By Jeffrey Pojanowski, Public Discourse. (image: Ágatha Depiné/Unsplash)
I sat down and began writing this essay on the morning of April 21, 2025, less than thirty minutes after learning of Pope Francis’s death. Now is the time of pre-written obituaries, the lull before arguments about his “legacy,” or whispers in the loggia about the politics of succession. But such matters are not my focus here—nor is, at least directly, any claim about the proper direction of the Church’s doctrines, teachings, or practices. Absent the kind of crisis or rupture that would make essays like this irrelevant, my simpler point pertains no matter who greets the faithful in St. Peter’s Square. My claim is this: the Church needs to be a site of real, concrete encounter, a place of face-to-face friendship and even interpersonal friction in a time of disenchanted angelism that renders real transcendence unreachable. This plea for concreteness is, thus far, ironically abstract, but I hope the rest of this essay makes it more tractable.
The Church will always be a hopeful sign of contradiction, though what it corrects will vary with the errors of the age. The pagan world the Apostles confronted was one of suffocating immanence: an eternal universe of cyclical time, the heavens a ceiling, one’s station one’s fate—with most stations leaving their holders vulnerable to the whims of capricious gods or, more likely, of men who acted like those pitiless deities. The Gospel was truly good news: the cosmos had a beginning and an end (in two senses of “end”), that heavy sky would be torn like a curtain, and our ultimate station was to be united, should we so choose, with a God who made us in His image and was love Himself. Given the dark, stuffy stasis of the pagan dispensation, it was not surprising and perhaps altogether fitting that the Holy Spirit came as fire and wind. Nor, given the oppressive concreteness of the previous metaphysical regime, was it surprising that the countervailing temptation would be toward an all-spiritualizing Gnosticism.