In his message to the G20 summit in Germany last summer, Pope Francis described his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (EG) as “the programmatic document of my Pontificate.” Editor Gerard Mannion calls this collection “the first exhaustive and thematic scholarly treatment of EG” (13). Though the lengthy introduction fails to mention it, this volume originated in an Ecclesiological Investigations conference at Georgetown University more than three years ago, in March 2014 (155), only four months after EG appeared in late November 2013. Five of the twelve contributors are from Georgetown. The volume's considerable strengths, as well as its significant weaknesses, are due to its origin.
A few contributors are keen to settle old scores and celebrate the church's emergence from the “dark night” of the past thirty-five years. But in the main they succeed in deeply situating Pope Francis’ new emphases in EG with respect to the Second Vatican Council. With their attention to themes of Vatican II neglected by Francis’ two immediate predecessors (e.g., the return to Roncalli, people of God, synodality and local churches in various forms from episcopal conferences to parishes and the sensus fidei, the pastoral and the doctrinal), these essays put flesh on Walter Kasper's claim that with Pope Francis we have entered a new phase in the reception of the council. This phase presupposes earlier phases (34). And it will not be the definitive phase (49–50).
EG burst upon us unexpectedly in November 2013, just months after Francis’ surprise election in March. Massimo Borghesi's recent and well-received Jorge Maria Bergoglio: Una biografia intellectuale illustrates how the sources of Francis’ distinctive vision continue only gradually to come to light. Written at an early phase of our understanding of Francis’ sources and revised for publication within the next couple of years, most of this volume's essays generally lack a sense that EG marks not only a new phase in the reception of Vatican II in some abstract sense. It is also an encounter with a complex Latin American reception of Vatican II, from Medellín to Puebla and Aparecida, but also including what Juan Carlos Scannone calls a “multiplier effect” of interactions with Rome, from Evangelii Nuntiandi to the two instructions on liberation theology to Ecclesia in America. This makes EG much more than a monolithic “ecclesiology of liberation” (109–17). Rather it performs Francis’ culture of encounter and dialogue, gathering up five decades of the reception of Vatican II in Latin America and offering it to the rest of the church as a body of diverse cultures.
Unfortunately, this volume has no Latin American contributors and no extended treatment of the Argentine “theology of the people.” Its chief pioneers, Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello, along with CELAM and Aparecida, are mentioned at various points in the text but do not appear in the index. The country of Colombia is misspelled (110) and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is relocated to the United States (169).
Two essays, however, stand out in their turn to Latin American sources to clarify what in EG might appear new to European and American readers. With an assist from Austen Ivereigh's 2014 biography of Francis, William Werpehowski's close textual analysis finds the “spiritual stance” (135–37) underlying Francis’ distinctive approach to traditional social doctrine in his Argentine “theology of the people.” In a provocative but optimistic essay, Maureen O'Connell confronts Pope Francis, whom she describes as “White Like Me” (144), with the contribution of racial difference to economic inequality in the United States. She turns to the possible role of culture in deconstructing racism, turning specifically to the “people's mysticism” (mistica popular), in the “theology of the people” (155ff.).
If “the future of Catholicism” lies with the Global South, this volume's prophetic vision is surely skewed by lack of attention to Latin America. Nevertheless, despite its shortcomings, it offers solid scholarly insight into EG and belongs in university libraries, especially those that support graduate programs. Scannone's March 2016 Theological Studies essay, “Pope Francis and the Theology of the People,” with its focus on EG, would help address some of this volume's lack of attention to EG's Latin American location.
