Cardinal Vesco denounces ideal of Christendom (L'Osservatore Romano)

In a new book, the French-born archbishop of Algiers offered strong criticism of the ideal of Christendom.

“Secularization is a disease that also afflicts religion,” said Cardinal Jean-Paul Vesco, O.P. “In Christianity it has a name: Christendom. It is the Gospel erected as a moral, social and even political organization.”

The prelate made his remarks in Far cadere i muri [Bringing Down the Walls] a newly published series of letters exchanged with Samuel Amédro, a Protestant pastor.

Italian journalist Sergio Valzania, author of a front-page Vatican newspaper on Cardinal Vesco’s comments, welcomed the prelate’s criticism of Christendom.

“In this context, the Gospel fully recovers its nature as an announcement, as good news, and tends to free itself from the apparatus that Caesarism had built around it,” Valzania wrote.

“It is not just a question of contiguity, if not identification, with political power as it was at the time of the Papal States,” he explained, as he described Christendom as an era “in which a morality based on rules and not based on love enters into crisis, more attentive to the defense of the majority social attitudes than to the acceptance and understanding of those who live on the margins of society itself.”