The Catholic Church after Neoliberalism (after John Gray)

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The Church after Neoliberalism – a Grayian Meditation

The Catholic Church is older than the states that surround it and more durable than the economic orders that rise and fall beneath its windows. Yet it has never been outside history.

It survived feudal Christendom by absorbing it, weathered mercantile modernity by compromising with it, and accommodated the bourgeois nation‑state by sanctifying it. The age now ending — the era of borderless neoliberal globalisation — was greeted in Rome with the same guarded opportunism. The Vatican Bank placed funds on Wall Street, theologians spoke of a “global civil society”, and John Paul II discovered in progressive human-rights language a vocabulary fit for encyclicals.

But the ideologies that once seemed permanent are dissolving. A Church that trusts any passing order will learn, again, that it has backed a transient construct.

I.  Corporatism, Neoliberalism, and Their Ruins

Catholic corporatism once ranged from medieval guild solidarities to the twentieth‑century industrial settlement epitomised by Quadragesimo Anno. That later model collapsed with the factory belts on which it relied. 

John Paul II’s qualified sympathy for the market in Centesimus Annus (1991) “within a strong juridical framework” was directed chiefly against Soviet centralism.  Yet the order that replaced communism — what Gray labelled “the neoliberal utopia” — carried its own seeds of decomposition: deterritorialised capital, a universal consumer ideal, systemic community damage.  Financial crises, widening inequality and political backlash followed.

In these ruins the Church retains only abstract principles — subsidiarity, preference for the poor, dignity of the person — too skeletal for an age of algorithmic surveillance and sovereign wealth funds.

II.  Demographic Shifts and Doctrinal Fission

As the Western liberal order fragments, so too does the geography of faith.  Europe, cradle of Catholic universality, is ageing and spiritually inert, although Poland and Slovakia still export clergy disproportionate to their population.  North America is richer in money than in vocations.  By contrast, Catholicism is expanding in Africa’s peri‑urban zones and the Pacific Rim’s barrios, arenas where Pentecostal churches, Islamist movements and techno‑pagan cults compete.

A global Church ruled from a baroque enclave on the Tiber presupposes cultural links that no longer exist.  African Catholics confronting warlord polities turn to protective sacramentalism; German Catholics dispute synodality and gendered language; Chinese Catholics practise catacomb piety under Xi’s algorithms.  Francis’ exhortation to be “a Church that goes forth” conceded this plurality.  The Synod on Synodality widened consultation yet retained central control, exposing what was tacit: one communion in law, several in fact.

Digital media, charismatic papal moments and migrant flows sometimes re‑stitch a thin sense of global identity, but Gray’s maxim applies: institutions cannot summon unity by appeal to universals once history has dissolved the conditions that made those universals plausible.

III.  Moral Capital and its Exhaustion

For two centuries the Church traded on the moral credit of saints and missionaries.  Clerical abuse scandals squandered it.  If the priest is perceived less as alter Christus than as potential predator, the sacramental economy implodes.  States question school subsidies; donors shift to secular NGOs; cultural elites dismiss clerical celibacy and sexual ethics as archaic.

In the West the Church has lost authority to police public morality; in the South it competes with movements promising miracles or cash.  Moral capital, once spent, is slow to replenish.

IV.  The Coming Political Topography

Gray notes that globalisation ends not in cosmopolitan harmony but in civilisational realignment.  The emergent map is multipolar: a Chinese sphere combining surveillance capitalism with Confucian‑Leninist nationalism; an American bloc fractured by tribal politics; a resurgent Orthodox Russia; a post‑colonial Islam negotiating modernity through selective technology and Sharia.  The West, as a coherent polity, is dissolving; Rome can no longer pose as its conscience.

The Holy See will revert to micro‑diplomacy: brokering prisoner swaps between Kyiv and Moscow, edging towards modus vivendi with Beijing, issuing climate encyclicals ignored by petro‑states.  Without anchorage in a stable bloc, papal diplomacy risks becoming pious brokerage — useful only when convenient to stronger powers.

V.  Post‑Liberal Christianity or Tribal Remnant?

Some hope the setback of neoliberalism will open space for post‑liberal Catholicism: communitarian economics, integral ecology, a liturgical renaissance.  Gray would counsel scepticism.  The forces unravelling globalisation — great‑power rivalry, hollowed‑out economies, resource conflicts — are indifferent to romantic schemes.  More likely is a patchwork Church surviving locally, inserted in cultures it cannot remake.

In liberal metropolises it may persist as boutique identity (e.g., French bourgeois traditionalism).

In parts of Africa it may harden into a militant socio‑political bloc (Nigeria’s Christian associations against jihadist militias).

In China it will vacillate between underground resilience and state‑managed pseudo‑Catholicism (post‑2018 provisional agreement). 

On the Pacific seaboard it may syncretise with prosperity gospels and neo‑shamanic therapies.

Canon law will still define one communion; sociologically the Church will look like a federation of tribes sharing a contested creedal archive.

VI.  Conclusion

If Gray were writing, he would remind Catholics that their Church has outlived empires precisely because it never fully trusted any of them.  Its future depends on reviving that scepticism: recognising that providence guarantees neither comfort nor permanence, and that no human institution can embody the Kingdom it proclaims.

The neoliberal experiment promised universal prosperity and ended in stratified insecurity.  A Church that tethered its critical witness to that order now surveys the wreckage and must choose: reinvent itself as another moral‑advocacy NGO, or embrace its condition as a pilgrim people — uncertain, divided, and obliged to inhabit the ruins with a humility commensurate with its own failures.

Survival, not triumph, is the Catholic vocation in the century ahead. Survival, Gray would add, is no small accomplishment in a civilisation determined to dismantle itself in pursuit of further impossible ideals.