A church that needs to resurrect

MADRID – The image of the pillaging flames of Our Lady produces immense desolation. Just on these dates, at Holy Week, shortly before the celebration of the day of the resurrection, the best news that Catholicism can offer to the human being, one of the most emblematic cathedrals of the planet, cracks under fire. Obviously, for the vast majority, this is not a sadness related to the confessional experience. Our Lady is a secular sacrament. It represents human history, not God. But there is no doubt that the scene seems designed to become a metaphor for the enormous crisis that this religion is currently experiencing. Does it make sense to be Catholic? What is the fate of the church?

I was Catholic too. Like almost all Latin Americans, I was educated in my childhood to react emotionally to expressions of faith. In my youth, I thought about the possibility of being a priest. I spent two years at the Jesuit Seminary but, one month before making my wishes, I deserted. Then, over time, I gradually moved away from any church. I found myself more in the league with the uncomfortable lucidity of Christopher Hitchens than with the devotion before the altars. Now, I am an atheist who, like most atheists, I miss sometimes and want faith.

I think it's a pretty common process in almost everyone born in the second half of the last century. Catholicism has never been able to read change and reinvent itself creatively before anything that happened in the last decades of the twentieth century: from the badual revolution to the empowerment of women to the technological revolution and the digitization of the world, through the crisis of social utopias, the end of clbadical ideologies and new forms of exercise of power. The new speed of history has left the Catholic hierarchy in a deplorable spectacle: naked and elderly.

Even today, this disagreement is obvious and terrifying. In the context of badual scandals, in which the church is slow to react with a radical and decisive ethic, Joseph Ratzinger wrote a few days ago an allegation in which he tried to link the pedophilia of many priests to the changes in religion. world baduality during the sixties. Thus, the first self-retired pope of history, the priest who, over the years, was responsible for overseeing and protecting the doctrine of the church, seeks to free criminals with cbadocks that would have had to be judged by the courts for a long time. Fortunately, everything has changed. We live in a crisis of deep representation. Just as in politics, it is no longer as easy to represent the people, but now it is not so easy to represent God.

The resignation of Benedict XVI and the election of Francisco I can be considered as an ingenious marketing operation forged in the Vatican. Catholicism was facing unprecedented global questioning and needed a new image. In addition, the election of an Argentine was a smart move to serve Latin America, its biggest consumer. Bergoglio, more than a product of faith, seems to be a market strategy, an urgent response to the need to give an idea of ​​the change.

To all this must be added the growing success of evangelical churches. Before the enemy was outside: it was atheism, communism. Now, the enemy is on the territory of faith, he shares the same God. It is estimated that 19% of the Latin American population is evangelical. In some Central American countries, they are in the majority. The Vatican loses its best flock.

Perhaps there is no stronger signal of the crisis of Catholicism than the existence of two popes. Never before has the church's history been so ambiguous with the representation of God on Earth. While Francis I emphasizes that priests who have committed abuses should be punished by ordinary justice, Benedict XVI attempts to dilute these crimes and transfer any responsibility to the history of the world. If Jesus Christ was to rise today, who did he believe in? Would he feel represented by one of the two?

Like all other leaders, the Catholic hierarchy must understand that it no longer has the same benefits as before. For better or for worse, the flow and speed of information disrupted the entire social dynamic. The public is now much more transparent. The power is weaker. The notion of the sacred has been paganized.

Catholicism must reinvent itself. With a lot of moral consistency but also much faster. The Vatican accumulates decades behind the pace of today's societies under the banner of globalization and technology. The priesthood of women, baduality and celibacy, official wealth, internal democratization and economic transparency are some of the outstanding issues in trying to reconnect with believers. The black smoke above Notre Dame also reminds us that the church needs to be resurrected.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka is a writer and regular contributor in Spanish at The New York Times. His latest novel is "Mujeres que matan".

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