“God Only Knows” N°37: The Slow Fragmentation of the Catholic Church

Dear readers, dear readers,

Very happy to see you again after this summer. I hope it was good and relaxing for you. We are entering a new season of our exclusive “God Only Knows” newsletter and I appreciate your loyalty and patience.

I try, a little out of time, to free myself from the immediate conditioning of hot news to share with you which seems to me to be stable, notable, decisive in the medium term.

With this dose – and responsibility – specific to this profession, which would be a form of “presumption” in the first sense of Larousse. A meaning that is not negative. These are analyzes and judgments based not on absolute proof but on clues, observations, hypotheses, probability. Together with the certain and tangible facts, this forms the daily material of journalism.

This is also the spirit of this letter: to approach the complex and delicate realities of the fields of religion, spirituality, secularism, to grasp them as much as possible, to formalize them with words, in order to nourish our reflection. common. At a deliberately slow pace to let things settle. For the urgent and the daily you can, if you want, refer to my articles in Le Figaroprinted or published on the internet.

This in-depth approach imposes humility, I dare say, in the face of realities that are beyond us, but also a strong rational requirement. And above all the freedom to say things in cultural universes where speech is often padlocked. Freedom could also be the salt of this missive, its key word.

What to remember in this fall of 2022?

I had the good fortune at the end of August, then in September, to go twice to Rome, a city that I know very well having lived there for ten years and to go there very regularly. The aim was to cover two events: the creation of new cardinals and an exceptional meeting of the Senate of the Church requested by the pope on the reform of the Roman Curia; Francis’ trip to Kazakhstan, which I followed on the papal plane.

After these “Covid” years marked by distance, screens, virtual appearance, nothing can ever replace the quality of these conversations in the shadow of the “trattorias” which surround the Vatican city where we know however that even the walls have ears…

There is indeed a paradoxical Vatican tradition: it is forbidden for those who know, to speak of the “secrets of the Palace”, it is possible for them to say a lot, in good intelligence, when trust is established and it is not never betrayed.

From these two stays, I confirm the “end of reign” atmosphere that I described last spring, which I will not go into in detail in this letter. Otherwise to note a form of feverishness and voluntarism, never before observed at this point in more than three decades of Roman journalistic experience. François’ lieutenants are very nervous about the implementation of the reform. They are often more royalist than the king.