A NEW CATHOLICISM
There are moments in church life that quietly expose the distance between what is written and what is lived. The funeral of Valentino, the celebrated Italian fashion designer who died at the age of ninety‑three, held in a Roman basilica, was one of them. Nothing sensational happened. No liturgical drama, no theological uproar. Just a simple, human scene: two men who had loved him – one his partner, one a former partner – stood up during the liturgy to speak about him from the ambo. They were composed, sincere, grieving. The assembly listened. And that was that.
If you were waiting for a doctrinal earthquake, you would have been disappointed. What you saw instead was something far more ordinary: a community responding to a death with the instincts that communities tend to have. Someone has died; those closest to him want to speak; of course they should. It felt natural. Pastoral, even.
And yet, the moment carried a quiet irony. Christian tradition has always insisted that thought precedes action, that doctrine shapes practice. But here the opposite seemed to be happening. The Catechism still says what it says – in careful prose, printed on respectable paper – but the assembly behaved as though those paragraphs belonged to a different genre altogether. Not denied, not contested, simply… unused.
It is one of the curiosities of contemporary Catholic life: documents abound, but their normative force often evaporates the moment they meet the pastoral instincts of ordinary people. Practice does not rebel against doctrine; it simply walks past it, with the gentle confidence of someone who assumes that reality will be forgiven for not fitting the text. It also hinted at something else: a pastoral style increasingly content to meet people exactly where they are, without the older instinct to call them somewhere else. A church that, in practice, welcomes you just as you are and leaves the question of conversion politely unspoken.
In this sense, it is a new kind of Catholicism – not the Catholicism of tidy categories and predictable boundaries, but something more fluid, more improvisational, shaped less by regulation and more by accompaniment. One is reminded of Romano Amerio’s remark about the ‘dislocation of the Divine Monotriad’: in classical theology, love flows from truth, not the other way around. Experience follows understanding; the will follows the intellect. When this order is reversed, the entire spiritual architecture shifts. And whether or not one shares Amerio’s concerns, the pastoral instinct on display that morning certainly leaned toward love first, doctrine later.
This is not a uniquely Catholic phenomenon, of course. Every Christian tradition knows the tension between what it teaches and what it actually does. The Catholics are simply more visible when it happens. Their rituals are public, their structures are public, and their contradictions are public too.
What Valentino’s funeral revealed – without fanfare, without controversy – is that the Church’s lived practice is already negotiating realities that its official teaching has not yet absorbed. The gap is not created by moments like this; it is merely revealed by them.
No doctrine was changed that day. No manifesto was issued. But something was made unmistakably clear: the Church’s pastoral life often moves ahead of its doctrinal formulations, not out of defiance, but out of fidelity to the human stories placed in its care.
And perhaps that is the real lesson. Not a scandal, not a victory, not a defeat – just a reminder that the Church’s life, in all its tenderness and untidiness, is always larger than the documents meant to contain it.