(ROME)
Silvio Berlusconi was given the very rare honour of a state funeral today (Wednesday) in the Duomo of his beloved Milan. Outside the cathedral, thousands gathered in the piazza to watch the service, presided over by the Archbishop of Milan Mario Delpini, on huge television screens.
Il Cavaliere (The Knight), as they called him, or Silvio Il Magnifico as I called him was no saint. But his belief in God was central to his revolutionary vision as the first populist of the modern era.
He was famous for telling jokes and one of the most famous was the proposal he made to God to resolve the perennial tensions in Heaven between santi, beati and angeli. After keeping him waiting for hours God eventually comes out of his office and tells Berlusconi: “I love your idea moltissimo about turning Heaven into a public company quoted on the stock exchange.” But He then adds: “Just one thing though: Why am I only Vice-President?”
Yet if you read the international press coverage of the media tycoon who became the most voted for, and longest serving, Italian prime minister since the fall of fascism in 1945 – not just in this week of his death aged 86 from leukemia but since time immemorial – you would quite understandably be left scratching your head and wondering: how come?
This grotesque buffoon – for that is how the international media have always portrayed him – should surely be swiftly and silently despatched into the hereafter with as little fuss as possible.
Here, after all, is a man described by The Times, no less, in the headline on its obituary of him as “Italy’s scandalous celebrity PM” who was “found guilty of a bewildering array of felonies”.
But this is a false – dare I say dishonest? – narrative.
Berlusconi was only ever convicted once, for instance, for tax evasion in 2013 – a crime committed by a company over which he had no legal responsibility and those who did were acquitted.
In addition, at the time of this crime, he was Italy’s highest taxpayer.
The court gave him a four year jail sentence which was commuted to one year’s community service, spent mostly in an old people’s home, playing the piano. He was also banned from public office for five years.
But Berlusconi was a genuine political trail blazer. He was the first modern populist decades before it became fashionable elsewhere with such dramatic consequences.
And this meant, among other things, that he was determined to defend traditional Christian values and culture against the long march of rootless globalisation through the western world.
Populists defend such stuff as Christian values and culture even if they do not believe in God and are called cultural Christians.
Personally, I think it is impossible to defend Christian values unless you believe in God because otherwise there is no divine imperative.
But Berlusconi did not have this Achilles Heel because he most definitely did believe in God.
He once said: “I’m religious, a practicing Catholic. I’ve got five aunts who are nuns and on Sundays my cousin who’s a priest comes to Arcore to celebrate Mass in my private chapel. I take communion often.” (Arcore is his palatial home near Milan).
The Cavaliere’s private life, however, was morally chaotic.
The twice married father of five was a womaniser.
Like Trump he was a tycoon turned politico. Unlike Trump he was molto simpatico. Nor did he, like Trump, grab women in their most intimate areas. He seduced them with gifts and songs. He was, after all, a former cruise ship crooner.
The Catholic Church is very forgiving but Italy’s judges and journalists are not.
For people who do not live in Italy it is difficult to understand that prosecuting judges can be driven not by a desire to exercise justice but to secure a political result.
In Italy, criminal investigations are conducted by prosecuting magistratres. Many of them – not all – have a political agenda. The left-wing ones are nicknamed the Toghe Rosse (Red Cloaks). It was they who came after Berlusconi.
Berlusconi, a self-made millionaire who carved out his first fortune as a property developer in Milan and his second as the founder of Italy’s private television network, entered politics in January 1994 to – as he said – stop communism.
In what became known as a judicial revolution against endemic corruption in Italian politics prosecuting judges had put on trial hundreds of politicians. This wiped out all major political parties except Italy’s communist party which had been the largrest in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc and now – calling itself post-communist – stood poised to get power for the first time.
But Berlusconi’s new Forza Italia party and its coalition allies won a general election March 1994 which brought him to power. This was perhaps his greatest service to the Catholic Church. In May, his football club AC Milan won the Champions League.
