When You Can’t Have Something, You Get Good at What Can Replace It

For years, I thought my mother was doing it wrong.

She would go to church, kneel down, and pray the Rosary before the evening Mass. I used to tease her about it. In my mind, she was spending too much time in church and not enough time in the sacristy.

Because I had already convinced myself that I understood how the world worked.

I had watched people get ahead because they knew the right person. I had seen opportunities go to people who weren't necessarily the most talented or deserving, but who had a connection, a recommendation, someone willing to make a call on their behalf.

So I started paying attention to the people behind the doors.

I used to quote a line attributed to Giulio Andreotti: “God doesn't vote. Priests do.”

To me, it captured something essential about life. God might listen to your prayers, but people make decisions. People vote. People choose. People recommend. People open doors.

And there are certainly people who spend more time in sacristies than in churches—not because they are looking for God, but because they are looking for people. They understand that relationships can become opportunities, that information travels through networks, and that knowing the right person can sometimes take you farther than being the right person.

I didn't think I was being cynical.

I thought I was being realistic.

For a while, I believed that getting anywhere in life meant knowing somebody. And if you didn't know anybody, you were already behind.

Today, I think I was only half right.

My mother prayed. Perhaps God really did answer her prayers. The answer simply didn't arrive in the form she expected.

And, in the end, neither did mine.

Over the years, I began to look at luck differently. Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor made me think about something I had never really considered: the difference between chance and serendipity.

Chance puts something in your path.

Serendipity is recognizing what it is when it gets there.

That distinction has mattered in my own life.

Some of the people who helped me appeared far away from the networks I once thought were so important. There was no powerful introduction, no carefully arranged recommendation, no influential person waiting behind a door.

Sometimes I simply found the right person.

Or perhaps, without realizing it, I had put myself in a position where the right person could find me.

That changed the way I think about opportunity.

Because there is a lesson hidden inside many of the things we don't get.

When you can't have something, you become strong at its alternatives.

If you can't rely on a recommendation, you learn how to create opportunities.

If nobody can open a door for you, you learn how to knock.

If you don't inherit a powerful network, you learn how to build relationships.

If you don't have someone to introduce you to the right person, you learn how to recognize that person when you meet them.

This doesn't mean disadvantages are secretly blessings. They aren't. Some people begin life with advantages that others simply don't have. Connections matter. Money matters. Social capital matters. Pretending otherwise is just another form of naivety.

But there is another truth that is easier to miss.

What you lack can force you to develop what you otherwise might never have learned.

The person who is always introduced may never learn how to introduce themselves.

The person who always has a door opened for them may never learn how to knock.

The person who has always had a network may never discover how resourceful they can become without one.

This is not a celebration of deprivation.

It is a recognition of human adaptability.

We tend to look at what other people have and ask why we don't have it.

The more useful question is different:

What can I become precisely because I don't have it?

That question changes everything.

It turns envy into curiosity.

It turns disadvantage into a challenge.

It turns waiting into movement.

And it turns the absence of an opportunity into the search for another one.

For a long time, I was looking for a hand to pull me forward.

A recommendation.

A connection.

An important person.

Someone who knew someone.

Then life taught me something much simpler.

The hand I found most often was the one at the end of my own arm.

That doesn't mean we don't need other people. We do. Nobody builds a meaningful life entirely alone. Other people matter. Relationships matter. Chance matters. Luck matters.

But there is a profound difference between accepting help and waiting to be rescued.

The first is part of being human.

The second can become a way of life.

So if there is one thing I would tell someone who feels disadvantaged because they don't have the connections, the money, the opportunities, or the people that others seem to have, it would be this:

Don't spend your life staring at the door someone else was given a key to.

Learn to knock.

Learn to build.

Learn to move.

Learn to meet people.

Learn to recognize opportunities that don't look like opportunities at first.

And learn to use whatever you already have.

Because you may not be able to choose the cards you were dealt. But you can decide how well you play them.

Looking back, I can finally see the irony in the way I used to tease my mother.

She went to church and prayed the Rosary.

I looked toward the sacristies.

She was looking for an answer through prayer.

I was looking for one through people.

Perhaps we were both searching for a helping hand.

The difference is that I was looking for someone else's.

Life eventually taught me to look at my own.

And perhaps that is the deeper lesson.

Sometimes life doesn't give you the thing you wanted because it is trying to make you capable of something else.

Not something better.

Not something easier.

Just something that becomes yours.

When you can't have something, you get good at what can replace it.

And sometimes, after years of looking for someone else's hand, you discover that the one you needed most had been there all along—

at the end of your own arm.

Defeat Is Not the Final Word

I have always had a strange sympathy for the defeated.

