20th century

The twentieth century is presented not as an age of confident progress but as one of exhausted causes and institutional retreat. Gris Marsala imagines people left behind after the battles have quieted; Father Óscar sees the Church losing the very groups whose lives might have renewed it. Together, their reflections make the century a crisis of allegiance: the old banners remain, but fewer people believe they can guide anyone safely forward.

The abandoned chessboard

Gris Marsala describes the century as dying badly. Revolutions, she says, have all been made and lost; the barricades stand deserted, and once-solidary heroes have become solitary figures holding on to whatever can keep them alive. Her image of an obsolete chess pawn, forgotten in a corner while the battle’s noise fades, turns historical defeat into a question of personal loyalty: whether there is still a king worth serving.

The image does not claim that every form of belief has vanished. Gris begins from the premise that each person has a distinct kind of faith, and calls faith necessary in this declining age. Its necessity is sharpened by the collapse of shared causes: belief may persist, but no longer as an uncomplicated membership in a victorious collective.

The Church losing its constituencies

Father Óscar gives the crisis an institutional history. He argues that the Catholic Church has betrayed its original message and traces a succession of losses: after the Reformation, it lost half of Europe; in the eighteenth century, it excommunicated Reason; a century later, workers recognized it as siding with masters and oppressors. In the century now ending, he says, the Church is losing the young and women. His bleak forecast is of mice running between empty pews—a religious institution surviving in buildings emptied of the people it claims to serve.

His account links this decline to the Church’s internal culture, not only to changing loyalties outside it. In the seminary, Father Óscar came to see a system governed by forms, ambition, and capitulation. Clergy choose professors, friends, or bishops who can help them advance; relationships become instruments of promotion. His recollection of learning that priests perform more kinds of bowing than the four before the altar makes institutional submission a counter-image to the Church’s public claim to moral authority.

Faith after allegiance

Gris’s isolated pawn and Father Óscar’s empty pews register different consequences of the same historical exhaustion. One is the individual left without a cause or a sovereign to serve; the other is an institution whose inherited authority no longer commands the people it once gathered. The novel places these perspectives side by side without resolving them into a single prescription: faith remains necessary, yet the systems that once organized it have become suspect.

Father Óscar also connects the century’s religious decline to the danger of spiritual substitutes. He believes his vocation has failed to give people the sign they need, leaving them vulnerable to palm-readers, astrologers, and spiritual salesmen. The crisis is therefore not simply a movement from belief to disbelief. It is a struggle over what can occupy the space left by compromised institutions, and whether an individual can remain upright when the larger battle—and the community that gave it meaning—has receded.