Today for the Church the situation is very difficult. Is this one of the many crises that Christianity has experienced or a definitive decline? It is a question that also worries those who look at Christianity from the outside. But crisis does not necessarily mean an end. It can be an opportunity to open up to the future, knowing that the big risk is to be content to survive, regretting a better past. The solution is to live in crisis. The Church today is called to a condition of struggle, this time not against external enemies but against indifference and discredit.

"On the night between 15 and 16 April 2019, the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris burned down." That fire – with which the book opens – devastated a historic center of European Christianity and also symbolically represented the crisis situation in which the Church has been pouring for many years. In France as in Italy, in Europe and elsewhere in the world there has been a continuous reduction in religious practice, a decline in vocations, a lower incidence of the Catholic presence in public life. A situation of emptiness that – as Riccardi argues – concerns us all and that this book documents through the figures and events but also with the positions taken by the protagonists of the internal debate of the Church, from popes to bishops, from theologians to animators of the main religious movements. From a great historian of the Church and the religious world, protagonist of Italian public life, the impressive X-ray of the crisis of the Christian world and the analysis of the debate and the different ideas on how to get out of it.