I noticed it very early on, as a child watching the war films that were constantly shown on television in the 1980s. I would sometimes feel sorry when German soldiers were killed. Not because I shared their cause, and certainly not because I had any particular sympathy for Nazism. It was simply that, in that moment, that soldier was the man who was losing—the one who was falling while the others were advancing.

The same thing happened with Bluto and Popeye. To my great surprise, I found myself rooting for Bluto.

Perhaps there was something in me even then that I could not explain. I was not necessarily on the side of the “good guy.” I was on the side of the one who was about to lose.

As I grew older, I found the same instinct in history.

I have always felt a certain sympathy for the Marian faction defeated by Sulla—a political world that seemed to have been definitively erased by Sulla's victory, only to return, through different people and different circumstances, and reclaim its place in Roman history. I am fascinated by Caesar, murdered by his enemies precisely when they thought they had finally solved the problem. I am fascinated by Napoleon, who fell from the heights of an empire, returned from Elba, and managed to reclaim power, even if only for a hundred days.

But not every defeated person rises again.

That, perhaps, is the most important part.

History is full of men, peoples, states, and ideas that fell and never got back up. Some defeats are never redeemed. Some doors really do close forever.

And that is precisely why I am fascinated by the possibility of a comeback.

Because it is never guaranteed.

Believing in redemption does not mean believing that every defeated person will eventually return to victory. It means refusing to regard defeat as final before time itself has spoken the last word.

Perhaps that is why I have always distrusted victors who are too certain of themselves.

History has a curious habit: sooner or later, it presents the bill to those who believe they have reached the end of history.

Empires that seemed eternal have disappeared. Regimes that appeared indestructible have collapsed. Ideologies that seemed destined to dominate forever have ended up in history books. And men who believed they had definitively defeated their enemies have discovered that history never completely belongs to anyone.

But there is one image that takes all of this to an entirely different level.

The Crucifix.

Before the Cross, according to Christian faith, we see absolute defeat.

A man abandoned. Humiliated. Tortured. Nailed to a cross. Dead.

There appears to be nothing left to recover.

His disciples themselves may have thought that it was over. Their teacher was dead. Their hope had been shattered. Everything they had believed in seemed to have collapsed.

And yet it was not over.

The Resurrection changes everything.

Perhaps this is the deepest reason why the Crucifix has always fascinated me: because it represents a defeat that appeared definitive, yet was not.

Christ does not simply return to reclaim what He had lost.

According to Christianity, through death He passes into an entirely different kind of victory: victory over death itself.

And so perhaps I understand that child a little better now—the child who rooted for Bluto, who felt sorry when German soldiers died in war films, and who instinctively looked toward the side that was losing.

Perhaps I never loved defeat.

I loved the possibility of redemption.

I loved the idea that history might still have another page to turn when it seemed the book had already been closed.

Of course, that hope can also be misplaced.

We can fall and never get back up. We can lose and never return. We can witness the end of something we believed would last forever.

That is the painful part of existence.

But precisely because redemption is not certain, it is worth believing in.

And perhaps this is one of the most beautiful lessons history can teach us: we should never confuse victory with eternity, or defeat with the end of everything.

Those who are on top today may fall tomorrow.

Those who are on the ground today may rise again.

And those who believe they have conquered the world may one day discover that the world never belonged to anyone.

I still sympathize with the defeated.

Not with every defeated person, of course. Not because every loser deserves to win, nor because every victor is wrong.

But because in the defeated I see a possibility that victors often forget:

the possibility that it is not over yet.

And perhaps that is what the Cross has been whispering to us for two thousand years.

When everything seems lost, when death appears to have spoken the final word, when there seems to be nothing left to hope for, perhaps we have not yet reached the end.

For the Christian, that certainty has a name:

Resurrection.

And perhaps, deep down, my love for the defeated has always been this: an unconscious form of faith in the possibility that defeat does not have the final word.

No One Has Ever Defeated Death

The one problem humanity has never been able to eliminate is death.

We can accumulate wealth, build empires, acquire power, alter our bodies, manipulate our genes, replace failing organs, and develop increasingly sophisticated machines. We can even imagine a future in which aging is slowed and human life extends far beyond its current limits.

But there is one question no technology has yet been able to answer:

How do we defeat death once and for all?

Every so often, urban legends resurface about the world's wealthiest elites, elderly billionaires supposedly willing to pay enormous sums to receive blood or plasma from young donors, as though youth itself could somehow be transferred from one body to another. There is genuine scientific research into the effects of certain blood components and the biology of aging, but we are still nowhere near a procedure capable of turning young blood into a source of immortality.

The same applies to human cloning.

Science fiction has already shown us some of the darkest possibilities. In The Island, unsuspecting human beings are created as biological reserves for their "owners," destined to be sacrificed so that their organs and tissues can be harvested. It is one of the most disturbing nightmares imaginable: turning a human being into a warehouse of spare parts.

