And yet, what a turnaround it was this summer to see Pope Francis, frail on his “pilgrimage of penance,” apologizing to Indigenous people in Canada for some of the awfulness of church-run schools on Native ground. Of course, that vibrancy is due in part to a legacy of spiritual imperialism - cross and sword at the head of armed colonizers. A majority of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, he says, “are people of color living in the global South.” “No institution is as multicultural or multilingual, few touch as many people,” writes McGreevy. But this same church is vibrant and growing steadily outside of Europe and North America. The crimes against innocents have been a big contributor to the cratering of membership in much of the world. A church that has survived Christian-on-Christian wars, corruption on a scale that would make Satan blush and state campaigns to crush everyday Catholicism is still mired in what may be its worst crisis ever - clerical sexual abuse and the institutional cover-up. If he doesn’t answer the questions that a curious 12-year-old in Spokane, Wash., once had, he does a remarkable job of explaining how the epic struggle between reformists and traditionalists has led us to the present moment in the Roman Catholic Church.Īnd what a moment it is. McGreevy, a professor of history at Notre Dame and author of three books on Catholicism, with an attempt at making narrative sense of one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of the oldest institution in the Western world. As the Irish Catholic comedian George Carlin noted, the priest who was supposed to have all the answers responded to a student’s perplexed queries with the inevitable, “Well, it’s a mystery.” It was torture, yes, but also a spiritual muddle.
All those monarchs and ministers, the papal edicts and parsing of purgatory, the vast inexplicability of the doctrine of infallibility.
When I was a tween kid in salt-and-pepper corduroys at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary school, the only thing I feared more than an authoritarian nun with a stiff ruler was the prospect of that class known as church history. CATHOLICISM: A Global History From the French Revolution to Pope Francis, by John T.
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