"Can the Catholic Church change? The obvious answer is yes, since everything that lives changes until it dies.” (1). Nathan Kollar, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, however, has in mind a special kind of change, namely, “liminal change”: “This is a chaotic kind of social change that occurs between historical eras, such as between Jesus’ death and the Council of Nicaea (325 CE), between the destruction of the Western Roman Empire and the growth of Christendom, between the degradation of Christendom, the growth of the modern, and its contemporary end. Today the modern era has come to an end, and we are now living in the chaos introducing a new era, which has not been named.” (4). Kollar, in other words, is saying that the future of the Catholic Church will be both continuous with and strikingly different from the various civil societies and churches of the past.

Kollar sets forth his argument in six chapters. In the first chapter, he describes his own life as a youngster in the 1950’s. He grew up in a steel mill town (North Braddock, PA), went to grammar school in an Irish parish and served as an altar boy at Mass. Confession to a priest was the  regular way to rid oneself of fear and guilt for various reasons. Yet, a decade later in the 1960’s, this traditional life-style began to change. Adult Catholics began to differ on the bizarre behavior of younger people in their never-ending search for self-identity.  Likewise, the unexpected split between conservatives and progressives among the bishops at Vatican II was embarrassing to some but exciting to others, given the broad coverage of the proceedings by the secular news media. But Roman Catholics in the United States still took pride in John F. Kennedy as the first Roman Catholic to be elected President of the United States.

In Chapter Two Kollar reflects on the Jewish roots of Christianity in depicting Jesus as a Galilean peasant who was the charismatic leader of a reform movement announcing the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. Jesus healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and taught people how to live in peace with God and their neighbors through parables, stories with an unexpected point (85). His own life was caught short by capture and execution at the hands of Jewish and Roman authorities, but the authors of the four Gospels testified to his rising from the dead and commissioning the  Apostles to spread the Good News about God’s saving love for humanity. These new-born Jewish Christians gathered in homes to celebrate the Eucharist after the pattern of what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper. Yet, given his mystical vision of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Paul of Tarsus was converted to Christianity and argued forcefully to fellow Jews that Gentiles likewise should be baptized in the Spirit. Yet, ironically Paul’s missionary work among Gentiles eventually resulted in Christianity losing its Jewish heritage and being incorporated into a more secular Roman way of life (99-122).  Chapter Three then describes the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire under steady pressure from migrant Germanic tribes at its borders. Hence, the Pope in Rome and bishops in their dioceses gradually took over the duties of civil authorities in former Roman colonies. In Rome, on Christmas Day, 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlesmagne as the Roman Emperor” (154), thereby inaugurating the new era of Christendom.

In Chapter Four, Kollar describes the often-troubled relations between Popes and Emperors. Emperors sometimes threatened to invade the Papal States with their armies, and Popes responded by threatening to excommunicate the Emperor and thereby suspend the allegiance of subordinates to his authority. Good-faith efforts at reconciliation between the two spheres of authority were attempted but proved to be largely unsuccessful.  For, both Popes and Emperors were victims of their own lavish lifestyles. Hence, it was not surprising that the Protestant Reformation eventually took place at the urging of Luther and Calvin for religious reasons. But the landed gentry within England and elsewhere blatantly confiscated Church-owned lands that likewise served the needs of peasants and the poor for the sake of their own financial interests (281-289). In Chapter Five, Kollar describes the proceedings of the Council of Trent with its subsequent impact on Church-State relations in the Tridentine era.  The Roman Catholic Church thereby found itself in opposition both to all forms of Protestant Christianity and to the rising power of the nation-state at the same time.  The unhappy result was a deeply conservative Church that clung tenaciously to the unquestioned authority of the Pope along with Tradition, the careful preservation of traditional beliefs and practices (290-338). 

The sixth and last chapter is perhaps the most revealing: “I have chosen a few issues of the present which must be dealt with for this liminal age of church and culture to move to a fruitful future. The premise of this book, and this chapter, is that we look back only to live forward” (340).  But what are these key issues? For example, who and what do we really mean by God? How do we distinguish legitimate differences between the sacred and the secular?  Do we Catholics genuinely accept and try to implement the social doctrine of the Church so that non-Catholics might be led to join us in creating a more just social order for the poor and marginalized?  Can we eliminate the scourge of war, above all, in a nuclear age? Do we ultimately need a more process-oriented philosophy of life? Admittedly, if the size of this book (400 pages) seems overwhelming, at least read the Introduction and this last Chapter.  Then let your imagination take over gently to push you into thinking about the likely future of the Catholic Church.