Empty square and tired rituals. Death of a Pontificate

The picture speaks for itself. General audience on Wednesday. Empty square. Only a few dozen people. Okay, it's raining. But once, in case of rain, the square became an expanse of umbrellas.

The picture is bleak, and the Vatican mass media, starting from the television center, no longer know how to hide the fact: no one goes to listen to Francis. We try to make up for it with narrow, or rather very narrow, images, a bit like Polish TV did with John Paul II visiting his homeland. But if in the case of Polish television the problem was to hide the crowds flocking to Wojtyła, in the Vatican the problem is the opposite: to hide the embarrassing gaps.

This Pontificate is dying like this, of starvation. Having started with so much hope, it is running out of steam due to general disinterest. Things that happen when the Church starts chasing the world. Because the world is always one step ahead, and the Church becomes simply pathetic when it pretends to go along.

Meanwhile, it's raining in the Vatican basilica. Infiltration almost everywhere, even in the archives. Of course, managing such a large asset is not easy, but maintenance has been – literally – water for some time. Witnesses say that housekeeping also leaves something to be desired. In the absence of papal celebrations, St. Peter's increasingly resembles a museum in a progressive state of abandonment. And things are no better in Castel Gandolfo, where the papal palace, no longer used as a residence, has become to all intents and purposes a museum and is starting to suffer from all the problems typical of these places (including a recent fire).

Meanwhile, the participants in the synod, gathered around their tables, discuss, discuss, discuss. A kind of great dance of words on the deck of the sinking Titanic. Nothing wrong with arguing, of course. The problem is that the participants seem to move on another planet compared to actual reality. The Church is dying, the faithful flee, vocations disappear, but the Synod members live in a world of their own. Like all apparatchiks, party officials, they belong to a closed caste, whose sole purpose is the perpetuation of itself.

Meanwhile, another book comes out with another interview with the pope. Meanwhile they tell us that at the synod prayers were prayed for migrants and refugees. Meanwhile they take care to let us know that "some poor people in Santa Marta had lunch with the Pope". Churches always need rituals and these are the tired rites of the dying "Church of Francis".

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