What happened today in St Peter's Basilica in Rome: I think everyone has already heard of the desecration of the altar, and I shall not repeat in what base manner it was done. A terrible abscess of a neglected disease of modern society

If one tries not to discuss the actions of this man, who is evidently very unwell, there is another thing that troubles me: people simply watched and waited for security to appear. Not one of the worshippers tried to stop him, to exact some act of retribution, to knock him off his feet, drag him out of the church, or teach him some sense. Do you think that twenty or fifty or more years ago everyone would have looked on in the same way as one of the principal altars of Christendom was desecrated? Would there really have been no bold souls, or simply witnesses unable to contain their wrath, who would have given this scoundrel a thrashing?

One could reflect on the trauma of the loss of the sacred, on the neoliberal modernisation that destroys religiosity, on society's rupture with tradition, on the deepening ideological crisis of Western society, on the destruction of the foundations of spiritual life, on the desecration of churches as a shameful moral act, and, in the end, on a cultural challenge to God Himself. Yes, all this is a large and very weighty subject.

But people, what has become of people? Where are our emotions? Have they really turned at last into the silent smiles of emoji and crystallised into likes on social networks? Why do the ordinary manifestations of human sensibility, impressionability and, since the occasion calls for it, anger, vanish somewhere from real life? And what comes next?