A Good Pope Is Gone, 100 Bad Days Of Trump And One Big Reason To Hope For A Better Future

-Analysis-

ROME — Few events prompt us to reflect on the meaning of an era quite like the death of a Pope. And perhaps all the commentary surrounding the legacy of Pope Francis will end up overshadowing a more prosaic, but equally pressing, consideration: the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term.

Some might even see this coincidence as a sign of the times we are living through. Neither the man who made peace his life’s mission, nor the one who promised it within 24 hours of taking office, seems to have achieved it. And so we ask ourselves: if neither faith nor a superpower can save us, what can?

It is a bleak thought, revealing a curious paradox: we constantly decry the unpredictability and relentless pace of our age, and yet every time change arrives it appears to us as being threatening and definitive.

We see this in the sweeping judgments passed on the present moment: “American democracy is lost,” “globalization is over,” “conflict with China is inevitable.”

Self-destructive guilt

Even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said, “The West no longer exists.” The death of Francis has been cast in similar tones. We’ve heard that “with his passing, the Pope of hope has died,” as if no one who comes after him could possibly carry on that message of hope.

This mindset is so widespread that it might deserve a new word: definitivism. And it is worth noting how, rather than conjuring up the usual apocalyptic “we’re all doomed,” it instead feeds a kind of self-destructive guilt: just look at how often the word “suicide” pops up these days in headlines and speeches: the suicide of the United States, of democracy, of the West.

If we look closely, this kind of thinking isn’t unique to our time. Societies in every age have suffered from what we now call “presentism”, the belief that only the here and now matters, and that it is constantly under threat. Even the ancient Egyptians, who had a run of 3,500 years, believed they were at the end of an era each time a Pharaoh died.

Conspiracy theories aside, one thing is clear: fiction and reality shape one another.

All of this shows us that, for better or worse, every age is shaped by the way it tells its own story. Maybe we would never have made it to the Moon if Ludovico Ariosto or Jules Verne hadn’t first dared to imagine it. Today, some even suspect that the wave of war movies serves to normalize war’s return to the global stage, even after we had once sworn it off for good.

Conspiracy theories aside, one thing is clear: fiction and reality shape one another. Trouble starts when we begin to believe too much in the stories we tell ourselves — when we mistake the narrative for the facts.

History is full of self-fulfilling prophecies, things that happen precisely because we imagined them so vividly and repeated them so often that they came to feel not only possible, but inevitable.

The idea that our age is drawing to a close does not arise spontaneously, nor is it dictated solely by events. Rather, it is the product of a narrative that, day after day, turns uncertainty into conviction, speculation into dogma, until we no longer see a transition, but a looming collapse.

In constantly invoking the end of our world, we turn a perfectly understandable anxiety into a foregone conclusion.

A little patience

It is precisely here that history, in the sense of a critical inquiry into the past, should serve as our guide. It teaches us that nothing is ever truly inevitable. Even what now seems clear and linear is, in reality, the result of stories that sought to impose order on chaotic events, crafting logic where only confusion reigned.

This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve fallen into such simplification. After the victory of liberal democracies, we convinced ourselves that we had reached the “end of history” — the dawn of an unbroken age of peace and prosperity.

We forget that history more often changes shape than ends outright.

Today we run the opposite risk: imagining that what lies ahead must be a long, painful decline into some darker destiny. But both of these conclusions spring from the same impulse to freeze the flow of events into a story that must have an ending, whether happy or grim.

In doing so, we forget that history more often changes shape than ends outright. It rarely offers the clean breaks we like to think we are living through today. Having a little patience, a bit of perspective, can often be enough to see that.

This is the mindset we need if we want to break free from our endless present and begin imagining a different future: one not resigned to fear or fate. We can put a twist on an old papal proverb that carries of a kind of world-weary hope: whenever one era ends, another begins. Always.

Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!
Translation Matters • The Italian author closes the piece with an elegant paraphrase of an old Roman expression: “Morto un Papa, se ne fa un altro,” which literally translates to “A Pope dies, you make another.” Figuratively, it’s used to express the idea that, despite setbacks, life goes on. It’s often said with a touch of pragmatism or even indifference, but it can also carry a hopeful or reassuring meaning, depending on tone and context: a gentle reminder that new beginnings are always possible. In this case, the author applies the same idea to the world’s political cycles. It works very well in Italian, but was impossible to hold on to the word play in English and maintain the rhythm of the closer so I just made a reference (and link) about the proverb being about popes. —Gabriele Magro, Worldcrunch (read more about the Worldcrunch method here)