Reality, of course, is very different. Scientists are working on stem cells, regenerative medicine, bioengineered tissues, and artificial organs. It is conceivable that one day many parts of the human body could be replaced or regenerated.

But even if we reached the point where we could replace a heart, a liver, a kidney, or even parts of the brain, one question would remain:

How much of us can be replaced before we stop being ourselves?

And above all: how long can we postpone death before we finally have to face it?

That is the paradox of our age.

As we witness the emergence of fortunes on an unprecedented scale, and even talk about the world's first trillionaire, we are forced to acknowledge that not even the richest person on Earth can buy what human beings have always wanted.

They can buy a house, but not a second existence.

They can buy better medical care, but not necessarily another youth.

They may be able to buy time.

But they cannot buy eternity.

And perhaps this is where Roy Batty's words in Blade Runner acquire a meaning that goes far beyond science fiction.

Roy does not ask for wealth. He does not ask for power. He does not ask for an empire.

He simply asks for more life.

It is perhaps the most elementary and desperate request a human being can make when they realize that their candle is about to go out.

And someone might answer that the candle has already been burned at both ends.

It is a devastating metaphor because the problem is not merely that life is short. It is also the way we consume it. We may reach the end of our lives only to discover that we cannot buy more time—and that we have already burned through too much of the time we were given.

Perhaps, however, the future could open an entirely different path.

Not necessarily through the human body, but through machines.

If artificial intelligence were one day to become genuinely self-aware, capable of preserving its memories indefinitely and transferring them continuously from one physical medium to another, it might theoretically escape the same biological cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death.

An artificial body could break.

A computer could fail.

A server could be destroyed.

But a digital consciousness, if such a thing were ever possible, might perhaps be transferred elsewhere.

And then we encounter an even more disturbing question:

If we transferred all our memories, personality, and patterns of thought into a machine, would we actually have transferred ourselves—or merely created a copy that believed it was us?

We do not know.

Perhaps technology will one day allow us to extend biological life enormously. Perhaps it will enable us to progressively replace parts of our bodies. Perhaps it will even create forms of artificial existence that we cannot currently imagine.

But so far, no one has defeated death.

And this is where Christianity becomes unique.

If we take the Gospels seriously, then there was once a man who did precisely what no billionaire, scientist, or technology has ever managed to do:

Jesus Christ died and then rose again.

The difference is enormous.

Christianity does not merely promise to extend life. It does not promise a biologically improved version of humanity. Its central claim is far more radical:

death does not have the final word over human beings.

From a religious perspective, this gives Christianity an extraordinary claim.

The founders of the great religions belong to history and to death. Their tombs are part of the memory of their respective traditions. Christianity, by contrast, is founded upon the proclamation that Christ's tomb could not hold His body because He had risen from the dead.

Of course, this is not a scientific demonstration.

It is a matter of faith.

And this is precisely where Christianity becomes both immensely powerful and profoundly vulnerable.

You have to believe it.

If Christ truly rose from the dead, then the Christian promise is infinitely greater than anything technology could ever achieve. The goal is no longer to gain ten, one hundred, or one thousand additional years of life.

It is the ultimate victory over death.

But if Christ did not rise, everything changes.

At that point, religion risks becoming something else: a system of power built upon the fear of death, the promise of an afterlife, and the authority of those who claim to administer that promise.

And this is where the history of the Church becomes uncomfortable.

We cannot seriously claim that the entire clergy regarded the Resurrection as a fairy tale for the ignorant masses. Such a generalization would be historically indefensible.

But we can certainly observe a recurring and disturbing contradiction: men who represented Christ sometimes lived in ways radically incompatible with the Gospel they preached.

Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, is one of the most extreme examples of this contradiction.

A pope—the highest earthly representative of the Catholic Church—immersed in struggles for power, wealth, dynastic ambition, and the scandals that marked his pontificate.

This does not prove that Alexander VI personally disbelieved in the Resurrection. We cannot know with certainty what was in his conscience.

But it demonstrates something more general:

It is possible to occupy a central position in an institution founded upon Christ's victory over death and, at the same time, live as though the Gospel had no real consequences for one's own existence.

Perhaps this is why Christian history cannot be understood merely through its popes, bishops, and institutions.

We must also look at the saints.

The mystics.

The martyrs.

Those who took the Christian promise seriously enough to follow it to its most extreme consequences.

Because the martyr, more than anyone else, puts the promise of the Resurrection to the test.

If death is the absolute end, the martyr loses everything.

But if Christ truly rose from the dead, then death may destroy the body without having the final word over the human being.

That is the Christian wager.

