The Church’s Extrincist Response to the Pandemic: Re-reading the Church’s Acquiescence to Regulations in Agamben’s Wake

Abstract

In this article, I return to Giorgio Agamben’s intervention on the pandemic to reflect on one of his claims, namely the mundanity of the Roman Catholic Church. Agamben comes to this conclusion after reporting about the passive response of the Church to the state-of-emergency legislation and the “barbaric” conditions of social relationships that followed. These conditions, and not the conspiracy theories on the invention of an epidemic to extend forms of social control, are the primary focus of Agamben’s concern. I confine Agamben’s critique of the Church with a stipulation concerning the extrincist character of the Church’s reaction to the recent epidemic crisis. I argue that, due to the extrincist character of that reaction, the temporal power of the state has proven itself necessary to the defeat of the pandemic, but the spiritual power of the Church has manifested itself as superfluous.