For further discussion of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, see the new 2023 800-page Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, edited by the lay Canadian Catholic theologian Catherine E. Clifford of St. Paul University in Ottawa and the lay Italian-born-and-raised-and-educated Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University in Philadelphia (Oxford University Press).
To orient ourselves to the wide-ranging discussion in Czerny and Barone's book about Pope Francis' 2020 encyclical, I will set forth here the chapter title of the pope's wide-ranging 43,000-word 2020 encyclical:
Chapter One: "Dark Clouds Over a closed World" (paragraphs 9-55);
Chapter Two: "A Stranger on the Road" (paragraphs 56-86);
Chapter Three: "Envisaging and Engendering an Open World" (paragraphs 87-127);
Chapter Four: "A Heart Open to the Whole World" (paragraphs 128-153);
Chapter Five: "A Better Kind of Politics" (paragraphs 154-197 -- with eleven references to Pope Francis' widely read 45,000-word 2015 eco-encyclical);
Chapter Six: "Dialogue and Friendship in Society" (paragraphs 198-224);
Chapter Seven: "Paths of Renewed Encounter" (paragraphs 225-270);
Chapter Eight: "Religions at the Service of Fraternity in Our World" (paragraphs 271-287).
The document ends with 288 references to correspond to the 288 numerals in square brackets in the text - including twenty-one references to Pope Francis' widely read 2015 eco-encyclical, eleven of which appear in Chapter Five: "A Better Kind of Politics" (paragraphs 154-197).
This overview of Pope Francis' 2020 encyclical shows that it is wide-ranging and visionary. But most of the papal encyclicals involving Catholic social teaching that have been issued over the years tend to be visionary. After all, they are based on theological reasoning. So why in the world have Czerny and Barone written a book about Pope Francis' 2020 social encyclical?
One factor to keep in mind is the vociferous opposition to Pope Francis by certain conservative American Catholics. See the lay Italian Catholic Massimo Borghesi's book Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, translated from the Italian by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2021; orig. Italian ed., 2021).
For deep background studies of neoconservatism in the United States, see Peter Steinfels' book Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1979) and Gary Dorrien's book The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Temple University Press, 1993).
Now, Czerny and Barone's book includes a "Foreword" by Pope Francis (pp. ix-xiii), "Abbreviations" (pp. xv-xvii), "Acknowledgments" (p. xix), an "Introduction" (pp. xxi-xxxii), eight chapters (pp. 3-170), and a "Conclusion" (pp. 171-178), followed by two appendices (pp. 181-195), and an "Index" (pp. 197-208).
The "Abbreviations" show the range of thirty-nine documents referred to in the text (and often abbreviated parenthetically), including ten documents of Vatican II, eleven by the long-reigning Pope John-Paul II, three by Pope Benedict XVI, and five by Pope Francis. In addition to parenthetical citations in the text, the text also includes footnotes at the foot of the pages, many of which are not short.
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