"Reflections on the Illuminating Words of Archbishop Giuseppe Laterza: A Homily on Saint Pasquale Baylon, Bari 2026" by Carlo Coppola
Rossini's Don Basilio knew it well: calumny is a gentle breeze — it does not shout, it whispers, above all when constructed with the aid of social media, concealed behind a screen. It insinuates itself into sacristies, grows pianissimo, and in the end shakes the faith of the pure. But before yielding the field to it, it is worth recalling from what heights its opposite descends.
On 17 May 2026, at the parish of San Pasquale Baylon in Bari, His Excellency Archbishop Giuseppe Laterza — Apostolic Nuncio in the Central African Republic and Chad, titular Archbishop of Polignano, a native of Conversano — preached with luminous holiness on the figure of the saint of Torrehermosa: a simple and poor man, devoutly consecrated to the truth of an unwavering love for the Holy Eucharist, who regarded woman with purity of gaze and authentic veneration, in a world that still reduces her to an image of consumption while loneliness and femicide continue to grow. His homily — doctrinally learned, without ostentation, solid, refined, and profoundly human — offers us, by contrast, the precise measure of how ancient the betrayal of that example truly is, and of how many are calumniated for precisely such presumed betrayals of these values: a theme present in the evangelical Beatitudes, by which so many were besmirched — from Saint Joseph of Copertino to Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, to Saint John Paul II himself. From meditations upon the holy words of the Venerated Pastor of Conversano arise the memories of three historical strands of defamation against ecclesiastics, connected to those very same three causes that made the gentle San Pasquale a champion invoked throughout Christendom.
We offer three striking historical cases from past centuries — if only so that no one may be tempted to see in them echoes of contemporary situations — all linked to the land of Puglia. The first concerns the misappropriation of funds. In Bitonto, in 1593, Bishop Flaminio Parisi orchestrated denunciations for witchcraft against troublesome ecclesiastics. The Holy Office unmasked him. The second concerns relations with women and the abuse of the confessional, systematically evoked in the anonymous seventeenth-century memoranda of the convents of Polignano and Conversano. The third is the accusation of heresy: in the Salento of the sixteenth century, suspicions of crypto-Protestantism directed at figures such as Bishops Tafuri and Rullo proved to be instruments of local feuds dressed in the garb of doctrinal zeal.
These three typologies of accusation do not belong to any single ecclesiastical tradition. The Oriental clergy — Armenian, Syriac, Coptic — has known the same dynamics with equal, and at times more ferocious, intensity. Ecclesiastical defamation is a universal and trans-confessional phenomenon: it knows no rite, it knows no latitude. Church law responds with clarity: can. 220 of the CIC safeguards the good reputation of every person; can. 1390 §2 qualifies a calumnious denunciation as a criminal offence, obliging the calumniator to make reparation for the harm caused. The CCEO replicates these protections for the Oriental Catholic Churches. Rossini's little breeze, when it becomes a false and deliberate public accusation, ceases to be a metaphor: under canon law and pursuant to Art. 595 of the Italian Penal Code — with penalties of up to three years' imprisonment — it becomes a prosecutable legal offence.
