The Godless Madman and the Pope

By Fernando De Haro -This is a transcript of an interview conducted by Fernando de Haro with Javier Cercas about his book El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo (God's Madman at the End of the World). "I have felt envy for the strength—I call it the 'superpower'—that these people have, because they really do have extraordinary strength," says the writer.

Fernando de Haro: Your book, El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo (God's Madman at the End of the World), is initially dedicated to Pope Francis's trip to Mongolia, but in reality, it addresses many other things. You say, "I am an atheist, I am anti-clerical, I am a militant secularist, I am a rationalist, a rigorously impious person…" And yet, no one would guess that after reading your book. I get the feeling that the book is not just about Pope Francis, but about whether faith is reasonable or unreasonable.

Javier Cercas: I was made an incredible offer—literally incredible. Not just unusual, but unprecedented. I mean, they hadn't made it to anyone else. Two years ago, I was at the Turin Book Fair, which is the big Italian literary event. I was signing books and my editor came up to me and said, “Javier, there's someone from the Vatican who wants to talk to you.” I thought that was very strange. That person's name is Lorenzo Fazzini, and he's now a character in the book. He's the director of the Vatican publishing house. He said to me, "Pope Francis is traveling to Mongolia in late August, early September. We think you might be interested in accompanying Pope Francis. We would arrange the trip for you. We would open the doors of the Vatican to you. You could talk to whomever you wanted, ask whatever you wanted, see whatever you wanted, and in the end, write whatever you wanted. An essay, a novel..." Mongolia is a country with a Buddhist tradition and fewer than 1,500 Catholics, which is practically nothing.

De Haro: You hesitated at first, though; you weren't sure whether to accept the proposal.

Cercas: I hesitated very little. I was perplexed because he warned me: “Look, we haven't offered this to anyone else. The Vatican has never opened its doors to a writer.” I was completely stunned. I didn't expect anything like this. Do you know why I hesitated so little? Because I knew right away what this book was going to be about.

De Haro: Your mother.

Cercas: Exactly. I remembered my mother. My mother was a deeply religious woman, a true believer. The book jokes that compared to my mother's faith, Pope Francis's was somewhat doubtful. She was a seriously religious woman. When my father died, she said she was going to see him after death. And she didn't say that because my mother was strange, but because that is exactly the heart of Christianity. Catholics seem to forget that. And I'm not the one who says it's the heart of Christianity, nor was it Pope Bergoglio who said it. St. Paul said it.

De Haro: What surprises me is that you, starting from your mother's belief, are still interested in knowing if what she believed is true. Someone else who was an anti-clerical, secular, militant, rationalist atheist, even if he loved his mother very much, could have said, “These are things my mother believed, but I consider them settled; they no longer interest me.”

Cercas: We are confusing things here. I am an atheist, but I am not stupid. I know perfectly well, like anyone with a minimal education—though you don't need to be educated to understand that the Catholic Church, that Christianity, has been absolutely decisive for two thousand years of history. This must be said. I am an atheist, and I am anticlerical. By the way, so was Pope Francis—anticlerical, not an atheist, of course. When I say this, some people who are very ignorant about what the Church is think I am saying that Pope Francis wanted to burn priests. Anticlericalism, that is, opposing clericalism, is an absolutely fundamental concept in the Catholic Church. I am everything I have said before, but culturally, I am Catholic. I am Christian like everyone else in this country, in the West. Benedetto Croce said that "we cannot not call ourselves Christians." We cannot stop being Catholics. We all come from there. We come from Athens, from Jerusalem, from Jesus Christ and from Socrates.

De Haro: Cultural Christianity is one thing, and your mother's Christianity is another.

Cercas: It was totally different, indeed. What is at the heart of this book is the question of what my mother believed. It is absolutely crucial. It is the central enigma of Christianity and of our civilization. The subject of the book is not only Pope Francis but, above all, understanding what is happening in the Church today. The Catholic Church has been absolutely decisive in the last two thousand years of history from every point of view: political, cultural, ethical—in every sense. My purpose was to take advantage of this incredible circumstance to go there and find out what is happening in the Church. The most important thing has been to rid myself of prejudices, because all of us, without exception, are full of prejudices about the Catholic Church. Everyone, those who are for and against.

De Haro: And how did you rid yourself of your prejudices?

Cercas: That has been the great effort I have tried to make. By talking to many people, reading a lot, and, above all, making an effort to understand what the Church is today, what is being discussed at its heart in the Vatican, who the people are who run it, and who Pope Francis was. And believe me, Mongolia is a very exotic place, but the Vatican is even more exotic than Mongolia. For me, the whole experience has been incredible. From the first page, from the proposal—which is not only incredible but unprecedented, because no one had ever done it before—to the end of the book, which, if I were a believer, I would say is a small miracle.

