Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In dramatic stories and sweeping panoramas, distinguished historian John T. McGreevy tells the mesmerizing story of a Church torn between the forces of reform and reaction for the past 250 years. Anti-monarchist French clerics celebrated the Revolution, but the murder of priests and destruction of churches in the Terror galvanized a powerful conservative reaction that reverberates to this day. Missionaries around the world greatly expanded the Church's influence while bringing new tensions between a culturally diverse syncretism and the ultimate authority of Rome. The aspirations of the faithful for justice in this world--African Catholics fighting for independence, Latin Americans developing a theology of liberation, Polish and South Korean Catholics demanding democratic governments--challenged the politically cautious. The cataclysms of the Second World War, decolonization, the Second Vatican Council, and clerical sexual abuse have each remade the Church, leaving Pope Francis with the superhuman task of charting a path for over one billion Catholics worldwide.
Synopsis
The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic upheavals and internal divisions shaping the most multicultural, multilingual, and global institution in the world.
Through powerful individual stories and sweeping birds-eye views, Catholicism provides a mesmerizing assessment of the Church's complex role in modern history: both shaper and follower of the politics of nation states, both conservator of hierarchies and evangelizer of egalitarianism.?McGreevy documents the hopes and ambitions of European missionaries building churches and?schools?in?all corners of the world, ?African Catholics fighting for political (and religious) independence, ?Latin American Catholics attracted to a theology of liberation, and Polish and South Korean Catholics demanding democratic governments. He includes a vast cast of riveting characters, known and unknown, including the Mexican revolutionary Fr. Servando Teresa de Mier; Daniel O'Connell, hero of Irish emancipation; Sr. Josephine Bakhita, a formerly enslaved Sudanese nun; Chinese statesman Ma Xiaobang; French philosopher and reformer Jacques Maritain; German Jewish philosopher and convert, Edith Stein; John Paul II, Polish pope and opponent of communism; Gustavo Guti rrez, Peruvian founder of liberation theology; and French American patron of modern art, Dominique de Menil.
Throughout this essential volume, McGreevy details currents of reform within the Church as well as movements protective of traditional customs and beliefs. Conflicts with political leaders and a devotional revival in the?nineteenth?century, the experiences of decolonization after World War II?and the Second Vatican Council in the twentieth century, and the trauma of clerical sexual abuse in the twenty-first all demonstrate how religion shapes our modern world. Finally, McGreevy addresses the challenges faced by Pope Francis as he struggles to unite the over one billion members of?the?world's largest religious community.