In Europe, Catholicism has a new voice. He is the Spanish writer Juan Manuel de Prada, author of the novel La vida invisible. His life changed direction, as he puts it, in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II. He was in Rome and he “suddenly” wanted to adhere definitively to that “ancient liberty” which the religious and cultural treasure of the Catholic Church. He consider this liberty to be “the antidote to all the tyrannies of the world.” Prada considers these tyrannies to be a grand deception at work in the cultural in Europe. He states: “The dictatorships of the past stifled personal freedom. The modern ones induce man to worship himself, and thus deny his own nature.”
And again, he writes:
“The new tyranny of which we are speaking, instead, exalts man to the point of adoration, giving him the opportunity to turn his interests and desires into freedoms and rights, which however are no longer inherent in him by nature, but become the “gracious concessions” of a power that legally ratifies them. And so, turned into a child who contemplates his own whims as these are maximized and satisfied, the man of our time is more than ever the hostage of the assertions of power that guarantee him the enjoyment of all-encompassing liberty and constantly expanding rights.”
At the point of his conversion he saw Rome as the rock of salvation, not only religious salvation but also cultural. Rome appeared to him as the bulwark that clarifies the terms of our spiritual geneaology and shelters us from the battles of this new tyranny in which people fight over who what is our most authentic nature.
“The eternal revolution of Christianity consists in revealing to us the meaning of life, restoring to us our nature; from this discovery is born a joy with no expiration date. When this joy is combined with a minimum of artistic sensibility, life becomes a feast for the intelligence.”
His articles appear often in L’Osservatore Romano.
Read the preface to his book The Progressive Matrix of the New Tyranny
Filed under: culture
