So I want to talk tonight about the future of the Catholic Church and to do so in a way that is

purely suggestive of some possible futures.

And I guess I have a little bit of a pedagogical intent in that, which is to keep us open

to the possibility that there are any number of futures

for the Catholic Church in America.

There's not just one.

And there probably aren't just four.

To be honest, I just reached for a number.

But to me, the point of proposing a few possible futures is to eliminate present trends and just to think about them.

So apologies in advance, if that's, it's not intended to be a super aggressive talk in that sense, but a prospective talk.

So four futures, the Catholic Church in America.

First, an acknowledgement, I ran across a book a couple of years ago called

Four Futures Life After Capitalism, and that's the inspiration for this talk. It has nothing to do with life after

future galatres. There's nothing to do with life after capitalism. But I did steal the title because I thought it was a nice way of thinking about present friends.

So this is not a talk about life after capitalism. And this is not going to be a talk even about every possible aspect of the Catholic Church.

Now, I'm a political scientist and a political theorist,

and so I'm going to try to think about four possible political situations or political aspects of four situations that

the church might find itself in. Two of those are kind of normal or predictable and two of

those are extreme. So we'll get to them. So this talk is about politics. When I say that this is talk about

politics having to do with the church, that might strike you in a strange way. We tend to think

of religions as being primarily confessions of faith with certain types of association that are attached to them.

And I'm not going to be talking too much about belief or aspects of Catholic theology.

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