Time & Perspective Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

That opening question is bait, and Buttiglione knows exactly who’s meant to bite. “The past was more Christian?” is a familiar slogan in European culture-war politics: a nostalgic shorthand for social order, moral clarity, and a supposedly unified identity before secularism, immigration, and liberal rights regimes complicated the picture. By answering, “At times perhaps, in others, though, no,” he performs a careful double move: he nods to the audience’s longing without granting them the myth.

The intent is defensive and strategic. Buttiglione, a Catholic-inflected politician, can’t simply dismiss the idea of a “more Christian” past without alienating core constituencies. But he also can’t endorse it outright without being cornered by history. Europe’s “Christian” eras include holiness and charity, yes, but also crusades, confessional violence, state corruption, and church complicity with power. The subtext is a warning against weaponized nostalgia: Christianity, he implies, is not a stable metric you can apply to centuries as if you’re grading a nation’s piety.

The sentence structure does the work. “At times perhaps” offers a soft concession, the rhetorical equivalent of keeping the door slightly open. “In others, though, no” slams it shut on absolutists. It’s a politician’s precision: refusing a binary, resisting the easy campaign line, and repositioning “Christian identity” from a historical claim to a contested, selective memory. In context, it reads like an attempt to reclaim moral seriousness from those who want Christianity as branding rather than burden.