Page 13 - CSIV n 3 ENG version

to testify its values its principles and its methods.

Explain its symbols. It must abandon that form of self-
referentiality and avoid the transformation of civil society and

its profane rites. He must question himself because he has lost

decisive moments in the process of secularization of the state,

because he has not seized the opportunities; As did the religious

world, to set up schools and universities in which the value of

secular and professional culture could be a form of growth of

young people who instead found only two formative offers. The
public or the private confessional one. What did the Masons do?

This is a question that has somehow made the diffusion of Masonic

thought fragile, which instead must go back to taking root both

for examples and for committed Men. If Freemasonry bears witness

to its culture, its values of fairness, freedom, rights and
respect, and does so only in the place designated to the Masons

(the lodges), it does little to say that we have done great

gestures in the past or have had great men. Today we must express

our reasons for defending the Men and giving answers to those who

need a country and a policy capable of giving answers to young

people, to poverty, to marginality, to loneliness, to formative

emptiness, to the need for identity, of a modern nation. We must
give a dream back to Italy in the forms that have marked Masonic

thought: freedom, equality, tolerance. We must have the awareness

that we have crossed the border of the economy, of finance, of

communication and we have entered globalization with fragile and

in some cases even manipulative rules of the spirit. It is a duty
for Freemasonry to overcome the "fragmentariness" and the

"liquid" form of society. To return to be a moment in which it

reconstructs a dream: a society does not live only on economy, it

does not live only on finance, it does not live only on work, man

needs to dream to return to being himself needs to give himself a

way new, it needs to rediscover its own spiritual identity an
identity that is also dictated by the need for redemption. Let's

look at the current situation, look at the problem of work, we

look at young people: an unemployment that goes beyond 30%, a

poverty of households that goes beyond 12%, a perception of

27.6 percent insecurity! Is it possible that masonry, a bearer of

great values, does not speak of the dramas of this society? I
would say no! This does not happen because there are harassment

clauses against the Masons; it happens because the cultural

lighthouse that masonry lit up was opaque and in the general

gullibility of that "cultural and informative" class speaking

against the Masons represented closeness to this or that power

without realizing that the spirit of secularism is the salt of
the peoples' cultures both modern and ancient. But in our

country, we have chosen other paths against the laity and against

the Masons. Today we collect the rubble of a lack of politics of

merits, of responses to needs, of a Europe not of peoples but of

Finance, of a culture that rejects and does not accept suffering,

suffering and defeat. But not for this the value of initiatory
thought has been lost or has bent its back. It is not the culture