Pope Francis Failed: Do we Need a New Religion?

Religion is all about the concept of "sacred"

The Pope used to dance tango when he was young, here, we see him dancing with the Goddess Gaia in heaven.

Though not religious in the traditional sense, I’ve been reflecting deeply on religion lately. What is religion, and why do people care about it? Why aren’t we religious anymore? May religion return, one day, in some new forms? The recent death of Pope Francis led me to write down my thoughts.

Let me start with something that happened in Florence in 1501. A certain Antonio Rinaldeschi, in a fit of rage after losing a large sum of money gambling, picked up horse dung from the street and threw it at an image of the Virgin Mary. He was reported to the authorities, arrested, and then hanged. A panel illustrating the story was painted by Filippo Dolciati in 1502, and, later, a church was built where it took place. The Church of Santa Margherita in Santa Maria dei Ricci hosted the panel up to recent times. It is now in a museum, but there is still a reproduction there.

It is an element of Florentine history that is not easy to find for the casual tourist; there is not even a Wikipedia page in English about this story. The details are available only in Italian. Evidently, it is difficult for us to be proud of an event that involves a barbarous and excessive punishment. And yet, the people who built the Church and admired the panel thought that it was the right thing to do.

But if this event happened, there must have been reasons that made it happen. Rinaldeschi didn’t just throw some dung at an image; he desecrated a sacred symbol of the time in which he lived, the Virgin Mary. And the sacred is not something that anyone can afford to ignore. In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard says, “The sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man increases or seems to increase in proportion to man’s effort to master them.” Sacred involves turmoil, death, violence, and, above all, blood. It is the very essence of the life and death duality: blood makes us live, and it is also a symbol of death. Sacredness is central to the very fact of being human.

The importance of the sacred changed very little throughout history, except that we switched the definition from one thing to another. At the time of the Roman Empire, Emperors embodied the sacredness that was at the basis of the whole social structure. Now, think about the revolution that Christianity was. The idea that God would incarnate in a human being was so alien to the people of the time that it was considered both evil and incomprehensible. But it was perfectly logical: switching sacredness from the state to human beings was the way to reform a society which had become a monstrous form of exploitation of the many by the few. A society in which the poor, the dispossessed, and the slaves had no rights and no protection from the abuses perpetrated on them by the powerful.

Christianity succeeded only in part in changing the world, but it did rein in the absolute power of the Roman Emperors who, in the end, had to admit that they had to obey the law just like everyone else. It was the last Roman Empress, Galla Placidia, a devout Christian, who created the Digna Vox edict in which she stated exactly that. We can still feel the immense power Christianity represented if we consider how our ancestors saw the world. For more than a millennium, in Europe, people would see everything in a Christian light, to the point of executing a poor man who had done nothing more than throw some dung at a painting, harming no one.

In time, Christianity lost its original potency as the West, fueled by fossil wealth, rebuilt a structure reminiscent of the Roman Empire. This new monstrosity is dedicated to enriching the elite at the expense of the poor, and it offers no protection for the weak against the strong. Even the human body, once revered as the vessel of God’s son, faces desecration, forced to be inoculated with whatever the state mandates. Yet the power of sacredness can be abused only for so long before it vanishes, like a soul departing a lifeless body. The sacred symbols of the Western World, “The Country,” “The Flag,” “Science,” “Democracy,” and, above all, the state itself, are losing potency.

Pope Francis thought that he could return Christianity to its ancient roots: an idea that was born to protect the poor and to create a just society. He failed. In part, it was because of his own mistakes, for instance, aligning with the powers that be about vaccinations. But it was probably unavoidable. Most old structures tend to become too rigid to be reformed from the inside. The Catholic Church started sliding down toward irrelevance before Francis, and it will probably continue to do so after him, eventually disappearing in the background noise, just like Paganism did in Roman times. Francis will not be the last pope, but he may well have been the last relevant pope.

But religion is about the sacred, and the sacred is everything in our view of the world. In the series of cycles that humankind is following while it moves toward the future, we will need something new to arise to defend the sacredness of humanity. Will it be a return to the old religions? Or will it be a completely new religion? There is a bubbling of ideas and movements appearing: Wiccan, Gaianism, Neopaganism, New Age, Cybersectarianism, and more. What the new “thing” will be, it is impossible to say for the time being, although when it appears, we’ll likely see it as being as evil and incomprehensible as the ancient saw Christianity. But we can be sure that it will come from some place which we wouldn’t even imagine could change the world.

Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see." John 1:46