The paradoxical “both-and” of Catholicism, the ability to unite two contraries, should be different from allowing a former president to utter profanities and insults during a speech at a white-tie Catholic charity dinner. Former President Donald Trump’s insults targeted a sitting Catholic president, Joe Biden, his vice president, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, a governor, a senator, a mayor, and former mayor, a number of other public figures, and, of course, immigrants, many of them Catholic. For a church that is more and more obsessed with
branding, it was remarkable to see how one single event, the “Al Smith dinner,”
which fundraises for Catholic charities in New York, managed to soil what
remains of the reputation of the church in American public life and the legacy of
Al Smith.
Alfred Emanuel
Smith was a Catholic politician, the governor of the state of New York (1923-1928)
when he ran for the U.S. presidency in 1928 and was defeated — it was a rout, actually — by Herbert Hoover. Smith was also defeated thanks to a vicious, racist, anti-Catholic operation that was run by several groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. It served as a stark reminder, especially for the bishops and clergy who had been confident in the governor’s chances, that U.S. Catholics still faced the deeply rooted fears that an immigrant Church, supposedly controlled by a foreign leader in the Vatican, might dominate a Protestant nation. It was a time when
Catholics (the Irish, the Italians, etc.) did not yet qualify as “white” and
therefore were not seen as real Americans. The election of the first Catholic
president in 1960 and the teaching of the Second Vatican Council liberated
Catholics from the “finger of suspicion” that Kennedy mentioned in his famous campaign
speech in Houston.
Catholic identity in the political arena: From Al Smith to JD Vance
In
these last 100 years, and especially after World War II and the Cold War,
U.S. Catholics have become insiders. They no longer must prove themselves in the
eyes of what used to be the mainstream — Protestant Christianity and the
liberal establishment. The problem is that we do not know whether U.S. Catholicism
will make a difference in changing the direction this country seems to have
taken.
If Trump is elected president for the second time, his choice for vice
president, JD Vance, would become the most powerful Catholic in the country, serving as second-in-command to a president who would be 82 by the end of the four-year term. Vance was chosen by a man who, after losing the election in November 2020, did not hesitate to call for violence to overturn its result. Those
acts put the United States in the category of those countries where it is not taken for
granted that there will be a peaceful transition of power from one president
and one party to another. Vance brushed aside and repeatedly dismissed what happened between November 2020 and the January 6, 2021, assault against Capitol Hill. It is unclear whether this cavalier attitude stems from cynical expediency, an inability to distance himself from Trump, or if Vance genuinely does not care about the matter. The symbolic violence of impolite and profane
speech by populist leaders often sets the stage for physical violence. In Trump’s America, we are already beyond that point.
The symbolic violence has already become physical violence, and Vance has
become part of this movement.
This exemplifies where U.S. Catholicism currently stands in its relationship with the democratic and constitutional system. It is not just about candidate Vance. One
would look in vain for statements from the U.S. bishops’ conference about Catholic teaching’s preference for democratic and constitutional systems over
authoritarianism, for the rule of law over threats to jail political opponents.
There are those
who celebrate Vance’s rise to national prominence as a victory for a stronger
role for Catholicism in public life. But if one examines the policies Vance is advocating (such as on immigration, though not exclusively) and the language and rhetoric he employs to promote them, it becomes clear that his Catholic “identity” has undergone a different kind of “privatization” of the faith, similar to what Kennedy was accused of in recent years by some prominent U.S. bishops.
The American religious and cultural mainstream that rejected Al Smith in 1928 and embraced Kennedy in 1960 no longer exists. Similarly, that version of American Catholicism has either faded away or become a minority. The 20th century was an
era when “Catholicism enjoyed higher expectations than it does now.”
If it wasn’t always an anti-Fascist Catholicism, at least in the Anglo-American
world, it had to become non-Fascist to align with national interests. The Cold
War cemented the political credentials of Catholics, whose anti-Communist résumés were unquestionable.
Clash of Catholic values and authoritarianism
Now, the
patriotic and culturally adaptive American Catholicism of Joe Biden and Nancy
Pelosi is being substituted by a more threatening and subversive version of Catholicism,
non-committal, or worse, which concerns democratic and constitutional values. It
is threatening and subversive, which is different from “prophetic” or “counter-cultural”,
and willing to correct the distortions of American constitutional systems, particularly regarding economic justice, racial relations, and the responsibility of the United States to the rest of the world.
With all the flaws that candidate Kamala Harris
and the Democrat Party have in the eyes of Catholics (beginning with abortion
and gender), at least they represent a guarantee regarding respect for the fundamental
rules of constitutional democracy. On the other side, the GOP under Trump and
Vance no longer is the “pro-life” (whatever that means for you) party it once was or claimed to be. There has been a reduction in “pro-life” spending by the Catholic
Church in the current election cycle.
MAGA “Make America Great Again” financiers may calculate that pursuing unpopular anti-abortion campaigns
right now could damage the prospects of the Trump/Vance ticket. Abortion
rights have prevailed in each of the six states that have held ballot measures since the
June 2022 overturn of “Roe v. Wade” by the U.S. Supreme Court.
This year, in
the first presidential election after the mob stormed the Capitol on January 6,
2021 (which Trump recently called “a day of love”),
the problem is not just the constitutional agnosticism of American Catholics.
This is nothing new. Already, Father Luigi Sturzo, the founder of the Popular Party
in Italy, who had to flee to the United States during Mussolini’s regime, had noticed the reluctance of American Catholics to take a position against fascism.
The problem is that in this current phase of the “deculturation” of Catholicism, what was once cautious agnosticism has, at best, devolved into constitutional illiteracy. This easily plays into the hands of American ideologues promoting illiberal and anti-liberal Catholicism, fostering indifference toward the rule of law and an orderly system of governance. Both progressive and conservative Catholics need to clarify the ambiguities of emphasizing Catholic social teaching. The
trajectories of the 21st-century church in the United States, and Vance in it, demonstrate
that “social Catholicism” and the democratic, constitutional culture of
Catholicism are two different things. The political history of Catholics in
Europe and the West is full of “social Catholics” who embraced authoritarianism — Fascism, Nazism, Francoism, and so on — while pretending to defend a
traditional idea of society, of the family, and religion.
A defining moment for U.S. Catholicism in the 2024 election
The 2024 presidential
election is a soul-searching moment for U.S. Catholicism. Whatever happens after
November 5, American Catholics will have to give some explanation about their
role in what the United States has become. Gone are the days when only White Evangelicals,
or Wall Street, or the military-industrial complex could be blamed for the
decline of American democracy. The leaders (both clergy and lay) of U.S.
Catholicism must choose the political system they think is more
compatible with the values of the Gospel. This choice has not been made yet by
those who officially represent the Catholic Church in the United States. The consequences are not abstract: upholding
the rule of law, the respect of
minorities in a pluralistic and multicultural society, the protection of voting
rights, and the rejection of ideologies of nationalist and racial supremacy.
In the long
run, we will see the effects of these cultural and ideological mutations within
the U.S. Church on global Catholicism. Remaining loyal and committed to democratic ideals used to be a key credential for American Catholics. A choice
for Trump, who tried to overturn the 2020 election and represents a real threat
to our democratic institutions, would betray those credentials as well as those who need to be
able to count on Catholics.
Massimo Faggioli @MassimoFaggioli
This post was originally published on here
