Catholicism’s Symbolic Universe

One of the things that has destroyed the perception of Catholicism among the people, is having lost a symbolic universe that gives form and substance to being Catholic. This was one of the great “crimes” of the last decades, the systematic suppression of a world of songs, gestures, smells that contextualized for us the world in a way that was deeply religious. It was expected that a healthy renewal would not give away these symbols, but it might have updated them without losing their specificity: instead they were fought without mercy, and for most of them virtually destroyed.

Camillo Langone says it well in his last interesting book “Thoughts of Lambrusco”: “I wanted to go to kiss the ring of a cardinal. I had been enticed by Patrick Leigh Fermor, who at the pump of Cardinal Seredy, Prince-Primate of Hungary , had devoted four pages of his beautiful ‘Among the woods and the water’. It was the description of the 1934 Easter Mass in the cathedral of Esztergom, on the banks of the Danube. The best clothes, “men were bareheaded, the women wore a handkerchief tied under the chin “, the candles, the canopy,” the high white miter “the organ, choir, incense, Latin, and the ritual of kissing the ring. Eighty years later there is not a good air for us kissers of rings. the Holy Spirit had chosen a pope able to address the majority of humanity, that means apostates and envious. To us the minority, convinced by Christ that envy (not to mention the diabolical pride) was a feeling by monkeys, no one was interested anymore. For us, happy few who adored, admired, kissed, after the last burst of Trento shot by Benedict XVI, with the motu proprio that should liberalize the Gregorian Mass, remained literature”. In short, a whole symbolic world that has disappeared to give space to the mundane symbolism.