Massimo Faggioli

The global crisis of democracy is yet one more challenge for a Church fighting for social justice.

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Catholic bishops around the world are responding in various ways to the crisis the Church is currently facing. Some have tried to show that the bishops in the United States and Germany are doing so in a similar fashion.

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In his novel “A Legacy of Spies” John Le Carré ponders the relationship between England and Europe.

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Vatican II was, according to Karl Rahner, the beginning of the “world church.” Elected bishop of Rome half a century after Vatican II, Francis is the first pope who is not from the Euro-Mediterranean area, and he can therefore be understood as the first pope of Rahner’s “world church”: a truly global, non-Eurocentric church. But theological globalization and institutional globalization are two different things, and they have been surprisingly disconnected from each other in the recent history of the church. The institutional shock of a Latin American Jesuit being elected as pope has been slower to influence theology than one might have expected in 2013.

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The number of Catholics continues to drop in Germany. More than 216,000 of them decided to “leave the Church” last year alone by ceasing to pay the government-mandated church tax. This is just the latest example of what has become a slow, but steady pattern of defections from the Catholic Church in the Western world. Baptized members already began leaving in the first half of the twentieth century, but they have done so in even greater numbers over the past 60 years.

This does not mean Christianity is disappearing. But, almost everywhere, it shows that the Church is losing its tight control over the faith.

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“If Matteo Salvini becomes prime minister, Italy will have a government led by a Catholic who is devout but schismatic.” So said Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to NATO and the ex-Soviet Union, in a recent opinion piece in the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera. (more…)

One of the effects of the sex-abuse crisis is the current moment of institutional iconoclasm—the temptation to get rid of the institutional element of the Catholic Church. The failures of the church’s institutions are now on full display, even more so than after the revelations of the Spotlight investigation. It is hypocritical, however, to interpret the abuse crisis as a clerical abuse crisis rather than a Catholic abuse crisis. Obviously, the clergy had a unique role in the crisis, but the moral and legal responsibilities do not belong exclusively to those wearing a Roman collar. We are still reluctant to acknowledge the systemic nature of this crisis as something that affected the entire Catholic world and not just its ordained ministers. We would like to contain it neatly within the hierarchy so as to exempt ourselves from the burden of critical self-reflection.

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This year marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when the Allied troops invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944. Just two days earlier the Allies had carried out the Liberation of Rome, making the Eternal City the first capital to be freed from Nazi German occupation.

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 It’s been more than fifty years since Vatican II ended—on December 8, 1965—and some of the conciliar documents are now showing their age. One of these is the declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae, the conciliar document that benefited most from American influence, and above all from the influence of John Courtney Murray, SJ.

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Pope Francis’ visit to Bulgaria and North Macedonia may not be as sensational as his trips to the Arabian Peninsula or the United States. But it reveals much about the similarities in the life stories of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. The nine years Roncalli spent as the Vatican’s representative in Bulgaria (1925-34) were a decisive period in the formation of the future Pope John XXIII.

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On the evening of April 10, six weeks after the conclusion of the Vatican’s summit on the sex-abuse crisis, the “pope emeritus,” Benedict XVI, made known his thoughts on the genesis of that crisis in a five-thousand-plus-word essay sent to a periodical for Bavarian priests, quickly translated into English, and then diffused online by Catholic websites known for their hostility to Pope Francis.

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The treaty of Feb. 11, 1929 was a diplomatic triumph for both Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI.

The fascist regime was assured the political support of Italian Catholics and the Holy See received minimal, but essential territorial sovereignty.

This would give the papacy necessary freedom to govern the universal Catholic Church, following the Holy See’s humiliating exclusion from the 1919 peace talks.

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“They build a Church within the Church … while making of their views a dogma. I am not defending myself against them, but against what I would call their schismatic spirit.” John Henry Newman on integralism.

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The most visible critique of the just concluded Synod of Bishops’ assembly on young people has focused on sections in the final document that call for a strengthening of synodality at all levels of the Church. It is absolutely surprising how very little so many bishops know about synodality, a method Pope Francis has sought to develop throughout his pontificate and a concept Catholic theologians have been discussing for at least a couple of decades.  (more…)

Why a New Wave of Sexual Abuse Revelations Has Deepened Preexisting Divisions.  (more…)

The right-wing effort to delegitimize Pope Francis is continuing. (more…)