Vatican City, Feb 17, 2021 / 02:00 am (CNA).- Mario Draghi, an economist and retired banker, was sworn in as prime minister of Italy on Saturday, after the previous government coalition collapsed when a party pulled its support for then prime minister Giuseppe Conte.
As President Sergio Mattarella’s pick to form a new government, Draghi was an unexpected choice. But he was able to win enough support to form a new coalition, appointing a mix of technocrats and politicians to his cabinet.
Many in Italy hope that the 73-year-old Draghi, president of the European Central Bank from 2011 to 2019, can save the country’s faltering economy. He is credited with saving the failing euro during the eurozone crisis, earning him the nickname “Super Mario.”
Pope Francis signaled his approval for the economist in July 2020, when he named him as one of 26 ordinary academicians of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which promotes the study of economic and political sciences to aid the development of the Church’s social doctrine.
But Draghi, who has had private audiences and phone calls with Pope Francis, has been seen with favor from inside the Vatican for much longer.
The former banker, who described himself in 2015 as a “liberal socialist,” was featured in a November 2019 article in the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, which is approved by the Secretariat of State and the Holy See before publication.
The article had high praise for Draghi, saying that he “emerges as a policymaker of the highest stature: to gratitude is added the hope that his way of proceeding without rhetoric, with in-depth analysis and vision, will be adopted in broader areas of both European and Italian politics.”
Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., La Civiltà Cattolica’s editor-in-chief, told the Italian news agency AdnKronos in early February, before Draghi was confirmed as prime minister, that “the figure of Draghi was the protagonist of one of the most complex phases in the recent history of Europe.”
Spadaro, seen to be close to Pope Francis, said that while a technocratic government was not ideal for Italy, it “could be a parenthesis intended as a moment of reflection” for the country before it returns to a political government.
Draghi’s connections to the Jesuits begin from childhood. He attended a Jesuit-run school in Rome, the Massimiliano Massimo Institute, from fourth grade through the third year of high school, an experience for which he has expressed “profound gratitude.”
In a 2010 interview with Vatican Radio, he recalled “the dedication of the Jesuit fathers” and the moral standards that the school imparted.
“A message that expressed that things had to be done to the best of one’s ability, that honesty was important, but above all that we were all special in some way. Not so much because we went to Massimo but because [we were] special as human persons,” he said.
While serving as president of the Bank of Italy in 2009, Draghi wrote an op-ed for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, in which he commented on Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical “Caritas in Veritate.”
The economic crisis “confirms the need for a relationship between ethics and economics,” Draghi noted in the more than 1,000-word article. “Every economic decision has moral consequences. This is even more true in the era of globalization…”
“According to the Church’s social doctrine, if the autonomy of economic discipline implies indifference to ethics, man is pushed to abuse the economic instrument,” he said. “If it is no longer a means for achieving the ultimate goal — the common good — profit risks generating poverty.”
The economist was also a featured speaker at the August 2020 Rimini Meeting, an annual gathering in Italy organized by the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation.
In 2019, he was given an honorary degree from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
At the awarding ceremony, university rector Franco Anelli called Draghi “the protagonist of an economy ‘in action,’ not just ‘in the books.’”
And in his own speech, Draghi told students of the university that he hoped they would “put their skills to public service.”
“There will be mistakes and retreats because the world is complex,” he said. “However, I hope that you will be comforted by the fact that in history, decisions based on knowledge, courage, and humility have always shown their quality.”
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Peter Seewald has developed an intimacy with Benedict apparent in his interviews, and book. His judgment should be trusted. If our blessed loved Benedict XVI departs he’ll remain an advocate. Of course his final testament will be interesting. A true and faithful witness I’m confident he will be rewarded with beatific knowledge of his beloved Jesus of Nazareth. It will end the moot controversy of who is pope. The contrast with Francis is remarkable. Nowhere do we find in Benedict since his spiritual maturity any ambiguity, any preposterous suggestion, any abrogation as pontiff in witnessing to and defending the faith as revealed. Unlike our present experience. I refuse to judge Pope Francis because I am not equipped to do so. God is the judge of his conscience. No one is equipped to accompany and discern the truth of a person’s soul. Nonetheless I can and must pass judgment on a person’s works. There I address with full confidence that there are deceptive features, said in passive tense not active as one intending to deceive. For example Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia 303 quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas in ST 1a2ae 94 4, Although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects. Aquinas addresses Justice in this passage to emphasize the need to deliberate the conditions on the ground so to speak in determining what is just. He’s posing a hypothetical to demonstrate a point, not that we can never determine what is just – if for example we take it literally that we will always find exceptions. Instead Francis proposes that we will always find exceptions to an intrinsically evil act like Adultery [or abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation] which demolishes the reality of intrinsic evil. Aquinas holds there is no virtuous mean between excess and defect for such an evil. Murder, abortion, homosexuality are always evil. Consequently Francis underscores a doctrine of mitigation that affects all morality leaving culpability indeterminate and subject to discernment and resolution. He references in 302 the Catechism that mitigation may reduce to a minimum moral culpability (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2352). Mitigation cannot become a theological category that eliminates mortal sin as warned by John Paul II. Especially if we remain in a continuous state of repeated intrinsically evil acts, as if the serial fornicator, adulterer, sexual deviant diminishes culpability, is even freed from mortal sin. Insofar as abortion the overwhelming majority are convenience decisions, rarely under extreme conditions of duress. Mitigation as employed by the Pope Francis places personal conscience as the determinant of what is a moral good or evil. Indeterminate moral standards due to exceptions, mitigation, and conscience are the three levers that overturn traditional Apostolic morality, a first in Church history and a deceptive doctrine he commends to all clergy to employ by accompaniment and discernment. Thereby placing the onus on the priest to grant the benefit of the doubt. As in Malta tacitly approved by this Vatican that anyone may now approach the sacraments at will regardless of manifest sin, with the proviso they follow the guidelines, the three levers of deliberation and dissolution of culpability provided in Amoris Laetitia. I submit this commentary in conscience as priest and my obligatory witness to the truth.
Does possibly mitigated subjective culpability ever elevate conscience as the determinant of what is moral good or evil, or eliminate objective morality? Pope Benedict wrote directly and unambiguously to this point, and to the widespread deadening of conscience in the West:
“I have been absolutely certain that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying force of the subjective conscience . . . Hitler may have had none (guilt feelings); nor may Himmler or Stalin. Mafia bosses may have none, but it is more likely that they have merely suppressed their awareness of the skeletons in their closets. And the aborted guilt feelings . . . Everyone needs guilt feelings. The loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized as guilt (see Psalm 19:12). [‘But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.’]
“To identify conscience with a superficial state of conviction is to equate it with a certainty that merely seems rational, a certainty woven from self-righteousness, conformism, and intellectual laziness. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism that produces excuses for one’s conduct, although in reality conscience is meant to make the subject transparent to the divine, thereby revealing man’s authentic dignity and greatness” (Values in a Time of Upheaval, 2006).