Saint Francis the Good

This is no news, but I happened to read it today. On facebook, I must admit. Some friend of mine posted it.
So it turns out that Pope Francis said in October that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real, and this is perfectly compatible with the existence of God, moreover, this "requires" the existence of God.



I guess Unamuno happened to be not too far away from my thinking when I saw this, and the Pope´s speech reminded me of San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr). This is a novel written by Miguel de Unamuno in 1930. It tells about the life of a priest in a small Spanish village.

Now, spoiler alert. This will be a real spoiler.

I warned you.

So the novel starts with Manuel, a catholic priest, arriving to the village. The three main characters are Manuel, Ángela (a local) and Lázaro (Ángela´s brother, recently arrived from America). The story presents Manuel as the perfect, merciful, calmed, conciliatory, righteous, virtuous priest whom everybody in the village loves and admires and even venerates.
Until -and here comes the spoiler- Lázaro raises doubts on whether the priest is actually a believer. In his words, "He is too intelligent to believe everything he teaches." So finally, it turns out that Manuel, the perfect priest, in fact does not believe in God or an afterlife. But he´s doing what he´s doing because he thinks the simple people in the village need to have hope and consolement in the promise of eternal life. At the end, Unamuno even suggests that Christ himself didn´t believe in God.

So I read this news -old news- about the Pope and I couldn´t help thinking of "Saint Emmanuel". I don´t know what this man believes or not. I am not in any way suggesting he´s an atheist. But I do think the guy is smart. Smart enough to foresee that, if the catholic church doesn´t change its doctrines, there´s no way the institution, and the religion with it, can survive. Everything he´s done so far goes in the way to cleaning the image of the christian church: he apologized for the church´s "mistakes" during the middle ages, for the rejection of homosexuality, for the opulent lives of many priests. He had a word on the use of condoms. He´s trying to make peace with society, which is probably the only way to go, but something his predecessors didn´t know how to do, He´s being brave enough to confront the most conservative sectors of the church. He, believer or not, understands that religion, as opposed to science, cannot compete with science. And he´s trying to make religion evolve along with science, so that sheeps don´t miss the right path.
Don´t take me wrong, I don´t consider myself better than most sheeps. But I am a lost cause, I don´t have hope and I never will. And what is worse, I hope I never will, because, the way I see it now, that would mean embracing a lie. The biggest of lies. The cruelest, maybe, as it is the fake promise for something that will never happen. Just imagine you´re dying, meh, it´s ok, no biggie, will see you all on the other side. And then you die. And fuck you, there´s no other side! Game over.
So I´d rather live my life knowing that it is what it is, and everything I want to do, I must do here. And everything I didn´t do will stay undone. But I do understand how sheeps feel and why they need hope. So I think, for those who hope, keeping that hope alive is a good thing to do.

Therefore, I like this pope.

I could go on and on, arguing about how ridiculously important religious ideas are to society, how stupid it is that you must pretend to believe in the christian god if you ever want to become the president of the US, just as stupid as if you´d have to swear that your favorite pizza is ham and mushrooms. May the mushroom pizza be with you. I swear on mushroom pizza. Religions are just ideas, shared and very rigid but ideas, and they should not matter at all, for anything, as long as they are respectful between them. I could, like I said, go on and on.
But I will not.