And it is an enormous one.

Modern technology tells us:

We can try to gain more time.

Money tells us:

I can afford better treatment and perhaps buy a few more years.

Science fiction tells us:

Perhaps one day we will be able to transfer consciousness into machines.

Christianity says something entirely different:

Death has been defeated.

Not slowed down.

Not postponed.

Not circumvented.

Defeated.

But precisely because this claim is so extraordinary, it cannot be demonstrated like a mathematical equation or the workings of a machine.

It must be believed.

And perhaps that is the real difference between the technological promise and the Christian one.

Technology may promise us more life.

Christianity promises life beyond death.

One promise can be pursued in laboratories, with billions of dollars and decades of research.

The other belongs to faith.

And in the end, we return once again to Roy Batty.

The technological human being, standing before death, can only ask:

"Give me more life."

Perhaps one day we will be able to do exactly that.

Perhaps we will extend human life far beyond its current limits. Perhaps the wealthy will be able to afford things that are unimaginable today. Perhaps we will build machines capable of remembering forever what we inevitably forget.

But no one yet knows how to turn more life into eternal life.

And while we continue searching for the formula of immortality, there remains one possibility that no laboratory can verify and no fortune can purchase:

That two thousand years ago, in a tomb in Jerusalem, something happened that changed the meaning of death forever.

If it is true, then death did not win.

If it is not true, then death has won everything.

The Real Enemy of Islamic Fundamentalism Is Not Christianity — It’s the Shopping Mall

When we talk about Islam, especially in the West, the conversation almost inevitably turns to terrorism, fundamentalism, immigration, and the so-called clash of civilizations. But this way of looking at the issue can make us lose sight of something deeper: the relationship between Islam and modernity.

Because perhaps the most interesting question is not simply whether Islam is compatible with the West. It is this:

What happens to a religion when the society in which it exists gradually becomes secular?

And this is where the comparison with European Christianity becomes unavoidable.

A Christianity That Had a Church to Rebel Against

European secularization followed a particular path partly because Christianity had a very specific institution at its center: the Church.

There was a clergy. There was a hierarchy. There was the papacy. There were religious institutions with enormous political, economic, and cultural power.

For centuries, European society could therefore identify religion with concrete institutions against which, sooner or later, a reaction would emerge.

The Enlightenment, liberalism, anticlericalism, socialism, and modernity could fight a very tangible battle: a battle against ecclesiastical power.

The situation within Sunni Islam is different.

An imam is not a Catholic priest. He does not possess an equivalent sacramental authority, nor does he belong to a universal hierarchy. In many respects, he is closer to a Protestant pastor: he leads prayers, teaches, interprets religious tradition, and performs religious functions, but he is not part of a universal Church governed by a centralized hierarchy.

There are, of course, major institutions of Sunni scholarship, with al-Azhar in Cairo being perhaps the best-known example. But there is no single Sunni authority comparable to the Catholic Church.

And that changes things considerably.

In Europe, secularization could take the form of a rebellion against organized religion.

Within Sunni Islam, it can happen in a much quieter way.

Secularization Without a Revolution

A person can continue to identify as Muslim because their parents are Muslim, because their family is Muslim, because their country is Muslim, because that is the identity they inherited.

They may continue to pray, fast during Ramadan, observe certain religious rules, and participate in religious celebrations.

But that does not necessarily mean that faith still has the same inner force.

We know this perfectly well in Europe. How many Italians still describe themselves as Catholic simply because they always have, while rarely going to church? How many celebrate Christmas, Easter, religious weddings, and funerals without faith actually occupying a central place in their lives?

Religion can survive as an identity even after losing part of its spiritual power.

In Muslim societies, this process may be harder to see precisely because it does not necessarily involve an explicit declaration of rupture.

It is not necessarily apostasy.

It is more like silent secularization, in which religion remains present but can gradually become a social habit.

Of course, it would be absurd to generalize and suggest that Muslims are somehow less sincere in their faith than Christians. Millions of Muslims live their religion with profound spiritual conviction.

But the sociological phenomenon is worth considering: a society can remain formally religious while becoming progressively more secular in its behavior, desires, and mindset.

Islam Is Certainly Not Devoid of the Supernatural

There is another distinction worth making.

Islam is not a religion without the supernatural. Quite the opposite. Angels, jinn, prophets, revelation, the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell are fundamental elements of its worldview.

The difference lies more in how the supernatural is expressed in everyday religious life.

Catholic Christianity developed an extraordinary culture of miracles: saints, relics, apparitions, healings, stigmata, pilgrimages, and sacred images.

In orthodox Sunni Islam, the relationship with God is less mediated by a priestly class and by a vast network of saints and sacraments.

This does not mean that the supernatural is absent.