De Haro: And if you've read it, don't tell anyone. Don't worry, I won't tell. No spoilers.

Cercas: Everything has really been extraordinary because what I've found is a series of issues that are never talked about.

De Haro: In fact, you scold some of them and say, “You're not getting the message across.”

Cercas: It's true. When people talk about the Church, they talk almost exclusively about political issues. The Catholic Church was, of course, very powerful for centuries; it had armies. The Pope had armies and even states. Today, the Church has no real, effective political power. We have seen Pope Francis say from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica that wars must end. And we are all totally enthusiastic about him saying these things. How many wars have ended? When people talk about the Catholic Church, they talk almost exclusively about politics. And yet the religious discourse, which is the essence—because the Pope is first and foremost a religious leader and the Catholic Church is a religious denomination—is completely buried. So when you say that Pope Francis was anti-clerical, people get scared.

De Haro: You recount your history with faith. You abandon faith after reading San Manuel Bueno, Mártir by Unamuno. And then literature becomes for you a form of knowledge that replaces, in a way, religion. It's a form of knowledge that isn't rationalist, that isn't what we use in math or physics. It seems to me that you're making a comparison between faith and aesthetic knowledge. What's the difference between the knowledge produced by literature as aesthetic knowledge and the knowledge produced by faith? Are they similar?

Cercas: No, they are different, totally different. I try to be completely honest in the book. I am not a believer, but I was. In reality, I am a normal, ordinary guy right now in Spain, in Europe, in the West. I was educated in Christianity because my family was Catholic, my education was Catholic, and my country has a strong Catholic tradition. At a certain point, I lost my faith. This is very common right now in Europe, in the West. I lost my faith in the following way: I was living in Catalonia and would go to Extremadura every summer to a small village. One summer, one of those things that happen in the summer happened to me. I was 14 years old and I fell madly in love.

De Haro: And she said no.

Cercas: When I returned to Gerona, where I lived, I wanted to hang myself from the dome of the cathedral. The situation was very serious, and I went looking for the most serious book I could find to solve it, which turned out to be San Manuel Bueno, Mártir.

De Haro: Our entire generation was marked by San Manuel Bueno, Mártir.

Cercas: Everyone remembers that novel. It's a very short novel that tells the story of a priest who doesn't believe—a priest who loses his faith and, despite this, continues to preach to his parishioners because he thinks that if he doesn't, they will be lost. So I, who until then had been a great kid—athletic, an excellent student, and very religious because my family was—went into crisis. I didn't just go into crisis; I lost my faith, started smoking, started drinking beer, and entered a kind of mental chaos from which I still haven't emerged.

De Haro: You're exaggerating a little when you say you haven't emerged from mental chaos...

Cercas: No, I'm serious. And indeed, as you say, I went looking for something in literature. From that moment on, I started reading in a different way. I started reading not only for pleasure—I had always been a keen reader—but also in search of knowledge. I understood this much later. I went in search of the certainties I had lost, the certainties of faith. That's a mistake, because literature doesn't offer certainties; it doesn't offer the serenity, the tranquility, the strength that faith provides. But by the time I discovered this, it was too late. Literature was a substitute for me, a substitute for my lost faith.

De Haro: I believe that the way of knowing through faith and the way of knowing through literature can be similar in some ways.

Cercas: In both cases, one learns through clues. It is not experimental knowledge but knowledge gained through an aesthetic impact. There are many characters in the book, of course, and one of them is an extraordinary man named Tolentino. Cardinal Tolentino is the prefect of the Dicastery for Culture, that is, the Minister of Culture. He is a poet—not just a poet, but a great poet. My Portuguese friends say he is the best poet in the Portuguese language. This book talks about faith and many things that are apparently unrelated to the general interest, but they aren't, because if you explain them well and understand the subject, they can be totally fascinating. The proof is that this book is being widely read. In a conversation with Tolentino, I tell him that faith is like intuition, like poetic intuition—that is, the perception of meaning where others see none and the transmission of that meaning through sophisticated language. I am referring to the language of poetry. The cardinal replies that it is exactly that, like poetic intuition. But then I spoke to Pope Francis and said, “The cardinal and I agreed that faith is like a kind of poetic intuition.” And the Pope said, “No, it's like a gift.” I don't think there's any difference between the two; in other words, they are complementary, if not the same thing. In any case, faith is not voluntary. The narrator of this book, who is me, is called the “godless madman.” He is a madman who has lost God. Then there is the “madman of God,” who is the Pope. Pope Francis was named after Francis of Assisi, who called himself the madman of God. There was a moment when I felt—not in this book, but before this book, although this book has changed my life—envy of true believers, like my mother or the missionaries in this book, who are truly exceptional people. I have felt envy for the strength—I call it the 'superpower'—that these people have, because they really do have extraordinary strength. I have seen my mother do extraordinary things that I would not be capable of doing. But faith is not voluntary... No, you cannot say, “Because I am interested in it, and because it gives me a lot of strength and makes me feel good, I am going to have faith.” Poetic intuition, like faith, you either have it or you don't. And whether it's a gift or an intuition, I had it, and I lost it.

