Angelus News | March 22, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 6

closely with those of the “BRICS
nations” (Brazil, Russia, India, China,
and South Africa among them, as the
acronym suggests) than they do with
the White House, even under a liberal
administration led by a Catholic and
self-professed Francis admirer.
Ad intra, with regard to the internal
life of the Church, Francis is pursuing
a program of “synodality,” a difficult
term to define with precision but
which, in broad strokes refers to a more
participatory and inclusive ecclesial
approach, rooted in compassion and
dialogue, and with less emphasis on
some of the traditional moral battles
which have defined Catholic identity
in America in recent decades, especially
with regard to “life issues” such as
abortion.
Both of those transitions have been
trying for some sectors of American
Catholic opinion. To some extent, the
tensions overlap with the usual left/
right divides, though not exclusively so.
Many American liberals, for instance,
may find Francis’ refusal to forthrightly
condemn Vladimir Putin, for example,
even more frustrating than conservatives,
some of whom feel a certain
grudging admiration for the Russian
leader.
Standing back from the particulars
of any given issue, what seems clear
about American reaction to Francis
that it cannot properly be understood
in isolation, but rather as part of a more
epochal shift in Catholicism — to wit,
the rise of a global Church, one in
which the United States simply is not
the pivot point.
A bit of math makes the point: There
are 1.3 billion Roman Catholics in the
world today and just over 60 million in
the United States, which means that
Americans account for slightly under
5% of the global Catholic population.
Put another way, 95% of the Catholics
on the planet today are not Americans,
and do not necessarily see the world
through the lens of American experiences,
interests, and priorities.
Two-thirds of the world’s Catholics
today live outside the boundaries of the
West, in Africa, Asia, Latin America,
the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and
points beyond. By 2050, that non-Western
share will be three-quarters.
In such a far-flung global community
of faith, Catholics in the U.S. increasingly
will be pressured to make their
peace with the reality that the Church,
and its leadership, will not always react
from within American categories or
according to American logic. Right
now, the tensions unleashed by this
transition are focused on Francis, but
they just as easily could be aroused by
a pontiff from Congo, or Sri Lanka, or
Myanmar — all, by the way, at least
remotely plausible candidate nations to
give the Church its next leader.
To be clear, American Catholicism
is hardly sliding toward irrelevance in
global Catholic affairs. The Church in
the U.S. wields mammoth resources,
both human and financial, including
by far the world’s leading network of
Catholic institutions. They include
schools and universities, hospitals
and clinics, social service centers and
humanitarian organizations, and on
and on.
Nevertheless, American Catholics
need to be clear that the turbulence
of the Francis era is not a one-off affair
triggered by the idiosyncrasies of a gaucho,
or cowboy, pontiff. It is, instead,
a harbinger of things to come — perhaps
not always in service to the same
agenda, but unlikely to be predictably
“American” in tone or content either.
To put the point differently, the
Francis papacy will pass, as all papacies
eventually do. Yet the new and more
complicated era in the global Church
he embodies, with both its promise and
its frustrations for Americans, appears
here to stay.
John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux.
Pilgrims take part in the annual Cirio de Nazaré procession in Belem, Brazil, Oct. 9, 2022. More than a million pilgrims
take part in the procession, which takes place on the second Sunday of October and honors Our Lady of Nazareth. |
CNS/RAIMUNDO PACCO, REUTERS
March 22, 2024 • ANGELUS • 21