In his latest book, L’Avenir de Dieu (‘God’s Future’), Jean Delumeau writes that the aggiornamento of the Church will not really be realized until the day the pope is a Chinese woman, married to a black man.

The idea may seem pungent. One day perhaps, Delumeau’s prediction will come true. The Church will then have shown visible signs of its potential universality. But why stop there?

To achieve universality, it would be probably more effective to unite all the world faiths, to synthesize their dogmas, to resolve their millennial schisms, to dissolve the reasons of their incompatibilities, to exclude their exclusions, and for each one of them to recognize their own flaws and errors. More than anything else, it will be necessary for them to prove that universal religions are in a capacity to bring effective peace to the world, to guarantee justice, to put a veil of goodness and benevolence over humankind.

Without goodness, justice and equity, religion is nothing but farce, hypocrisy, talk of clouds.

A « Chinese woman » who became pope would embody a great symbolic leap, no doubt, but the road is long. We will have to walk longer than the time of one leap.