De Haro: There's a moment in the book when you leave a meal with a group of people in Rome and you say to yourself, “Maybe if I had had friends like these, I would have kept my faith.” Note that you're not leaving a liturgical celebration; you're leaving a meal.

Cercas: This is said by a character you know, Lucho Brunelli, who is a great guy, perhaps Pope Francis's closest friend in Rome. He says that Pope Francis spoke of faith as an attraction, like the attraction we feel for a woman, like erotic attraction. What Christ had, said the Pope, was that he was an attractive, interesting guy.

De Haro: A humanly interesting attractiveness.

Cercas: Brunelli says that what leads people to faith is finding interesting people. And I would add something more. It's a fundamental issue in the book: it's about finding interesting people with interesting language. I'm very clear about this: I think the Church has a serious language problem. If Christ was attractive, it was because he had extremely attractive language. Attractiveness is expressed through attractive language. Things and language go together, of course. The Church has a cryptic language that no one understands. I'll give you an example I always use. One of the fundamental words of Francis's papacy is a word that no one understands. Maybe you understand it, but 90% or 95% of people don't understand “synodality.” It is an absolutely fundamental word for understanding what the Church is doing right now. It means moving from a vertical Church to a horizontal Church. It means, if you push me—and here some theologians will throw their hands up in horror, but I have defended it in the Vatican—that there should be a more “democratic” Church. Not democratic in the sense that there are parliaments or elections, but democratic in the etymological sense of the word. Democracy means power of the people, and synodality means power of the People of God. To put it quickly, it means a participatory Church, a Church in which people intervene and express their opinions, not a Church in which only the hierarchy speaks. And this is fundamental. But the language of the Church is an old, rusty, syrupy language...

De Haro: You suggest that the problem is not just one of communication. There is a moment when you ask a very interesting question. You ask whether the Church is still looking for miracles. You said before that faith cannot be achieved by willpower. I find this interesting because if the Church ends up relying only on certain structures, on a certain ethic, on a certain doctrine, and not on miracles, it loses what is most essential to it.

Cercas: Sometimes it seems that the Church forgets fundamental things. I have mentioned the most fundamental of all, which is the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life. What I am about to say is very strong, but it is true. Christ was not only a rebel from a social point of view; he was a guy who said very dangerous things. He was a subversive who said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” He was a man who was crucified because he was dangerous. He was a rebel who said, “All human beings are equal and deserve mercy and affection.” And this at a time when slavery reigned. A guy who surrounded himself with the humiliated, the offended, the poor, those who had nowhere to die, sinners, prostitutes, and tax collectors for Rome. He was a truly subversive guy. He embodied a rebellion that was not only social but, I would say, metaphysical. What Christianity says is, “We want to live longer.” There is a rebellion against death. That is the heart of Christianity. That is the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life. I am not saying this, nor is Pope Francis saying it; Paul says it very well: "We will rise again because Christ rose again. And if Christ did not rise, our faith is in vain." In other words, our faith is useless. And sometimes it seems that this terrible, monumental rebellion against death takes a back seat. When people talk about the Church, they talk about its position on Ukraine or immigration... and it's all very well for the Church to say these things. But there are other things that are the real “rock and roll” of the Church.

De haro: It's funny that an atheist like you would tell the Church that it is forgetting the core of its dogma and its religious dimension.

Cercas: Look, I was with Enzo Bianchi, who is a great Italian theologian. This man told me one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me about this book. He said, “This man, from the outside, is reminding us of things that we have somewhat neglected.” From the outside, we see things that Catholics on the inside have pushed to the side or take for granted. I'm not going to reveal the ending of the book so as not to spoil it...

De Haro: But we can say that at the end, you suggest that perhaps the miracle is possible. You leave the door open.

Cercas: The godless madman, who is me, the narrator of this book, ultimately feels what many great artists of the 20th century have felt: nostalgia for God. In other words, nostalgia for meaning. Nostalgia for miracles.

De Haro: That's where we all are, believers and non-believers alike.