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 a 30-year absence, we’re bringing back the format. This, we hope, will be the first of many symposia to come.

George Washington, in his first inaugural address, called the “republican model of government” an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Today, the American people’s hands are increasingly at one another’s throats. Polarization is the defining characteristic of our politics. Gone are the days of trying to “just get along.” Politically motivated violence is an ever-present threat. In the past few years, we’ve witnessed riots, assassination attempts, and takeovers of civic and educational buildings. The sense of dread is diffuse in the erstwhile home of the brave.

It’s no great revelation to say that Catholics have never been at home in America. From the Blaine Amendments to the Obama administration’s battles with the Little Sisters of the Poor, from the Ku Klux Klan and the Know-Nothings to Antifa and Jane’s Revenge, rulers from above and ruffians from below have sought to marginalize Catholics in public life. To put it in biblical terms, they have tried to cast out Catholics from the banquet and banish them to the outer darkness.

Those efforts have not abated. Since the sex-abuse scandals erupted in the early 2000s, Catholic priests have become objects of mockery and derision in the public mind, and the bishops have effectively lost their moral authority. As institutional influence wanes and the number of practicing Catholics declines, threats and acts of violence are surging. In 2017 a sitting senator expressed “concern” that “the dogma lives loudly” in a Catholic Supreme Court nominee. In 2018 the FBI recorded 51 anti-Catholic hate crimes, and 64 in 2019. Since 2020 there have been 467 attacks on Catholic churches, including 73 incidents in 2024 alone (as of Oct. 29).

Anti-Catholicism is alive and well in these United States. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “the deepest bias in the history of the American people.” Historian Philip Jenkins called it “the last acceptable prejudice.” More recently, John Carr, former chief lobbyist for the U.S. bishops, called American Catholics “politically homeless.”

And yet the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “intervening directly” in “political structuring and organization of social life” is the “vocation of the lay faithful” (no. 2442). And the U.S. bishops in Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics (1998) remind us that “Jesus calls each of us to be a leaven in society,” to “proclaim His message” (no. 7), and thereby influence the character of our nation.

How are Catholics to accomplish this given the increasing stridency of American politics and the living legacy of American anti-Catholicism?

Two recent books proposed answers. Rod Dreher, to great fame in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (2017), called on Christians to “embrace exile from mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture.” Conservative Christians have lost the culture war to a powerful “liberal elite” who have “revolutionized everything.” Even worse, Dreher writes, “the American people, either actively or passively, approve.” Rather than “wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles,” he insists that we “work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance.”

That’s one option. Another, likewise expressed in the title of a book, is Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). Patrick J. Deneen calls for replacing the liberal elite with a new “aristocracy,” one aligned with “the wisdom of the people.” This new elite would be formed by “a conservative ethos” and hold to “a common good conservatism.” They would be “charged particularly as the trustees, defenders, and protectors of culture, tradition, and a longstanding way of life.”

There’s a third option, integralism, the proponents of which (who have journals and institutes at their command) outdo Dreher and Deneen by calling for a state based on Catholic values, a theocracy akin to what advocate Andrew Willard Jones in Before Church and State (2017) calls “the sacramental kingdom” of King Louis IX. In the France of St. Louis’s reign, Church and state were deeply intertwined, “everywhere and always together, bound together in the very unity of Christ,” Jones writes. Louis IX saw it as his duty to “build a society of virtue,” and his regime aggressively enforced Catholic orthodoxy.

The time is ripe to reconsider the trajectory of our nation, and how — or if — Catholics fit into it. 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 option 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?

Respondents were given the choice to answer some or all the questions directly or to address the themes therein. What follows are the replies of those who answered directly. The replies of those who addressed the general themes will be presented in a later issue. As this is a symposium, no attempt was made to achieve uniformity of response.

Virginia L. Arbery

1. The word exhaustion connotes an over-expenditure of energy incommensurate with the activity, or project. It implies that the project holds a certain reserve which, when spent, terminates the work. The “American experiment” presumably refers to the founding outlined by the proposed Philadelphia Constitution of 1787, ratified in 1789. A republican form with prescribed, enumerated powers at the national level and the residual powers left to the states — what Publius in the Federalist Papers calls a “double security” — and with a check on ambition through separation of powers does not have a lifespan, a point of exhaustion.

