John L. Allen - The Future Church: How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church

I want to begin by acknowledging Trace Murphy, my editor at Doubleday, and Bill Barry, who was the publisher at the time this project took shape. Both are a writers dream, literary professionals who care deeply about ideas as well as helping a book find its audience. Theyre extraordinarily good at what they do. Thanks are also due to everyone at the National Catholic Reporter, which has been my home in the print world for more than a decade. Tom Fox, Tom Roberts, Joe Feuerherd, Dennis Coday, Teresa Malcolm, Margot Patterson, Sr. Rita Larivee, Patty McCarty, Wally Reiter, Toni Ortiz, Arthur Jones, Rich Heffern, and all the other past and present members of the NCR cast have been marvelous friends and colleagues. Im especially appreciative of their tolerance for my absences to do the reporting and writing this book required. In a similar spirit, I want to thank my friends and colleagues at CNN, especially my principal contacts over the years: Pamela Sellers, Maria Ebrahimji, and Gail Chalef. In moments of frustration Ive sometimes joked that navigating the bureaucracy of CNN can make the Vatican seem like a well-oiled machine, and without Pam, Maria, and Gail, I would have been lost on any number of occasions. In terms of my colleagues in the Vatican press corps, if I started to tick off here the names of everyone to whom this book owes something, the list would never end. Suffice it to say that you know who you are, and Im grateful.

Chapters of this book were read and critiqued by a number of people who deserve mention here: Cardinal scar Rodrguez-Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles; Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria; Bryan Froehle; Philip Jenkins; George Weigel; Fr. Thomas Reese; Fr. Andrew Greeley; Fr. Daniel Madigan; Fr. Emmanuel Mbam; Russell Shaw; Rick McCord; Walter Grazer; Fr. Brian Johnstone; Fr. Edward Cleary; Fr. John Wauck; Pamela Schaeffer; and Tom Roberts. In every case, their reactions were extraordinarily helpful. Froehle in particular was generous with his time and expertise. Needless to say, the flaws in the book are of my own making, not theirs. My wife, Shannon, also read every line of this book at least twice, and along the way she fed me valuable ideas and resources. This book would never have seen the light of day without her support.

I also want to say thank you to those readers who sent me ideas, arguments, exhortations, and detailed reactions. That material was fundamental in shaping the decisions and the perspectives that run through the book. In a special way, I need to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the audiences in various parts of the world with whom the ideas of this book were worked out during lectures, keynote speeches, workshops, and addresses Ive given over the last couple of years. You will never know how much watching the reaction on your faces, listening to how hard you laughed at various points, and pondering the questions you had asked long after I had answered them on the spot have contributed to these pages.

A final note of thanks is in order for all those people in forty countries who have opened their lives, their minds, and their hearts to me over the course of the past decade, giving me an up-close-and-personal education in the contours and complexities of global Catholicism. In a special way, I want to think Cardinal Rodrguez and Archbishop Onaiyekan, each of whom opened his diocese and cleared his schedule for me in March 2007 to help test some of the ideas Id developed about Catholicism in the global South against the realities on the ground. To both, a hearty ad multos annos.

A book freezes an authors thinking at a given moment in time. To follow the conversation beyond these pages, I invite readers who have not yet done so to sign up for my weekly Internet column, All Things Catholic, and to check out my daily postings at this address: http://ncrcafe.org/node/507. Ill be keeping a close eye on the evolution of the trends described here.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Shannon, whose love constitutes the most powerful trend in my own life, and to our cherished pug, Ellis, a very catholic creature in terms of the universality of his affections. Both endured the long gestation of this book with grace, for which I will be forever grateful.