For those who maintain—and we maintain—that the Church should be less opaque and more open to society, these days are a powerful counterargument: questions of faith cannot be opened to the world, because then the mystery quickly degrades into a vulgar and tacky spectacle, not unlike Eurovision. Rome is a magnificent city, this is obvious, but the Romans have long suffered from a fierce tourist overcrowding (which we also know here, with no less ferocity), now worsened by the floods of parishioners arriving from all over the planet as if they were typhoid Football fans or fans of pop stars. Religious tourism must have been one of the first forms of junk tourism, and it has never gone downhill. The media's constant connections with special envoys dedicated to pushing the artichoke in front of passing tourists, or at best, in front of some cardinal who's passing by quickly, combined with the legion of Vatican experts and conclave analysts who literally emerge from under rocks, like some insects, is killing it.
Many of them would do well to keep in mind that the film Conclave, from director Edward Berger with Ralph Fiennes in the lead role (the next international actor about to be proclaimed "a bit Catalan") is very good - including, of course, the magnificent ending - but it is still a fiction, a thriller with as much or as little resemblance to reality as the one it has The Godfather with the world of the mafia, for example. If we're going to recommend films of the genre, it's very interesting. The two popes, by Fernando Meirelles, which dramatizes a long conversation between the last two pontiffs, Ratzinger and Bergoglio, played by Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. And it's a good time to recover The Last Temptation of Christ (both the Martin Scorsese film and the Nikos Kazantzakis novel on which it is based, which can be found excellently translated into Catalan by Pau Sabaté and published by Adesiara), a story that presents a Jesus Christ who doubts his destiny until the very last moment. Especially necessary in these times filled with sinister clowns who demand martyrs and human sacrifices for their causes.
Whichever pope emerges, it probably won't be any of the ones most talked about in recent days. But the important thing is that the Church doesn't become the next great world power to take (or retake) the path of regression and obscurantism. We already have fanatics, charlatans, and opportunists in our midst, and within the Church, ultraconservative and fundamentalist sectors have been preparing their maneuvers for years for when that moment arrives. There is no ceremony, no ritual, no prophecy that can protect us from the worst harm, which is what we humans are capable of doing to one another. Hell is already on Earth, and all some of us would want from the new spiritual leader of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church is that he not contribute to driving the flames even higher.
