Each Sunday evening, François Clauss concludes the two hours of the Grand journal by Wendy Bouchard with a very personal perspective on the news.
"Funny Holy Week might have said the late and facetious Jean-Pierre Mocky on this strange Palm Sunday. But who could have imagined one day a sanctuary of Lourdes totally deserted by its pilgrims, victim of the appearance of a mysterious virus.
Even in their most fertile imagination, neither Nani Moretti nor the creators of "The Young Pope" would have dared to offer us this mind-blowing image of a Pope alone praying for the world in front of a Saint Peter's basilica deserted by his faithful. A mysterious virus has dictated the Fa.
It seems very far this time when at the dawn of the first millennium, when the epidemic of the fiery disease decimated the countryside, the relics of the Saints were exhumed from churches in search of a helpless parade to what was then divine anger.
On his blog, the thinker Jacques Attali reminds us that one of the great lessons of the epidemic of black plague of the 14th century was the loss of political power of the Church, at the end of the Middle Ages, and the appearance the first police becoming the only force capable of protecting the lives of citizens.
A millennium later, the dark forces tried to resist. The Ayatollah of Qom in Iran refused in February, when the virus was already spreading, to interrupt its worship and the rallies in its city, calling its sanctuary "house of healing". Today there are 3,600 Covid19 deaths in Iran.
The rabbis of Bnei-Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city of 200,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, have forced the Israeli army to deploy to the streets because they refuse to leave their synagogues and to submit to other orders than those of God. Half of the people hospitalized today in Israel for Covid 19 come from ultra-Orthodox communities which represent only 10% of the country's population.
Overwhelmed by the terrible health reality, which even forces Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro flattering their evangelical electorate to submit to the necessary confinement, the dark forces will not resist the Covid19 any more than the black plague of the Middle Ages today .
And yet, the message that this strange virus conveys also shakes our contemporary faith, this absolute belief in the world of progress, science, innovation and trade, the indisputable happiness a few weeks ago of triumphant globalism .
Never perhaps have we needed so much to hold on to new beliefs, to explore the ways of a new confidence, never perhaps have we had in these times of confinement the time for us ask as many questions and reflect on ourselves, as evidenced by the proliferation of meditation and opinion sharing sites on all social networks.
As evidenced by these toll-free numbers that all religions have made available to their faithful, disoriented, in search of landmarks, but in an indispensable quest for meaning.
Yes, funny Holy Week, funny Ramadan fast looming in a few days, funny Passover, in places of worship as deserted as our souls seem to be inhabited today, looking for answers, new certainties and another world.
This new world of the post coronavirus of which we are already drawing the contours, that of a necessary new political practice, of an essential new sharing of wealth, of an essential new mode of production will not exist either without a new form of spirituality. As if it was also time to write our new testament together. "