Leadership Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

There is a neat little power move hiding in Buttiglione's blunt insistence on "the right" to call sin "sin": it reframes a theological claim as a civil-liberties issue. The phrase sounds modest, even procedural, like a plea for free speech. But the real action is in the redundancy. Of course priests can name sins inside their own doctrine; repeating it suggests that something - courts, secular institutions, European liberal norms - is trying to take that prerogative away. The line manufactures pressure: if you disagree with the content (what counts as sin), you are cast as opposing the principle (the right to say it).

That subtext mattered in the early-2000s European culture wars, when Buttiglione, a Catholic conservative, became a lightning rod during his bid for a top EU post. Questions about his views on homosexuality and women's roles weren't just personal; they were proxies for whether a pluralist bureaucracy could tolerate officials who held traditional doctrines. "Priests" is doing strategic work here too. He doesn't say "I" or "the Church"; he invokes a socially legible figure who, in many societies, is presumed to be under siege, even when the institution remains influential. It lets him shift from defending contested moral judgments to defending the moral authority of the speaker.

The intent is less about clerical privilege than about jurisdiction: who gets to set the moral vocabulary in public life. Buttiglione's sentence claims that secular modernity can accommodate religious condemnation without demanding that religious people soften their own categories. The catch is that "sin" is never merely descriptive; it drags a social hierarchy and a political program in its wake.