Massimo FAGGIOLI, The Liminal Papacy of Pope Francis: Moving Toward Global Catholicity. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2020. Pp. 205. $27.00 pb. ISBN 978-1-626988-368-7. Reviewed by Nathan R. KOLLAR, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY: 14618.

On October nineth two thousand twenty Secretary Pompeo again declared that the Pope should be more active on the world stage and was risking the moral authority of the church in its lack of presence there.

This book explains how and why Pope Francis does operate on the world stage. It is just not the same one that Pompeo, and the Conservative Catholics he serves, stands on. Nor is it the one built by previous Popes. Francis, Faggioli claims, sees the global stage from the perspective of those who stand on the periphery: the dancers, singers, prop movers, ticket sellers, cleaners, and ushers. Pompeo sees it from those who wish to dominate everyone on the stage.  Many times, Faggioli uses the metaphor “globalization” rather than “stage.”

Faggioli does his explaining in six chapters and an Introduction. First he sets the foundation for his argument by describing how the papacy is evolving under Francis’ tutelage as a post-Vatican II pope who has never spent time in Rome, who was ordained after the Council, who was a bishop of the people, and who is exercising his papal service during a radical change in the papacy itself —with a “pope emeritus”  walking the same grounds he does. Faggioli accepts the contemporary hermeneutical principle that where you live, when you live, and with whom you live is vital for understanding who you are and what you do. These questions are answered over and over throughout the book as they become his interpretative tool for describing Francis’ ecclesiology of globalization and its pastoral consequences. 

His six chapters follow his foundational Introduction. The following chapter headings describe how he goes about answering these questions in detail. Pope Francis, Global Catholic, Francis and the Reception of Vatican II as a Global Council, Catholicism from the Peripheries, Ad limina of the Peripheries: Francis’s Ecclesiology of Globalization, Global Governance of the Catholic Church, The Papacy, Geopolitics, and the Crisis of Globalization. These are tightly organized chapters, overflowing with information about popes since Pius XII. They enable Faggioli to make his argument that Pope Francis in personal history and present action is a transition figure (liminal) between the already and not yet.

The book is written as part of the Catholicity in an Evolving Universe serieswhich sees as its purpose “…to explore all facets of life through the lens of catholicity: a sense of dynamic wholeness and conscious awareness of a continually unfolding creation.” This book’s lens is the papacy in general and Pope Francis in particular. What it sees is a pope from the edge of the Catholic world, now present in the former center of that world, Europe and Rome. Church membership on the periphery is growing while membership in the former center is rapidly decreasing.  This pope seeks a truly catholic Church free from its former fundamentalist and judgmental mentality open to those on the socio-political and economic margins. The opposition to the institutionalization of this vision portrayed by Faggioli are the powerfully monied class of Roman Catholic conservatives and those clerics socialized into seeing the Church from the Rome of the last three centuries. This opposition looks forward to a time when their vision of normative twentieth century Catholicism will uniformly and globally be implemented throughout a Catholicism centered in Roman ecclesiastical culture. Faggioli suggests that Pope Francis’ institutionalization is advancing through the slow reform of the Curia, a reawakening of the Vatican II’s vision of collegiality, and his continual use of synodality.  

As a part of the above-mentioned series and written by a well published author who is acknowledged as an expert in current Catholic affairs, it is obviously written for those who recognize his authority and expertise. What this means for a reader who is not part of the audience of the series, Commonweal, or National Catholic Reporter, is the jargon used and the controversies discussed in the book may be unfamiliar to her or him. He also has a habit of writing long sentences. Sometimes a paragraph long, many times 104 words long. Some words, such as liminality, are not used in the common anthropological sense but more in accord with the targeted audience. But whether a member of the targeted audience or a person deeply concerned about the Catholic church past, present, and future, this is a must read for the amount of historical data and the insightful way Faggioli arranges that data to provide a hopeful guide to the Global Catholicism of today and tomorrow.