Catholic Discordance

2022 Catholic Media Association honorable mention Pope Francis 2022 Catholic Media Association honorable mention in English translation edition One element of the church that Pope Francis was elected to lead in 2013 was an ideology that might be called the American model of Catholicismthe troubling result of efforts by intellectuals like Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus to remake Catholicism into both a culture war colossus and a prop for ascendant capitalism. After laying the groundwork during the 1980s and armed with a selective and manipulative reading of Pope John Paul IIs 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, these neoconservative commentators established themselves as authoritative Catholic voices throughout the 1990s, viewing every question through a liberal-conservative ecclesial-political lens. The movement morphed further after the 9/11 terror attacks into a startling amalgamation of theocratic convictions, which led to the troubling theo-populism we see today. The election of the Latin American pope represented a mortal threat to all of this, and a poisonous backlash was inevitable, bringing us to the brink of a true American schism. This is the drama of todays Catholic Church. In Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, Massimo Borghesiwho masterfully unveiled the popes own intellectual development in his The Mind of Pope Francisanalyzes the origins of todays Catholic neoconservative movement and its clash with the church that Francis understands as a field hospital for a fragmented world.