Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis
By John T. McGreevy
WW Norton 2022

John McGreevy is Provost and Professor of History at Notre Dame, an authoritative historian of the Roman Catholic Church, and his new book, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis, has a very intentionally international sweep to it, emphasizing the modern Church’s global, multicultural roots. McGreevy skillfully balances his broader themes with wonderfully evocative personal portraits of individuals in their sometimes contentious relationships with the Church through the centuries, figures like Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, or ex-Jesuit reformer George Tyrell, who railed against the “monopoly of ecclesiastical power.” 

McGreevy’s book therefore makes for page-turning reading, but it opens with a stunning assertion. “The hinge point in how Catholics got from the French Revolution to the current moment,” McGreevy writes, “is the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), one of the most important events of the twentieth century.”

A list of the most important events of the twentieth century would need to be generously long to be long enough to include Vatican II. But the real objection here isn’t the magnitude of the event but the nature, that hinge point business; in the 250-year span of McGreevy’s concentration, by far the two most important events in Catholic history, the real hinge points, have nothing to do with the Second Vatican Council. They are, of course, the Church’s behavior during the Second World War and the Church’s behavior during the enormous sex abuse scandal that erupted into public discourse in 2002 when the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix (neither of which is mentioned by McGreevy) brought to national and international attention the sheer scope of the scandal. 

It’s ominous, then, that McGreevy’s accounts of both of these epochal events are, to put it gently, very much wanting. He briefly mentions Pope Pius XI’s increased chafing against the brutality and bigotry of the Nazi Party and his commissioning of an encyclical to address the issue. But after Pius XI’s death in 1939, his successor Pius XII “declined” to release that encyclical … a curiously neutral phrasing that McGreevy only amplifies: “From his nuncio’s office in Munich, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli watched the growth of the Nazi Party with foreboding,” he writes of Pacelli when he was still a high Curia official, “especially since the movement at its origins counted many Catholic members eager to demonstrate their patriotic bonafides.” 

That foreboding is pretty much all readers get, and it’s not nearly enough, of course. There’s an entire body of literature devoted to the indisputable fact that when Pope Pius XII was confronted with one of the greatest organized evil of the 20th century, he wheedled, connived, enabled, and compromised. Catholic bishops and clergy all over Europe sometimes displayed astonishing bravery by refusing to sacrifice their Christian values to the brutality rising all around them (and in fairness, McGreevy relates some of their stories), but in this they acted without the support and especially without the example of the Pope himself. It was a startling failure – or maybe something darker – and McGreevy barely touches on it.

Even worse, in some ways, his Catholicism’s treatment of the Church sex abuse scandal of the 20th century. Its chapter, “Sex Abuse (and Its Cover-Up)” begins with the kind of close-up focus that works so well elsewhere in the book. McGreevy opens his discussion by looking at the Australian city of Ballarat and the abuse cases that ripped the place apart. 

You expect the same approach used in the rest of the book: the close-up focus will gradually widen into a broader topical discussion. Not only does this not happen, but what happens in its place is maddening. The chapter is barely four pages old before McGreevy’s narration has wandered, amazingly, to other subjects – Papal charisma, the Church’s position on homosexuality and abortion, issues of synod government or gender equality, and the list goes on, seemingly covering everything but the sex abuse scandal. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, a major evildoer of the scandal, isn’t even mentioned in connection with it, name-checked instead in connection with his objection to obscure Curia communication issues (his quote is accidentally telling: “dialogue as a way to mediate between truth and dissent is mutual deception”). For decades, Law used his awesome authority in the Church in order to play an obscene shell-game with known predator priests, inflicting them on parishes that knew nothing about them. Law knew exactly what would happen in those parishes, and he did nothing to prevent it, and it did happen. When the scandal broke, Law had to flee the jurisdiction; in a 500-page book about the modern history of the Catholic Church, he probably deserves a glance. 

McGreevy’s summation of the sex abuse scandal, delivered before his chapter wanders off to discuss the latest trends in kitchen accessories, is hair-raising:

Most sexual abuse occurs in families, and much sexual abuse has occurred in secular organizations … Scholars have only begun to to study sexual abuse, and assessments are necessarily tentative. Still, the spiritual manipulation conducted by perpetrators, combined with the spiritual desolation felt by survivors, may be a distinctive Catholic contribution to the crisis. The idealization of priests and the priesthood meant perpetrators often had free reign. [sic] They could manipulate mothers eager to find role models for their sons, or abuse young women seeking counseling. They could expect deference from parishioners and law enforcement officials. Survivors often reported that their own parents refused to believe initial accusations against beloved clergy.

This is negligence carried right up to the doorstep of complicity. Why begin with those noxious comments about sexual abuse occurring in families or secular organizations, other than to downplay the scope of what happened in the Catholic Church? Why make the preposterous claim that “assessments” about sexual abuse are tentative, other than to downplay the personal impacts of what happened in the Catholic Church? Why any soft-pedaling at all, on a subject that is so clear and so utterly damning? Is Catholicism a work of history or apologetics? At a later point McGreevy notes that the Catholic Church is hemorrhaging members, and he offers an array of possible reasons. This is the reason, this catastrophe in which thousands of priests, bishops, and cardinals from every country on Earth were revealed to be Vatican-shielded sexual predators repeatedly attacking the most vulnerable members of their own congregations – this was clearly a death-blow to an entire denomination, and yet it can’t hold McGreevy’s attention even for the length of the single chapter that bears its name. 

The book moves on, touching on Pope Benedict XVI’s 2013 resignation (acutely characterized here as “a giant step away from the monarchical understanding of the papacy”) and finishing with the ascension of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope and the first from Latin America. Pope Francis is so shrewdly assessed that, again, readers will wish the proportions of this book were different enough to allow more pages on the Pontiff who is leading (however waveringly or unwillingly) the Church into a new era. 

According to McGreevy, Catholicism is not ending but rather evolving, and his book is naturally open-ended. But true change comes only from soul-searching, and readers will draw their own conclusions about how much of that really happens in these pages.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.