Il giorno degli sciacalli

È il caso di leggere quello che Palmiro scrive sulla religione e sugli avvoltoi che se ne fanno alfieri.

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My friend Palmiro writes (in Italian) on religion and on the vultures who claim to be its ministers.

Here's an attempt at translation

Yesterday Elisa, the first child of a young technician I work with, was stillborn: the umbilical cord wrapped itself around her neck in the last few moments of her birth and strangled her. It's a tragedy that has affected all of us, but it's not quite what I want to talk about - it's a tragic fact, but an "ordinary" tragic fact - I want to talk about the funeral, a church funeral since the family is religious. In this crowded church, right in the middle of the main nave, more visible than the cross itself, there was a collections box with a sign "For the Movimento per la vita" (the main Italian pro-life organisation). I won't comment, the fact itself is so clearly disgusting there's really no need, but I wonder, how can a person - because even a priest is, after all, a person - stoop so low, take advantage of such a tragedy. And to think that at first I hadn't even noticed it, in the crowd - together with friends and relatives there was the whole company in there - and I was even telling myself, lapsed militant agnostic that I am, that even the Church has its useful function in people's lives, that in such a sad moment I felt part of a larger community offering comfort to a member who needed it. What an idiot I was to let myself be led by the nose even for a moment - let these cynical, exploiting shamans be wiped away, let the churches - which are ours, fruit of the labour and the genius of our ancestors - remain there forever as a symbol of the flawed genius of our species and our need for myths.