Addressing the events in Trieste, Fontana argued that the police reaction, in an oppressive general framework, “has shown that ordinary people, simple people, workers have kept the light of reason in the face of obviously illogical and forced measures.”
He went on: “This is the universal aspect: there is a system that curls up like a hedgehog when it wants, but there are important sectors that fortunately are still exempt and give hope.”
For Fontana, “the management of the pandemic is political and not technical.”
“The proof is that governments (i.e., politics) use science and ‘experts’ according to their interests, publicly condemning those who ‘do not believe in science.’ But they are the first to use only a certain science and not Science,” he said.
“If by ‘technocracy’ we mean the government of technicians, no, this is not the case. If by technocracy we mean the politics that exploit science and technology, then, yes, this is the case."
Fontana also suggested that amid the pandemic “politics is killing politics.”
“Ideas of new centralisms prevail, of new decision-making processes, of a permanent state of emergency, of control from above on people’s movements and ideas, of new ‘men of providence,’ of the freezing of parliaments and political opposition, of new ostracisms, and new censure of ideas that do not conform to those of the apparatus,” he said.
He added that “politics has been blocked for two years in Italy.” He described Mario Draghi, the country’s prime minister since February, as “the son of the permanent emergency,” adding that “as such [he] will probably be the future president of the Republic."
“Politics becomes oppressive while it should be liberating,” Fontana said, “favoring the use of reason, moving people and social bodies towards the common good, which is an organic concept. Many weak subjects have been sacrificed to the fight against the pandemic, and others will follow in the future.”
The Van Thuan Observatory has long decried what it sees as a totalitarian drift around the world. Indeed, its latest report on social doctrine examines the Chinese model, a capital-socialist model of social control, and how this profoundly attracts the West.
“Let’s take a practical example,” Fontana said. “The Chinese model has implemented the one-child policy, causing a fall in births (although now it does the opposite), but Western democracies have taken the same approach through state abortion. So there are more significant links between the Chinese model and Western democracies than we think.”
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Within Italy, there is little talk of government overreach. Fontana suggested that the reason is that “the Italian system has rolled up like a hedgehog,” showing “connections, silence, very close collaborations, even if manifested ‘in the Italian style,’ that is to say with an apparently good-natured attitude.”
Although the Italian Church has taken a clear position on the need to vaccinate and has not addressed the question of overreach, several voices in Italy have raised the issue.
Martina Pastorelli, a journalist and founder of Catholic Voices Italia, has collected them and, since the beginning of the debate, undertaken to present their point of view.
Speaking recently with Pastorelli, the philosopher Carlo Lottieri argued that “we are now in the sovereign state which places itself as God on earth. It is modern totalitarianism based on the control operated by the controlled themselves (this is the purpose of the Green Pass), on accusatory moralism, and on fear used as a means to domesticate.”
But there is also a Church that speaks. In a lengthy homily on Dec. 9, Bishop Corrado Sanguineti of Pavia, northern Italy, stressed that concentrating all mass media communication on “faith in science” risked simplifying reality.
This is also a danger for the Church, the bishop suggested, speaking on the solemnity of St. Syrus, patron saint of the northern Italian city.