Two recent books suggest that, amidst challenges and problems, the pace of authentic Catholic renewal is accelerating in these United States.
Anne Hendershott and Christopher White’s Renewal (Encounter Books) was nicely timed to coincide with Pope Francis’s recently published comments on seminary reform. There, the pope stressed the imperative of integral formation, in which human development, spiritual growth, intellectual formation, and the development of pastoral skills mesh together in preparing the priests of the future. As Hendershott and White demonstrate, American seminaries, once deeply troubled by the confusions of the immediate post-Vatican II decades, are at the forefront of that renewal, in ways that might well be imitated by other countries in the West.
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