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.
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