Reading Catholic news day after day can have the unintended effect of blurring many years’ worth of sensational stories into one another in one’s mind. One of the great gifts of John Gehring’s Reclaiming Catholicism, then, is that he has masterfully woven together many of these stories percolating in our minds to show how they support a set of ongoing themes in the Catholic Church in the United States.
Since this book went to press, of course, American Catholicism and the future of the church have become further entwined with the election of U.S.-born Cardinal Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV. A few months ago, Pope Leo said to Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, Tex., the chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, “The church cannot be silent…. I wish they [the conference of bishops] were a stronger, more unified voice” on immigration. Such a clarion call for unity and prophetic witness in and from the American hierarchy is in line with the message Gehring offers in these pages. The bishops obliged with a historic video message upholding the dignity of immigrants and condemning the “indiscriminate mass deportation of people.”
One of the aforementioned news stories of which I was reminded while reading this book was the essay in the July 2017 issue of La Civiltà Cattolica co-authored by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., and the Presbyterian pastor the Rev. Marcelo Figueroa, in which the authors, Gehring writes, “offered a blistering critique of the way conservative Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States had teamed up on some issues at the heart of Trump’s agenda.”
At the time that article was published, there was widespread backlash from some of the Catholic figures who suspected they were the targets of these remarks. In the end, the article was prescient in its analysis of some of the most troubling aspects of the coming years. Spadaro and Figueroa were proven correct, and those Catholics in the United States who had caricatured the two authors were wrong. Gehring takes Spadaro and Figueroa seriously in his study, and their thesis meshes nicely with Gehring’s.
Reclaiming American Catholicism, coming in at nearly 400 pages, is a comprehensive and meticulous synopsis of many of the ills that are plaguing the church in the United States. In particular, Pope Francis’ pontificate (2013-25) provides neat bookends for Gehring’s incisive study, because it frames some of the fundamental events that led to the divisions in the American church today.
In Chapter One, he presents an account of the U.S. response to the Second Vatican Council, largely seen through the work of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Gehring shows how the immediate aftermath of Bernardin’s 1983 “consistent ethic of life” address at Fordham University led to a battle within the American hierarchy that only intensified during Pope Francis’ pontificate.
Chapter Two delineates the relationship between many U.S. bishops and the Republican Party, culminating in the 2016 presidential election and the alliance between a vocal sector of the episcopacy and Donald Trump, especially on the issue of abortion. Gehring, to make an understatement, is not in favor of such a partnership.
Still, it is worth noting that this book is not an apologia for the Democratic Party; Gehring is happy to critique the various shortcomings of liberal politicians as well. He notes that in 2016, the Clinton campaign “made a strategic and ultimately flawed calculation that white Catholics were not a priority.” This was, indeed, a failure.
If he writes a revised edition of this book, Gehring will have to contend with the early months of Pope Leo’s papacy, the first year of Trump’s second term, and other Democratic missteps vis-à-vis Catholics, such as Kamala Harris’s decision to skip the Al Smith Dinner in 2024.
Chapter Three sees Gehring wrestle with the term of the second Catholic president of the United States, Joe Biden. More than that, however, Gehring analyzes the response of the U.S.C.C.B. to Biden’s support for abortion rights and its treatment of whether he should be allowed access to the Eucharist. In the next chapter, Gehring examines the culture wars that have enraptured the American church, especially over the last few decades. Enter Leonard Leo, a Catholic influencer and architect of the current Supreme Court. Leo, Gehring writes, is one of a number of wealthy Catholics who are bankrolling a “distinctly American brand of Catholicism [that] is characterized by a preference for traditionalist rituals such as the pre-Vatican II liturgy, a preoccupation with fighting LGBTQ rights, and an unwavering faith in unfettered free markets.”
Gehring saves his most scathing critiques for Leo, Tim Busch, Charles Koch and the members of the American hierarchy who have bought into their worldview and their rhetoric.
The last three chapters of the book highlight issues rooted deeply in the context of Catholic social teaching. Gehring goes to great lengths to show how Catholic culture warfare in the United States is challenged by these key issues: intersectionality, critical race theory, racial justice, gun violence and the culture of death, the climate crisis, restorative justice, slavery and white supremacy, sexual abuse by members of the clergy, L.G.B.T.Q. justice (especially focusing on Black and Latino L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics), women’s leadership, and the rise of the nones.
At times, reading this book was a painful reminder of some of the terrible things that have befallen the Catholic Church in the United States over the last few decades: clerical sexual abuse, homophobic attitudes flying in the face of Pope Francis’ movement in the direction of greater openness, racism that is excused or passed over in silence, the reduction of Catholic moral teaching to a single issue—the list could go on. But all of these are a necessary prelude to the hopeful crescendo of the book’s closing chapters.
In his analysis—ranging from people of color in the pews to university professors and from faith-based mobilizing groups to religious orders of women—Gehring shows quite clearly that there are reasons for hope in the church today. And if he is critical of many bishops who have aligned themselves behind only the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, he is complimentary to other members of the hierarchy by name. Blase Cupich, Robert McElroy, Joseph Tobin, Wilton Gregory, Paul Etienne, John Stowe, Joseph Tyson, Gustavo García-Siller, Bernard Hebda, Michael Jackels, Shawn McKnight, Mark Seitz and Thomas Zinkula all merit particular mention for their commitments to church leadership through embrace rather than exclusion.
This book is not perfect. Many readers will find a variety of errors of fact and misspelled names to be particularly distracting at times. If an updated version of the text deals with some of the developing topics mentioned above, Gehring and a copy editor would do well to amend some of these missteps, including fixing a keen eye on the chapter endnotes, where many of these errors appear and which are sometimes incomplete.
Nevertheless, Gehring has provided a peerless book on the challenges facing Catholicism in the United States after the first quarter of the 21st century. I hope this book finds its way to many parish reading groups. More importantly, however, readers will also see reasons for hope as we move toward a future that takes into consideration a preferential option for the poor and oppressed and a renewed emphasis on the consistent ethic of life.
This book is a gift in its faithful recovery of tradition and the encouragement to all of us to hand on this treasure.
This article appears in January 2026.
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