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The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful Are Shaping a New American Catholicism

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In the past two years it seems as if more books seem to have been published on Roman Catholicism than at any other time. The most recent books have focusing not as much on the Church, but ht clergy sexual abuse scandal that has plagued the Church and how the Church ought to respond. David Gibson's book The Coming Catholic Church belongs in this genre.

Gibson divides the book into three sections: one devoted to the laity, another devoted to priesthood, and a third section focuses on the episcopacy. Gibson seems very hopeful that the laity can and should play a significant role in reform. He does have some criticisms of the laity and while he does not blame the current scandal on lay people or take a simplistic view that if lay people had more of a say, none of this would have ever happened, he does warn against the danger of putting clergy members on too high a pedestal (something that will probably not happen anytime too soon). Gibson is both sympathetic and critical of the priesthood. He basically sees priests as good hearted people, but also caught in the traps of clericalism. While he supports a married clergy, he also sees the value of celibacy in some cases. He supports a broader membership in the clergy so that the Church will not only be relevant, but will also have enough priests to maintain the Sacramental life of the Church. Gibson is most critical of the bishops, and seems to believe they are hopelessly irrelevant and while he is hopeful of changes in the laity and priesthood, he seems less hopeful as far as the episcopacy is concerned. While he admires Pope John Paul II, he seems to present a thesis that the problem with the bishops is that there are too many John Paul II clones. For this reason he hopes that the Pope's eventual successor will have John Paul II's dedication and enthusiasm, but will also be open to reform.

The book is accurate and well researched something that is probably due to his talent as a journalist. A bit of editing could help, for some parts are a bit repetitious. He has many opinions, but is able to back up his opinions with fact. His voice offers a different perspective, which is probably why I found this book quite significant. Gibson is a journalist, not a theologian, member of the clergy, or religious life. Many of the most recent books about the scandal are written by Church insiders, both liberal and conservative, who often times have an agenda. Gibson has a point of view, but this comes from his love of his Church, and purely from that love. Gibson also offers his point of view from the eyes of a Catholic, but not a life long Catholic. As a convert, Gibson seems to be able to see what is essentially Catholic and offer a fresh and balanced point of view. In my opinion, this is what Gibson attempts to do, and in many ways did it satisfactorily.

Don Hewitt (of 60 Minutes) famously tells his reporters to 'tell me a story.' Storytelling may be appropriate for a TV report, but when you take on a complex topic in a book-length analysis, stories can get in the way. The reason is simple: the likely audience for this kind of a book already has their own story. The likely reader of this book already has his own history with the Catholic Church. There is no need to tell stories with human interest, because any story a reporter might tell will pale in comparison with the richness of the reader's own experience.

Telling a story can get in the way of analysis. In one arc, Gibson tells the story of Wilton Gregory, the bishop who headed the post-scandal Episcopal conference. As Gibson presents it, Gregory's story is almost a fall from grace. Gibson presents Bishop Gregory as the insider who sensitively sees the need for the hierarchy to confront itself. However, in this story, the hierarchy is the villain. Instead of Gregory redeeming the hierarchy, the hierarchy uses Gregory to further protect and isolate itself. This makes a compelling story (even assuming it's true) but what's missing is analysis.

There are, in the bishop's dilemma, two important values to protect, but which are currently at odds. The first value is the pressure to hold predatory priests accountable. The second value is to protect innocent and honest priests from unfair accusation. Not being a member of the clergy, Gibson is plainly unaware of why that second value is so important. It isn't always personal vanity. Because of the business he's in, a priest's personal reputation is vital. Unfortunately, a reputation is the easiest thing for an enemy to destroy, simply by offering accusations that leave a stain. It doesn't matter whether such accusations stand up to proof; the accusation alone does the damage. It's also clear that Gibson doesn't appreciate how often a priest's reputation comes under attack. Plenty of people would gladly start/spread every rumor about a priest. (Ask any priest.) Most people would be surprised at how often, and how vicious, these attacks actually occur. About this, Gibson says little.

The bishops, we all agree, went too far in protecting their priests' reputations. Of the two values (accountability and protection), many bishops chose wrong. Therefore, what's truly needed in this book is a thorough discussion of how to draw that line. It isn't easy. You can't believe every accusation, but you can't dismiss them all, either. You can smugly say that the bishops drew the line poorly, but that's not enough. You have to further explain how to draw the line properly. That takes analysis, and sober reflection.