To be sure, as Publius also writes in Federalist 57, republican forms depend on a virtuous people more than any other form of rule. Our founders achieved this aim. Whether the people remain good stewards of their legacy and have been guided by virtue is, of course, questionable. The miseducation of generations by those holding philosophies that undermine republican liberty (Marxism, socialism, irreligion) as well as the philosophia perennis on which liberty depends has contributed to the perception that the American project is “exhausted.” But this miseducation was not inevitable, and neither was the decline in virtue accompanying it.

The rise of the administrative state under the influence of progressivism also has undermined the aims and structure of the U.S. Constitution. It also has enervated public spiritedness and general engagement. We still witness, however, effective officeholders who take seriously their constitutional duties. The Supreme Court and certain members of Congress have resisted usurpations by other branches and, in asserting their objections, have illustrated the durability of provisions for “ambition” counteracting ambition (Federalist 51). We also see citizens in religious and other groups who are alarmed by their loss of liberties and the civic virtues upon which they depend. They have formed associations to resist policies adverse to the common good. Many fine classical schools have been founded in the past 40 years, and the number of charter schools is truly heartening. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed nearly 200 years ago, the American inclination to associate so as to achieve commonly held aims is one of the bulwarks against the leveling tendency of equality. Liberty is harder to achieve and keep, he wrote, when equality’s “charms” gratify citizens daily. These many organizations, such as right-to-life groups and associations to protect the electoral college, indicate that folks believe their efforts can be efficacious. Their perseverance can help restore constitutionalism and the virtues upon which it depends.

2. Nothing prohibits Catholics from entering politics locally or nationally. In fact, in running for the school board in my small town, I have found that non-Catholics are grateful to be able to vote for someone who can articulate traditional principles and practices. My fellow Catholics in town (apart from the orthodox ones who teach at Wyoming Catholic College), however, are not as traditional as the non-Catholics. Their sense of compassion often gets in the way of their good sense. Well-educated Catholics should take the lead in their communities and states and in the national government.

3. Neither the Benedict Option nor integralism can address the active participation in government needed to restore public virtue and constitutionalism. Though small intentional communities make a significant difference in forming future citizens who can lead through example and competency, I am not overly optimistic about short-term success. Those involved in public service must be content playing the “long game.” Nevertheless, I am 100 percent against “regime change.” I disagree fundamentally with Patrick J. Deneen and others who argue that the American founding was flawed. I concur with Robert R. Reilly, Daniel J. Mahoney, and others who admire and appreciate our political roots, seeing them as harmonious with the preservation of Western civilization. I also find that pursuing isolated Christian or Catholic communities falls short of keeping in front of the public mind the principles and beliefs we hold dear. We should cherish our small, highly faithful communities, but we must also engage those outside them.

4. Of course there is hope. Wherever there is life, there is hope. Wherever there is strong conviction wedded to truth and hard work, there is a Catholic presence. Wherever there are sympathetic, likeminded Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who share the value of human life, there is hope. We cannot despair. We must add prayer to hard work and keep the conversation with others beautiful.

Virginia L. Arbery is Associate Professor of Humanities at Wyoming Catholic College. A Richard Weaver Fellow and a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, she has taught at the University of Dallas, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, St. Anselm College, Austin College, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Assumption College. A corecipient with Glenn Arbery of the Circe Institute’s Russell Kirk Paideia Prize (2010) for lifetime achievement in the Humanities, she is currently finishing a book tentatively titled Decorum: The Doorway to Virtue.

Edmund Waldstein

1. The American experiment was never entirely coherent. From the beginning, there was an uneasy mix of elements of political tradition received from the ancients (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, et al.) and elements of the ideas of the revolutionary modern political philosophers (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, et al.). The best of the ancients saw politics as ordered to the most complete common good of human life: the activity of virtue shared in civic friendship. They saw the order of political society as a great good, in which human beings could find their home. The moderns, on the other hand, saw politics as ordered to defending subjective individual rights, that is, the liberty of each man to seek individual goals without government interference. Many of the ills of modern American life are derived from the modern elements. Those who want to guide America in a beneficial direction should try to recover more of the ancient elements. There are some signs that contemporary politicians are at least willing to give lip service to a politics directed toward the common good.

