The news talks about nothing else: the Pope is coming soon. We citizens who pay our taxes will lay out a red carpet for him because blessing the new cross of the Sagrada Família is apparently very important. A man arrives, a simple man, to whom millions of people, as human as he is, attribute some kind of power beyond what the rest of us earthlings have, and the city must bow at his feet. It must be that we always need someone to adore: Bad Bunny, Rosalía, the Pope, Lamine Yamal. The Pope, by the way, completely refutes the premise of gender deconstruction theories according to which a male wearing skirts and dresses is the antithesis of patriarchal power and is subversive, and I don't know how many more inventions we owe to the also revered, almost sanctified, Judith Butler. There are plenty of men in robes who, unfortunately, do not represent any subversion of the performative mandates assigned to their sex (because the mandates are for us) nor, of course, do they constitute any opposition to the misogynistic order. Quite the contrary, if I think of men who don't wear pants, it turns out they are holy men with the most masculine power: bishops, imams, priests, monks of all kinds.
So, this gentleman with as many arms and legs as all of us will come (if he isn't hiding one under his starched cassock) and we'll have to put up with him every time we turn on the news. I don't know what happened to what I was taught in school: that in a democracy religion should be left in the private sphere and citizens should govern and organize themselves according to reason and laws arising from our own sovereignty. As a Barcelonian, I can tell you I won't feel very sovereign when I see the entourage of the head of a small state ruled by men received as absolute monarchs once were. This tiny country, which dictates the policies of much larger powers, seems to be inhabited by a majority of men, and the women in it, we don't quite know what they are there for. On top of that, it's a regime in which most of the men must be celibate (only a god who hates men can forbid them to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh; only a deeply disturbed pervert can invent voluntary castration; then you say Islam is violent). God forbid I ever set foot in such a strange place, let alone have political dealings there or receive its leader with all honors.
I would understand the importance given to the Pope's visit if there were millions of Apostolic Roman Catholics here, those who take communion day in and day out, confess sins, and believe in the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, and all that indigestible cosmology impossible to swallow if your brain hasn't been washed since childhood, but the fact is that there are fewer and fewer believers. The supposed revival of neo-Christianity, spread and advertised in recent times, is nothing more than a trend, this one indeed quite performative (or does Rosalía believe that homosexuality, adultery, or abortion are sins? Will she arrive a virgin at marriage?). There isn't a new wave of illuminated children of atheists who decide to ignore everything the ecclesiastical hierarchy hides, from the indecent privileges that exempt them from paying taxes to the covered cases of pederasty, passing through the hypocrisy of doing charity while continuing to hoard wealth. What there is is a very typical phenomenon of our time: a lot of propaganda and seduction by a particular religious power. With the complicity, moreover, of post-leftist parties that no longer remember the long history of progressivism to try to domesticate religious power. They sell their secular soul for a few votes while the dead of free thought turn in their graves.
