The Churches, the cathedrals, they are symbolic places, liturgical, rituals. And so they should be considered. If a Church burns, if the most famous cathedral in Europe burns, it will mean something in the allusive realm of symbols. E the silence of the Pope falls within the symbolism of the event. As soon as I saw the fire, I thought about Dominique Vennier's suicide in Notre-Dame, the spring of six years ago, to witness the suicide of our civilization. Certain profane acts unleash negative energies, they summon demons, a religious man would say at the time Notre-Dame was built.
Sixty churches burned in the space of a few years in France, perhaps during restorations, they are a worrying balance that we can deal with like a case, a statistical data on 45 thousand sacred buildings, such as accidents at work. But it then comes back into our imagination, between myth and superstition, the connection between the suicide of Christianity and the destruction of the churches, between the abandonment of faith and the carelessness that leads to the fire, between hatred towards Christianity and the fire that envelops it, between the papal complaint that the churches are empty of faithful and priests and therefore their intended use must be redefined and the havoc before our eyes... Wanting to descend from the symbolic and sacral level to the allegorical and literary one, we could say with Pasolini that the Church is like a child who feels unloved and becomes ill, it becomes more fragile, more vulnerable, prepares for the disease, the accident, death.
Christianity burns in the fire of hatred and is incinerated in the smoke of indifference. The flame as a Luciferian reverse of light, ash as the diabolical reverse of incense. Medieval thoughts, someone will say, but those thoughts were at the origin of those cathedrals.
Never before has Christianity been under attack as in our time. There is a widespread, militant, hatred towards Christianity, of mainly Islamic origin. Then there is a widespread, sordid, contempt for Christianity by the secularist West, of Masonic-Enlightenment derivation, that inspires the European Union. And there is rejection, a removal, an indifference towards Christianity on the part of the inhabitants of our time themselves, perhaps baptized in the sign of Christ.
To this triple hatred, contempt and rejection, as Bergoglio's Church responds? With a radical project of reconversion of Christianity to the global world. If the Church dies in Europe, except for fires like the one in Paris, then we need to focus on Africa and Asia, transmigrate and open up to migrants. If faith does not take root and the divine arouses disbelief, then we need to focus on rescue, on reception, on charity. If the promise of immortality and resurrection no longer works, then let's focus on social redemption and the defense of the poor. If Christianity collapses as a civilization then it must become a world, suffer the desert and start from the most remote, more alien or more hostile to Christianity, like the Muslims. Here is the reconversion of the Church according to Bergoglio. Where the word reconversion no longer evokes the religious etymology of convert but the technical-industrial one of reconverting. Which is the reconversion announced by Bergoglio of empty churches into shelters, hospices, reception places or in any case in intended uses that have nothing more to do with the motivation that founded and animated them for centuries, if not for millennia. If you deprive a place of all sacredness, of all holiness, you strip it, you dispose him to everything and above all to nothing.
It is in this context that the intervention of the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, takes on a meaning of awakening, if not revenge, well beyond the topic raised. At stake is not the issue of pedophilia, but the permissive and transgressive culture that dominates in our time. And, it is the wave of '68 but '68 in church translates as Vatican Council II, which is the prologue in heaven of the global protest. Give in to the mentality of our time, to unlimited freedom, to unbridled desire, to rights without duties, much less sacrifices, to the expansion of the ego and its right to withdraw from nature and destiny, it is at the origins of the evil to which present Christianity is prey. And surrender to those who represent its opposite, the fundamentalists, fanatics, repressive, Islamic sexists and obscurantists is the corollary and perhaps the crowning achievement. However, the capitulation.
Hence the image of wounded Christianity, burned, dejected in Paris, in Rome and everywhere. For goodness sake, Notre-Dame will be restored, such a strong tourist-attractive location will be regenerated, the money will be found, maybe even more than expected and Macron will put the building back in order, as already happened after the revolutionary fumes. It's about investments, of icons, of construction, not of faith, art and religion. But the image of the Madonna's house in flames will remain in our eyes and in our hearts the feeling of an Easter without Resurrection.
MV, The Truth 17 April 2019