2. Catholics should have confidence in the power of the truth to change society. Current trends should not be taken simply as given. We should have something of the spirit of St. Edmund Campion, who faced the seemingly irreversible defeat of Catholicism in 16th-century England when Protestantism was the religion of the ascendant upper class and of the emerging middle classes with their new economic power. It was the religion of the intellectual and cultural elites — of the fashionable scholars, writers, and artists. And it was, above all, the religion of the Elizabethan political and bureaucratic elite. To its proponents, Protestantism was the cause of truth, justice, and freedom. Catholicism, by contrast, was to them the religion of superstition, oppression, and treason, the religion of deplorable country bumpkins, reactionary aristocrats, and malign foreign tyrants. And yet, when Campion, who was living in disguise, in constant danger of capture, wrote a letter to the Queen’s Privy Council explaining his motives, he wrote with tremendous confidence of having “such assurance” in his side of the quarrel and “evidence so impregnable” and “such courage in avouching the Majesty of Jhesus my King” that he was sure he could persuade the politicians, theologians, and lawyers of England.

Today, as we face the ascendency of the quasi-religion of woke liberalism, we should have similar confidence in the power of our cause and of Jesus our King.

3. Multiple, simultaneous approaches are needed. Yes, we need modern-day St. Benedicts who form small collectives in which a better form of community is modeled in the liberal wasteland. We also need modern Esthers and Daniels who try to do what good they can within the existing institutions, guiding them as much as possible toward the pursuit of the true good of the people and away from the worst evils. But we also need to set our long-term sights on modern-day Constantines and Theodosiuses who will one day convert the secular state of the present into an integralist political community that recognizes the truths of the faith. That long-term goal is necessary to keep in mind, even if it might seem remote, because it helps us understand the true nature of the present and our task within it.

4. There is always hope. Yes, evil always rages, but often the good springs up in unexpected ways. Finally, even if a particular nation falls, we still have that greater hope of the final victory of Christ that is to come and that cannot fail.

Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., is a monk of Stift Heiligenkreuz in Austria and a lecturer in moral theology. Born in Rome and raised in the United States and Austria, he is editor of the two-volume series Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias.

Thomas Storck

1. It is hard for me to understand how a nation can be an experiment. Such a notion presupposes that the United States is not actually a nation but an idea, something that underlies our many attempts, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, to impose our particular political and social structure on foreign nations. Those attempts have been disasters for those nations and for us.

Those attempts have been made in the name of liberalism, a liberalism that began with the rejection of the medieval Christian social and economic order and, at present, is busy pretending there is no such thing as the male or female sex. Sometimes the boundaries liberalism sought to overthrow were artificial and cried out to be destroyed, such as racial segregation, but liberalism does not and cannot distinguish between natural and artificial boundaries. Its mantra is simply “freedom,” whether the freedom to mutilate one’s body due to disordered desires or the freedom to destroy families and traditional communities in the name of globalization and free-market economics. Our political community was founded on this liberalism, and our national discourse presupposes it. Hence, as a culture, we can only with great difficulty oppose it or even perceive its errors. Both of our major political parties represent it in different ways.

Insofar as we can speak of an American experiment, we can assert that what was implicit in it has become explicit, that the right to pursue happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence has become “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” as retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Thus, we would need a profound spiritual and intellectual awakening in order to emerge from our present distress, an awakening only the Church can offer, although, at present, her light is mostly hidden under a bushel.

2. If electoral politics is downstream of culture, as has been rightly noted, then so long as the Church remains true to her God-given mission of proclaiming the whole Gospel, she will never entirely fit into any political order shaped by an ethos foreign to her own. She must either convert that society or remain at its margins. For some time, Catholics strove to fit into America, but that came at the cost of downplaying the hard edges of Catholic doctrine and pretending we could join in a continual common effort with those who are not of the faith. This was a mistake, which should now be clear to everyone.