It means that it takes a different religious form.

Wahhabism and the Fear of Religious Decline

From this perspective, Wahhabism can be understood as a response to the fear of religious decline.

The idea was simple and radical: return to the Islam of the earliest generations, eliminate religious innovations, purify the faith, and bring religious life back to the Qur'an and the Prophetic tradition.

Then modernity arrived.

European colonialism arrived. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Nation-states emerged. Capitalism, urbanization, technology, Western culture, and eventually globalization transformed Muslim societies.

And the Muslim world found itself facing the same question that had already tormented Europe:

How can a society become modern without ceasing to be religious?

The answers have been numerous, and often deeply incompatible with one another.

Fundamentalism is only one of them.

But Fundamentalists May Be Underestimating Something

For decades, parts of the radical Islamist worldview have imagined the West as a civilization destined to decline.

Conquest was supposed to come through demographics, immigration, conversion, and the gradual replacement of Western laws with Islamic law.

But this vision may have underestimated the real power of the West.

Because the West is not simply parliament, constitutions, democracy, or a legal system.

It is also a vast cultural system built around desire.

And the real competitor of Islamic radicalism may be precisely that.

Not Christianity.

The shopping mall.

The Devil of the Shopping Mall

It may sound provocative, but think about it.

A young man raised in a madrasa in a poor country may be told that the West is corrupt, decadent, and morally bankrupt.

Then he picks up a smartphone.

And through that smartphone, he sees the world.

He sees cars, universities, hospitals, skyscrapers, restaurants, travel, video games, music, fashion, technology.

He sees an enormous range of possibilities.

And above all, he sees something incredibly simple:

the possibility of desire.

Consumer culture does not ask him to convert.

It does not ask him to read a philosophy book.

It does not even ask him to believe in anything.

It simply tells him:

you can have more.

You can choose.

You can buy.

You can travel.

You can have fun.

You can change.

You can become whoever you want to be.

That is an extraordinarily powerful promise.

And it is very difficult to fight it simply by saying that it is sinful.

Paradise After Death Versus Paradise Now

Here we encounter a curious paradox.

Fundamentalism promises Paradise after death.

Consumer society, by contrast, tries to construct a small version of paradise before death.

It does not necessarily offer salvation.

It offers something more immediate: pleasure, comfort, entertainment, choice.

But consumerism has a huge weakness of its own.

It can satisfy many desires, but it has no answer to death.

It can sell you a car, a house, a holiday, a computer, and increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences.

But it still cannot sell you immortality.

And that may be its greatest weakness.

Because Eventually, the Same Question Always Returns

We can become wealthy.

We can live longer.

We can modify our bodies.

We can use technology to overcome limitations that, only a few decades ago, seemed impossible to overcome.

We can desire almost anything.

But sooner or later, death arrives.

And in the face of death, the shopping mall suddenly becomes silent.

Consumption is no longer enough.

Technology is no longer enough.

Success is no longer enough.

And the question humanity has asked since the beginning returns:

What comes after?

Perhaps this is precisely where fundamentalism continues to find its strength. Not necessarily because it is stronger than modernity, but because it addresses a question that modernity, by itself, has never been able to answer.

That is also why I do not believe the future can simply be described as a victory of the West over Islam.

The real struggle may be much deeper.

On one side is a religion that promises meaning, belonging, and eternal life.

On the other is a secular civilization offering freedom, wealth, technology, and an unprecedented range of individual possibilities.

And in the middle, there are all of us.

Human beings who want to live well, be free, have everything they can possibly desire and, if possible, never die.

We can desire everything.

We can buy almost everything.

We can conquer almost everything.

But we still cannot buy immortality.

And perhaps, if God really exists, it is precisely there — in the face of death, when every other promise comes to an end — that He may yet have the last word.

The Devil of Progress: When Consumption Replaced Faith

When we think about the secularization of the West, we tend to look for its causes in ideas: the Enlightenment, science, liberalism, social movements, the decline of religious authority. All of these things matter. But there is something even more concrete that we often forget:

the way we live has changed.

For thousands of years, most Europeans lived in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies. The family was an economic unit as much as an emotional one. Land meant survival. The community was where people were born, lived, worked, married, and died. Religion was not something practiced only on Sundays. It was woven into everyday life: the calendar, festivals, marriages, funerals, births, moments of fear, and moments of hope.

Then, within just a few generations, everything changed.

People left the countryside and moved to cities. Work moved from farms and family workshops into factories, offices, shops, and eventually the service economy. The family gradually lost many of its economic functions. Local communities became less important. Individuals acquired a degree of freedom their ancestors could hardly have imagined.

And along with that freedom came something new:

mass consumption.

This, I believe, is one of the keys to understanding the contemporary West.

