"The Eucharist is the sacrament of non-violence! Thanks to the Eucharist, God's absolute 'no' to violence, spoken on the cross, echoes alive down the centuries. And, at the same time, it is God's 'yes' to the innocent victims, and it is the place where all the blood spilled on earth joins with the blood of Christ and cries out to God and 'pleads more insistently than Abel's'.
"But Christ's meekness is no justification for the violence that is done today to his person, and in fact renders it the queerer, the more odious. This is not just a question of the pressure to remove the cross from public places and the crib from Christmas folklore. In an unending stream of novels films and plays, writers manipulate the figure of Christ under cover of imaginary and non-existent new documents and discoveries. This is becoming a fashion, a literary genre."
"It is trading on the vast resonance of the name of Christ and on all that he means to a large part of humankind, to achieve wide publicity at very little cost, or to shock with advertisements which exploit Gospel symbols and images, as the one of the Last Supper. This is literary parasitism!"
"Yet if in some extreme cases believers react and phone to protest about these things, some people are scandalised and decry it as intolerance and censorship. Intolerance has changed sides in our day, at least in the West: where we used to have religious intolerance, we now have intolerance of religion!"
"We could perhaps appeal to these people of our time, not only for our own sake but for theirs as well," concluded Father Cantalamessa, "saying what Tertullian said to gnostics of his time who denied the humanity of Christ: 'Parce unicae spei totius orbis': Do not destroy the only hope of the world”.