Despite the obviousness of that mistake, multitudes of Catholics still appear to think that with a bit of touching up here and there, American society can be made into something to which Catholics can cozy up. As long as we keep thinking this, we will continue to be disappointed and never succeed in our divinely given mission of converting our country and the rest of the world to the faith.

3. Long before Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option, some of us associated with the magazine Caelum et Terra advocated the formation of Catholic intentional communities. Even in the 19th century there were a number of such communities formed by those who understood that Catholicism was more than a set of beliefs, that it was also a way of life that went beyond the individual and even the familial level. I certainly would support efforts of that kind, but only as one of various methods of dealing with a culture that’s becoming more and more openly anti-Catholic. At the same time, such intentional communities must remember Our Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations. Catholic intentional communities are simply a strategy, first to establish a more or less secure base for ourselves and our families, and then from which to go out to convert our neighbors. They must not be seen as akin to the communities of the Amish, who seem content to live their own lives and leave everyone else alone.

As for talk of “regime change” or integralism as a political movement, this is simply nonsense. I can label myself an integralist in that I accept the Church’s perennial teaching on the evangelization of the political and social order, but that doesn’t mean I want to impose it by force on an unwilling populace. If we want a Catholic social order, we had better begin by converting our non-Catholic neighbors — although it might be wiser to begin by converting ourselves first, as few American Catholics have any glimmer of what the Church teaches about the shaping and reshaping of public life.

4. For the past four years, we have had a president who is juridically a Catholic. For the next four years, we will have a vice president likewise juridically a Catholic. Both publicly disagree with more than one moral teaching of the Church. It is hard to think of any recent Catholic politician who made the faith and Catholic culture the foundation of his worldview. At best, recent Catholic politicians have uncomfortably yoked opposition to abortion and suchlike evils to an otherwise essentially liberal understanding of man and society. I cannot imagine an informed Catholic who holds to all the teachings of the Church making any headway in American politics. Perhaps at the local level, where such matters can often be ignored, a genuine Catholic could fulfill a limited political role, but it is difficult to see how that could be done at the national or even the state level. Too many compromises would be required for him even to get elected.

Thomas Storck, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has written widely on Catholic social teaching, Catholic culture, and related topics for many years. He is the author, most recently, of Economics: An Alternative Introduction (Arouca Press, 2024) and host of The Open Door on WCAT Radio.

James G. Hanink

1. In reflecting on the American experiment, we should ask which Americans and whose experiment. For indigenous people, there was no novel experiment. Rather, there was a familiar and ongoing struggle, marked by intertribal violence and intensified by European settlement, to defend tribal territories and sustain kinship groups.

For most European immigrants, the overriding experiment was to remake their lives on a distant continent. Economic stability was a primary goal. So, too, was keeping alive the customs they brought with them. Some of these newcomers also cared deeply about the freedom to practice their religion.

For the well-established and relatively wealthy founders, the experiment took the form of a Constitution; it was a document that blended classical ideals, Enlightenment aspirations, and Christian imperatives. Yet even the founders quickly recognized that their Constitution required amendments. Not surprisingly, it has continued to do so. That continuing experiment, initiated with the Declaration of Independence, is not exhausted. It is an enduring achievement of self-governance. But, in itself, it is not enough for our flourishing. The Mandates of Democracy are only paper pledges without the people’s practice of civic virtues.

2. Here again we must ask which Catholics. Duly enculturated Catholics whose frame of reference is the political liberalism or the political conservatism of recent decades will be shown a “place at the table” of American politics. Why suppose otherwise? Many of their hosts are Catholics of the same sort.

But Catholics who honor the Church’s Magisterium cannot expect to find a seat at that table. Nor, indeed, can anyone who believes it is always wrong intentionally to kill the innocent or to threaten to so act. Again, why suppose otherwise? American politics has capitulated to the now-entrenched policy of nuclear deterrence, that is, the threat to use weapons of mass destruction. American politics, in addition, has acquiesced to the widespread practice of abortion and euthanasia. This double betrayal of human life, at both its beginning and its end, is starkly incompatible with the inherent dignity of mankind.

