from LECCE, ITALY. THE CHURCH AND THE STATE, A LONG STORY OF COLLABORATION

Police lack sense of humour

An anti-religion demonstration took place in the centre of Lecce [southern Italy] on April 30, 2010 with an exhibition, leaflets, megaphone and discussions on sexuality, abortion, personal freedoms, obscurantism. All these questions are obsessively brandished by the Church, as it tries to intrude its tentacles in the intimacy of everyone.
Nothing strange so far, except that the terrible demonstrators, just for fun, were offering desecrated wafers, wine of the Madonna and sweets of free love to passer-bys. Funny games were also being played to cheer the sunny afternoon of the very bigoted and bourgeois city of Lecce. But, as everybody knows, the pigs in uniform don’t like having fun except when they massacre those who end up in their barracks and police stations. So the pigs showed off their contempt: defamation, defamation, this is public defamation! First a few Digos officers tried to film passers-by and demonstrators intent at playing darts with a picture of Ratzinger [the current pope], but were soon driven away. Then they came back in greater number in anti-riot gear in order to seize the vituperated picture. Meantime dozens of people strolling in the piazza realized how the police, headed by chief Digos officer Raffaele Attanasi, were acting violently in their attempt to apply censorship. Not yet satisfied with creating such a chaos, Mr Attanasi threatened to kill an anarchist comrade if the latter dared touch him: ‘I’m going to chase you and kill you’, said the officer. Needless to say, the mess created by the police (but shouldn’t they guarantee public order?) attracted the attention of many passer-bys and onlookers, who stopped to watch the exhibition and to take leaflets. More police and carabinieri arriving on the spot were compelled to step back in front of the demonstrators denouncing them publicly through the megaphone.

Anarchists from Lecce

Text of the leaflet distributed during the initiative:

In a different way

To claim that violence and sexual abuse of minors are consequences of being homosexual [as an Italian high prelate recently did] is a proper terrorist act. It means to deny free sexual choice by considering it as a disease to be eradicated in order to avoid the most disgusting crimes that can be imagined. This is what high prelates of the Italian church felt obliged to say in the middle of so-called ‘paedophilia scandal’ that involves priests all over the world with the cover-up of the Vatican – including the pope. Besides suppressing all possibilities of auto-determination, this affirmation aims at banning the ‘diverse’ and legitimises, on a social and cultural level, the persecution against them. The more and more frequent aggressions against homosexuals are a clear example of this.
The stabbing of a homosexual is never mentioned whereas much is said against the abortion pill in the name of the defence of the ‘non-born’. Similarly, the murder of a pro-abortion doctor by a catholic fundamentalist is also silenced. Obviously not all lives are considered equal and worth being lived in the same way. After all, this reflects the entire history of discrimination characterising the catholic church and all the religions in the world.
If, on the one hand, the Vatican tries to divert the attention from the infamy committed by its representatives, on the other, relying on a particularly favourable socio-political climate, it tries to condition the life of everyone through practises of control on bodies and minds by pursuing its millennial aim: the submission and obedience of the masses through obscurantism.
Interfering with women's wombs and spying under people's sheets are practises aimed at social control: in this respect the Church and the State have always worked together in order to survive and reproduce themselves. Not by chance the campaign against the abortion pill can count on the support of the most conservative and reactionary politicians. This is an obvious example of the new form of collaboration between the State and the Church, which has seen the leaders of the Veneto and Piedmont regions backing the ban of the abortive pill in their local hospitals. Furthermore, when cardinal Bertone argued that it is homosexuality that leads to sexual violence on minors, there was total silence on the part of all [Italian] political representatives.
To talk about collaboration between the State and the Church might sound strange to some, but it is sufficient to look back in history to realize how the authority of these two institutions has always been the same.
Because of this collaboration, the revolutionaries shot priests and burnt churches during the Spanish civil war. If this had happened everywhere, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about all this now…