In a 2013 interview, Pope Francis famously likened the church to a field hospital, saying that his vision of the ideal church is one that attends to the overwhelming suffering of the world before concerning itself with smaller matters. In this book William Cavanaugh adopts Pope Francis's metaphor to show how the church can help heal both the spiritual and the material wounds of the world.
As he examines the intersection of theology with themes of religious freedom, economic injustice, religious violence, and other pressing topics, Cavanaugh emphasizes that the church cannot condemn the evils of the world from a position of superiority. Rather, he says, its practices of solidarity with humanity must be based on a profound recognition that the church shares in the guilt of human sin. Cavanaugh's Field Hospital provides guideposts for a church that is willing to go outside of itself onto the battlefields of today - both metaphorical and literal - not to inflict wounds but to bind them up and heal them.