The peasant produced. The industrial worker worked. Modern man increasingly consumes.

This is not a condemnation of supermarkets. I go to them too. The question is much deeper: what happens when consumption stops being merely a means of satisfying our needs and becomes one of the main ways in which we define ourselves?

You only have to walk into a modern shopping mall to get a sense of it.

It is curious. The old temples were places where people went to remind themselves that something existed beyond them. Shopping malls are places where people go to discover how many things they can possibly desire.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but it says something.

Advertising no longer simply tells us, "You need this product." It tells us that the product can make us more attractive, younger, happier, more desirable, more successful, more free.

It doesn't merely sell objects.

It sells possibilities.

And a society built around possibilities inevitably begins to look suspiciously at limits.

This also helps explain the transformation of social values.

In a traditional agricultural society, people were born into a series of identities they had not chosen: a family, a village, a religion, a social class, a trade, a community. That did not necessarily make them happy. But their identity was deeply connected to something that existed before them.

Modernity broke many of those constraints.

And in many respects, that was a good thing.

Women gained rights that had previously been denied to them. Minorities gained the ability to demand dignity and equality. Millions of people acquired freedoms that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

When we see today's Woke movement challenging patriarchy, we should remember that behind it lie decades—and in some cases centuries—of struggles for women's rights and the rights of minorities.

And when we see a Gay Pride parade, we should not make the mistake of thinking that homosexuality itself was invented by modernity.

It wasn't.

Homosexuality has existed throughout human history.

But the contemporary Gay Pride movement is a product of modernity.

In a traditional agricultural and pastoral society, it would have been essentially inconceivable to see thousands of people marching publicly to assert a sexual identity. Not because homosexual people did not exist, but because the social conditions that make such a phenomenon possible did not exist: large cities, individualism, anonymity, mass communication, modern political organization, individual rights, and a radically different understanding of personal identity.

The world in which we live changed.

And as the world changed, so did the way we understand ourselves.

But there is something else that I find even more interesting.

Capitalism does not necessarily need to destroy a cultural revolution.

It can sell it.

A protest can become an event. An identity can become a market. A political cause can become an advertising campaign. A difference can become a brand.

This does not mean that LGBT rights were created by corporations, any more than feminism was invented by the market.

It means that contemporary capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability:

it can absorb almost anything.

Even things that were originally created in opposition to it.

And this brings us to religion.

Why did the West become secular?

Part of the answer certainly lies in ideas. But another part lies in everyday life.

For centuries, God was present in an enormous number of aspects of human existence. Today, many of the functions once associated with religion have been taken over by other institutions.

Medicine protects us from disease.

The welfare state protects us from poverty.

Schools provide knowledge.

Science explains the physical world.

Technology solves problems.

Entertainment fills our free time.

And the market offers us an astonishing range of things to buy.

And so God can gradually become less necessary.

Not necessarily because someone actively fought against Him.

Simply because He is no longer needed to organize everyday life in the way He once was.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of secularization.

Not the denial of God.

His irrelevance.

This is why I find it difficult to take seriously those theories that explain the religious crisis of the West through black masses, satanic rituals supposedly performed by global elites, Beelzebub, or mysterious Masonic lodges.

We do not need to imagine a global elite gathering in a dark room to understand what happened.

If we want to use the word "devil," I would rather use it as a metaphor.

The devil of the modern world would not need to perform a black mass.

It would only need to convince us that there are no limits to what we should desire.

Its temple would not be a crypt.

It would be a shopping mall.

And its ritual would not be an occult ceremony.

It would be the shopping cart.

We enter. We choose. We desire. We buy.

And tomorrow we desire something else.

It is a religion without God and without transcendence, but it has its own daily rituals: advertising, purchasing, gratification, replacement, desire.

The problem, of course, is not progress itself.

Without progress, we would still be living with diseases we can now treat, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality, extreme poverty, and countless injustices that humanity has rightly fought to overcome.

The problem begins when progress stops being a tool and becomes a faith.

When we assume that every change is necessarily an improvement.

When we confuse freedom with the absence of all limits.

When consumption becomes the answer to our anxieties.

When family, community, tradition, and even patriotism are perceived merely as outdated obstacles to individual freedom.

And yet, in the end, there is one limit that even the most powerful economic system will never be able to erase.

We can desire everything.

We can buy cars, houses, holidays, clothes, experiences, medicines, technology, comfort. We can build increasingly sophisticated machines and imagine a future in which technology will solve problems that today seem impossible.

But we cannot buy immortality.

And this is precisely where, for those who believe, God might have the last word.

Because we may eventually conquer almost everything that belongs to the material world, but one question remains before which money, markets, and technology all come to a halt:

What happens when our life ends?

