Recently there was a story in the Catholic press about a speech in which an Italian churchman apparently referred to things like abortion and euthanasia as "terrorism with a human face."
Now there’s this story about L’Osservatore Romano referring to an Italian commedian’s jibes at B16 and the Church as "terrorism."
The paper is quoted as saying:
"This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the
Church," it said. "It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage
against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life
and love for man."
I don’t know what all the commedian said, but the story refers to him saying:
"The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved," he said.
He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.
"I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco," he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.
This kind of thing leaves me scratching my head.
I’m one of the biggest B16 fans there is, but I don’t see how this kind of stuff amounts to "terrorism." Either there’s something missing from the new story that the commendian said that would qualify in this regard or there is something in Italian culture that would allow these statements to be taken as incitements to violence or the word "terrorism" means something different in Italian . . . or I don’t know what.
While people regularly talk about how hard it is to give a rigorous definition to the term, it seems to me that at the core of the idea of terrorism is using either violence or threats of violence to cause fear in order to get someone to do what you want.
If there isn’t at least the threat of violence, it isn’t terrorism. It’s something else. For example, if someone threatens to release damaging information to get someone to do what he wants, it’s blackmail.
If violence or the threat of violence isn’t being used as some kind of coercion (either on the social policy level or on the personal level) then it isn’t terrorism. Violence without the purpose of coercision is just violence. Thus murder–even mass murder–is not terrorism.
So I don’t see how abortion or euthanasia or joking (even joking badly or offensively or mean-spiritedly) about the pope is terrorism.
But like I said, maybe the press reports have left stuff out, or maybe "terrorism" means something different in Italian.
I just hope we aren’t approaching an ecclesiastical equivalent of Godwin’s Law–something to the effect of "The more sharply felt the subject matter of a dispute is, the more likely a churchman is to call it ‘terrorism.’"
That would only rob the word of its meaning.
Would that count as lexical terrorism?
