A few years ago I wrote a book that was very pessimistic about the future of the Church in the United States. American Catholicism is a religion, I argued, in a state of probably irreversible decline. It is on the road, not to total disappearance exactly, but to a reduced state in which it will … Read more
One of the many peculiarities of contemporary Catholicism resides in the fact that so many people on the extreme left and extreme right of the Church are in basic agreement about the Second Vatican Council. In fundamental ways, they insist, Vatican II was a sharp break with the Catholic past. People on the left generally … Read more
Over the past few weeks, I’ve read lots of congratulatory backslapping over David Van Biema’s piece in Time, “Is Liberal Catholicism Dead?” Let me offer some words of caution for my friends here at InsideCatholic and in the Church at large: Be very distrustful of the news of liberals you hear borne on the tongues … Read more
In May 1964, in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, I published a book, The Open Church, an optimistic assessment of the changes in the Catholic Church that I believed the council would produce. I had written it in white-hot haste in my room at the Pensione Baldoni in Rome during a six-week period … Read more
