{"id":76788,"date":"2022-12-11T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldcatholicnews.com\/the-reinvention-of-the-catholic-church\/"},"modified":"2022-12-11T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T12:00:00","slug":"the-reinvention-of-the-catholic-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldcatholicnews.com\/the-reinvention-of-the-catholic-church\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reinvention of the Catholic Church"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In May 2021<\/span>, a time when public gatherings in England were strictly limited because of the coronavirus pandemic, the British tabloids were caught off guard by a stealth celebrity wedding in London. Westminster Cathedral\u2014the \u201cmother church\u201d of Roman Catholics in England and Wales\u2014was abruptly closed on a Saturday afternoon. Soon the groom and bride arrived: Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds, a Catholic and a former Conservative Party press officer with whom he had fathered a child the previous year. A priest duly presided over the marriage, despite the fact that the Catholic Church opposes divorce and sex outside marriage, and that Johnson had been married twice before and had taken up with Symonds before securing a divorce. It was an inadvertently vivid display of the Church\u2019s efforts to accommodate its teachings to worldly circumstances.<\/p>\n

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Explore the January\/February 2023 Issue<\/h2>\n

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

View More<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

That same month, Church-state relations in the United States took a fresh turn when the Supreme Court decided to hear a case from Mississippi that challenged the legal right to abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade<\/i>. The Court\u2019s decision reflected the power of its conservative majority, whose six members include five traditionalist Catholics. And it augured an eventual victory in a 50-year campaign against legal abortion, a movement anchored from the start in the Church teaching that life begins at conception\u2014an absolute position on an issue that ordinary Catholics, like most other Americans, disagree about. The victory came this past June, when the Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Together, these episodes point up an incongruous recent development: the Catholic Church\u2019s assertive presence in public life even as Catholic faith and practice recede in families, schools, and neighborhoods in America and across Europe. As John T. McGreevy observes in Catholicism: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis<\/i>, signs that the Church has lost vitality are abundant. Europe has seen parish closures, shrinking numbers of priests, dwindling attendance at weekly Mass, and steady departures from the faith. In the U.S., more than a third of people raised Catholic \u201cno longer identify as such.\u201d The clerical sexual-abuse scandals have ravaged the Church\u2019s credibility, cost it billions of dollars, and put some of its leaders under criminal investigation.<\/p>\n

At the same time, a rich variety of evidence suggests that Catholicism isn\u2019t on the wane; it\u2019s just changing. In recent decades, the pope\u2014first John Paul II, then Benedict, and now Francis\u2014has become a ubiquitous global figure, made so through jet travel, mass media, and a cult of personality. The view of \u201chuman dignity\u201d framed in the 1930s by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain\u2014and enshrined in a United Nations declaration in 1948\u2014has become a benchmark for international law and human-rights efforts. Africa, once seen as \u201cpagan\u201d missionary territory, is now home to a sixth of the world\u2019s Catholics\u2014230 million people\u2014and \u201chigh birth rates and high rates of adult conversion,\u201d McGreevy writes, \u201cmean that African influence within the global church will continue to grow.\u201d In the U.S., the recent arch-Catholic remaking of the high court is likely to shape public policy for decades.<\/p>\n

From the June 2019 issue: Abolish the priesthood<\/p>\n

McGreevy, a practicing Catholic and the provost of the University of Notre Dame, is well placed to offer perspective on the Church as an institution at once teetering and thriving. He\u2019s also a historian of Catholicism and has made its interactions with civil society a theme, one he approaches with an evenhandedness rare in the field. After Parish Boundaries<\/i> (1996)\u2014an account of race relations in various urban dioceses in the U.S. over five decades\u2014he considered the country as a whole in Catholicism and American Freedom<\/i> (2003). In American Jesuits and the World<\/i> (2016), he extended his reach to Latin America.<\/p>\n

Now taking the Church\u2019s global presence as his subject, McGreevy has written a lucid narrative of two and a half centuries of history, structured rather like a Ken Burns\u2013Lynn Novick documentary. The chapters proceed in chronological sequence, organized around themes: the suppression of Catholicism in the 1700s, followed by its revival over the next hundred years; the Church\u2019s dealings with empire, democracy, and nationalism in the early 20th century; the post\u2013Vatican II turmoil over birth control, priestly celibacy, and the \u201cdechristianization\u201d of Europe; and finally Pope Francis\u2019s application of Catholic teachings to such global problems as rising economic inequality and climate change. It\u2019s a book designed to provide a \u201csavvy baseline,\u201d McGreevy writes, as Catholicism is \u201creinvented\u201d in the years to come.<\/p>\n

The standard <\/span>narrative of the Church over the past two centuries depicts an institution dead set against the modern world abruptly swerving to embrace it. That narrative is simplistic, and McGreevy complicates it. His working idea is that Catholicism began its encounter with the modern world well before Pope John XXIII, in opening the Second Vatican Council in 1962, asked the bishops assembled in Rome \u201cto ignore \u2018prophets of doom\u2019 who saw in \u2018modern times nothing but prevarication and ruin.\u2019\u200a\u201d In McGreevy\u2019s telling, the shifting began in 1789. The French Revolution produced a government hostile to Catholicism and sparked the revolutions of 1848 that in turn shaped the modern nation-state. Ever since, the Church has been engaged in a struggle to address social, moral, and political developments while maintaining a consistent religious identity.<\/p>\n