That's what this book is lacking. This book is basically a story, not an analysis. In this story, the laity are heroes who will one day triumph over the tyrannical bishops and nefarious Vatican curia. That may be a story, but it isn't analysis.

Until now, the books about the current crisis in the Catholic Church have come from two flanks: the crotchety right, blaming everything on a lack of fidelity or those rascals behind Vatican II (George Weigel et al) ... and the defiant left, blaming everything on an ailing Pope who refuses to get with the program (Gary Wills et al).

Now, at last, comes a balanced and clear-eyed view from the vast middle -- not only that, but it comes from a convert with a passion and genuine affection for his beleaguered Church.

David Gibson's "The Coming Catholic Church" manages to synthesize two centuries of triumph and turmoil in the American Catholic Church into a coherent, intelligent and altogether revelatory work that, at this moment, stands as a definitive account of how the church got where it is today -- and where it may be headed tomorrow. Drawing on history, sociology, theology and just plain good storytelling, Gibson presents the most complete and compelling picture of the modern church that I've found (and I've slogged through a lot of them!) He brings to the book a journalist's eye and a committed Catholic's concern, and the result is an invaluble document that should be required reading for every American Catholic, both lay and religious.

Gibson gives equal time to arguments from conservatives and progressives, and avoids taking sides; both, he suggests, have their strengths and weaknesses, and neither is completely right or wrong. That gives the book a credibility and balance that I found most welcome. And he divides his book clearly into three sections: the laity, the clergy, and the hierarchy, showing the fundamental role each must play in the Church, how each has reacted to the recent scandals, and how each will be challenged to change its relationship with the other if the Church is to be renewed and reformed.

"The Coming Catholic Church" will help readers see the Church as the wonderful, flawed, monumental and maddening institution it is and always has been -- and understand, perhaps for the first time, why. What you will find here are tales of a confused and conflicted clergy, an angry and impassioned laity, and the defensive and sometimes helpless hierarchy.

What you will also find is a quiet but insistent plea: we are all in this together, and must work together to renew our Church. The book's ultimate theme is one of hope and redemption -- the triumph of Easter over the despair of Good Friday.

I can't overstate how important and necessary this book is. I'm sending one to every Catholic I know, with the urgent message: "Read this. Now."

I can't state it any plainer than that. For any Catholic who cares about the Church, and wants to know what the future may hold, pick up this book. It's all there. Read this. Now.

It seems the one constant in American Christianity is its parochialism. Whether it be those on the right who equate the faith once delivered to the saints with conservative American domestic and foreign policy or those on the left who believe the Church will be saved by becoming more of a liberal democracy, the attempt to have American cultural, political, and religious ideals hijack the Church for its ends goes along undaunted.

David Gibson adds to this heritage in The Coming Catholic Church - his view of how the sex scandals plaguing the Catholic priesthood has altered the playing field in the Catholic Church and is reshaping American Catholicism. Indeed, Gibson goes as far as to infer that the entire ecclesial model the Catholic Church has used for over a millennium is being rendered obsolete overnight by happenings in the United States and, to paraphrase an adage, "What is good for American Catholics is good for the Catholic Church."

The book is divided into three sections on the laity, the priesthood, and the hierarchy. The overall presentation is one of an enraged laity demanding the institution be made more democratic, the bishops resisting these demands, and the some well-meaning priests caught in the middle. Beginning with the understandable sense of betrayal and outrage felt by American Catholics as the widespread nature of the scandals and the American bishops' complicity in covering up misconduct by their clergy became known, Gibson uses this as a springboard for describing how the state of the American Catholic belief and practice - that can at best be described by the moniker "Cafeteria Catholic" - is set to revolutionize affairs in the Church.

While Gibson does a solid job detailing the anger of many Catholics in America about the scandal, he then makes the unwarranted assumption that this will lead to a wholesale change in the Church. There is no evidence supporting a mass desire for change in Catholic doctrine among the faithful. The anger is over sexual misconduct and the irresponsibility of the bishops in not removing known sexual predators from the ranks of priests. While those calling for the ordiantion of women and other changes in Catholic doctrine are trying to add their causes to the cries for change, subsequent events demonstrate that such an expansion of the cause to things not related to the problem will not find much of an audience beyond those already committed to that cause.