3. Living the Gospel is the only credible way of preaching the Gospel. In so doing, we help shape our politics and our social life. At their best, Catholic parishes already form small intentional communities. For these parishes to succeed, they need to promote schools and social services grounded in the faith. Their doing so organically leads to, and depends on, the cooperation of their sponsoring dioceses.

Insofar as fresh endeavors akin to the Benedict Option act in harmony with local parishes and their dioceses, they can enhance what is already in place. Indeed, they can become catalysts of renewal. In this ongoing dynamic, where the bishop is — as St. Ignatius of Antioch taught — there is the Church.

Living the Gospel, the animating source of Catholic social teaching, brings center stage the common good, the telos of political and social life. In advancing the common good, the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity, and economic democracy come into play. Solidarity, with its spirit of one-for-all-and-all-for-one, insists that the first measure of justice is how we treat the most vulnerable. Subsidiarity tells us that we best realize our civic potential when we act in a decentralized way. Economic democracy calls for a widespread distribution of goods and resources. Without economic democracy, political democracy is illusory. Today, only the American Solidarity Party embraces these principles and does so in harmony with a consistent ethics of life.

Integralism, as now discussed, is simply wrongheaded. The state, unless it sheds the pretense of absolute sovereignty and dismantles the rule of bureaucracy, makes for a dismal collaborator.

4. Dum spiro, spero! So wrote Cicero, believing that while we breathe there is hope. Unlike a geometrical abstraction, political life is a contingently shifting phenomenon. Its very nature is changeable; over the past century, it has included a wide range of competing tendencies.

For starters, consider our record of nationalism and internationalism, of individualism and tribalism, of imperialism and retrenchment. The passing parade of political life has featured an often-surprising cast of characters. Yes, in recent times, before our eyes, political life has congealed into an arrogant secular liberalism. Even so, no regime can maintain itself indefinitely. Nor can today’s velvet tyranny.

Politically engaged Catholics — would that there were more of them! — surely have hope. We need to reject the constricting binaries of Left and Right, liberal and conservative. Instead, we must search out common ground to advance the common good. In doing so, let us remember that unless the Lord build the city, they labor in vain who build. Here is my proposal made in hope. Let us adopt the motto of St. Junípero Serra, to which he held fast as he literally limped along the entire coast of California: Siempre adelante, con juicio (Always forward, with judgment).

James G. Hanink, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is an independent scholar, though more independent than scholarly!

Will Hoyt

There are times when the fairytale about the king not wearing clothes becomes relevant, and all it takes is a simple nudge for people to wake up and see an obvious and extremely important fact that, only moments before, had not been visible.

Take the questions motivating this symposium. Upon answering them, we can experience such a nudge.

Answer to first question: No. Given that the American experiment, so called, is the place where Western civilization is actively on trial, with the entire world watching, as it were, from the balcony, our experiment in self-governance can hardly be said to be exhausted.

Answer to second question: Of course. Indeed, you could make a case that, ever since the election of John F. Kennedy, Catholics have created the playing field on which political life happens, let alone driven discussions proper. Even if Catholics haven’t done this, we have been able to exercise the same voting privileges that every other citizen has and will continue to have — barring invasion by another country or civilizational collapse.

Answer to third question: No. Outside of pedigreed monastic orders, intentional communities always fail. As for reconfiguring the administrative state, that project would, perforce, rely on Herbert Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance to the same degree the New Left does.

Answer to fourth question: (This is the sleeper question, the kicker.) Yes. It is — surprisingly — to defend the written charter otherwise known as the U.S. Constitution and recognize it as the miraculously apropos instrument it is.

Let me explain.

