In dramatic stories and sweeping panoramas distinguished historian John T. McGreevy tells the
mesmerising story of a Church torn between the forces of reform and reaction for the past 250
years. Anti-monarchist French clerics celebrated the Revolution but the murder of priests and
destruction of churches in the Terror galvanised a powerful conservative reaction that
reverberates to this day. Missionaries around the world greatly expanded the Church's influence
while bringing new tensions between a culturally diverse syncretism and the ultimate authority
of Rome. The aspirations of the faithful for justice in this world-African Catholics fighting
for independence Latin Americans developing a theology of liberation Polish and South Korean
Catholics demanding democratic governments-challenged the politically cautious. The cataclysms
of the Second World War decolonisation the Second Vatican Council and clerical sexual abuse
have each remade the Church leaving Pope Francis with the superhuman task of charting a path
for over one billion Catholics worldwide.
