Being There: Pope Francis’s Death and the Future of the Catholic Church

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a week-long series of essays at Public Discourse reflecting on Pope Francis’s pontificate, his legacy, and the Catholic Church’s future.

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.

Our current age, by contrast, flees concreteness of any kind. It is by now a cliché to bemoan the fact that most of us live in a world of distracted virtuality, but that does not make it any less true or urgent. Antón Barba-Kay’s bracing book, A Web of Our Own Making, explores how digital culture is changing, indeed rewiring, our very understanding of ourselves and our world. We reckon ourselves in terms of what is digitally quantifiable (and commodifiable), and we spiral toward a frictionless existence of distraction and distance from others—a world of avatars engaged in mimetic rivalry with other avatars, not a community of persons. When we unlock our phones, the eyes we are most likely to look into are our own. In this world acedia is not just one vice among others, but the way of life. This arrangement combines both unhappy dispensations discussed above: the suffocating immanence of the pagan cosmos with the abstracted angelism of the Gnostic. We are disembodied, capricious sublunar gods, fleeing death by living an infinite doomscroll.

We are not made to be this way, so of course we are unhappy. Nor can we lifehack our way out of this discontent; seeking out an app for that only reinforces those imprisoning structures. The Church, as it always manages to do, can name, speak to, and cure this current ailment. In a disembodied time, it is resolutely concrete: the splash of holy water, the smear of oil, the pinch of exorcising salt, the smell of incense, the quiet voice of absolution in your ear, the gentle slap of confirmation, Blaise’s candles on your throat, the laying on—or grasp—of hands, the gentle ache of the knees at consecration, the weird, withered relic of a saint, and, of course, the taste of bread and wine that are, mysteriously, His flesh and blood—suffering embraced and given loving meaning. This revolution will not be digitized. Yet unlike the pagan pinch of incense, this materiality does not point to things sufficient unto themselves, but rather to the resurrection of a body mysteriously spiritualized, a hypostatic union that is the heavenly inversion of our slothful abstraction.

This is not a new program, but a perennial proposition that is providentially apt for our times. And the most important thing for the Church to do today is to present it and be aggressively present with it. To be itself, but even more so. It’s not clear we need new formal initiatives, and I do not have grand strategies about how best to reach out in new ways. But perhaps we can learn lessons from earlier times, and embrace successful forms of evangelization: to be joyously, publicly different and let the world know, one person at a time, why we are. For parishes it means open doors, opportunities for the sacraments, preaching the faith, welcoming the curious, and reaching out to the stranger. Nothing strikingly new, though nothing easy, given the strains and claims put on a dwindling number of priests. For the laity, it means converting, and returning, daily to the riches that the faith offers us. It means to pray, to embrace the sacraments—to draw on the Church’s strength not as a spiritual lifehack, but as a path to being who we are truly called to be and to loving Whom we are called to truly love; and, more concretely, to live joyfully and differently as welcoming witnesses to a way of life that is truly better than what is on offer. Our priests cannot do it alone, and no parish program is a substitute for the friction that is actual encounter with another person. As banal as it sounds, the mission of the Church today boils down to being there: being there for a dislocated and disembodied world that needs to know that Being is there.

Catholics disagree on a lot these days, and these disagreements are important. It would be naïve to say that some kind of vigorous emphasis on an overlapping consensus among doctrinally, liturgically, or ideologically divided Catholics will save the day. And I recognize that, to certain kinds of Catholics, the emphases in the paragraphs above are in themselves an implicitly polemical brief for a kind of “normie” orthodoxy—neither “beige” nor “based.” That, I guess, is inevitable, as there is no neutral standpoint on these things. Nevertheless, believing in something like the Catholic Church and her deposit of faith presupposes a non-contestable core that is insoluble to the political waters that seem to suffuse everything these days. And that, it seems, is sufficient unto the day. Indeed, it is challenging, exciting, and deeply countercultural, a sign of contradiction that we should aspire to have emblazoned on our foreheads for all to see—whether we take communion in the hand or on our knees.

In short, what the world needs is mere Catholicism, and a lot more of it.

Image by Benhur Arcayan and sourced via Wikimedia Commons.