Bishops and theologians who share a concern that the reforms of the Second Vatican Council have failed to take root throughout the US Church met last weekend to chart a path forward

Last weekend, four cardinals, the apostolic nuncio to the United States and 30 other bishops were joined by 35 leaders drawn from the Church’s academic, charitable, philanthropic and ­journalistic arms to discuss the future shape of American Catholicism. It was a rare opportunity for bishops and theologians concerned about the ongoing reception of Vatican II to meet face-to-face to talk candidly about the opposition to Pope Francis in the US Church and the ways in which the culture wars have distorted the Catholic intellectual and moral traditions.

The first speaker, Villanova ecclesiologist Massimo Faggioli, told the conference that opposition to Pope Francis is rooted in a prior, sometimes latent, opposition to Vatican II among American Catholics. Speaking of the 1990s and the early part of this century, he said: “On the one side, there is the beginning, in academic theology, of symptoms of detachment from the institutional Church but also from a connection with the lived experience of the people of God, in ways that are more drastic than anywhere else in global Catholicism … On the other side, there is the neoconservative ideologisation of Catholicism, which still showed in the 1990s a certain amount of respect (at least nominally) for Vatican II.” This neoconservative slant, Faggioli claimed, had created a “clerical culture of identification of Catholicity with one particular model of papal leadership”. As he pointed out: “The papacy of Pope Francis had blown the lid off the pot.”