[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_45

Two in one flesh, Lucetta Scaraffia e Margherita Pelaja, 2008

I don't believe in God.

My family baptized me joyfully, and with the same pleasure, I opted out by de-baptizing myself as an adult.

I‘m wary of religion, or at least the concept of religion as a political and social institution. The monotheistic theological structure is the “celestial” projection of existing power hierarchies; it is another way to reproduce and consolidate them on the ground. I also think faith, spirituality, ritual, prayer, and the sense of belonging are part of the human being and can make the beauty of being a community. Still, I also think that they should be considered separate from religion, even if religion has included them in its doctrinal practice, making us forget that "community" is possible even without it.

I have long studied religions and religious thought, particularly that which derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition, and this interest has always led people around me to think that I am a fervent faithful.

“To defeat the enemy, you need to know it well” is how I used to defend myself. However, over the long term, I realized that even a simple interest in religion, however materialistic, can be another way to reinforce its power and myth.

If I think of all the Italian intellectuals who dialogue with the Catholic Ecclesiastical Institution, I feel sick in my stomach. It seems to me that they really believe they are building a bridge over a dualism that doesn't actually exist, between Science and Faith, between the temporal world and the spiritual world. There has never been this distinction; the Church was born as a state body. And it still is.

When representatives of Italian culture talk with the Church, they give it a credit that it does not have: that of being just a theoretical apparatus freed from current power. They forget that the Church deals with politics and money, not only with metaphysics.

When I discovered Lucetta Scaraffia, one of the two authors of this book, I was quite impressed. Scaraffia is an Italian historian and feminist, but she is also a Catholic and a strong believer.

For me - due to my personal life experience, my vision of the world, and my character - it is not possible to conceive at the same time paying attention to women's issues and feeling passionately part of the Catholic religion: they are two mutually exclusive areas.

This book is a historical essay on the relationship between the Church and sexuality over the centuries through a feminist lens. And, despite my stark opinion about it, I found it very funny:

"This has always been one of the main problems in defining Joseph's role in a patriarchal society: that of a man who is deprived of his sexual prerogatives, who is the father of a child who is not his, and above all must serve and protect a wife and a child infinitely superior to him. We can, therefore, understand the great difficulties that the cult of Joseph has encountered in the history of Christianity: until the 15th century, very few Christians were baptized with his name."