In recent days there have been a series of events, some of great international resonance and others more local or secondary, but all of them crossed by a particularly relevant common thread, because it contributes to creating the impression that it is really reaching its goal. end a historical era, to make way for a world that is still largely unknown. At this time it is difficult to apply exhaustive and shared definitions of the transition we are experiencing and, on the other hand, historians know well that any definition is purely formal and didactic, and rarely corresponds to the reality of the facts: the Middle Ages, the The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Short Century, and so on, are just high school textbook titles. The world of human beings is much more complex and varied.
The death of Gorbachev and the queen.
In the space of a week, two of the most symbolic heads of state of the 20th century died, representing the two empires of East and West, the Eurasian-collectivist and the Atlantic-liberal, summing up in themselves the hopes and contradictions of the two conceptions that have oriented the consciences of the generations up to the present in a binary scheme. Right and left, communism and capitalism, Christianity and atheism, dictatorship and democracy, reform and stagnation and so many other simplistic categories that have made it possible to live in an understandable way, making consistent and predefined field choices, without the anguish of lacking a specific identity and a community of belonging, as is happening with those who were born in the 21st century.
Queen Elizabeth had to manage a delicate family situation: the marriage of her son, the current King Charles III, to the “princess of the people” Diana Spencer, which lasted from 1981 to 1996, and the sensational death, the following year, of the woman who had somehow marked the end of the sanctity of the British monarchy. No doubt family and court scandals had not been lacking in the royal past, but they were related to the internal balances of the sacred caste of power. The story of Charles and Diana instead inaugurated the public appropriation of the affairs of the House of Windsor, annulling the abyss between the throne and the people, the “disintermediation” that is already common in the life of any person and allows with a click feel equal to any monarch or star in the sky.
In a way, Isabel had managed that transition, compromising her iconic figure to keep alive the memory of a world that had already disappeared and that the day after tomorrow will be definitively buried. Gorbachev came to power in 1985, joining the collective imagination alongside Diana and another great interpreter of the end of that world, the saintly Pope John Paul II. The informative opening of glasnost that lifted the iron curtain of the Soviet world, was the only true reform of it, given the complete economic-political failure of perestroika. The Polish Pope also broke down many barriers that kept the figure of the Roman pontiff in an unattainable empyrean and became the first “media pope”, taking inspiration from John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council with the opening to the world of the Catholic Church, which today is irreversibly continued by his Argentine successor.
Pope Francis’ trip to Asia
If Wojtyla came “from a distant country”, Bergoglio came to the Vatican “from the end of the world”, the first non-European and non-Mediterranean Pope, the great revolution of contemporary Catholicism. And the current decade of Pope Francis’ pontificate increasingly guides the Church “going out” towards the peripheries of the world, freeing herself from the weight of earthly commitments and carrying through to the ultimate consequences the end of her temporal power, which formally took place a barely a century and a half. An important moment, but not yet decisive for universal history. The trip to Kazakhstan was undoubtedly one of the most symbolic of this change of era, reflecting and redefining the final phase of the triumphant papacy of Wojtyla, who had visited the ex-Soviet countries closest to Russia to demonstrate the victory of faith over atheism. , after he had to give up the strongholds of Moscow and Minsk.
Between 2000 and 2001, John Paul II went to Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and Kazakhstan, precisely the lands that Putin’s neo-imperialism claims today to defend itself from the “invasion of the West”, of which the Polish Pope was the charismatic leader. Pope Bergoglio seemed anything but an “invader”, trudging through Astana’s ultra-modern palaces as Wojtyla himself had twenty years earlier, both weakened by age and the physical ailments of the final stages of their respective lives. pontificates and thus accentuating the effect of “vanishing” the limits that mark these historical transitions. No longer the empire of religion but dialogue with peoples and cultures, in Asia, where Christians have never dictated the law. No longer war of the West against the atheist demons and then the fundamentalists, as in 2001 of John Paul II, but a call for peace by Francis for Ukraine and for the whole world in the new world war “in pieces” of 2022.
Between triumphalism and requests for forgiveness, a new impetus for the mission and ecumenical openings, from the prayer meeting in Assisi in 1986 to the Nursultan Congress in 2022, the figures of the two most mediatic popes in history seem to be much closer to each other. which would suggest a “twentieth century” vulgate that contrasts the traditionalist with the progressive. Another factor is added to this double Eurasian prophecy: the Polish Pope experienced at that time the refusal to dialogue of the most important and influential Christian Church after Rome, the Moscow patriarchate; and the Argentine, who had reestablished relations with her, must have noted with dismay the resurgence of “militant Orthodoxy” in tones worthy of the Crusades, he also disappointed by the impossibility of visiting Moscow and embracing his “brother” Kirill again , as in the days of the Cuban illusion.
The Congress of Religious Leaders of Kazakhstan also showed a paradox: the coldness and hostility of the representatives of Moscow, with the absence of the patriarch and the Soviet ritualism of the delegation headed by Metropolitan Antonij, compared to the great affability and fraternal spirit of the representatives of Islam, with whom Francis is achieving great results in interreligious dialogue. It seems then that the great war against Islamic terrorism has ended, giving way to a new one against orthodox imperialism. An anecdote that highlights the grotesque aspect of the situation that has been created was the question from the Kazakh Foreign Minister during the preparatory meetings for Francis’ trip: “Will the Pope celebrate the Mass in the square in the Christian rite or in the Christian rite?” Muslim?”.
The Caucasus War and the Ukrainian Counteroffensive
In the days that the Pope was in Kazakhstan, two war events provoked in turn confused reactions and mixed emotions. The eternal conflict between Azerbaijanis and Armenians over the mountainous area of Nagorno-Karabakh resumed with violence precisely when a definitive peace agreement seemed to be close. At the same time, the Ukrainian army surprisingly deceived the Russian invader by attacking him where he did not expect it, and in a few days recovered a large part of the occupied lands in six months.
The Caucasus is a symbolic borderland between Europe and Asia, as are the disputed parts of Ukraine around the Black Sea. In addition, Azeris and Armenians have symbolized the conflict between Christians and Muslims for many centuries, but today they also represent opposite opposite parties: Yerevan is pro-Russian, while Baku is the main alternative to the supply of Russian gas to Europe. Just as it is difficult to assess the Ukrainian revenge, which seemed impossible and inadequate while the majority was waiting for the surrender of kyiv so that they could once again celebrate world peace, now, instead, there are fears for the future of Russia, since a collapse and Putin’s disappearance would open unpredictable scenarios and perhaps more catastrophic than the current ones.
Xi Jinping’s journey
In this context, the Chinese president made his first trip abroad after two years of the pandemic and arrived in Nur-Sultan at the same time that the Pope was celebrating (in Latin) the mass of the Catholics of Central Asia. XI Jinping then went triumphantly to Samarkand, placing great emphasis on the Shanghai Cooperation meeting, one of the many Asian acronyms that until now had had very little importance in geopolitics and the world economy. China seems to want to assume the imperial heritage that the United States is renouncing, especially after the withdrawal from Afghanistan a year ago, and that Russia is unable to claim, as is evident in the taciturn expression of Putin in the protocol photos with the great Chinese brother.
Will China rule the world in the next era? Will Europe be able to reassert its historical centrality, while conservative parties seem to rise to power from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean? Many other questions arise and precisely when the Kazakh capital seemed to be the center of the world, in Brussels President Ursula von der Leyen once again condemned the war in Ukraine, “a war against our energy, our economies and our values”. A war that should be waged with the weapons of faith, as Pope Francis preaches, in order to be “messengers of peace”.
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