austraLasia #2558

Halloween pumpkins, human rights and all that

ROME: 14th December 2009 -- Every now and again events come together in interesting and even disturbing ways. Last night Italian TV at least, and perhaps elsewhere in the world, was stunned by a reeling Prime Minister Berlusconi - physically reeling from a vicious physical attack that saw him carted off to hospital.
    Tonight, the Rector Major will be speaking in the hallowed precincts of the Italian Senate, in the company of the Republic's President for Extraordinary Committee on Human Rights.  The event has been organised by VIS, the Volontariato Internazionale Salesiano, which ran the 'Human Rights and the Preventive System' Conference in January of this year.  Ostensibly the event is intended to launch the Acts of said Conference, but in the light of recent events it takes on a little more punch, if one may use that word.  Whatever one thinks of the Italian Prime Minister, nobody but nobody has the right to punch him out in full view of the nation, not even alone in the dark alleyways of some obscure Italian village.
    But there is more.  Some weeks ago a referendum in Switzerland put the kybosh on building minarets in that country.  ìHo-hum' many people might have said.  That's Switzerland's problem, and who wants minarets anyway?  But that's what the Swiss said, and Claudio Cordone, a very prominent Salesian Past Pupil from Beirut, who is now the head of Amnesty International, saw fit to write an article for the Ney York Times - or was it that the NYT saw fit to print what he had written - pointing out the abject failure of civil society and political parties in Switzerland to prevent what is in fact a human rights failure.  He feels sure that the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg will put things right on this score.
    Can we be so sure?  The same Human Rights Court has banned crucifixes in Italian State schools, prompting Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, yet another prominent Salesian, to say that Europe in the third millennium  'leaves us only with (halloween) pumpkins and takes away our most precious symbols'.
    All of which makes the Rector Major's moment tonight rather more significant than simply launching the Acts of a past conference.  In a few days time Salesians all over the world will be repeating the words of their profession in honour of the 150th 'moment' of the original foundation when a group of young adults gathered in Don Bosco's room for what the minutes of that meeting describe as having 'the sole purpose of promoting the spirit of true charity....' noting too that 'in these disastrous times of ours [such young people] are liable to be corrupted and plunged into godlessness and irreligion to the detriment of the whole of society".  So things haven't changed all that much!  Europe's, Italy's, Switzerland's woes today are everyone's woes in every part of the world.
    We will follow tonight's speech with interest.

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Title: australasia 2558
Subject and key words: SDB General: Rector Major, human rights
Date (year): 2009
ID: 2000-2099|2558