Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: "The Nation" su Papi

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/randall
"Italy's Pillow Talk", by Frederika Randall.
You could hear the gravelly, nighttime voice of the prime minister in 
audiotaped conversations posted on the website of the news magazine 
L'Espresso. Not many of Italy's newspapers had the courage to publish the 
transcripts, as explicit as a webpage for "chlamydia /symptoms" and just 
about as sexy. Apart from one RAI channel, Italian TV, both public and 
private, was as silent as the grave. But the tapes, secretly recorded by 
42-year-old "escort" Patrizia D'Addario before, during and after her night 
with 72-year-old Silvio Berlusconi at his Roman residence, left nothing to 
the imagination. There was Patrizia saying "no way" when she hears that 
Berlusconi does not use condoms. There were comments about il lettone di 
Putin, "Putin's big bed," a glamorous-sounding romping ring that was 
promptly disavowed by the Russian prime minister. There was Berlusconi 
offering Patrizia professional advice: "If I may...you need to touch 
yourself on a regular basis." And so forth.
You didn't have to be a puritan to think this pirated pillow talk revealed 
at least a grave lack of judgment on the part of the Italian premier, if not 
actually the "illness" that his wife, Veronica, mentioned when she announced 
in May that she wanted a divorce. Both Patrizia and other young women 
courted by Berlusconi have said he offered them seats in the European 
Parliament. Yet the prime minister has refused all calls to answer questions 
in Parliament about his nightlife, and denounced the media coverage as 
"trash." Toughing it out seems to be his strategy. Why, then, did he 
suddenly take a 90-degree turn last week and seem to acknowledge that the 
"trash" was true? "I'm no saint," he said, adding that Italians liked him 
that way. True enough: San Silvio is one nickname nobody ever called him.
He's been addressed as Papi, "Daddy" as in Sugar Daddy, the pet name used by 
the scores of young women, some of them underage, invited to parties at his 
Roman residence and to his Sardinian pleasure palace, where he housed them 
in special, purpose-built bungalows. He's been called il Caimano, a nasty, 
hungry, aggressive alligator native to the Cayman Islands, the very sort of 
Caribbean fiscal paradise where Berlusconi's excess wealth was alleged to be 
packed away. But the nickname that just might stick to him for posterity 
comes courtesy of the tough old Resistance fighter and crack journalist 
Giorgio Bocca, who dubbed him Piccolo Cesare: Little Caesar, the gangster 
who will forever have the squat legs and saturnine demeanor of Edward G. 
Robinson.
Of course we know he's no saint, so who was Berlusconi addressing when he 
declared he was not? In part, he was speaking to all those Italian men who 
themselves are no saints when it comes to honoring their marriage vows, the 
ones enjoying the long twilight of machismo. But he was also sending a 
covert message of humility to the supreme judge of Italian morals, the 
Vatican. Like any other fallible Italian male, Berlusconi hopes the Church 
will pardon him his sins as prime minister, just as the Catholic clergy has 
traditionally rapped the knuckles of men who fell prey to the sin of Lust 
and then pardoned them (meanwhile comforting their women and urging them to 
look the other way). Humans, above all men, are going to sin; otherwise what 
are priests for?
Rather astonishingly, Berlusconi has until now enjoyed good relations with 
the Catholic hierarchy. In one of those bargains with the devil that the 
Church of Rome has made before (see its highly opportunistic relations with 
Mussolini), the hierarchy tacitly backed Berlusconi in the 2008 elections. 
Despite one divorce and even as a second one was brewing, Berlusconi has 
made a point of flaunting "family values." The Church knows the Berlusconi 
government can be counted on to back the Vatican line on stem cells, in 
vitro fertilization, birth control and prophylactics (yep, we know Silvio 
toes the line there!), abortion, gay rights and mandatory life support for 
the terminally ill. Those might seem mere technical concerns when you 
consider Avarice, Lust and other deadly sins already flourishing on Italian 
soil. But under Benedict XVI, obedience to the Church line on such 
biological issues has become a primary test of faith.
