Cardinal Zuppi at Agnostic’s Secular Funeral: “The Lord Could Not Stand Dogmas”
He delivered an address, published on Avvenire.it (August 8), in which he practically canonized the self-described agnostic.
Guccini, 86, had described himself as an “agnostic possibilist.” Zuppi, who was his friend, recalled that the singer had once told him he wanted the cardinal present at his funeral.
Addressing Guccini directly, Cardinal Zuppi imagined what the deceased might now be seeing: “We do not know precisely … what you see: the fullness of that light which, in reality, you had already sensed from here and which you were able to glimpse in the poignant and infinite beauty of life.”
Cardinal Zuppi portrayed Guccini’s agnostic doubt positively, as an honest search for truth.
“Doubt was your way of standing before things without cheating, with integrity,” he said. “You never stopped asking and listening.”
He then told the deceased: “Today you encounter the answer.”
“You will find a place of your own, your own story, your books, your old friends and, finally, infinity.”
And the Cardinal added: “Whoever makes the human question his own always discovers the presence of God.”
Cardinal Zuppi compared Guccini’s criticism of society and the concerns of Christ, “Even the Lord could not stand the dogmas and prejudices that struck one’s neighbour.”
Zuppi went on to condemn the ambitious and overbearing, “empty people,” priests who fail to examine their hearts, materialists convinced that God is dead, ideological extremists and those who divide humanity between “us” and “them.”
“Ideologies confuse and cause harm,” Zuppi told Guccini. “You are right.”
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