CV NEWS FEED // A new book from Catholic journalist and Church analyst Francis Maier aims to give Catholics in the U.S. a voice and provide a snapshot of the state of the Church in the 21st century.
In a recent interview with Catholic project What We Need Now (WWNN), author Francis Maier said that his book, True Confessions: Voices of Faith From a Life in the Church, is “a record of faithful—clergy, religious, and laypersons—confessing Jesus Christ and his Church, each from his or her own experiences, and each for his or her own particular reasons why.”
From December 2020 to May 2022, Maier interviewed bishops, priests, lay people, investors, and donors about their personal stories and their views on the current state of the Church. According to him, conversations with bishops were “very frank, often sobering, but in the end very encouraging.”
“The bishops and priests I’ve known and worked around throughout my career are overwhelmingly good men, doing their best in very demanding jobs,” he said:
I’ve reread the conversations I had with parents of adopted children, and children with special needs, probably a hundred times. I don’t know where the kind of love and routine generosity I found in those couples, often in the face of very serious hardship, comes from in people. But it’s hard to be depressed about the Church and the world when you meet that sort of Christian witness.
Maier also said that there is a lot of life in the Church that is easily obscured by focusing on “dysfunction” within the Church.
“One of the pleasures in doing the book was interviewing the donors and ministry leaders, too many to count, who are doing great apostolic work,” he said. “We just never hear about them because mainstream secular thought ignores them, and has no interest in recognizing them.”
In terms of the future of the Church, Maier said that the sexual and technological revolutions changed “nearly everything about modern life.” According to him, the consequences of those revolutions are still affecting the Church today, forcing Catholics to go through “a deep ‘re-formation’ or restructuring of how we think about ourselves and the world.”
“I don’t doubt for a minute that the Church will survive and grow, because she’s not ‘our’ Church but God’s Church. We don’t own her. She belongs to Jesus Christ, and he doesn’t abandon his people. But that doesn’t mean the next 20 or 30 or 50 years will be easy,” he said.
Maier concluded that the different vocations and stories showcased in his book serve as “part of the glory of the Church.”
“They also reflect the reality of human nature and life, which the Church understands better than anyone…” he said. “Life isn’t finally about power. It’s about love. And I hope True Confessions succeeds in conveying how well so many faithful Catholic people do love the Church and what she teaches, and witness that love to others.”
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