Catholicism

Describing John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis as ambitious would be an understatement on the basis of the first chapter alone. In erudite yet accessible prose, McGreevy comes to terms with the history of the Catholic Church from the French Revolution through the present. The result is a work that is not only informative for readers of all backgrounds, but also bespeaks McGreevy’s hope for younger adherents of the world’s largest religious tradition.

Perhaps that hope emanates from McGreevy’s calling as a teacher. As this book was approaching its release date, McGreevy was being installed as provost of the University of Notre Dame. While a member of the history department, its chair, and even as dean of the College of Arts and Letters, McGreevy published books such as Catholicism and American Freedom (W.W. Norton, 2003) and American Jesuits and the World (Princeton University Press, 2018), works that positioned him as one of the leading voices on the more recent centuries of the Church’s history.

In his latest book, McGreevy takes his lead from a remark Pope Francis made in Florence, Italy, in 2015, that the Church was not experiencing “an era of change but a change in era.” To that end, McGreevy writes in his introduction that “Catholicism in the twenty-first century will be reinvented, as it was in the nineteenth. We just don’t know how. If this book provides a savvy baseline as that process unfolds, it will have served its purpose” (xiii).

As that reinvention occurs, perhaps McGreevy has his students in mind when, turning to Pope Francis again, when he expresses his hope that they will “be better positioned” as citizens of their respective nations and as citizens of the world than their predecessors.

Despite being McGreevy’s most ambitious work to date, readers seeking a comprehensive history of the contemporary Church will need to look elsewhere. The three parts and sixteen chapters comprise his work are arranged chronologically but primarily consist of an array of representative stories that highlight a dialectical pattern of history. To McGreevy, the contemporary history of the Church is defined by a myriad of world events beginning, in the case of his particular work, with the upheaval initiated by the French Revolution and advanced by the subsequent Napoleonic wars.

When making meaning out of such a world, McGreevy sees Catholics inclining toward one of two views—ultramontanists, who view the papacy as the primary source of authority, and reform Catholics, who prove “more consistent with Enlightenment ideals of science and investigation and a church with more deference toward episcopal and even lay authority at the expense of the papacy” (8). Debates enlivened by that tension offer McGreevy a way of organizing his effort, Catholics a means of understanding themselves at a deeper level, and non-Catholics the ability to better discern the Church’s animating logic.                    

Universality has proven to be a key component of that logic from the time Christ charged his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 28:19). The manner in which the Church leaned into that call during the timeframe McGreevy considers is perhaps the most compelling part of this global history. As a result, McGreevy’s work is at its best when detailing the transition that occurred when indigenous bishops began to replace colonial bishops in Asia, Africa, and South America. Such a shift allowed the Church to lean more fully into its universal character while adding a layer of depth to the historic orthodoxy sustaining it.      

McGreevy’s work also excels when outlining the life and legacy of Jacques Maritain. While college students, Maritain and his wife Raïssa embraced the Church after a desperate search for a way out of the crisis of meaning plaguing the modern world. Both would go on to make numerous contributions to the academy and the Church. McGreevy goes to considerable lengths to unpack, for example, the significance of Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (Humanisme Intégral – Fernand Aubier, 1936) for a Church and a world grappling with how “the flourishing of the human ‘person’ required respect for the person’s embeddedness in communities such as family, professions and churches” (204). Maritain’s humanism would then weave its way into his work, ranging from art theory to political philosophy, informing at almost every turn the spirit of Vatican II.   

To get the most out of McGreevy’s impressive work, readers will need to invest some effort into discerning how his narrative examples fit into the dialectical schema he utilizes. One can read the narratives as merely compounding waves of information, but that option is insufficient. The narratives are representative, but organized in a manner that allows readers to appreciate the creative tension that both inspires the Church and threatens to engulf it.

Todd C. Ream is Honors Professor of Humanities and executive director of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Todd C. Ream

Date Of Review:

April 21, 2023