Abstract
On 15 September 2008, the investment bank Lehmen Brothers collapsed, escalating the collapse of the global economy into the greatest recession since the Great Depression. The parallels to the 1930s ushered in a widespread concern among commentators about the political consequences: would the economic shock be a catalyst for similar social and political developments 80 years previously? Today, the alarm, it appears, is becoming all the more real.
The same year, Italian ecclesiologist and historian Massimo Faggioli first moved to the United States, before taking up a position at Villanova University. Since then, he has become a well-known public commentator through his journalistic work, especially with Le Croix International and Commonweal. Faggioli also represents a new kind of academic engagement through his Twitter account and nearly 8,000 followers. While his academic focus is on Vatican II and its aftermath, there is a sense that the current geo-political trend looms large in his work. He is an ecclesiologist who takes seriously the responsibility articulated in Gaudium et Spes, 4: ‘the Church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.’
His current offering, Catholicism and Citizenship, is a reflection on the role of the church in a pluralistic democracy, necessitated, in part, by a crisis in political Catholicism. He opens his diagnosis by relating this crisis to the competing ‘interpretation(s) of the trajectories of modernity, which in turn is closely connected to a historical and theological hermeneutic of the Second Vatican Council’ (p. xiii). In Pope Francis, he argues that there is a re-engagement with the method of the aforementioned Gaudium et Spes, and its warrant to interact with the modern world.
Faggioli unpacks the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council in an interesting way. Rather than recounting leading figures, as is often the case, he relates the experience of other regularly overseen agents at the Council, namely the religious orders and lay ecclesial movements. He argues that Pope Francis is, in part, drawing upon the Council’s vision of their ‘post-institutional’ role in order to counter the many institutional problems within the church.
Faggioli’s writing style is very readable, perhaps honed by his newspaper pieces and public lectures. For example, he continually numerates the points he wishes to make. In Chapter Three, he proposes three big shifts (secularization, religious freedom, and the idea of the nation state) that inform four changes within Catholicism (globalization, change in leadership, plurality, relationship to power) and provide the backdrop to three challenges facing Catholicism (overcoming paradigms of hegemony or persecution, developing new relations with power, and dealing with pluralism within the world and within itself).
While Chapter Four deepens the reflection on the relationship between the prophetic and established church, Chapter Five is the most diagnostic of the book. Faggioli, as an outsider to the American experience, offers a unique insight into the reception of Gaudium et Spes in American Catholicism, arguing that it differs from the experience of the global church. The divisiveness of the reception of Vatican II was greater in the US, because without depth of theological and historical commentary, the Council became too easily associated with the cultural revolution of the ‘the sixties.’ The polarization within politics that occurred afterwards in the US found another expression in the culture of American Catholicism, effecting the reception of the pastoral constitution of the church.
In the final chapter, Faggioli again numerates a diagnosis of the Catholic Church today, explicitly in light of the pontificate of Pope Francis. He proposes six points or ‘wounds’: ‘tribal’ Catholicism; critical obedience and faithful dissent; a preoccupation with ‘culture’; a problem with freedom; relationship with the secular; and finally, a false dichotomy between insiders and outsiders. The ‘antidote’ (p. 125) is Francis’s re-appropriation of the ecclesiology of Vatican II articulated most clearly in Evangelii Gaudium, 236. The church, Francis writes, ‘is a polyhedron, which reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness.’ The ongoing relationship that is mercy, which is at the heart of the church, implies that the church must be a process, rather than a fixed entity.
In the end, this book is a ‘call to citizenship and a call for a culture of engagement and encounter, in light of what the pontificate of Pope Francis says about the legacy of Vatican II and the role of the Catholic Church today’ (p. 151). This invitation is all the more important in light of current geo-political trends. I would argue that it foreseeable that the Catholic Church—both universal and local—may have to take a stance on defending democracy. An ambiguous relationship to pluralistic democracy, aligned to a narrow ecclesiology, may mean that the church will miss that critical moment. If that were to happen, it won’t be the first time the Church would have been found wanting.
Faggioli’s work is to be commended. This is an approachable book that makes an important contribution to a vital question.