Mercy and… POLITICS | President’s end-of-year Messages

By Francesco Di Sibio On Apr 1, 2025

For spazio + spadoni, Francesco Di Sibio, the author of the book on end-of-year Messages from President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella

Tribune control officers go to great lengths to maintain silence among visitors. Of course, we are not rowdy, but the situation prompts finger pointing at said deputy, chatting with our seat neighbor about the words we are hearing … all of which are forbidden, just as we were made to read on the regulations, before authorizing us to go up to the second floor .

We each have a badge on our chests to remind us: we are visiting the Chamber of Deputies.
Below us, the proceedings are taking place, that is: today, in the presence of an undersecretary, speeches booked by members of the various sides take turns, while at the same time all the others present are moving about, coming in and out, talking among themselves, sometimes much more intensely and disturbingly than the visitors. But so be it.

My presence in Rome is motivated by something else, and the visit to Parliament is an industrious wait. In fact, it is Tuesday, March 25, and in the afternoon I will present my essay at the Berlinguer Hall of the Chamber of Deputies.

The work, Compass Editions, is titled “Quirinale, Dec. 31, 8:30 p.m.” and deals with the End-of-Year Messages of Sergio Mattarella’s first term (2015-2021).

Said in this way may seem an idle exercise. What can reflecting on a speech made during a New Year’s Eve dinner or street concerts offer? And then, what can the president of the Republic say, after expounding his own thoughts all year long?

I have to offer the answer to 3 small whys.

1. Why the president of the Republic?

Erick Fromm wrote, “The fact that millions of people share vices does not make those vices virtues” (Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society, 1955)

Having a totally different person on the Hill highlights contradictions.

Sergio Mattarella’s calmness and sobriety contrasts the agitation of so many leaders busy collecting likes and votes, which are much more the result of fickle, intangible, volatile impressions than they were a few years ago.

In addition, teams dedicated to building the mud machine against political opponents are often set up, often using hoaxes, unfounded news: I remember on all of them that war machine called “The Beast.”

Voting has lost its specific weight, and in this climate of abstentionism, we often no longer even remember who our preference went to in the last election rounds, if we went to vote the previous time.

We need an anchor, a stable but not static link to the Constitutional Charter.
After someone, in a broad sense, said that this is not his Europe; for the same reasons, someone else might say that this is not his Constitution.

2. Why the end-of-year Messages?

These Messages are a sign of national unity; they are addressed to each and every Italian.

Each president has had his own style and his own point of view, ever since Luigi Einaudi who, in 1949, began this tradition by borrowing it from other experiences in which on the last day of the year the highest office of the state would wish the citizens well by also including a kind of report on the year that had just passed.

It is not the report prepared for a more or less restricted category of people, which undoubtedly can elevate its level of exposition and analysis. Of course, in fact it is a message, not a speech; it has a different tenor.
But those words dig into the flesh of our existence.

3. Why in the House of Representatives?

I confided to one person that I would be in the Chamber of Deputies. In his eyes I read dismay. What on earth will it be?

There, it is not just ignorance, in the technical sense of not knowing, but remoteness, distance.

We have lost the proper distance with people, as well as with institutions.

A few meters from that hall, 10 years ago, on January 31, 2015, in the Chamber of Montecitorio, Sergio Mattarella was elected to the office of President of the Republic. During his first term, many things changed in the world, in Italy, in Italian politics. The seven-year term passed quickly amid common days, fear of international terrorism, and unexpected pandemics.

This essay may be a popular novel,
but it has useful insights into a better understanding of institutions and their liturgies that must be preserved.
To preserve does not mean to make untouchable, but to guard the source of civilized living.

The flow can also change direction.

Having set out my whys, the presentation was closed by the speech of Pierluigi Castagnetti, several times a member of parliament and MEP, the right person to speak constructively about Sergio Mattarella and Italian democracy, so much so that I chased him and waited several months last year for him to write the preface to my essay.

Castagnetti questioned what the country would be, today, without Mattarella: “our president reveals every day a solidity of constitutional culture, despite the anomaly of a Parliament in which the majority did not elect him.
The commitment of someone who tries every day to be faithful to his role emerges.People understand that he is nurtured by the trust of the people.” The president “understands the importance of retaining the support of the community because it represents the unity of the nation.We learned from the war the importance of sticking together.”

He recalled how “the risk we run is to consider the Constitution outdated while the Constitutional Charter is the heritage of the Republic. Mattarella’s historical intelligence is to build, every day, around the heritage of the Constitution, a sense of untouchability. We should be grateful because we are in the hands of a president who has moral powers, and moral power is most important. Politics needs a spiritual dimension that has nothing to do with religion, which reminds us of the need to defend the legacy of the fathers. There is a continuity between the New Year’s magisterium and the everyday magisterium, and it is this everydayness that reassures us even in storms.”

Francesco Di Sibio
Head of Social Communications Office
Archdiocese of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi-Conza-Nusco-Bisaccia