From then on until the day he died Italy’s Toghe Rosse subjected Berlusconi to what all honest observers define was nothing less than a judicial witch-hunt. The Corriere della Sera this week estimated that in all he had faced 80 criminal trials. He had paid €770 million to more than 100 defence lawyers. The charges included corruption, bribery, tax evasion, money laundering, mafia collusion, and under-age prostitution. Former left-wing prime minister Matteo Renzi, Barack Obama’s favourite European politician, told a prime-time talkshow this week that left-wing magistrates had indeed deliberately targetted Berlusconi for political reasons.
It was the bunga bunga scandal that began in 2010 that destroyed him as Italy’s dominant politician. It made him and Italy a global laughing stock and in combination with the Euro Crisis forced his resignation in 2011.
It also led to him being put on trial accused of paying for sex with an under-age prostitute, a Moroccan belly dancer nicknamed Ruby the Heart-Stealer, who was 17 at the time.
Both he and the Heart-Stealer denied sex and there were no witnesses to the alleged sex. He was, let’s not forget, in his early seventies and a prostate cancer survivor. Yes, he gave her money, but so what? He always gave money to women.
As he said at the time: “I’ve never paid a woman for sex in my entire life.”
But the damage was done. No one believed his version of the truth: that his parties were elegant soirées.
In the end, he was acquitted of all charges which included bribing two dozen female guests including the Heart-Stealer to give false testimony– but only this year just months before his death. They were charged with receiving bribes and were also acquitted.
That the Italian prime minister should host such parties which, according to prosecuting judges, were orgies at which women guests often dressed up as nuns, made matters even worse.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then Vatican Secretary of State, said in August 2011 that “those who hold a position of public responsibility .. should commit themselves to a more robust morality”.
Despite bunga bunga and tout ça, Berlusconi was always a committed defender of traditional values.
The conservative Cardinal Camillo Ruini told the Corriere della Sera this week that he and Berlusconi had become good friends. Asked if Berlusconi believed in God he replied: “I think he did”.
He added: “He did historically important things for Italy, above all impeding the ex-communist party to get power in 1994.”
Even the women guests at his elegant soirées which the judges and media called Bunga bunga parties were aware of his religious nature. Sabina Began, an actress and regular guest, said: “He is a very spiritual man. He has helped me to find faith as well… his home is decorated with crucifixes. He is very spiritual and he has put me on a spiritual path.”
When he bought AC Milan in 1986 he installed Monsignor Massimo Camisasca as the team’s chaplain who celebrated Mass every Saturday with those members of the team who were interested – and many were – when AC Milan were due to play the next day at home. “He was convinced this would be decisive for the serenity of the players,” says Monsignor Camisasca.
Berlusconi was in favour (in the end) of gay civil unions but never gay marriage. He opposed surrogate pregnancy. And in 2009, he fought tooth and nail to stop doctors turning off the life support machine of 38-year-old Eluana Englaro who had been reduced to vegatative state after a car crash. He even passed an emergency law to stop the doctors. In vain.
In the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, he said that Western civilisation was superior to Islamic civilisation which led to him being branded Islamophobic.
Many Italians are convinced that it is not he who is evil but those who hounded him all these years in the judiciary and the media.
In 2021, he wrote an article inspired by Benedetto Croce’s 1944 essay “Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians” in which the philosopher said that, regardless of whether we believe in God, Christianity has been “the greatest and most fertile revolution in history” and the word “Christian” defines the values of our civilisation.
“Each human being, thanks to the fact of existing, possesses human rights. Rights that are obviously not a concession from the State, but come directly from God, for who believes, and are part of the human condition for who does not believe.”
“What’s more, our civilisation – formed from a fusion of the Graeco-Roman and the Judeo-Christian – is the civilisation that has produced the most liberty and equality in history and these things are absent or limited in other cultures.
“The Church has been the motor behind the greatest cultural achievements of our civilisation.”
I still doubt whether such a civilisation, for all its achievements, can endure without its citizens believing in God.
Berlusconi, though a believer, begs to differ.
God rest his soul.
Nicholas Farrell is a contributing editor of the Catholic Herald
(Photograph of Silvio Berlusconi’s funeral in the Duomo, Milan, Italy | wikipedia)
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