"Around America. Conquest and evangelization"Giovanni Maria Vian, professor of history at the University of La Sapienza of Rome and former director of L'Osservatore Romanohas written an interesting work, half historical and half journalistic, about the development of the papacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the work and organization of the Roman Curia. The book is presented journalistically as an allegory of the famous apocryphal prophecy of St. Malachy about the last pope who would reign in history and who, "theoretically", would usher in the end of the world and who, according to the prophecy, would be called John XXIV. In reality, apart from the cover, prologue and epilogue, the book is a work of history based on documentary sources from the Vatican Archives and on testimonies of varying rigor.
A reading of the Church
The book has been presented in certain press as a critique of some facets of the pontificate of the last Popes from St. John Paul II to the present day, although in reality we are dealing with an analysis of variable value.
In fact, Professor Vian, a connoisseur of the Roman Curia and of the contemporary history of the Church, echoes an appreciation abundantly developed by the great Christian intellectuals of recent history such as Merry del Val, Romano Guardini, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Rahner, Ratzinger and more recently by Andrea Riccardi.
According to Vian, the Church should abandon the style and ways proper to the society of Christianity, that is to say, those corresponding to the connivance with the State from the time of Emperor Constantine to the present day, to recognize that the separation of Church and State is irreversible and that the Christian roots of society are disappearing at great speed, to enter fully and in a few years into a new post-Christian globalized civilization and culture.
In this sense, when St. John Paul II affirmed that the new evangelization was "new in its ardor, method and expressions", he was referring to a society still with Christian roots that could be "de-secularized" and become Christian again to a considerable extent, that is, a human society still with Christian roots founded on the Gospel, Greek philosophy and Roman law.
Church and dialogue with the world
Surely, although he does not say it explicitly, what Giovanni Maria Vian is proposing, deep down, would be the convenience of celebrating a new Vatican Council III that dialogues with today's world. To rewrite "Gaudium et spes", to analyze the current western society in order to help it find educational, anthropological, philosophical and spiritual approaches that revalue the dignity of the human person and open horizons of hope to a society in decadence. He wants the Curia to emerge from self-referentiality (p. 205) and return to the rule of law (p. 213).
It is important to realize that the liberal society, like the social-democratic one, has perished and we are moving towards a new culture and civilization in which cultural and social parameters are different.
It must be discovered that there are immense layers of today's society that have no other major interests than personal self-affirmation, moral autonomy, pleasure and comfort, and that the first world, in fact, despises solidarity and emigration because it has become cruelly unsupportive precisely because it has abandoned spiritual values.
First world society is self-destructing at great speed: fundamental values such as love, family, friendship, work, culture, serenity of judgment, spiritual and transcendent vision, and even ecology and the environment, peace.
The solution
Vian seems to forget that the Catholic Church has the solution: the human and divine person of Jesus Christ and his saving doctrine. His capacity to drag and transform, to ignite and open horizons of happiness, of unlimited love and concern for others, the family, the world, the needy, the discarded. Benedict XVI said it in a very graphic way: "The Holy Spirit is the source of all our faith".We have believed in God's loveThis is how a Christian can express the fundamental choice of his or her life. One does not begin to be a Christian by an ethical decision or a great idea, but by the encounter with an event, with a Person, which gives a new horizon to life and, with it, a decisive orientation" (Deus Caritas est1).
In any case, Vian reminds us that it is necessary to rewrite part of the Christian doctrine in order to give an answer from Christ to the real problems that afflict men and especially those of the ruling classes of this world of ours: a new anthropology, attractive and consistent with the dignity of children of God, endowed with freedom and dignity (p. 25).
In this regard, Vian will devote a few pages to highlighting the final document by which the Pope endorsed the conclusions of the "synod of synodality" on November 24, 2024, a few months before his death. This extraordinary post-synodal document connects very well with current sensitivities, also with other religious confessions and in the social organization of the economy - of business - and in the way of working in teams that has been imposed. Precisely, the final document underlined Vian speaks to us of putting the shoulder and to feel the Church as our own. At the same time, the bishops of the whole world and the Pope, as fathers of the family, will watch over the course of the universal Church (p. 39).
Logically, many of the futurist proposals that are exposed throughout this work are completely opinionated and touch sensitive points of the tradition of the Church, for what it is necessary to take them with freedom, as well as they have been expressed with naturalness as, for example, the proposal of destruction of the works of art made by certain artists of our time entangled in terrible juridical causes (p. 47). Finally, he will directly address the reform of the Pontifical Curia, its working methods and the contribution of ideas that have continued since the code of 1917 (p. 98).
The comments on Opus Dei are biased, imprecise and subject to a false dynamic: Opus Dei has never wanted to be an exception, nor to live apart from the bishops, nor to be an institution of power, but to serve the Church and souls (p. 218).
The Last Pope. Present and future challenges of the Catholic Church.
