Enzo Bianchi: the many faces of a very Eastern ‘Old Believer’ who appealed to the sort of people who like that sort of thing

In truth, Father Enzo Bianchi seemed like a character from Kovancina, a Dosifeo from "The Martyrdom of the Old Believers" played by Ghiaurov – or at least that is how he struck me the one time I met him amiably, both of us being rather portly, in a restaurant at the Circolo dei Lettori in Turin. According to De Bortoli, he had a ‘Martinian heart’, and who am I to judge? According to Recalcati, he was practically a Freudian, someone who preached against the religion of fear and suffering (a psychoanalyst is not obliged to recall that, in truth, Lucretius had preceded the Viennese master in this regard, and his atheism was rock-solid). For Cacciari, he embodied the spirit of a ‘civil monk’, and moreover, his was a mysticism of solitude—taught as freedom—worthy of Mount Athos. According to Melloni, he was a victim of curial Constantinianism that had survived right into the papacy of Francis. According to many other intellectuals with a taste for the esoteric ‘Logos’ of Orientalism, who admired and even adored him, he was an innovator of conciliar Christianity, a theologian of ecumenism and a thinker from the Christian East who was wary of so-called Latin Christianity. He was an interesting figure; there was something of the Monferrato Christian Democrat about him, but this is irrelevant in a journey that begins with democratic Catholicism and culminates in the most mysterious and exclusive form of monasticism. He was a ‘slow food’ hero of the nourishment of faith.

The notable aspect of the absorbed reverie in which Father Enzo had immersed his followers and friends – as Maurizio Crippa recalled here yesterday, all of whom were of a high calibre and for the most part lacking in faith and loyalty to the Church of Rome – is summed up in his hostility towards Ruini, so open and powerful that it manifested itself harshly even after the Cardinal’s death, describing him as ‘the one who caused many of the faithful to suffer’ – a judgement clouded by the notion that truth is an authoritarian illusion rooted in the Church’s usurped power, far from splendour. The idea that Catholicism, as both teaching and evangelical experience, also encompasses suffering, hierarchical discipline, the understanding of the Church as an institution of the people, and the development of doctrine—including its non-negotiable dogmatic aspects—was not one that resonated with him, although he personally bowed to the papal decision excluding him from visiting his own creation, the monastery of Bose. His success as a guru to the educated and searching—a category that includes a great many fine and capable people—is surprising in that it coincides with secularism, following a worldview based on existentialism and a libertarian spirit, utilitarianism and the joy of living, whilst seeking to ground all this in an encounter between East and West that today sounds strange and even sinister. Indeed, the comments and the many beautiful and loving tributes surrounding Bianchi’s death have brought to light what Francesco meant by that phrase – one he never definitively endorsed but which slipped from his lips in a moment of absent-mindedness – that ‘God is not Catholic’. He meant that God is alive, but Catholicism is dead. With a little more effort, Enzo Bianchi’s friends should have drawn the conclusions from their love – which is always a difficult thing to do.