Extreme polarization invites handwringing. Like Bob Dylan 50 years ago, we’ve all been thinking, “Aw, Mama, can this really be the end?” But it’s not the end. Sure, the West as on view in Virgil may be over. But that doesn’t mean some new form of civilization won’t replace it. As Dylan knew, and we now also know, we’ve simply been “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and can, therefore, kick up our heels, owing to newly arrived empirical evidence that wokeism combined with belief in the rightness of lecturing provincials is itself a religion with its own sacraments. Thanks to that evidence, we can finally see that the problematic (not premodern) tenets of liberalism — namely, that an ontological zone called neutrality exists and, no less importantly, that reason can exist apart from faith — are completely baseless. And that fact, in turn, means we are freed — you might say liberated — to ask the one question we’ve needed to ask all along so we can effectively meet postmodern challenges by (1) confirming that truth comes into view through traditions rather than in spite of them, and then (2) asking which faith among the many faiths comprising our new confirmedly multicultural society most effectively enables glimpses of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But let us pinch ourselves to make sure we are awake and not dreaming as we finally grasp that we are standing on the threshold of a beginning rather than an end. How? By calling to mind John Rawls’s groundbreaking apologia for liberalism, A Theory of Justice (1971). The beauty of Rawls’s approach is that he sets up his arguments as thought experiments in which consensus emerges among interested parties regarding which set of rules is needed for a society to be practically just. Rawls calls his goal “justice as fairness,” and his signature move in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (1993) is to ask readers to imagine that the parties in his thought experiments deliberate behind a “veil” of ignorance regarding which position they will hold in the society they will occupy once the thought experiment ends, and depend only on “public reason” when designing a polity in which a variety of faith communities have a stake. During the 1970s and even the 1990s Rawls’s arguments were persuasive. Now, however, they seem off-target and, to that extent, worthless. Why? Because there is more at stake now. Bona-fide cultural life is itself on the line, given that half the country is starting to think of religion as ideology. Hence, the crucial question is no longer how to ensure distributive justice, but to which faith — which tradition-dependent rationality — we should commit, as a place to think in and act from.

It used to be hard to get people even to think of asking this question. But now we’re all asking it. And thanks to the electoral college and rights enumerated in a First Amendment that descends all the way from the Magna Carta, we should be able to keep asking it, and in that way activate the only truly common good this side of Heaven.

Will Hoyt, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is a former carpenter who now manages an inn for oil and gas workers near Wheeling, West Virginia. He is the author of The Seven Ranges: Ground Zero for the Staging of America (Front Porch Republic Books, 2021).

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

1. What is meant by the American experiment: world’s lifeboat? shining city on a hill? the Puritan Empire? In my reckoning, America is a fumbling giant, confused and weakened but not yet dead. The possibility of moral regeneration, of another Great Awakening, is fairly strong, but we must fight for it and bring it about without fear.

Protestant America, however, is largely dead. The WASPs surrendered in the wake of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. A late friend, Faith Ryan Whittlesey, a Reagan stalwart and twice U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, used to tell me in disgust, “We WASPs do not even control the membership rolls of the West Palm Beach Tennis Club anymore.” Whittlesey converted to Catholicism. There certainly was a Catholic moment in America in the 1950s; it showed great promise, only to peter out for lack of zeal and strategy.

Our American system, the liberal dictatorship of pleasure, makes it extremely hard to foster martyrs. Instead, it mass produces softies, or outright hedonists, who wouldn’t be caught dead shouting ¡Viva Cristo Rey! Some will shrug and ask: In our liberal context, how effective would that be? The answer depends on how strong our faith and will are. We must rejuvenate our faith and apply our iron will to the Reconquista of the American project. Retaking America from the left-liberal armies must start with faith and culture. The American project needs rejuvenation, not resuscitation.

2. Catholics should not expect a “place at the table.” We should build our own table, and others will come, and still others will be invited when we are ready. Jesus preached that His Kingdom is not of this world, so we shall not build an earthly Jerusalem. We are also supposed to fight the good fight; therefore, we should get organized. We should keep tabs on the political system and, most of all, the culture. This entails fielding our own candidates, or making demands of those who seek our votes, establishing criteria for our support. We must rewrite the Index of Forbidden Books, adding to it movies, websites, podcasts, and the like. Boycotts must be in the cards: from pickets to cyber counteroffensives. A Catholic force empowered by strategically developed activism will be invited to the mainstream table sooner or later, if only to placate us. And we’ll have to make a choice whether to accept the invitation. Perhaps some should, to appear accommodating and tolerant, while others should persist in various forms of civil disobedience.