The first formal hint that relations with the Vatican were strained came 
during Obama's July visit to Italy for the G8 summit, when Berlusconi asked 
for a papal audience just after Obama and Michelle saw Pope Benedict, and 
was rebuffed, according to press reports here. More recently, Avvenire, the 
daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops Conference, issued its first comments 
on the sex scandal, saying that Berlusconi's refusal to answer questions 
about the matter had left the country in a state of "desolation" and that 
declaring himself "no saint" was inadequate. The paper also printed several 
of what were reported to be hundreds of letters castigating Berlusconi's 
behavior--and Church officials for not making their voices heard. "What 
trash, how repellent, what poverty of spirit," wrote Father Angelo Gornati, 
from Lombardy. "Not only does he not deny this squalid behavior, he flaunts 
it as performance, talent, valor."
It often comes as a surprise to outsiders what a powerful role the Vatican 
plays in Italian politics. Nonbelieving Italians like to say that Italy is 
il cortile del Vaticano, the Vatican's backyard: a country where the Church 
automatically expects obedience (although there is also a strong 
anti-clerical tradition here). The threatened loss of Catholic consensus 
sent some tremors through the majority coalition. If what some Italian 
papers reported is true, Berlusconi's trusted political adviser and Vatican 
insider Gianni Letta was so discouraged by the daily revelations of 
Berlusconi's antics that he barely spoke to him for many weeks. Yet even 
during those weeks, it seems, Letta spent days negotiating with the 
cardinals, trying to repair the breach between the Church and the right. One 
thing he apparently promised the Vatican was a legislative fast track for a 
bill that would effectively make it impossible to write a useful "living 
will" and would rule out "do not resuscitate" clauses.
The prime minister himself, meanwhile, let it be known that he intended to 
make a pilgrimage to the hometown of the stigmata-bearing Padre Pio, a 
genuine twentieth-century Catholic saint known for performing miracles.
If the Church does finally condemn Berlusconi for moral turpitude, however, 
it will be missing far better reasons to repudiate him. To cite just one: 
although the facts are still not clear and the full truth may never be 
known, Berlusconi's name has recently emerged in connection with reported 
murky "negotiations" between Cosa Nostra and Italian government officials in 
1992-93, when two leading anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo 
Borsellino, were murdered in spectacular bomb attacks in Sicily and three 
"show bombings" killed eleven people in Milan, Florence and Rome. Those 
bombs went off at a crucial moment in postwar Italian history, when the 
corruption scandal known as Tangentopoli, or "Bribesville," had discredited 
and was destroying the two leading governing parties, the Socialists and the 
Christian Democrats, which had been caught taking bribes from virtually 
every major company in Italy. With the political establishment in disarray, 
some intelligence officials are supposed to have stepped into the power 
vacuum and, in connivance with the Mafia, may have had a role in 
Borsellino's murder, according to police interrogations of at least one 
Mafia informer. And according to a witness with insider knowledge of Cosa 
Nostra (the son of a former mayor of Palermo convicted of Mafia activities), 
Berlusconi's name appears on a document drawn up by a Mafia capo during the 
secret negotiations. One of the things the boss requests is that Berlusconi 
turn over one of his three TV networks to Cosa Nostra--a bold demand that 
was never met.
If that document proves to be genuine, it would suggest that Berlusconi was 
a plausible Mafia interlocutor during that murderous season. It's a scenario 
so chilling that it has never been told, except in a novel. That book, Nelle 
Mani Giuste, by criminal court judge and seasoned noirista Giancarlo De 
Cataldo, was based on months the author spent reviewing court records and 
parliamentary commission investigations. It posed the question: who ruled 
Italy in 1992-94, when the political establishment, apart from the former 
Communist Party, was in tatters? In De Cataldo's version, it was a sinister 
axis of Freemasons, Cosa Nostra and spooks left over from cold war days 
(when the CIA backed a clandestine network to keep the Italian Communists 
out of power). And Silvio Berlusconi was the man who met the famous 
criterion of Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard: "everything must change in 
order for everything to remain the same." In De Cataldo's novel, as in real 
life, businessman Berlusconi became a politician almost overnight and in 
1994, swept to victory and kept "the Communists" at bay. In real life, one 
of Berlusconi's closest advisers, Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, has been 
convicted of "mediation" between Cosa Nostra and "significant economic and 
financial actors." Little Caesar? There are worse things than being an aging 
Don Giovanni. 

 
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/randall
e sulla "natural growth"
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/zonzsein