Acknowledgements

There is a special energy in co-authorship. We are theologians who serve on theological faculties and have extensive training in other disciplines (Massimo in history, Bryan in sociology). That fact, together with our diverse backgrounds, languages, and scholarship, made this collaboration all the more rewarding and, we hope, fruitful. Massimo’s scholarship on the Second Vatican Council dates to his work from 1996 to 2008 at the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII (FSCIRE), founded in Bologna as the Istituto per le Scienze Religiose by Giuseppe Dossetti (1913–1996) in 1953. Since that time, Massimo’s work has bridged the historical and contemporary, conscious of the link between the reception of the Second Vatican Council and contemporary comparative ecclesiology. Bryan’s work on global church statistics, pastoral studies, and practical theology dates to his time from 1990 to 1991 at CISOR, founded in Caracas by Alberto Marcel Gruson (1936–2023) in 1966 as the Centro de Investigación Socio-Religioso. Bryan’s work focus deepened during his work from 1995–2003 at CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, culminating in Global Catholicism: Portrait of a World Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2003). It continued in work that Bryan conducted through generous funding from various sources, including the Luce Foundation, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and the Templeton Religion Trust.

Statistics related to the Catholic Church in this volume, together with related tables and charts, were compiled by Sean C. Thomas. Originally trained as a biomedical engineer, Sean has worked closely with Bryan as a doctoral research assistant since 2021 and has pioneered a number of new approaches to global Catholic statistics. He devised ways to scan and convert the pages of the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae into electronic datasets after extensive tests to assure data quality. He did similar work with the Annuario Pontificio and other Catholic data sources. He made judicious use of the World Christian Encyclopedia, curated by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, as well as numerous publicly available sources of global socio-demographic data. He researched the backgrounds of cardinals, dicastery leaders, and synodal participants from diffuse sources. Together with Bryan, he developed and tested the various formulae and statistical analyses used in this project. He created the graphics that display the results.

The book was born from an idea that arose in both authors who come from different research specializations but converge on one focal point. It is time to intentionally open Global Catholicism as a new field of study, and to ground it in an intradisciplinary theological approach that integrates history and social science with missiology, ecclesiology, and related fields. We see the promise of this field, and the method and methodologies it presupposes, as of great potential value for academic, ecclesial, and societal publics the world over. This has acquired new relevance during the pontificate of Pope Francis. While Massimo and Bryan wrote everything together, Bryan had primary responsibility for Chapter 2, the first portion of chapter 3, and Chapter 6. Massimo had primary responsibility for Chapter 4, the second and third portions of Chapter 3, and Chapter 5. Responsibility for Chapters 1 and 7 was shared. The tabular appendices are the work of Sean Thomas.

This book project is part of something much larger, and a theological vision far greater, than simply a single book. Our work to promote the scholarly field of Global Catholicism dates back to 2018, when we first sponsored sessions on Global Catholicism at the European Academy of Religion meetings that took place in Bologna that year. We have sponsored such sessions at the annual meetings ever since and have worked to identify scholars who might engage this emerging field. We appreciate how these and other scholarly gatherings have sharpened our thinking. We are grateful to audiences and their reactions to various addresses we have given over the years. While we trust that readers will find this work fresh and original, we are sure that many will recognize themes on which we and others have been working now over many years. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. We also wish to thank the various venues, too numerous to mention here, where some of the writing and thinking here first appeared. We are immensely grateful for each and every one of those opportunities to publish, present, speak, and teach on these topics. the support of so many, including our colleagues and especially our families, this would not have been possible.