Oddly enough, Gibson early in the book reminds Americans of the universality of the Catholic Church. Yet he fails to heed his own warnings that they not expect the Church to represent an American viewpoint. Apparently forgetting this point, he spends much of the remainder of the book defending the thesis that the problems of the American Church demand changes in the worldwide structure of Catholicism.

While certainly not a radical, Gibson does fall into the category of the pleasantly liberal Catholic who wishes the Church was more democratic and modern. Like many liberal Catholics, he ties the scandal to calls for reform that would amount to the Church repudiating traditional Catholic doctrine. Yet these "reforms" would do little more than turn the Catholic Church into another faceless liberal Protestant sect. As recent history can attest, these changes have led to disintegration and not renewal whenever they have been employed.

Also left unmentioned in Gibson's thesis is that the fact that almost all of these cases involved predators who committed homosexual acts. The thought that the scandal might be a problem involving homosexuality would no doubt fall on deaf ears with good liberals like Gibson, but, given recent developments, this is obviously well understood at the Vatican.

Gibson also fails to take into account those places where the Church in America is most healthy. While religious orders that have liberalized are grey and dying, those that have taken a traditional path are healthy and growing. Dioceses that adopted the more liberalizing tendencies in the past few decades are having the most trouble while those that are most conservative are among the healthiest. In addition, new converts are coming from Evangelical Protestantism and are invigorating the Church. The post-Vatican II American Catholicism that relies on some vaguely defined "Spirit of Vatican II" that appears nowhere in the Vatican II documents is largely a baby-boomer phenomenon that is destined to die with them.

Gibson closes his book looking towards the future and pinning his dreams on the hope that the successor of Pope John Paul II would finish the job begun at Vatican II, thwart the efforts of those backward traditionalists, and usher in the Church that any Western progressive thinker could respect. How ironic it was that when the great Polish pope did pass on to blessed memory, it was Cardinal Ratzinger - who comes off in the book as the staunchest of all conservative forces - that received the nod as Pope Benedict XVI.

With The Coming Catholic Church, Gibson does a fine job describing the perilous predicament within which the Catholic Church due to both the actions of sexual predators among its priests and the inaction of bishops in removing these monsters from service in the Church. However, by attempting to piggyback a whole list of unrelated issues to the crisis without any supporting evidence, Gibson's efforts come off as motivated more by a desire for his church's social respectability than its adherence to the truth.

Gibson's evaluation of the current state of Roman Catholicism in the United States is something of a rarity in the world of contemporary Church discussion. Balanced, fair, and level-headed, he illustrates the impact the 2001 priest scandals have had on the faithful, but also touches on such phenomena as the shrinking number of clergy and religious, the disaffectedness of many of the faithful before, during, and after the scandals hit, and the effects various factions (left- and right-wingers, among others) have on what direction the Church is taking. Gibson's work, while delivering some sobering news, is nonetheless possessed of a sense of hope for a better future, as well as deep faith in what the Church means to Her many children. All in all an excellent and well-worth-reading examination of the current American Catholic Church.

Gibson's writing is direct, if almost painfully colloquial at times. His incessant insertion of quips and jokes can lighten the tone but also distract readers from the gravity of the discussion at hand.
His consideration of the three camps in the Church is accurate thought not incredibly balance. The laity, for all their relative powerlessness seem to take an inordinate weight in the text.
The concerns expressed by the reader from Indianapolis are pointed out in the text; in fact the church, especially in Africa, is experiencing clergy power abuses of a different sort which can be solved by a similar system of decentralization of power away from the Vatican.
The need for a stronger, though not necessarily heavier-handed, church leadership at all levels is evident. The solidarity of the priests and bishops and the remoteness of the laity can only be remedied by a resolution among all three factions to move beyond this scandal and to enter a relationship where the respect for all three parties is restored. This final conclusion is brought out only in the very end of Gibson's book.
In all, Gibson provides a well informed, though poorly documented, examination of the paths that have lead all three camps of Catholics to the current impasse and examines possible routes for all of them. His conclusion is optimistic and exhortative, that "the adventure of Catholicism is beginning anew".

David Gibson presents a broad and thoughtful analysis of the major issues confronting the Roman Catholic Church today. Moving beyond the headlines of the recent abuse scandal, he examines the changes not only in the Catholic Church itself, but also in secular society which have exacerbated the inherent conflicts between materialism, consumerism (among many "isms") and the life of the spirit.

