By Juan Arias
In recent global research conducted by the Ipsos Institute in 26 countries, Brazil and Colombia are among those who believe in God the most, with 89% and 86%, respectively.
At the bottom, among the least believers, is Japan, with 19%.
When asked whether faith in God helps them in any way in times of crisis, Brazil and Colombia also appear in the first row with 90% and 89%.
Regarding concrete belief in heaven, Brazil and Colombia also come out on top with 79% and 78%.
On the other hand, those who believe in hell include Spain, with a miserable 22%.
Spaniards prefer to bet on heaven.
The curious thing is that the survey shows that believers in general, especially Christians, whether Catholics, Protestants, or Evangelicals, appear today to be more conservative than the Vatican itself.
Since the Second Vatican Council, which revolutionized Catholic theology, popes from John Paul II to the present have carried out a true revolution on what can happen in the afterlife, revising the old concepts of hell, heaven, purgatory, and limbo.
If, until then, these states after death appeared as physical places where one enjoyed or suffered, the last popes have carried out a true revolution.
According to them, even the conservative German Pope Benedict XVI, the so-called “novissimos” are not physical places but spiritual states.
Thus ended hell with the boiling oil cauldrons of hell as so plastically described by Dante Alighieri in his famous The Divine Comedy.
And even disappeared forever, the so-feared limbo of the children were the little ones who died before being baptized and, therefore, still with the weight of original sin.
The decision to eliminate limbo forever was made, curiously enough, by the conservative Polish Pope John Paul II. And this has a history that he confided to journalists one day.
He told us he had reunited his entire family in the same tomb: “Except for my sister, who was stillborn”.
We learned that Pope Wojtyla had a sister who had never been mentioned.
He said that she was stillborn.
Her parents, who were fervent Catholics and could not baptize her, did not bury her.
They threw her in the garbage.
It was something that Wojtyla, when he became Pope, could not stand and, with the stroke of a pen, decided that limbo did not exist.
His stillborn sister had to be in heaven.
It may seem like a simple anecdote, but it is something more. Before the Polish pope decided that limbo did not exist, millions of Christian families worldwide suffered with their dead children before they were baptized because they could not be in heaven.
And they were not consoled by the doctrine that they would not enjoy God’s presence there, but neither would they suffer.
The most unbelieving, even then, were already making graces with the limbo.
I remember a very funny Andalusian aunt of mine from Baza, Granada, who, anticipating the decision of Pope John Paul II to eliminate limbo, was already having fun with it.
When the subject came up, she used to say with her usual jest to those who asked her what limbo was all about.
She used to say: “Jozú, it’s neither fu nor fa. I want to and I can’t. We don’t know what that place is. We don’t know what that strange place is where poor children neither have fun nor suffer”.
The modern popes understood this and convinced themselves that the beyond, of which we know nothing, cannot be considered a physical extension with places of happiness or torture.
The truth is that, especially concerning hell, with the boiling cauldrons of fire, in which Spain appears in the polls as the most unbelieving, the jokers, even believers, always ironized.
I remember a joke that ran when I was young.
There were two close friends. One of them died.
When the other also left this world, the first thing he did was to visit his old friend, whom he considered a saint.
He had only one defect: he could not stand cold and drafts.
As soon as he reached the afterlife, he went to heaven to get news of his friend, who had been goodness personified.
His astonishment was that he was not there. But he had been so good.
Resigned, he went to see in purgatory.
Perhaps his friend had had some hidden sin, some venial sin, and was still purifying himself.
Had he been condemned to eternal fire, he who was so saintly, yet so cold?
Resigned, he knocked at the door of hell.
When they opened it, he heard a voice shouting from inside:
“Please close that door; it’s freezing! It was his friend, and even hell was not warm enough for him.”
Jokes, irony, and criticism sometimes contain ancient wisdom.
Today even popes are beginning to understand that certain precepts of the Church are unsustainable in a world that has become secularized, that has discovered even Artificial Intelligence, that has left the dark Middle Ages far behind, and that no longer agrees, as they used to say, with millstones.
What will perhaps remain, as it appears in the latest world survey on the faith of the peoples, is that Homo sapiens need to believe in something capable of deciphering the mystery beyond life.
Radical atheism, however modern it may appear, continues to be an enigma in a contradictory world in which, together with rabid modernity, we need to believe in something that alleviates our finiteness and our thirst for eternity.
With information from El País
News Colombia, English news Colombia, Religion
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