The CIS figures say that the percentage of people who attend mass in Spain as a whole does not even reach twenty percent of the total population. In Catalonia, the percentage drops to less than half. The number of believers is higher, as we know, than those who actually practice. If we are talking about Roman Catholicism, this must oblige us to do something; the simple rhetorical manifestation of faith should not be enough. Almost half of the population defines themselves as atheist, agnostic, or indifferent. And perhaps the most noteworthy thing would be to know if it is more in the common good's interest for us to be Christians or not, or if things would collectively go better for us if there were an agreement, of Christian roots, among all of us. The visit of Pope Leo XIV to our country serves to make us ask many questions, especially seeing once again the fervor that a Holy Father arouses, far above what a pop star or any other civilian figure can motivate. All this passion has a point of stridency and comedy, even ugliness and posturing, and it forces us to ask ourselves why, while seemingly so devout and good people, we live in a society so unequal, unnecessarily violent, selfish, intolerant, and dismissive of differences. And it reminds us that the Church has been a den of criminals and pedophiles, protected by the curia, still an authority that seeks more to protect than to collaborate with justice and side with the victims. It is absolutely abominable. Because faith and morality must be one thing, and deeds another, and sympathizing with a pedophilia mafia (and art collecting and real estate speculation) must be yet another. I tried to listen to the pope's speech to politicians, but the first thing I thought was that it should not have happened, or not in the seat of popular sovereignty. A religious leader should not give political speeches in a parliamentary chamber, because we are not in an Islamic regime but in a liberal democracy that has separated the state from the Church. Obviously, he did politics there, or expressed his ideas in defense of 'human life', understood as a criticism of abortion and euthanasia. But nevertheless, not even the pope himself must believe what he preaches; he is well aware that neither here nor anywhere else will abortion be prohibited again, and the right to die with dignity is being implemented everywhere, because our life is ours, and not God's or the vicar's. All in all, it gives a rather pathetic whiff of intellectual and political decadence, or of a faith that is not authentic, but rather a faith in faith itself, or a belief in when beliefs used to work. Meaning is the longing for meaning. Even the Pope knows that God is dead and that deep down he lives on nostalgia. Paolo Sorrentino, with his series about popes, has understood all of this in an admirable way: everything is sustained by aestheticism and the will to believe that belief still has a strength that can no longer be drawn from anywhere, because we all know that it only has the entity of comedy or guilty hypocrisy.