THE COMING CATHOLIC CHURCH (published by HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.) focuses on issues confronting the laity, priesthood and the hierarchy, carefully exploring the background and composition of each intertwined segment of the church from a recent historical standpoint, current challenges within the church itself - locally, nationally and even globally - and opportunities for the future. Mr. Gibson's opinions and prescriptions regarding the future direction of the institutional church will undoubtedly generate controversy depending upon whether one favors more orthodox doctrine or embraces a more liberal approach to the faith. However, his ideas are based upon thorough research and a good understanding of the human institutions and composition of the church itself.

The book is an important one: regardless of whether you agree with Mr. Gibson or not, he presents the major issues and concerns which confront the Catholic Church in times of increasing challenge within a rapidly changing secular culture and society. How the Church - laity, clergy and hierarchy - deal with these challenges will determine its effectiveness in remaining true to the fundamental Gospel message.

David Gibson is an astute observer of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. This book is comprehensive, well researched and well documented and well written. It is as relevant now, in 2010, as when it was written. I recommend it to all Catholics, and to all who are concerned about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. David Gibson, along with Peter Steinfels, and Gary Wills, has written movingly about his concerns for his church and his thoughtful arguments are well worth consideration. Highly recommended.

I am a convert from Protestantism, where my father was a minister, and I cannot tell you how poorly the various Protestant sects have fared in having what is essentially a POLITICAL philosophy, democracy, destroy what unity was left among them over the course of the last century. Luther himself was said to have muttered, late in life, "I set out to bring down one pope and created a hundred popes..."--and this is the onus of "the Protesters", to continue to split exponentially as each dissenting panjandrum reserves the right to interpret Scripture as he or she wishes, regardless of the wishes of Christ as expressed in John 17:20-6.
David Gibson, on the other hand, would have you believe that The Church is too top-heavy a kingdom, even if this is exactly what Jesus Himself described it as--A KINGDOM, not a democracy, and as every school child knows, a KINGDOM has a hierarchy: Christ's Vicar atop, laity at the base. But, oh, how this grates on our very American sensibilities! Nevertheless, do we not stop to consider that the hierarchy are nothing more than LAITY ORDAINED? That the pope himself doesn't come from some elitist aristocracy, but was an orphan and a common student-seminarian like so many of us? Why do we hold authority figures in general in such disdain? To whom did so many turn to whenever the recent scandals broke for answers, for solutions, for redress? Why, the very authority figures they--and this author--hold in contempt, of course! In short, AUTHORITY IS GOOD--any honest parent, teacher, judge, soldier, officer of the law, or any other person would tell you so: and The Church, top-to-bottom, is, spiritually speaking, all of those things. American Catholics should see her for what she is or follow the footsteps of so many found in the footnotes of history--LEAVE the orthodox to worship in peace in THE community of believers Christ Himself founded some twenty centuries ago.
Besides, Gibson betrays his ethnocentrism by the very cover he's chosen for his book, the two flags flanking his prophetic title, as if--as one astute reviewer observed already--the AMERICAN Catholic Church isn't but a fraction of the gargantuan whole, and let's face it: the LEAST observant, the LEAST "catholic" (as in universal) fraction of the whole it is. I would not trade an iota of The Church's authority and autonomy--painfully won through centuries of struggle with emperors and kings and schismatics of old--for a more "democratic" church for all the world, for you can gain the world, dissenters, and still lose your soul.

Gibson, a journalist who covered the Vatican and then converted to Catholicism, offers a rare perspective on the American Catholic Church--one that is at times quite moving. Although the sexual scandal is nominally the focal point of the book, Gibson sees all of its horrors as a symptom of a deeper problem; namely, a Church whose fixation on the structure and form of worship blinds it to the human problems caused by that structure. He examines these human problems and possible solutions as seen from three perspectives: the laity, the priesthood, and the hierarchy. He neatly lays out Church history to show how it has shaped current happenings and conditions. His book is well researched, clearly written, and generally balanced. He is not, however, impartial. He lays most of the blame for the sexual scandal on the American bishops and Vatican Curia, seeing these bodies as arrogant, cut off from the "real world", and protective of their power based in part on centuries-old relationships with priests and the laity that have become dehumanizing and ultimately, unsustainable. As one might expect from an American journalist, Gibson believes the solution is less emphasis on structure, less unquestioned central authority, and more involvement from the laity in Church affairs. As he describes the heartrending experiences of various lay members and priests who have been victimized and ignored by "the system", one begins to feel that Gibson has a point.