Bøger af Massimo Faggioli

This book addresses the dismantling of Vatican II in our Catholic universities, the functional anti-Catholicism that now reigns in even "Catholic" higher education, and the loss of distinctive identity of what it means to be a Catholic thinker today. There is a crisis in American Catholic higher education and it reflects an unease among those who used to identify as Catholic thinkers. Our problem is bigger than the collapse of ecclesial credibility and the behavior of the bishops, and it can't be blamed solely on politics. This book scrutinizes this crisis in detail. Student enrollment is trending down for a variety of reasons--from perceptions about academic competitiveness and future employability to economic conditions related to the pandemic. But in seeking to address these challenges, many schools have put their Catholic identity at risk--namely, by positioning and marketing themselves as part of the mainstream liberal-progressive realm of higher education. Of course, some conservative Catholic institutions have doubled down on Catholic identity, even if in ways that can be concerning. But these schools have a strong natural affinity with certain kinds of Catholics, as well as a supportive institutional partner in the clerical establishment. You could say that liberal-progressive Catholic higher education has no such "core strengths," and that may be partly its own doing. It has embraced deconstruction of the neo-Scholastic hegemony since Vatican II so fully that it's now suspicious of Catholic institutionalism of any kind. It has been too accommodating of the identity politics that have taken root since the 1960s. Massimo Faggioli argues that the Catholic understanding of education needs new life. He has been working in the trenches as a teacher and thinker within the Catholic Church for three decades--first in Europe and then in the US--and he despairs that many of his colleagues now believe there is nothing left to the Catholic intellectual tradition--that is everything is now "post-confessional." Included in Faggioli's argument is a close look at the papacy of Pope Francis. From Laudato si' to Fratelli tutti, it is clear that Francis is leading a movement that rejects Catholic exclusivism and neo-fundamentalism, that critiques neoliberal capitalism, that seeks development of doctrine on the death penalty and the dismantling of a moral rigorism in the service of a bourgeois and conventional Catholicism. This fits well with efforts emphasizing diversity and inclusion as part of a Catholic identity that goes beyond what the canon of Western civilization contains. Yet, the relief brought about by Pope Francis's disavowal of the culture-war agenda can sometimes work as a kind of functional anti-Catholicism, in which Catholicism and Catholic culture are taken seriously only insofar as they support the technocratic paradigm of the contemporary university or one side of the two-party ideological agenda. Paraphrasing Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, Faggioli says that the university is one of the places where the Church does its thinking, and if we lose the "Catholic" university, we will be left with only a reactionary, non-thinking Church.

A powerful examination of the role of Catholicism in U.S. politics and in the life of Joseph R. Biden. After a dramatic election amid a raging pandemic, racial violence, economic collapse and historic national divisions that have threatened our democracy, Joe Biden succeeds Donald Trump as the 46th President of the United States. For Catholics, this is a momentous occasion in US public life, as he is the second Catholic to be elected to the nation's highest office, joining John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In 2021, Joe Biden becomes president in a very different situation than Kennedy's America. Today, Catholics play a much broader and more visible role in the public life of our country, and the triangle of relations between the White House, the Vatican, and the US Catholic Church is an essential dimension for understanding the political and religious urgency of this moment in our history. In this ground-breaking book, historian and theologian Dr. Massimo Faggioli provides an insightful overview of Catholicism in US politics, and its place as an anchor in the life of the man elected to lead the country at a decisive crossroads, an unprecedented moment in US history.

"A historical analysis of the ways in which Francis's papacy is unusual and thus open to greater possibilities than many of his predecessors"--

The death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI constituted undoubtedly two important elements in the broad theological and ecclesiastical landscape of the debate about Vatican II in the last few years. This change of pontificate has also nourished the journalistic and political dispute about Vatican II, its history and its legacy, and not only the historiographical and theological debate. Brief accounts of the history of Vatican II have reached the public at large but the research on Vatican II is already proceeding forward and beyond the state of knowledge about the council reached at the end of the nineties. Even if some observers seem to be satisfied with the present knowledge, for twenty-first century church historians and theologians interested in understanding contemporary Catholicism in the light of Vatican II, the intellectual undertaking is still evolving. The book gives a comprehensive presentation of the theological and historiographical debate about Vatican II. The attempt to go beyond "the clash of interpretations"--Vatican II as a rupture in the history of Catholicism on one side and the need to read Vatican II in continuity with the tradition on the other--is necessary indeed because the ongoing debate about Vatican II is largely misrepresented by the use of "clashing interpretations" as a tool for understanding the role of the council in present-day Catholicism. +

Liturgy and Ecclesiology in Sacrosanctum Concilium

The Medicine of Mercy

A Brief History of the New Ecclesial Movements

The Second Vatican Council ended in December 1965, but Vatican II is still happening in the global church. Catholicism has always had a universal claim, but the globalization of Catholicism as a truly world church became part of Catholic theology only thanks to that gatheringdecided by St. John XXIIIof bishops, theologians, lay observers, ecumenical representatives, and journalists. Vatican II is the most important event in church history after the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and it is the key to understanding Catholicism and its inner tensions today.