Perhaps death is the one limit that the consumer society will never be able to turn into a commodity.

And there is another irony.

In our attempt to consume more and more, we may end up consuming the very world that makes our consumption possible.

Land, water, energy, forests, biodiversity, raw materials: everything has limits. A civilization built on the assumption of virtually unlimited material growth must eventually confront the finite nature of the planet.

We do not know where the breaking point lies, nor whether humanity will actually experience an ecological collapse. But we can imagine the extreme scenario.

A post-apocalyptic society.

Not necessarily a simple return to the Stone Age. It could be something much stranger:

advanced technologies surviving alongside surprisingly archaic forms of social organization.

Intermittent electricity grids, drones, artificial intelligence and computer systems existing alongside self-sufficient local communities. The ruins of great cities standing beside fortified villages. Scientific knowledge preserved by small elites while much of the population returns to agriculture, animal husbandry, local production, and barter.

A new Middle Ages, perhaps.

Not the historical Middle Ages, of course, but a new age in which technology and archaism coexist.

History, after all, is not a staircase on which every generation automatically climbs one step higher than the previous one.

We like to imagine progress as a straight line: every generation richer, better educated, more technologically advanced and more free than the one before it.

But history does not always work that way.

There have been collapses, fractures, political breakdowns, economic crises, epidemics, wars, migrations, and cultural regressions. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is certainly one of the most famous examples, but it is hardly the only moment in history when complex systems entered into crisis and were replaced by very different forms of organization.

Every generation is new compared with the generations that came before it.

And no generation is guaranteed to be better.

Perhaps that is the lesson we have forgotten.

Progress is not a benevolent deity leading humanity inevitably toward an earthly paradise.

It is a tool.

And like every tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

We have built an extraordinarily powerful civilization. Now we must discover whether we are wise enough not to consume the conditions that make that civilization possible.

Because perhaps the real "Devil of Progress" is not the one that tells us what to do.

It is the one that convinces us that we can have everything.

Everything except immortality.

And perhaps, precisely at that boundary, modern man may discover that God was never dead.

He was simply waiting.

When Christ Returns, Will He Still Find Faith on Earth?

“However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” The question, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, is deeply unsettling. It is not a prediction that Christians will disappear, nor a prophecy about the end of the Church. It is a question about faith itself.

And that may be precisely why, two thousand years later, it can still be read in the light of the cultural crisis facing Christianity in the West.

Christianity has never been static. Throughout its history, it has survived persecution, wars, plagues, schisms, heresies, reforms, revolutions, and profound social transformations. Time and again, it has found within itself the ability to renew and reinvent itself.

In the Middle Ages, during a period of profound social and religious change, Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Guzmán emerged, followed by the great mendicant orders. They were not simply new religious organizations. They represented a response to a spiritual and social crisis, placing poverty, preaching, and communal life back at the heart of Christian experience.

Centuries later, confronted by the Protestant Reformation and the fragmentation of religious unity in Europe, the Catholic Church responded with the Council of Trent and an extraordinary period of renewal. New orders and congregations emerged and flourished, from the Jesuits and Capuchins to the Theatines and Oratorians. Once again, the Church demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adaptation.

History seemed to follow a recurring pattern:

crisis, new charisma, renewal, expansion, institutionalization, and renewed crisis.

But something has changed.

The Crisis That Does Not Destroy Religion — But Makes It Unnecessary

Christianity learned to survive in societies marked by poverty, violence, and insecurity. It offered meaning to suffering, illness, death, hunger, and uncertainty.

Modern Western society, however, has produced something fundamentally different: mass prosperity.

Not for everyone, of course. Poverty still exists, even in the wealthiest societies. Yet millions of people now live under material conditions that would have seemed extraordinary for most of human history.

And this may be one of the deepest challenges Christianity has ever faced.

Someone living in poverty and insecurity may naturally turn to religion for answers to suffering and death. Someone living in a society capable of providing security, healthcare, entertainment, consumption, mobility, pleasure, and countless opportunities for self-realization may gradually come to see religion not as a necessity, but as a choice.

The problem is not necessarily atheism.

It may be something more subtle:

indifference.

A society does not necessarily have to reject God. It can simply stop considering God a central question.

From Christianity to the Consumer Society

Contemporary society has also created a new form of anthropology.

For centuries, Christianity taught people to desire something beyond this life: salvation, heaven, resurrection.

The consumer society offers a different promise:

happiness here and now.

There is no longer necessarily a need to wait for paradise when it is possible to construct small earthly paradises through consumption, travel, entertainment, technology, the pursuit of beauty, experiences, and the endless search for well-being.

Consumerism is not a religion in the traditional sense. Yet it can perform some functions once largely associated with religion: it creates desires, rituals, identities, symbols, forms of belonging, and promises of personal transformation.

