Catholicism

From the French Revolution through the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and into the crises facing the Church today, John T. McGreevy traces a Catholic history that never moved in a single direction. Across roughly two centuries, he follows a religious institution that spans many languages, cultures and continents, and that has been repeatedly torn apart and remade from within.

McGreevy presents the Church as both a player in and a product of national politics, and as an institution that guards a strict hierarchy while also preaching equality. He follows European missionaries who built churches and schools in distant regions, African Catholics fighting for political and religious independence, Latin American believers drawn to liberation theology, and Catholics in Poland and South Korea who pressed for democratic government.

The narrative is populated by a wide range of figures, some famous and some little known. They include the Mexican revolutionary priest Servando Teresa de Mier; Daniel O'Connell, a central figure in Irish emancipation; Sister Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese nun who had once been enslaved; the Chinese statesman Ma Xiaobang; the French philosopher and reformer Jacques Maritain; the German Jewish philosopher and convert Edith Stein; John Paul II, the Polish pope who opposed communism; Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian founder of liberation theology; and Dominique de Menil, a French American patron of modern art.

Reform movements within the Church receive as much attention as the groups working to protect traditional customs and beliefs. The book connects these internal struggles to wider events: clashes with political leaders, a devotional revival in the nineteenth century, decolonization after the Second World War, the Second Vatican Council, and the trauma of clerical sexual abuse in the twenty-first century. Together, these episodes show how religion has helped shape the modern world.

The closing chapters turn to Pope Francis, who faces the task of holding together a religious community of more than one billion members.