppi - constituted the ‘queer family’ explicitly to deconstruct and liquefy the family: not ‘traditional’, a term that can be equated with a precise historical form, but which is natural.

Cardinal Zuppi's remarks are extremely serious, and should draw the attention of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, but given who presides over it, is beyond human hope. We hope that at least the cardinals will take this into account for the next conclave. We have no doubt that the Lord, to whom our supplication rises, who may deliver us from the wolves in sheep's clothing, will take this into account.