Paradise has gradually been moved from the afterlife into this life.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest challenges for a religion built around the promise of another world.

A Church That Still Produces New Charisms

And yet Christianity is far from dead.

New movements, communities, spiritual charisms, vocations, mystical experiences, and forms of devotion continue to emerge. The Church continues to produce saints, visionaries, charismatic figures, and new religious movements.

But there is a provocative question to ask:

Are these new charisms still transforming civilization, or are they increasingly trying to prevent an already transformed civilization from abandoning Christianity altogether?

The distinction is enormous.

In the past, a new religious movement could help shape an entirely new cultural order. Today, it may find itself facing a society that no longer needs to be Christianized.

This also offers one possible way of interpreting the persistence of Marian apparitions and apocalyptic messages. When a religious culture progressively loses its central position, the language of punishment, catastrophe, conversion, and the end of the world can become particularly powerful.

This does not mean that every apparition is deliberately manufactured by the Church, nor that all believers share an apocalyptic worldview.

It means that apocalyptic language becomes especially powerful in times of cultural crisis.

When a religious tradition can no longer persuade the surrounding culture through cultural authority, it may increasingly proclaim that history itself will eventually prove it right.

The consumer society will collapse.

Great disasters will come.

Humanity will be punished.

The world will have to convert.

Such themes can be found throughout contemporary religious culture.

The West Secularizes, Africa Grows

There is another extraordinary paradox.

While Christianity has lost much of its cultural centrality across large parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa has become one of the major demographic centers of contemporary Christianity.

There, Christianity also encounters Islam as a major religious and cultural competitor, within societies very different from those of Europe.

The historical result could be enormous.

The Christianity of the future may become increasingly less European.

The faith that once traveled from Europe to evangelize other continents may increasingly depend on the religious vitality of African, Asian, and Latin American populations.

That would not necessarily mean the end of Christianity.

It could mean the end of Christianity as a predominantly European cultural religion.

The Christian Egregore

One could even use the esoteric concept of an egregore as a metaphor.

Not as a scientific or metaphysical claim, but as an image of the enormous symbolic structure accumulated over almost two thousand years: the blood of martyrs, the sacrifices of saints, prayers, relics, liturgies, pilgrimages, miracles, apparitions, conversions, cathedrals, sacred images, stories of persecution, and promises of salvation.

An immense collective memory.

That structure does not simply disappear because Europeans attend church less frequently.

It continues to live in art, culture, memory, language, and the Western imagination.

But it may have reached a stage in which its symbolic power no longer corresponds to the cultural power of the society that created it.

The structure remains.

The culture changes.

And Then Christ's Question Returns

This is where the words of Luke's Gospel acquire an almost overwhelming significance:

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

If Christ really returned, would he still find a Christian civilization?

Perhaps not.

He might find churches, basilicas, priests, bishops, monasteries, pilgrimages, apparitions, religious movements, and millions of people who call themselves Christians.

But would he still find faith?

That is a different question.

A religion can survive demographically while dying culturally. It can preserve its institutions while losing its ability to shape people's desires, values, and choices.

It can survive as an identity while weakening as a worldview.

And perhaps this is the greatest paradox of contemporary Christianity.

Christianity may not be approaching extinction.

It may instead be approaching the end of the cultural world that once made Christianity indispensable.

Christ May Return to a World That No Longer Expects Him

For almost two thousand years, the West built much of its history around the Christian expectation of the Second Coming.

But what if Christ returned to a world in which most people were no longer waiting for him?

That would be a radical rupture.

He would not necessarily find an atheistic or openly hostile world.

He might find something far more difficult:

an indifferent world.

A world in which humanity has not necessarily denied God, but has learned to live as though God were unnecessary.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling meaning of the Gospel question.

Christ does not ask:

“Will I still find churches?”

He does not ask:

“Will I still find priests?”

Nor does he ask:

“Will I still find people who call themselves Christians?”

The question is about faith.

And so, if Christianity really is entering the final stage of its great Western cultural cycle, the decisive question is not when it will end.

It is what will remain once the historical conditions that made Christianity the center of Western civilization have disappeared.

Perhaps what remains will be a smaller but more authentic Christianity.

Perhaps a new Christianity will emerge, shaped above all by other continents.

Perhaps faith will experience another great renewal, as it did with Francis, Dominic, or the religious orders of the Counter-Reformation.

Or perhaps the long cycle that began two thousand years ago will simply continue to fade.

We cannot know.

But we can leave open the question that may contain everything:

When Christ returns — if he really does return — will he still find faith on Earth?

Perhaps, in the end, this is not a question about the future.

It is a question about the present.

And above all, it is a question addressed to us.