To Change The Church - Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

Zusatztext "A powerfully prophetic work whose sobriety and fairness magnifies the force of its warning. Pope Francis is leading a theological revolution whose recklessness beggars belief! and the effects of which stand to be more epochal than most Catholics realize. Ross Douthat reads the signs of these anxious times with acute clarity and far-seeing vision.  To Change the Church  is must reading for every Christian who cares about the fate of the West and the future of global Christianity." —Rod Dreher! author of  The Benedict Option Informationen zum Autor Ross Douthat is a columnist for the  New York Times  op-ed page. He is the author of  To Change the Church ,  Bad Religion , and  Privilege , and coauthor of  Grand New Party . Before joining the  New York Times , he was a senior editor for the  Atlantic . He is the film critic for  National Review , and he cohosts the  New York Times ’s weekly op-ed podcast,  The Argument . He lives in New Haven with his wife and four children. Klappentext Synopsis coming soon....... To Change the Church One THE PRISONER OF THE VATICAN At the center of earthly Catholicism, there is one man: the Bishop of Rome, the Supreme Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, the Patriarch of the West, the Servant of the Servants of God, the 266th (give or take an antipope) successor of Saint Peter. This has not changed in two thousand years. There was one bishop of Rome when the church was a persecuted minority in a pagan empire; one bishop of Rome when the church was barricaded into a Frankish redoubt to fend off an ascendant Islam; one bishop of Rome when the church lost half of Europe to Protestantism and gained a New World for its missionaries; one bishop of Rome when the ancien régime crumbled and the church’s privileges began to fall away; one bishop of Rome when the twentieth century ushered in a surge of growth and persecution for Christian faith around the globe. But all the other numbers that matter in Roman Catholicism have grown somewhat larger. When Simon Peter was crucified upside down in Nero’s Rome, there were at most thousands of Christians in the Roman Empire, and only about 120 million human beings alive in the whole world. When Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg door, there were only 50 or 60 million Christians in all of Europe. There were probably about 200 million Catholics worldwide when Pope Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemned modern liberalism in 1864; there were probably about 500 million a century later when the Second Vatican Council attempted a partial reconciliation with modernity. And now—well, to start in the red-hatted inner circle, there are more than 200 cardinals, roughly 5,100 bishops, 400,000 priests, and about 700,000 sisters in the contemporary Catholic Church. 1 In the United States alone, the number of people employed by the church in some form—in schools and charities and relief organizations and the various diocesan bureaucracies—tops a million. 2 Worldwide, the church dwarfs other private sector and government employers, from McDonald’s to the U.S. federal government to the People’s Liberation Army. That’s just the church as a corporation; the church as a community of believers is vastly larger. In 2014, one sixth of the world’s human beings were baptized Catholics. Those estimated numbers? More than a billion and a quarter, or 1,253,000,000. Catholic means “here comes everybody,” wrote James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. That was in the 1920s, when there were about 300 million Catholics, two thirds of ...

Product details

• Authors: Ross Douthat
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2017
• EAN: 9781501146923
• ISBN: 978-1-5011-4692-3
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Religion/theology; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies