Symposium on Catholics & American Political Life

Ed. Note: In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NOR hosted a trio of symposia that addressed the intersection of Catholicism and American political life. After more than 30 years, we’re bringing back the format. This, we hope, will be the first of many symposia to come.

One of the distinguishing marks of American history is the perdurance of anti-Catholicism. It has been called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people” and “the last acceptable prejudice.” But anti-Catholicism isn’t just a thing of the past; it’s still with us. It manifests in strange and surprising ways, as, for example, intolerance in the halls of power — Sen. Dianne Feinstein expressed “concern” that “the dogma lives loudly” in Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic mother of seven, during her 2017 Supreme Court confirmation hearings — and violence in the public arena: the FBI recorded 95 anti-Catholic hate crimes in 2021, and 467 attacks on Catholic churches from 2020 to 2024.

The antagonism to which Catholics are subject today coincides with a larger phenomenon: the collapse of religion as a cultural force. American Christianity has been beset by financial and sexual scandals among both Protestant and Catholic leaders, and by plummeting numbers of pew-sitters across all confessions. According to the latest Gallup data, only 30 percent of self-professed Protestants attend weekly services. Even among Muslims, attendance has dropped; only 28 percent attend mosque on a weekly basis. But the biggest drop has been among Catholics, only 23 percent of whom attend Mass once a week. Meanwhile, the number of Americans who profess no religion is at an all-time high — and climbing. We are experiencing a revolution of irreligion.

The decline of religion — especially Christianity, which was synonymous with America from its founding — has been accompanied by (or given rise to) numerous adverse trends, such as the polarization of our politics and the coarsening of our culture. Polarization? Recently we’ve witnessed riots, assassination attempts, screaming matches on television and college campuses, and takeovers of civic and educational buildings. Coarsening? One of the most popular songs of 2024 featured these lyrics: “What’s up with these jabroni a– niggas…? / f— ’em all and they mama… / Beat your a– and hide the Bible if God watchin’.” Meanwhile, gross earnings by the four million “content creators” on OnlyFans — the majority of whom peddle adults-only fare — was a whopping $6.63 billion in 2023. Americans can’t get enough of diss tracks and porn.

These trends put John Adams’s observation about the U.S. Constitution in stark relief. It was, the second president said, “made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Wholly inadequate. With an increasingly immoral and irreligious populace, what is the future of our constitutional republic? George Washington, in his first inaugural address, said the “republican model of government” is an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Has that experiment blown up in our faces?

Moreover, how do Catholics — that is, the moral and religious ones who are left — fit in to this American experiment? The lay faithful are supposed to be more than mere citizens. The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that “intervening directly” in “political structuring and organization of social life” is our “vocation” (no. 2442). How are we to fulfill that vocation given the ongoing decline in the number of practicing Catholics, the waning influence of the Church in public life, and the grim sociopolitical outlook?

Three movements have proposed paths forward.

As Rod Dreher acknowledges in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017), “Christians have gone from the center of American culture to its margins.” The most effective way they can affect the organization of social life, he writes, is by “building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation” of America by the godless.

As for political structuring, Patrick J. Deneen, in Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023), advocates the ascension of a new ruling elite that would assume control of America’s existing institutions in order to defend and protect our “culture, tradition, and a longstanding way of life.” This new ruling class would be formed by “a conservative ethos” and hold to “a common good conservatism.”

A third movement, called integralism, would overhaul both our social organization and political structures. It outdoes Dreher and Deneen by calling for the construction of a ruling state based on Catholic values — an American theocracy in which Church and state are deeply intertwined, “everywhere and always together, bound together in the very unity of Christ,” writes Andrew Willard Jones in Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (2017).

The time has come to reconsider the Catholic cause in the United States. To that end, we asked thinkers of different stripes (and religious traditions) the following questions:

1. Is the American experiment an exhausted project?

2. In view of present and historic marginalization (coupled with a steady decline in the number of believers and institutional influence), can Catholics expect a “place at the table” of American politics?

3. Assuming authoritarian anti-Catholicism continues to gain ascendancy, what is the best way for Catholics to “intervene directly in the political structuring and organization of social life” in America? Is it in forming small “intentional communities” based on the Benedict Option? Is it in “regime change” in which a new elite reforms our present institutions? Is it in an “integralism” that overthrows them and replaces them with expressly Catholic institutions? Or is it in something else altogether?

4. Is there any hope for Catholics in American political life?

The respondents featured in Part I of this symposium (Dec. 2024) answered the questions directly. What follows are the replies of those who address the general themes therein. As this is a symposium, no attempt was made to achieve uniformity of response.

Mark Barrett

In 1928 the nation’s first Catholic presidential candidate, Gov. Al Smith of New York, nicknamed “the happy warrior” for his relentless optimism, was greeted by burning crosses as his campaign train crossed America. The Ku Klux Klan organized against him, spreading a rumor that a photograph of Smith opening the Holland Tunnel in New York was a tunnel to Rome to facilitate the arrival of the pope. Another rumor claimed that all Protestant marriages would be annulled under a Smith administration. Still another claimed that Smith would open the nation’s borders to hordes of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Charles C. Marshall, an Episcopalian lawyer, asked in an open letter in The Atlantic Monthly whether there was an “irrepressible conflict” between Smith’s Catholic faith and the U.S. Constitution. More eloquent than the burning crosses, but the basic idea is the same.

Before launching his campaign, Smith rejected the idea that he would be subject to religious prejudice. But he eventually admitted that his faith was a political problem and confronted the issue. First, he responded to Marshall’s letter in the same venue, highlighting the disingenuous nature of many of the charges and patiently refuting the logic of others. Second, in a campaign speech in Oklahoma City, the heart of Klan country, he condemned as sacrilege burning the cross of Christ as a symbol of hate, and he described the attacks on his religion as pure bigotry and intolerance. In neither forum did he back away from his faith.

Smith lost, decisively. A Democrat, he lost counties that had never voted Republican before and would not again for many decades. Though many factors worked against Smith — importantly, he forcefully opposed Prohibition — the shape and scale of the defeat point to his Catholic faith as the biggest problem. The prejudice he experienced shocked and traumatized him. The campaign soured him on the American experiment, at least for a time. He grew bitter and questioned the country’s commitment to its own constitutional principles. By one account, his opposition to many of the programs he had once championed as governor, when presented as national policy in the New Deal, stemmed in part from his sense that a nation so corrupted by prejudice could not be trusted with such power.

Smith loved his country, but it had scorned him, and he responded as scorned lovers often do. He had good reason to feel betrayed by America’s failure to live up to its promises, but he should not have been surprised. Nor should we. The argument that Catholics do not fully belong in America, whether in its sophisticated or vulgar form, presents itself differently now than in 1928, but it still lurks in the background of our political discussions. Recognition of this reality is no bad thing if it enhances the integrity of our witness and our moral credibility. But it is easy to lose our perspective. We may be tempted to wed our faith to political agendas that seem to offer protection and power. The media-industrial complex cultivates and profits from such temptations, trading on anger and fear. Politicians seeking to benefit from this phenomenon are legion. The battle against faith’s becoming the servant of power is one that must be renewed constantly.

Yet, as Smith despaired, other Catholics, inspired by his impressive record, were addressing the needs of their communities. Though they lamented their exclusion from elite institutions, they did not see this as an impediment to promoting the well-being of their neighbors. These efforts most often began in the local community, whether in urban neighborhoods or in factories and mines through the burgeoning labor movement. Primarily focused on the material needs of individuals and families, their efforts helped to obtain jobs for the unemployed, feed widows and children, welcome and integrate immigrants into society, abolish child labor, and establish the outlines of a social-insurance system. Far from signaling a retreat from the world, this presaged the New Deal order to come, the contours of which Catholics would help to shape.

Their example should guide us today, even if the issues are different. Neoliberalism and a “throwaway culture” present a new set of problems to solve, and the commodification of everything, from human life to labor, demands a response from Catholics — a response that, if faithful, will confound both the Left and the Right. As Smith and other Catholics knew a century ago, our political choices shape the economy, which, in turn, shapes society.

When first confronted with Marshall’s article, Smith is alleged to have remarked, “What the hell is an encyclical?” Whether he and our forebearers read the encyclicals or not, they applied a distinctly Catholic conception of the world to the questions of the day. They did not throw up their hands in the face of bigotry and exclusion. Nor did they retreat. Rather, they went about the hard work of figuring out how to love their neighbors and seek the common good in the realm of public law and policy. Their work testifies to their convictions. We are the inheritors of their precious legacy, if we remember it.

Mark Barrett is a Pittsburgh lawyer and historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians Division 32 in Carnegie, Pennsylvania.

 John M. Grondelski

Let me be frank about Catholics’ place in American politics: We punch below our weight, and in many ways that’s our fault. Before we get into pipedreams about fundamental reconstructions of the political order, let’s recognize why we punch below our political weight. Catholic political impotence is one of the corruptions Roe v. Wade unleashed on America. If the Catholic response to the nationwide legalization of abortion had been managed properly, we would not be in this situation.

The Church is not, of course, a political entity, but her teachings have political consequences, and she exists in a political world. The Church in the United States, however, has not reckoned with these facts. Cowed by the Johnson Amendment (1954), the Church has retreated from effective politics for fear of losing her tax-exempt status. The amendment gagged religious participation in politics because Lyndon Johnson wanted to quiet down some of his political opponents. Getting rid of that gag order is almost three-quarters of a century overdue. Why have we not demanded our ability to speak to the world without threat?

Catholic political naïveté is sometimes stunning. Two examples will suffice. First, take the March for Life. I’ve been part of that noble effort since the 1970s. Nellie Gray, its founder, insisted that when marchers arrive at the Capitol, they go into the Senate and House Office Buildings to register their presence with their two senators and representative. I don’t see that so much anymore; people reach the Supreme Court Building and peter off, arguably not making as deep an impression as they could.

Second, though demonstrations are important, there’s something of a Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington approach to our political lobbying. Compare that to the culture of death, which is acutely aware of the many levers of influence and action in lawmaking. We should, but don’t, match that footprint, even though Catholics make up one-quarter of the American body politic. Why not? Because our actions (and the funding that should support those actions) don’t match our rhetoric. The adage says you put your money where your mouth is. We don’t.

For that, the U.S. bishops bear no small responsibility. Despite Vatican II’s calling abortion an “unspeakable crime,” have the bishops acted in ways consistent with that statement? After 50 years they have yet to conduct a national pro-life collection! Of course, they can’t give money to political-action groups, but they can support educational programs, and they can support crisis pregnancy centers, which, in the post-Dobbs era, are needed more than ever and are under increasing assault.

Part of the problem is that episcopal mouths are divided. While some bishops speak of abortion as a “paramount issue,” others undermine their brothers with qualifying, temporizing, or equivocating statements of their own, at times defining “life issues” as broadly — and, thus, as meaninglessly — as possible.

There is also a group of “professional Catholics” who have never been comfortable with the pro-life movement because it’s a burr to their otherwise comfortable relations with the left wing of American politics. This cabal tends to get organized — more so than the Catholic mainstream — around the time of presidential elections. With connections to Catholic academe, it manages to give cover to pro-abortion candidates. Catholics for Kamala is a case in point, as were Massimo Faggioli’s paeans to Joe Biden’s Catholicism in America magazine and in book form. The bishops, like Charlie Brown kicking Lucy’s football, fall for it every four years.

Absent real political organizing, it’s risible to talk about transforming the political order. Reconsidering the philosophical bases of the American founding, experimenting with “integralism,” or some other wholly new vision of political philosophy seems an audacious venture given our less-than-stellar performance in the existing political order. Let’s be honest: If 60 million adherents can’t pull off a basic and effective political lobby within that order, talk about reconstructing its foundations will go nowhere. For the latter to work would require a critical mass of Catholics to appreciate the philosophical and theological anthropology underlying Catholic social thought, as well as how that vision of man qua social animal differs in key respects from the social-contractarian vision of man that undergirds “private autonomous individualism.” Such an understanding is unlikely, given the general catechetical illiteracy in Catholic circles. Most Catholics would be as stumped as Ketanji Brown Jackson when asked, “What is a woman?” In other words, to pull off such a feat of reconstruction requires a critical mass that does not exist. Shouldn’t we try to build it?

John M. Grondelski (Ph.D., Fordham) is a former Associate Dean of the School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. All views expressed herein are exclusively his.

Robert McTeigue

American Catholics, historically, have been desperate to prove they’re real Americans, repeating assurances about not having divided loyalties. And those reassurances, practically speaking, have become more and more convincing over the past 65 years.

Papal warnings regarding the heresy of Americanism are little known. I didn’t hear about them until my postgraduate studies, and I was told not to worry about them because “Americanism wasn’t a real heresy. Pope Leo proved that European prelates didn’t understand what America was all about.” I was never encouraged to read what Leo XIII actually wrote on the matter. I finally did read his encyclicals Longinqua (1895) and Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899), and I suspect my professors didn’t give me the best guidance after all.

The misdirections multiplied when Pope Pius XI established the Solemnity of Christ the King in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925). This solemnity and its accompanying documentation could have caused continuing embarrassment for Catholics who wanted to be welcomed as real Americans. The solemnity is very much based on, well, the Kingship of Christ, His rights as King, the universality of His sovereignty, and even the hierarchical and teleological nature of creation. Language like that doesn’t get you invited to the better parties, and it certainly doesn’t put government coins in the diocesan coffers.

Consider this summary of the Kingship of Christ by Fr. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp.: “From the birth of the Catholic Church on Calvary and the solemn promulgation of her mission on Pentecost, the Kingdom of God in its essence has been present in the world…. The Kingdom of God or the rule of Christ the King is present in its integrity only in so far as the whole social life of states, political and economic, is permeated with the influence of the Church. To put it in other terms, Christ fully reigns only when the Program for which he died is accepted as the one true way to peace and order in the world, and social structures in harmony with it are evolved” (The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism, 1943).

It’s no wonder Al Smith’s presidential campaign failed. Some 30 years later, John F. Kennedy didn’t want to carry the Catholic “baggage” draped about Smith’s neck, so he declared that his Catholic faith could be safely compartmentalized for the greater good. Kennedy proved that Catholic identity need not be an impediment to American political success. Some 30 years after that, Mario Cuomo, the Catholic governor of New York, in an address at the University of Notre Dame, rolled out the “personally opposed to abortion, but…” line. Almost 40 years later, in a “Statement of Principles,” 60 Catholic members of Congress claimed their faith influences their actions in Congress, and denial of Holy Communion for their support for legal abortion would be “contradictory.” So much for being “personally opposed” to abortion!

What happened between 1960 and 2021 that resulted in public commitments and demands that would have been unintelligible to Kennedy and unthinkable to Cuomo? That’s a long and complicated story. Yet we can point to one change that facilitated the shift in stance from Kennedy and Cuomo to current congressmen.

In Quas Primas, Pius XI declared that the “last Sunday of October” is the best time for the Feast of the Kingship of Christ because it “sets the crowning glory upon the mysteries of the life of Christ already commemorated during the year, and, before celebrating the triumph of all the Saints, we proclaim and extol the glory of him who triumphs in all the Saints and in all the Elect” (italics added). As the crown of the liturgical year, the Kingship of Christ is also recognized in all the saints and feasts of the preceding year. The reign of Christ is acknowledged from the Church’s beginning and in the consummation of creation at the eschaton.

“Make it your duty and your task, Venerable Brethren,” Pius wrote, “to see that sermons are preached to the people in every parish to teach them the meaning and the importance of this feast, that they may so order their lives as to be worthy of faithful and obedient subjects of the Divine King.”

Nearly a century after the promulgation of Quas Primas, the feast now comes at the very end of the liturgical year, after the celebration of All Saints’ Day. The Kingship of Christ, consequently, can be viewed as exclusively eschatological: His reign begins as time ends. On this view, after the Ascension, the King is an absentee landlord who will collect the rent at the end of time. Until then, we’re on our own, and Christ has not much to say about how we live. Is this an oversimplification? Almost certainly. But that does not mean it is untrue.

Since at least the time of the French Revolution, the temptation has been to render the claims of Christ less intrusive, less commanding, less forbidding, and, finally, nonjudgmental. This is what Christ uncrowned looks like. What’s the moral of the story for American Catholics today? The same one Louis-Édouard Cardinal Pie gave to Emperor Napoleon III in 1859: “The time has not come for Jesus Christ to reign? Well, then the time has not come for governments to last.”

Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J., is a member of the U.S. Eastern Province of the Society of Jesus. He is the producer and host of The Catholic Current, a radio talk show that airs on The Station of the Cross Catholic Media Network, and he is on the National Ethics Committee of the Catholic Medical Association. His latest books from Ignatius Press are Real Philosophy for Real People: Tools for Truthful Living (2020) and Christendom Lost and Found: Meditations for a Post Post-Christian Era (2022). Fr. McTeigue’s work can be found at heraldofthegospel.org.

Jason M. Morgan

In America, politics is Protestantism, and Protestantism is politics. Together they form the national character, the strange, topsy-turvy soul of a secularist empire at once obsessed with religious revival, democratizing foreigners, and intermittently carpet-bombing them.

Americans’ centuries-old distrust of Catholics as somehow a Vatican fifth-column springs from Americans’ sense of being a uniquely chosen people, sifted out of history. God has given them a new commandment: Save the world — and incinerate the parts of it that do not cooperate with this plan of salvation. Rome may be the Eternal City, but Washington is the New Jerusalem, and with that the Old World religion cannot compete.

But somewhere along the way, Catholics, who for a long while made a manly show of defiance of Protestant politico-evangelical fever dances, gave in to the spiritual currents of the land. Liberation theology? Sorry, Latin Americans, that’s a New England vintage. Rome held out against the American fusion of sermons and stump speeches, even though Rome didn’t understand it. Concerned theologians, including some popes, saw the corrosive effect on society when religion and government are separated and called it “Americanism.” But nearly everything in American religious history suggests that religion and politics are the same thing. The separation of church and state? Arlington Cemetery is arrayed with crosses, stars, and crescents. Name one person buried there who was martyred for a faith other than the American creed. “In God We Trust” is still our national motto. It’s printed right there on the money the Federal Reserve creates out of thin air to fund wars and abortions. There is no separation of church and state in America. There is only America, crowned by the Almighty (or so the Americans would have it — God may see things differently).

The Americanist fingerprints of John Courtney Murray, S.J., are all over the documents of the Second Vatican Council, including his baby, Dignitatis Humanae. But you can hardly blame one Jesuit, then or now — yes, I’m looking at you, Your Holiness — for the dismantling of the Roman religion. Protestantism boomeranged clear across the Atlantic Ocean, spun for a season of frenzy over North America, crept into the Catholic seminaries and immigrant strongholds there, and then swung back across the ocean to Rome. Americanism is the heresy of church-state separation and also the reality of church and state indistinguishably combined. American exceptionalism is just as invincible, it would seem, as American Catholics have always known it to be. Not even Rome stands a chance against it.

And so here we are some two and a half centuries since a rogues’ gallery of slaveholding deists and assorted Enlightenment revolutionaries scrawled some lines on parchment in a colonial backwater and set in motion a cataclysm in continental Christianity. We are all democrats, all deciders in the religion-state the Founders bequeathed to us. American Catholics had little choice but to low with the herd. The priesthood of all believers preaches, in some corners, the genital mutilation of minors, and in others the “New American Century.” Children are dismembered by government-funded abortionists in our Christian America, and the best the Catholics sitting on the Supreme Court could do about it was to remand the question to the states, where the notion of infanticide is proving, on the whole, very popular with voters.

Choose any topic you like and you’ll discover that America is truly exceptional in that religion has no braking power on the evils of government. Catholicism in America — which is to say, more often than not, Americanism in a Roman collar — is powerless to stop the machinery of progress from grinding up those in the way, whether they’re the fentanyl corpses littering Appalachia, the tranq zombies swaying in the streets of Philadelphia, or the poor and the trafficked in virtually every corner of the nation. Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, meanwhile, are enjoying a building boom. War in Ukraine and Gaza is big business. War with Iran and China will be even bigger. Catholics will be right there on the front lines killing for democracy alongside their American brothers (and sisters!). For God has blessed America and will continue to do so only so long as we provide sufficient human sacrifice.

There emerges in the twilight of our republic a group of people who say that only Catholicism can save America. I marvel at those who seem not to have noticed that Catholicism is America now. Because America is Catholicism. The Spirit of 1776 conquered the Roman religion decades ago. A contingent of American Catholics looks to the Vatican to cure what ails America. It is a hair-of-the-dog gambit, at best, but not a cure. There may be, far beyond the horizon, a spiritual renewal prepared for the land of our birth. But if so, it will not be named after an Italian mapmaker. It will instead have a connection to a Roman metropolis that has also shed its unfortunate association with the world’s only remaining Protestant theocracy.

Jason M. Morgan, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, teaches history, philosophy, and international relations at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan. He is the author of Law and Society in Imperial Japan: Suehiro Izutarō and the Search for Equity (Cambria Press) and, with J. Mark Ramseyer, The Comfort Women Hoax: A Fake Memoir, North Korean Spies, and Hit Squads in the Academic Swamp (Encounter Books).

Thaddeus Kozinski

The evil that has entrenched itself at the very heart of political and cultural power in America not only purports to have authority over us but also, it seems, actually possesses it. It is as if it has a right to be there. Exorcists tell us that exorcism only works when it can reveal the “legal” right a demon has somehow obtained to possess its victim, for only then can it undo this “contract,” whether created by the curse of another or by the voluntary invitation of the victim. Nothing short of the undoing of that right can vanquish it. To accomplish this, the victim must renounce his idolatry — for all sin is a form of idolatry, putting something in the place of God — and then worship, explicitly and intentionally, Jesus Christ. Note that the demon will leave only when the victim both renounces Satan and surrenders to Christ. The soul cannot remain neutral.

The demon that possesses America’s ruling elite, and through them the collective soul, as it were, of the nation (and the West as a whole) has a right to be there, as a product of both a curse and a voluntary invitation. America was cursed long ago, and has been continually, by Freemasons and other rejectors of Jesus Christ. But we Christians also invited the demon in.

We will never be able to exorcise this demon by attempting to replace it with “medical freedom,” “individual sovereignty,” or “the will of the people.” These are counterfeit replacements for a freedom based on the truth about the human person, created with an immortal soul and teleologically ordered to the natural and supernatural good, the sovereignty of the family, and all other natural communities that organically and corporately embody the common good, the will of God, and the divine authority of the Church. Now, I am a proponent of the natural, God-given freedoms and rights that legitimately authorize the use of political, coercive power to secure and protect them. But these freedoms and rights, properly understood as grounded in natural and supernatural reality and interpreted definitively and authoritatively only by the Catholic Church, are not necessarily the same as the “American freedoms” granted to us, ostensibly, by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Though rhetorically our rights come from “Nature and Nature’s God,” there is no actual, historical religious tradition or institution to give determinate meaning and theological authority to such a claim, only unreal, ahistorical, abstract counterfeits of the traditions of the Catholic Church. As D.C. Schindler has demonstrated, the “god” of the Declaration is not the Christian one but an Enlightenment, deist, rationalist substitute. Thus, it has only as much authority as it has rhetorical and political power. It was quite easy for later generations of rulers to completely ignore and even reject this artificial civil theology when it was no longer persuasive, and to replace it with progressivism, secularism, and now wokeism. That is because there was no universally or publicly recognized moral and spiritual authority in the American Founding, just the Constitution and “We the People” (which means, in practice, the will of those empowered to represent the people). American power, both domestically and abroad, is authorized by nothing but itself. Thus, this power is uncheckable by anything other than an equal and opposing power. When such a thing manifests, inevitably it will employ its power under the conditions of modernity, meaning in a godless and self-referential manner. This is the main problem with the Catholic integralism of the Adrian Vermeule and Gladden Pappin variety: It is essentially Catholic Hobbesianism, with the true spiritual authority of the Church desacralized and profaned by being used as an instrument for the will to power of self-identified Catholics.

It is not that we have been gradually losing our rights, freedoms, and political power since, say, the Civil War and have lost just about all of them to totalitarianism; it is that we never really had them to begin with, for they were never grounded in true political authority. And true political authority is nothing but a participation in the transcendent spiritual reality and authority of God as mediated by the Church. The ultimate authority of God was revealed to us in its most pure form when it was utterly powerless: in Christ crucified. As the Church enters into her Passion in imitation of her Savior, we must be prepared to stay and suffer with her as she is crucified by the powers and principalities of the world. We must recognize and submit to true authority precisely when it is utterly powerless, as Mary and John did, and unmask and reject counterfeit authority when it is, seemingly, all-powerful, as it appears now.

Thaddeus Kozinski is a teacher and writer. He is the author of Modernity as Apocalypse: Sacred Nihilism and the Counterfeits of Logos (Angelico Press) and writes at childrenbewareofidols.substack.com.

George Hawley

As an evangelical Christian and a political conservative, I share many of the concerns of orthodox Catholics about the direction of American politics and culture. I am allergic to doomsaying, however, and I urge Christians of all traditions not to despair or assume only radical changes can set our country back on track. We have a great amount of work ahead of us, but Christianity historically has thrived in the United States within a classical liberal framework, and it would be a mistake to abandon that tradition.

I urge Catholics to note the positive developments in American politics over the past century. Although Christianity is declining as a cultural force, and an alarming percentage of Americans now answer “none” when asked their religious identity, there is arguably less anti-Catholic animus in this country than ever before. A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is Catholic, including most of the justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is Catholic. For only the second time in our history we had a president who is Catholic. It is remarkable how little attention these facts receive.

I understand that many orthodox Catholics are discouraged that leading Catholic Democrats choose not to promote Church doctrine when it comes to public policy, especially as it relates to abortion. Nonetheless, we have come a long way since 1960, when John F. Kennedy had to convince a skeptical nation that his Catholicism should not disqualify him for the presidency. In 1928 Al Smith’s Catholic faith played a role in his humiliating defeat in his race against Herbert Hoover. Joe Biden wasn’t hamstrung in such a way. Catholic identity is no longer a hindrance to achieving political power in the United States.

Catholics have played an especially underappreciated role in shaping the American Right and, by extension, the Republican Party. For much of our nation’s history, political conservatism was associated with anti-Catholic bigotry. The Know-Nothing Movement of the mid-1800s was overtly anti-Catholic, as was the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. But the postwar conservative movement ended this tradition. Among the intellectuals and journalists who set the American Center-Right’s agenda, Catholics were massively overrepresented. This was especially true at National Review, the flagship journal of American conservatism. William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, L. Brent Bozell, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham were all either raised Catholic or converted as adults — though, admittedly, in the case of Meyer and Burnham, they waited until they were literally on their deathbeds to do so.

Sen. Barry Goldwater, the first postwar presidential nominee to embrace fully the conservative movement, chose Rep. William Miller, a Catholic, as his running mate. That ticket was defeated in a landslide, but Catholics played an outsized role in growing conservatism as a powerful force in the coming decades, setting the stage for Ronald Reagan’s electoral landslides. Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly, the most effective conservative activists and organizers in the 20th century, were devout Catholics.

If we ever witness an authoritarian anti-Catholic turn in the United States, we can be fully confident it will not come from the mainstream political Right, thanks largely to the Catholics who built and worked within conservative institutions. Catholics will have a seat on the right side of the nation’s ideological table for the foreseeable future. This is no small accomplishment.

I understand the impulse to withdraw from mainstream politics, especially at a time when cultural trends are pulling the nation in a more secular direction. In fact, it might even be a good idea. I endorse efforts by Christians — Catholic and Protestant — to build strong, intentional Christian communities. I am more skeptical about efforts to change the nation’s trajectory via partisan politics or revolution. The quixotic pursuit of Christian nationalism — be it Protestant dominionism, Catholic integralism, or some other variety — will almost certainly be self-defeating.

Conservative Catholics with theocratic inclinations should be aware that they are not the first Americans to pursue that path, and the historical record will not inspire their confidence. Bozell, Goldwater’s ghostwriter and a close collaborator with Buckley, eventually broke with the conservative movement, launching the magazine Triumph in 1966. He hoped to import something akin to Francisco Franco’s variety of pro-Catholic authoritarianism to the United States. Few people remember this, as the effort was an abysmal failure, and the magazine ceased publication after a decade. What reason do we have for believing a similar effort will be more successful now? If anything, the public is less amenable to these kinds of arguments than it was five decades ago. Furthermore, we can question the efficacy of expressly pro-Catholic governments, even when they succeed in taking power. For all the superficial Catholic piety of Franco’s Spain or António de Oliveira Salazar’s Portugal, people quickly moved away from the Church as soon as the state took its thumb off the scale. Both countries are now much less religiously observant than is the United States.

Previous generations of Catholics fought hard to gain tolerance and, eventually, respect and significant influence in American life. They still possess these things, even as the country is becoming less Christian. As America increasingly realized the ideal of religious liberty, Catholics were some of the main beneficiaries. A problem with that liberty, of course, is that many people will turn their backs on God. It would be a mistake to use state power in an effort to reverse course, however, and such an attempt would further polarize America along religious lines and accelerate Christianity’s decline.

George Hawley is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama. He is the author of eight books, including Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism, Conservatism in a Divided America, and The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization.

Charles A. Coulombe

Having lived for the past seven years in Austria, I am in an interesting position of having gained a deeper understanding of our mother continent and the various countries from which the majority of the inhabitants of the United States come and a correspondingly deeper love for the land of my birth. Rather than a “shining city on a hill” or the “last best hope of mankind,” she is the country in which I was born, by God’s will. She has been very kind to my family and me, and I have a sacred duty toward her — patriotism being a religious virtue. As I am a Catholic, and she a non-Catholic country, part of that duty is to try to evangelize her. She did not begin in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, or even in 1492, but in 1567 with the establishment of permanent European settlements on her soil. This is to say, her history is not merely that of her independent political institutions but of her colonial roots in Spain, France, and Britain. If those institutions should change radically, she would still be the country I love.

With that in mind, I cannot say whether the “American experiment” failed or succeeded because I do not believe in the concept. I believe in these United States. That they have declined culturally, morally, religiously, and politically in my lifetime is undeniable, as is the fact that the era of Irving Berlin and Norman Rockwell in which I first saw the light is gone beyond recall. But the country remains; even if she were to be dismembered like Austria-Hungary, a great deal would remain of her in the successor states to which her end would give rise. Were her Catholics energetic enough to convert her, she would become a great nation indeed, whatever shape her virtue would impress upon her institutions. Unless and until then, she shall flounder as she always has — and yet I shall love her until I die.

The necessity of conversion is not only individual, for each soul, but for the well-being of the country as a whole. Orestes Brownson knew this when he wrote, “The Roman Catholic religion, then, is necessary to sustain popular liberty, because popular liberty can be sustained only by a religion free from popular control, above the people, speaking from above and able to command them, — and such a religion is the Roman Catholic” (1845). Without the faith, the First Republic, as we might call the period of American history from 1783 to 1860, collapsed. So fell what we might call the Second Republic (1865-1941). From the Second World War emerged the First Empire, which is with us yet. But because we have failed to evangelize the nation, we Catholics have never had a place at the table, for the most part; nor have we deserved it, really.

Nevertheless, the accidents of history have made Catholics a majority in certain areas of the country: southern Louisiana, northern New Mexico, and various ethnic islands scattered throughout the Midwest, Northeast, and elsewhere. If the U.S. bishops ever regain a strong grip on the faith, they would be in a position to exert a strong influence in certain localities. During the “Black Mass at Harvard” episode in 2014, I was one of a thousand who marched in a eucharistic procession from the chapel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to St. Paul’s Church in Harvard Square, protesting the proposed satanic rite. There we joined a like number who were engaged in a holy hour of reparation. All this was arranged by the extremely able Catholic chaplaincy at Harvard University. It occurred to me as we marched, and cars honked in support and people dropped to their knees in the street, that the faith is far from dead in the Boston area — it just lacks real leadership. Had the archbishop of Boston stood up for the faith regularly as the Harvard chaplains did that day, politics in the Bay State would be considerably different. But so long as we are burdened by those who hid under their beds and abandoned their flocks during COVID, we shall have the conditions we have.

The question of what we should do in the face of the current situation is really the same one with which our ancestors grappled, and which they spectacularly failed to answer. Neither the formation of “intentional communities” nor political tinkering is going to solve the American conundrum; it is, in any case, a false argument because strategies should be seen as differing means toward the same end, rather than either-or propositions. So, too, the debate over integralism, wherein some see it as the threat of imposing “Catholic sharia” on an unwilling populace — which it most certainly would be today, given the infanticidal propensities of a majority of Americans. But abortion was not outlawed in ancient Rome until after its conversion — nor shall it be here. The medieval and early modern order to which the integralists look for inspiration was not purpose-built. Rather, as the peoples of Europe and elsewhere converted, their institutions organically altered in accordance with their populations’ new religion, and so was born Christendom. So, too, shall it be with the wonderful country God has given us, if ever American Catholics — clerical and lay — do their patriotic and religious duty and work toward her conversion (while not neglecting any necessary political efforts). That is the great hope for Catholic Americans, and for our country.

Charles A. Coulombe is a Contributing Editor of CrisisMagazine.com (and its European correspondent), OnePeterFive.com, and The European Conservative. He previously served as a columnist for the Catholic Herald and film critic for the National Catholic Register. A celebrated historian, his books include Puritan’s Empire: A Catholic Perspective on American History, Star-Spangled Crown: A Simple Guide to the American Monarchy, and, most recently, Blessed Charles of Austria: A Holy Emperor and His Legacy. He resides in Vienna, Austria, and Los Angeles, California.

Karl Keating

On Christmas Day 1886, 18-year-old Paul Claudel — raised Catholic but delinquent in his faith — was listening to vespers in Notre-Dame de Paris. It was an event that “dominates my entire life,” he later recounted. “My heart was touched, and I believed. I believed with such a strength of adherence, with such an uplifting of my entire being, with such powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that since then all the books, all the arguments, all the incidents and accidents of a busy life have been unable to shake my faith.”

Claudel would go on to a long diplomatic career, becoming the French consul in many countries and eventually ambassador to Japan and, from 1928 to 1933, to the United States. He achieved fame as a poet and playwright, but he was not yet famous when, in 1907, he received a letter from 20-year-old Jacques Rivière.

The young man was in a sorrier state, religiously, than Claudel had been before his 1886 reversion. Rivière was full of passion and doubt. “I seem to see Christianity dying,” he wrote. “Indeed, none of us know what has happened to it. Nor what to make of those spires above the roofs of our great towns which symbolize no longer the prayer of any of us…. Nor what those stucco crosses, disfigured by an abominable art, that stand above the graves in our cemeteries, would tell us.” Rivière was lost and ardently wished to be found. He and Claudel exchanged letters for years, Rivière asymptotically coming closer to peace with the Church and then veering off, repeatedly, into despair. He became a noted writer, editor, and critic. He never settled comfortably in the faith — his was a perpetually incomplete conversion — and he died of typhoid in 1925.

Well before he wrote his first, plaintive letter to his hero Claudel, Rivière was infected by that French philosophical malaise that produced so many fine but dead-end writers in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. He never acted sufficiently on Claudel’s superb advice to him: “Read Dante. And as much as you can find of Newman.” And Chesterton, whom Claudel greatly admired.

I mention Claudel and Rivière at length because they symbolize the hope and (seeming) hopelessness of our current ecclesiastical and political situations. Claudel shows the possibility of a quick and lasting change, Rivière the possibility of prolonged indecision and inertia.

Sometimes I say, in private or in public, “I’m an optimist. I’m positive that things will get worse.” The quip elicits a chuckle — or at least a smirk. Both sides of the comment are true. I do think things will get worse, in certain ways and in the short term, but I also think “this too shall pass.” Though I do not expect to live long enough to see Churchillian sunlit uplands, I may live long enough to be able to say, with a knowing smile, “I told you so.”

At times I share the frustration and pessimism of Rivière, at other times the calm and assurance of Claudel. Mostly I am with the latter. I do think some things will get worse — perhaps uncomfortably worse — but I have enough confidence in providential superintendence that I expect the worsening to be countervailed by a bettering. I am old enough to have seen sufficient examples.

Though I never saw it firsthand — I have lived in Southern California rather than in the South — I remember racial segregation. I remember when it was disappearing, with glacial slowness. We had the sense that its final demise would occur, but only in the distant future. And then, in a generation, it was gone, along with all sympathy for it. It wasn’t so much that the laws had changed but that hearts and minds had changed, more quickly than most people expected. I have seen parallel things in matters of religion.

I worked in Catholic apologetics for more than four decades and still dabble in it. I engaged lifelong anti-Catholics in public debates, and I dealt one-on-one in private with countless diehard opponents of the Church, both religious and secular. I dealt with Catholics more lukewarm than Rivière and more misinformed than Internet pundits. I learned much through these interactions, including not to despair. I have seen too many conversions — religious, civic, cultural — for that. Some have been gradual, others instantaneous. Many have been inexplicable, yet they occurred. I learned not to put my trust in princes, whether ecclesiastical or political, because they almost invariably disappoint. I am skeptical of schemes, no matter how well reasoned or intentioned. I particularly am averse to sentimentalistic or romantic schemes, because of their impracticality. For that reason, I give little attention to, for example, the Catholic integralist movement. Though its logic may cohere — “Who says A must say B,” said Lenin — there is no real chance of its coming into play, at least not in this century. You cannot have a Catholic integralist society unless the society already is overwhelmingly Catholic — and convictedly so. In our wildest hopes, we are nowhere near that. The solution to current woes will need to be found elsewhere.

But I have misspoken, because there is no solution, at least not here below. There is only amelioration. Perhaps I have undiscovered British genes: I think we can muddle along, deleting much, repairing much, not despairing, but not fantasizing.

Karl Keating, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has engaged in Catholic apologetics for more than four decades and is the author of 20 books. His most recent is 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church.

A. James McAdams

American Catholics have reason to worry that some people would happily relegate them permanently to the political and social sidelines. When they decry the secularizing forces that have undermined traditional religious institutions and values, they are ridiculed by public intellectuals, talk-show hosts, and opportunistic politicians who treat them as if they were unreflective Neanderthals. But it is a stretch to say that Catholics are in danger of being totally marginalized in a country where they occupy positions throughout the U.S. government; educate millions of elementary, high school, and university students; and boast a sizeable media presence. Indeed, we have an outgoing Catholic president, an incoming Catholic vice president, and a longtime Catholic speaker of the house. Nevertheless, for the purpose of argument, let’s assume that Catholicism really is at death’s door. What remedies do orthodox Catholics offer to restore the Church’s authority?

Among the three solutions proposed in this symposium, Rod Dreher’s idea of building networks of resistance to propagate a resilient counterculture seems quaintly old-fashioned. It is an example of a recurring romantic motif in the American story. For my generation, the quest for an alternative realm of moral solidarity was epitomized by the hippie communes of the late 1960s. Thousands of disaffected young people went to the countryside, where they hoped to cultivate peace and love. Instead, they discovered they couldn’t even grow turnips, let alone overcome their many differences.

Similarly, the integralists’ dream of infusing the political order with Catholic conceptions of family values, justice, and authority may appeal to some of us. Yet, it only passes muster if we ignore the fact that the United States is home to multiple non-Christian religious traditions. Christians of all shades and types have vastly different understandings of these values, some of which are tinged with anti-Catholicism. Additionally, the integralists fail to recognize that the protections the U.S. Constitution offers to religious groups that do not share their faith are the same ones that protect Catholics from the tyranny of these groups.

Finally, so-called postliberal Catholics propose that Catholicism can find its deserved place in American society by persuading citizens to abandon liberal democracy and entrust their future to an enlightened aristocracy. That would be great if only we could guarantee the rule of virtuous leaders who are committed to the common good. However, as hapless citizens have found out since the French Revolution, there is often a big and bloody difference between the utopian promises of a countercultural elite and how it acts when it actually gains total power.

Though I regard these arguments with bemused skepticism, all three probably seem downright strange to the rising generation of young Catholics, the so-called Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012), on whose support the Church’s future credibility will depend. If orthodox Catholic intellectuals think any of these ideas will inspire the “Zoomers” in my classroom to devote their energy to raising the Church’s profile, they will be disappointed. The majority of my Zoomers do not regard the American experiment with liberal democracy as a failure, let alone a threat to their faith. They regard it as a success story. For this reason, they expect the Church to come to the defense of this system and its underlying values. Some of them are Democrats, others are Republicans. Regardless of these differences, they all want the representatives of their faith to be voices of reason in an unnecessarily polarized society. They want the Church to call out politicians’ lies about supposedly rigged elections and a nonexistent Deep State. Because they value expertise and accept the scientific method, they expect her spokesmen to denounce all forms of pseudoscientific quackery and denialism. Most importantly, they expect the Church to be a tireless advocate of Christ’s command to honor the dignity of every human being, regardless of trivial differences in race, ethnicity, or nationality.

Do these attitudes confirm, as some orthodox Catholic intellectuals bemoan, that Zoomers have fallen under the sway of a pernicious liberal establishment? Worse still, has a radical leftist professoriate brainwashed them into abandoning their faith? This does not appear to be the case with Catholic students at the University of Notre Dame. Quite the contrary. My students welcome the opportunity to discuss their faith in the classroom. I am happy to oblige! They regularly attend the more than 160 Masses celebrated on campus every week. Their dorm chapels are jampacked. They enthusiastically take part in the hundreds of service activities sponsored by Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. Many go on to earn teaching degrees from our school’s Alliance for Catholic Education, which has sent thousands of our graduates into America’s poorest Catholic schools.

In many ways, this is good news for those who worry about the marginalization of Catholicism. The situation certainly could be much worse. Let us remember that these Zoomers have grown up in an era haunted by the clerical sex-abuse scandals. Thus, many have ambivalent feelings about the institutional Church. Yet, they have not given up on their faith. This is also good news for those orthodox Catholics who have been equally horrified by these scandals. To win over the Zoomers, they need to recognize that they have inadvertently marginalized themselves by holing up in self-satisfied ideological bubbles. They must dedicate themselves to presenting the Church as an institution that is worthy of the Zoomers’ trust. After all, Gen Z has come of age in a world we created. If orthodox Catholics take this approach, they stand a good chance of winning the hearts and souls of a generation that is in the position to give the Church greater credibility as a force for good in American life.

A. James McAdams is the William M. Scholl Professor of International Affairs in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and a Contributing Editor of the NOR.

Christopher Beiting

My father was a boy during World War II. I once asked him what that experience was like. “Scary,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Hey, we didn’t know we were going to win!” he replied.

As we Catholics anticipate an increasingly difficult time in American public and political life, it is important to keep these words in mind.

Hey, how do we know we’re not going to win?

Most NOR readers are probably familiar with Francis Cardinal George’s statement, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” A friend who once met the cardinal asked him directly, “Did you really mean that?” “Yes I did,” George replied. “But everybody always forgets the last part of my quote: ‘But his successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.’”

It is upon that last part that I would like to focus: the light after the darkness. It may be hard to believe, but a number of recent trends point to it, trends from which I derive great hope.

One trend concerns Church membership. Young women seem to be leaving, while young men increasingly seem to be joining. This appears to be happening not just in Catholicism but in many ecclesial bodies in America. It reflects the social trend of young women becoming more “liberal,” and young men more “conservative.” It is not hard to grasp why this is happening. If modern ideology disparages men and masculinity — which it has been doing, for a long time — many men will not be attracted to it and will seek alternatives. Moreover, given the anomie in which young men find themselves these days, it is also not surprising that they are following the advice of the Jordan Petersons of the world and attempting to pull their lives together. Joining a Church, particularly a conservative one, is a way to do that. I have firsthand experience of this trend. A couple years ago, I taught religion at a Catholic high school and was surprised by how many of the guys were socially and politically conservative and consciously Catholic — much more so than in the days of my youth.

This trend has many implications for the future of the Church in America. Any sociologist of religion can tell you how feminized the practice of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular have become in this country, due in part to there simply being more women involved in ministries and such. It is a fact that if women are doing something, men usually won’t join in. But what will happen when that gender dynamic shifts? How appealing will schmaltzy, sentimentalized hymns and etiolated, femmy blonde images of Jesus be to a majority-masculine congregation? Not very. Instead, I suspect we will see a more consciously “muscular Christianity,” an approach that will have the added benefit of being better suited to a Church undergoing direct persecution. All this augurs well for a future role of prominence for Catholicism in American public life.

Another trend has to do with the nature of the priests who are fresh out of seminary. It has been my pleasure to work directly with about six of them in recent years, and they have greatly impressed me. Lord knows there are nowhere near enough of them, but what we’re losing in quantity we are more than making up for in quality. Conversely, I am not surprised when surveys conclude that there simply aren’t any progressives or liberals in the seminaries these days. Articles discussing this trend point out that the new batch of seminarians lack trust in their (mostly liberal) bishops. But if we step back and look at the big picture, we’ll see that one day, when the old guard in the episcopate has died off, these new priests will be their replacements. What will the Church be like then?

Sure, things look grim right now, but it’s clear that the Church in America is already beginning to get the congregations — and the leadership — she will need to see her through the dark times and to begin the process of rebuilding about which Cardinal George spoke. And those days are going to be very bright. Right now, I feel like Simeon holding an infant Messiah he would never see grow to manhood, or Moses gazing at a Promised Land he would never enter. I will not live long enough to see those bright days, but some of you younger NOR readers will. And I envy you.

Christopher Beiting, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Archivist at Waldorf University and Editor-in-Chief of The Catholic Social Science Review.

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