Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis

A lecture with John McGreevy (University of Notre Dame). Originally presented February 9, 2023 at the University of Chicago. This event was co-sponsored by the History Department at the University of Chicago.

The story of Roman Catholicism has never followed a singular path. In no time period has this been more true than over the last two centuries. Beginning with the French Revolution, extending to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and concluding with present-day crises, John T. McGreevy chronicles the dramatic upheavals and internal divisions shaping the most multicultural, multilingual, and global institution in the world.

In his latest book, John McGreevy gives a magisterial history of the centuries-long conflict between “progress” and “tradition” in the world’s largest international institution.

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John McGreevy is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History and Charles and Jill Fischer Provost at the University of Notre Dame. He was formerly the dean of Notre Dame's College of Arts & Letters. He is the author of four books, including Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, and American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Catholicism Global. His fourth book, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis, will be published by W.W. Norton in fall 2022. His essays have been translated into Italian, French and Spanish. He has received major fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the Erasmus Institute, and has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, New York Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, The New Republic, Chicago Tribune and other venues. He served on the Pulitzer prize jury for History in 2010 and since 2018 has been the co-chair of the Commonweal Foundation board.

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