John T. McGreevy - Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis

Catholicism

A GLOBAL HISTORY
FROM THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION TO POPE FRANCIS

John T. McGreevy

THIS BOOK TELLS THE STORY of Catholicism since the French Revolution. I wrote it for two reasons.

The first is to make an argument: a better understanding of Catholicism enhances our grasp of the modern world. No institution is as multicultural or multilingual, few touch as many people. The Chinese Communist Party, the European Union, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the International Monetary Fund possess global influence. But only the Catholic church includes extended networks of people and institutions in Warsaw, Nairobi, and Mexico City, as well as the most remote sections of the Amazon. Only Catholicism counts 1.2 billion baptized members, a majority of whom are people of color living in the Global South. Only a pope, as Francis did when visiting Manila in 2015, can attract six million people, perhaps the largest crowd in human history, to attend Mass in a driving rainstorm.

Historians increasingly recognize this. And the recent burst of superb scholarship on modern Catholicism makes this book possible. Placing these books and articles in conversation makes visible patterns blurred when studying a single person, town, parish, diocese, or country. The biggest change in history writing in my lifetime has been the loosening of the clamps of the nation-state. Nation-states matter for the history of modern Catholicism, as this book demonstrates, but doctrines, people, and devotional objects also crossed borders with ease.

In previous studies, I have tried to understand Catholicism in one nation-state and through its missionaries. Chastened, Ive made this study as much a story as my narrative skills allow, sacrificing coverage for individuals and themes. Specialists will regret what is missing and rightly so.

Just as the first Christians in Corinth differed from the first Christians in Ephesus, no two contemporary Catholic communities are identical. Still, the patterns of Catholic globalism in the modern era, woven by migrants, missionaries, intellectuals, and diplomats, are unusually dense. One example: a generation after an impoverished fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, reported that the Virgin Mary appeared to her in 1858 in the Pyrenees village of Lourdes, an astonishing 250,000 pilgrims descended upon the village each year. The same pilgrims carried small bottles of the healing waters of Lourdes back to their home countries for distribution and sale. Nurses placed Lourdes medals under the pillows of their patients. A journalist and Bengali convert to Catholicism told his readers that miraculous healings at Lourdes constituted infallible proof of God. Lourdes grottoes appeared in almost every major city in Europe, North America, and Latin America, and Pope Pius IX had one constructed in the Vatican gardens. In Paris, priests installed the citys first Our Lady of Lourdes shrine soon after the apparition, even as clergy from Paris working in Shanghai constructed a Lourdes grotto in China. A popular Lourdes grotto lies a five-minute walk from the office where I type these words.

In contrast to Protestantism or Islam, Catholicism in the modern era included not just transient networks of individuals but an increasingly powerful center. A Vatican stamp of approval, after all, proved crucial for the spread of devotion to Lourdes. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the organizational and symbolic reach of the papacy expanded. Papal bureaucrats built vigorous offices for doctrine, canon law, and missionary work, and a diplomatic corps staffed by ambassadors, or nuncios, fanned out across the globe. As recently as the eighteenth century, bishops rarely (if ever) visited Rome. Ordinary Catholics might not know the popes name. A pope would have never convened an ecumenical council of bishops from around the world without the approval of monarchs and nobles. And yet at the First Vatican Council in Rome in 1869, Pius IX did just that. Fifty years later a new code of canon law assigned to the pope the most complete and supreme jurisdiction over the universal Church.

The second reason for this book is personal. Most of my life has been spent studying in, teaching at, writing about, and administering Catholic institutions. Almost daily I get asked (and wonder): how did we get here?

The long sweep of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival, the building of a vast, protective milieu of parishes, schools, and associations, the political crisis of the 1930s, World War II, decolonization, and the end of the Cold War have resulted in a church marked by unprecedented vibrancy (in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia), concern for social justice (everywhere), and global connections. At Sacred Heart Cathedral in Guangzhou, China, a neo-Gothic church erected by French missionaries (and Chinese laborers) in the 1880s, roughly two thousand migrants from Nigeria worship each week at the Sunday afternoon Mass and socialize afterward. A few years ago, when attending Mass with my family while on vacation in rural Minnesota, I learned that the celebrant was a priest from southern India. He handed out a typed copy of his homily so that his congregation, the descendants of German and Irish Catholic farmers who migrated to the region in the nineteenth century, could decipher his accented English.

Meanwhile, in much of the world, the number of observant Catholics is shrinking, even hemorrhaging. The structures built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries barely stand. In 2020, in Ireland, once the source of missionary clergy and nuns for much of the Anglophone world, more bishops (two) were ordained than priests (one). The sexual abuse crisis has taken an incalculable toll, on survivors above all, but also on the credibility of Catholic institutions and the people who run them. The confidence of an earlier erathe West German magazine Der Spiegel explained to its readers in 1962 that the church had achieved a unity and consistency in teaching and structure never before seenis a distant memory.

The hinge point in how Catholics got from the French Revolution to the current moment is the Second Vatican Council (19621965), one of the most important events of the twentieth century. All Catholics live in its shadow. But that shadow is receding. Sixty years have passed since the warm, Roman afternoon of October 11, 1962, when Pope John XXIII, weeks after being secretly diagnosed with the cancer that would end his life nine months later, delivered the councils opening address. Arrayed in front of him in St. Peters Basilica were 2,500 Latin rite Catholic bishops, patriarchs representing Eastern Rite Catholic churches, Protestant observers, theological experts, and reporters, even as millions of viewers watched on television. Speaking in Latin for sixty-four minutes, John XXIII asked his listeners to ignore prophets of doom who saw in modern times nothing but prevarication and ruin. The church needed an aggiornamento, or updating. It should meet the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations.

The last person alive who played a major role at the Second Vatican Council is another elderly man wearing white robes. He is the ninety-five-year-old Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, formerly theologian Fr. Joseph Ratzinger. The day before John XXIIIs opening homily, Ratzinger, only thirty-four, addressed the German-speaking bishops. He worried that a Council of today, which the whole world, including non-Christians, will be watching could not lock itself in the cage of a medieval view of history, within which it cultivates a kind of ecclesiastical provincialism.