EDITORIAL
from issue no. 11 - 2007
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Thefts and crimes
Those who have the habit of exalting the past, usually to present the present in negative terms used to be called (and still are) – in a facile Latin motto – laudatores temporis acti. Such expressions are very summary and of doubtful utility in any case. It’s as well to avoid them. Some pointers are certainly worthwhile: such as the crime statistics
Giulio Andreotti
Romulus plows the line of the walls of Rome vowing that nobody would cross it without his consent. According to the legend his brother Remus leapt over it in challenge and was killed by Romulus. Fresco by Cavalier d’Arpino, Orazi e Curiazi Room, Capitoline Museum, Rome
Some pointers are certainly worthwhile: such as the crime statistics. Even if, perhaps out of skepticism, there are those who claim it is useless to report thefts because they believe the perpetrators are never (or almost never) traced and punished.
Another cliché is the negative judgment on immigrants, supposing them without argument to be responsible for most breaches of the law. I usually challenge their superficiality with the consideration that when there were only two Romans (and they were brothers) one killed the other.
Much later, when Rome was under the government of the popes, crimes and infringements reached impressive peaks.
As for the watershed of 20 September 1870 I read a curious observation in an old chronicle. Before the battle that determined that papal Rome become part of the new Italian State many Romans didn’t pay their taxes so as not to give money to the pope; immediately afterwards they continued to evade so as not to reward those who held the pope captive. Perhaps even after the Lateran Pact of 1929 the party of tax evaders remains active.
Tax evasion is deplorable even from a moral point of view. A priest who cited the Gospel’s view that what is due to Caesar should be rendered to Caesar, was cheekily answered by a member of the faithful saying that the Gospel says that the citizen found the coin to pay the tribute in the mouth of a fish. If that were the way of it, then everybody (or almost) would pay.
But in Holy Scripture there is something more... governmental, where one reads that rulers must be obeyed even if “rogues”.
And on the question of taxes the relative obligations are also included in the rules of the new Catechism.
A remarkable advance was made in the ’fifties when the Vanoni Law established income must be declared, whereby, till there be contrary evidence, the taxpayer himself establishes what he owes yearly to the inland revenue.
Vanoni trusted in the honesty of the Italians. Unfortunately he had no way of seeing the results. He died suddenly in the Senate after having made this moral offer of trust in the citizens.
