The Mystery and the Spectacle
The Church’s Mission to Reclaim Awe in a World of Endless Performance
Pope Leo XIV has just been elected. The news of his pontificate has rung out across the world—we finally have an American Pope. From the moment he was announced, I felt as if something different had just happened. As if we had entered a new timeline.
Pope Francis was the Holy Father when I entered the Church from evangelical Protestantism. I even remember him from my years as an atheist. I had never truly lived through the election of a new Pope—only distant memories from childhood of Pope John Paul II’s death.
When Pope Leo appeared on the balcony of the Vatican, it looked as if he had tears in his eyes. Suddenly, I felt a noble obligation stir in my soul—an affection for the Holy Father. In that moment, God granted me the grace to feel love for the leader of His Church on earth.
I don’t write this to explain what this Pope means for the Church, or for traditionalists, or for whatever timeline we now find ourselves in. I write this because of something he said in an interview—a line I believe he paraphrased from St. Augustine (but could not find the original context):
“The Church’s proper mission is to present to the people the nature of mystery as an antidote to the spectacle.”
When I heard those words—spoken by the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, an American no less—I sat back in my chair and exhaled. Not because it was poetic, though it was. And not because it was clever, though it certainly pierced. But because it named something I had been carrying for years without words. It felt like truth rising to the surface, uninvited, yet precisely on time.
I instantly focused on the word “spectacle.” For me, it meant more than just entertainment or distraction—it meant the entire shared epistemological experience of life as it is lived and collected by human beings. The show of existence. The great unfolding of everything we see, feel, and endure together. And yes, it is a spectacle—tragic, beautiful, unrelenting.
And in the context of the quote, it struck me that the Church is the one who understands this spectacle—even as most remain caught in its trance. She stands outside the show, not as a critic, but as a physician. She does not merely watch the spectacle unfold; she offers its antidote: the mystery of faith. Not mystery as confusion, but as the slow unending unraveling of eternal truth. The curtains of reality pulled back—not all at once, but thread by thread—as humanity continues its pilgrimage through the shared zeitgeist of history and existence.
This is what struck me about Leo’s words. The Church is not here to compete with the spectacle. It is not here to be more viral, more emotional, more entertaining. It is not here to “reach the culture” by mimicking its neuroses. No—she is here to be something entirely other. To be an interruption. A contradiction. A place where the masks drop and the light pierces through.
When Pope Leo said mystery is the antidote, I think he meant something deeper than “Church is sacred.” Mystery, rightly understood, is not confusion. It is holy depth. It is not a puzzle, but a presence. Mystery is the awareness that the world is not flat. That things are charged with meaning, even when they are hidden. That your suffering is not arbitrary. That your longing is not pathetic. That behind the veil of this life, something eternal is pressing in.
Like Aristotle’s cave allegory, humanity remains in the dark—watching shadows flicker on the walls, mistaking them for reality. And as Sir Roger Scruton once lamented, “one of the saddest parts of the modern world—particularly due to television—is that people live in a tiny, tiny slice of the present moment, which they can carry forward with them, but nothing remains. There’s nothing in their experience that reverberates down the centuries. The centuries, to them, are completely dark—just unillumined corridors from which they stagger into a single little sliver of light.”
This is the spectacle at its most tragic: not just the performance, but the forgetting. Not just distraction, but amnesia. In a world flattened into feed and flash, the past becomes irrelevant and the future unimaginable. And so we drift, ever stimulated, never rooted.
But the Church remembers.
She carries time in her body. Her liturgy echoes with the centuries. Her feast days are not holidays but homilies of memory. She stands in the cave—not mesmerized by the shadows but calling us toward the light beyond them. The mystery is not behind us, nor locked in the past—it is ahead of us, always unfolding, always deeper.
I don’t know what kind of Pope Leo XIV will become. I’m not interested in quick takes or ideological parsing. I know the politics will swirl, as they always do. But in that one quote—offered humbly, almost in passing—I saw a glimpse of something unshakable.
A Pope who remembers the world is not starving for relevance. It is starving for reverence.
And maybe, just maybe, the Church is finally ready to stop chasing the crowd—and start leading it back to the altar.
For too long, much of the Church has been tempted by mimicry. In René Girard’s terms, we imitate the desires of others, not because they are good, but because they are theirs. We chase relevance, we echo cultural mantras, we beg for attention—thinking if only we can package the Gospel in a form palatable to the mob, then we will be accepted. But the crowd does not want truth. The crowd wants spectacle. And the more we chase it, the more we become like it—until we no longer offer anything different at all.
The altar is not a stage. And the priest is not a performer.
He stands in persona Christi—not to reflect the crowd’s image back to itself, but to re-present the one true Sacrifice.
If the Church is to speak again with power, it must reject the spell of mimicry and return to mystery. Let the world have its noise. We have incense. Let the world have its algorithm. We have the Mass. Let the world have its influencers. We have saints.
Because the world does not need a church that looks like it.
The world needs a church that looks like Heaven.
And of course, in another sense (and probably most likely ha), the spectacle refers to what the French theorist Guy Debord described: a world in which images have replaced reality, where people live passively through curated media, marketing, entertainment, and social performance. That definition still fits well with what I thought it meant. Maybe that is what Pope Leo meant—and maybe I’m reading too deeply into it. But that’s where my mind went: not just to media, but to the whole condition of being alive in this disenchanted age.
But even as I write this—not in a state of grace—I feel a sudden invigoration in being Catholic. A quiet joy. A flicker of return. I’m optimistic about the Holy Father, yes—but more than that, I’m reminded that the Church is still alive, still calling us home.
The Church’s task is not to out-spectacle the spectacle.
It is to reveal reality.
Some nights, I really do feel that Chestertonian awe—that dizzying joy of remembering the Church is not just right, but enchanted. That it contains everything.
To be Catholic is to stand inside an endless cathedral of wonder.