European Fascism Will Strike Hard, The Pope's A Cynic: José Saramago

José Saramago, Nobel Literature Prize winner of 1998, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of “cynicism” and has said that the “reactionary insolence” of the Church had to be answered with the “impertinence of sharp intelligence”.

“That Ratzinger has the cheek to invoke god to reinforce his global neo-medievalism, a god he has never seen, with whom he has never sat down to have coffee, only shows absolute intellectual cynicism of character,” Saramago said in a discussion with the Italian philosopher Paolo Flores D'Arcais in a recent visit to Rome. Saramago was in the Italian capital to present his book, Notebooks (a collection of his blog articles) and to meet his Italian friends like the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine winner Rita Levi Montalcini.

In his discussion with Flores D'Arcais, Saramago claimed that he was a peaceful atheist but that he was now changing his idea. “The insolent reactionary ideas of the Catholic church has to be answered with the impertinence of sharp intelligence, of good sense, of responsible words. We cannot allow that the truth be offended every day by presumed representatives of god on Earth, who in reality are only interested in power,” he said.

According to Saramago, the destiny of the soul bothers the church very little and what it has always sought is control of bodies. To a question if the tardy faith of writers and intellectuals could be one of the causes of the crisis of democracy, the Portuguese writer said certainly so, but not just it, and that all of society was in that condition with a crisis of authority, of family, of traditions, a moral crisis in general.

Saramago warned that Fascism was growing in Europe and seemed convinced that it “will attack with force” in the next few years for which, “we have to prepare to confront hate and the thirst for vengeance which the Fascists are feeding”.

“Though it is clear that they will present it with pseudo-democratic masks, some of which already circulate among us, we should not be deceived,” he emphasised.

Source: Aporrea

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