Trento - The season Christianity is living through does not resemble a sunset, but that moment of the day when the light slowly changes and forces the eyes to see differently. It is a delicate transition, marked by tensions that can no longer be ignored: overburdened institutions, shrinking communities, scandals that have fractured trust, and a large part of the Western world that experiences faith more as a memory than as a living encounter. Yet precisely within these cracks, a subtle underground movement emerges, pointing to another possibility. Not an ending, but a transformation.
For some time, ecclesial structures have shown clear signs of fatigue. Empty seminaries, isolated parish priests, faded liturgies: unmistakable indicators of a system no longer sustaining itself. Recent decades have uncovered deep wounds rooted in dynamics of power that suffocated the essential. This loss of credibility is not a marginal accident but the symptom of a spiritual illness: when Christianity imagines itself as an apparatus rather than a path, it inevitably becomes rigid and collapses inward. Yet the unveiling of these fragilities places the Christian community before its most urgent responsibility: to let go of what has become sterile in order to rediscover what can still generate life.
In this historical turning point, the way we look at the past is decisive. The history of faith is neither a sealed archive nor a catalogue of forms to preserve with fear. It is a living reality, inhabited by generations that continue to question us. What came before us has not vanished; it remains in relationship with us, raises questions, exposes omissions, and suggests possibilities. When we read it with clarity and affection, it transforms—and in transforming it, we ourselves are changed. Christianity does not grow through repetition, but through the capacity to make what it has received mature.
In today’s world, the opposition between “believers” and “non-believers” is no longer adequate to describe what unfolds in people’s inner lives. Faith and skepticism coexist in the same person, often intertwined in new forms that no longer fit traditional languages. Indifference, more than militant atheism, is the true challenge of our time. But this interior fluidity—experienced by many as disorientation—can become the place of a renewed encounter with mystery. Adult faith is not the one that claims to possess definitive answers, but the one that accepts uncertainty as part of the journey and allows the deeper desire for truth, beauty, and meaning to surface.
The crisis we are living through should not be interpreted as an irreversible collapse. Every age marked by radical change has compelled faith to regenerate itself. Something similar is occurring today. Christianity, freed from the institutional monopoly over the religious sphere, can return to what it was at its origin: experience, search, discipleship. Less habit, more choice; less formal belonging, more personal adherence; less defense of boundaries, more openness to dialogue. It is not about abandoning identity but rediscovering it as a dynamic force, not a relic to protect.
If this is the afternoon of Christian history, to borrow the expression of the blind priest and philosopher Tomáš Halík, it is not because the light is fading but because it is changing in quality. It is the moment when what was clear in the morning becomes more complex, nuanced, demanding. But it is also the moment when the horizon of the future reopens. Faith has never considered time a closed cage: it is a journey toward a fullness not yet complete. Even now, as structures tremble and certainties crack, renewal remains possible. Not because the present is simple, but because every time faith becomes essential again, a strength surfaces—capable of setting us back on the road, imagining what does not yet exist, and releasing hidden energies.
For this reason, the hour Christianity is living should not be described in apocalyptic tones. It is rather a threshold: a passage that invites us to leave illusions of self-sufficiency behind and return to what is essential. A time that exposes the limits of religion as power but opens the possibility of a deeper, freer, more human faith. The future is not the place of decline, but the space where history awaits its regeneration.
Christianity may rediscover its youth precisely at the moment it seems to be aging—if it can live this crisis as an opportunity for metamorphosis. It is not night approaching; it is an afternoon preparing the hour in which everything may be reimagined. It is up to us to recognize it.
f.M.F.
Silere non possum