Author(s): Ross Douthat

Religion

Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, today Pope Francis is the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church and the most celebrated and controversial religious figure in the world. His leadership of the church has been perceived as a revelation or a threat, as a path to long-awaited transformation or to a disastrous-schism, as an opportunity to finally end the church's agony over priestly sex abuse or as proof that the Vatican is too corrupt to change. In To Change the Church, Douthat untangles the controversies of the Francis era: How the failures of John Paul II and Benedict XVI led to the election of the first Latin American pope, how the new pope's push to liberalize Catholic teaching on issue like divorce and the death penalty has opened a Catholic civil war, how the sex abuse scandal returned and how it has undercut Francis's promise to be a great reformer. He explains why the debates this pope has opened up over church teaching cut to the heart of the larger dilemmas facing Christianity in our disenchanted, discontented age-and how Francis's attempts to change an officially unchanging church could determine not only Roman Catholicism's trajectory, but the fare of all religion in the modern world. Book jacket.