3. There must be a multidimensional approach. Each option will address a different aspect of the good fight, and all options must complement the others. The objective is victory over the totalitarians (not authoritarians). There should be a division of labor in congruence with temper and character. Some are ready to be Militia Christi; others are much less hardcore. We must figure out the question of discipline and hierarchy. There must be coordination between the factions, with a discrete coordinating leadership operating a liaison network.

Some Catholic activists will be poster children for toleration and accommodation. They will be delegated to deal with the aggressor directly. They will turn the other cheek and publicly indulge humiliation. This will trigger sympathy for our cause. Meanwhile, other Catholics will resist, either actively or passively, generally or particularly. For example, there is already a strong pro-life movement; some participants are in jail, others are willing to go to prison for their beliefs. The movement’s various strains must be encouraged to amplify their particular narratives: from soft and moderate to hardcore and uncompromising. The trick will be to keep everyone together, while we work separately for the same end goal.

4. Hope springs eternal and is the mainspring of our faith. Self-ghettoizing facilitates further marginalization and irrelevance. The times call for giving witness. Naturally, this does not preclude (and, in fact, calls for) building a robust Catholic life via a network of parishes, churches, schools, and other institutions that feed resources and volunteers into the multiple projects of resistance.

But make no a mistake: The so-called Benedict Option is not enough. The secret police will knock on our doors, no matter how strong our resistance network is. I know whereof I speak. I grew up in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. My parents were anti-communists, Catholic human-rights activists. Both were arrested. My paternal grandmother survived the Gestapo, NKVD, and Polish secret police. Her husband survived the Gulag. The Soviets tried to kidnap my father as a “Soviet orphan,” but his grandfather saved him by fleeing west. Later, my father was arrested for his dissident activities and served time in jail. My mother was first detained by the communists when she was five, along with her eight-year-old brother. The secret police seized their parents and sent the whole family to prison.

I could multiply the stories of horror and persecution by both Nazis and communists, enemigos de nuestro Señor Jesucristo. But enough. What we need is more symposia like this to work out strategy, operations, and tactics of the vanguard and then massive Catholic resistance (networking with our evangelical brethren who will also be martyrs). This is a good beginning. We shall see what follows.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Professor of History at the Institute of World Politics: A Graduate School of National Security and International Affairs in Washington, D.C. He holds the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies and heads the Center for Intermarium Studies.

Christopher Zehnder

1. I answer with a question: The American experiment in what? If it is an experiment in representational government, or democracy, it is not specifically American. If it is an experiment because of what it proposes as the end or purpose of government, and if that purpose differs radically from that proposed by the Catholic political tradition, we should hope it is indeed “exhausted.” If it is, again, an experiment in representational government, it is unobjectionable; the popular are among the valid forms of government, and where they are customary, they should (all things being equal) be preserved. But where all things are not equal — where, for instance, the people can or will no longer act the part of citizens — we find not only exhaustion but decay. In such cases, the forms of representational government continue merely as forms; without the invigoration of the citizen’s sense of responsibility, they become a means of imposing demagogic and oligarchic agendas. That seems to be the state of things for various reasons, not least of which is the playing out of the proposal of the ends of government by the American founding itself and the Enlightenment tradition of which it was, at least in part, an expression. This proposal I call America’s “civic religion.”

2. Historically, the Catholic’s “place at the table” has been conditioned on his acceptance of, or acquiescence to, this “civic religion.” In its best formulation, this “religion” confesses that the highest purpose of civic life is temporal human happiness, which is to be realized in part through a public order founded on justice. I say “in part” because for the American civic religion, the pursuit of happiness is finally an individual endeavor the ends and means of which are determined by each person. For an historically influential strain of American thought, virtue plays a role in directing individual endeavor, but only as an instrumental good — it conduces to happiness; it is its necessary context, but it does not constitute happiness. Likewise, religion. The American founders praised religion, but in language that suggests that its value rests in inculcating virtue, seen as an essential underpinning and support of a republican social order. Whatever else religion might be is relegated to the private sphere.

For the Catholic, virtue is not simply a means of securing happiness; it is happiness. Virtue encompasses the “cardinal” moral virtues (justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude) and virtues of the intellect (knowledge of the truth, understanding, and wisdom). Virtue thus understood is perfected and elevated by the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), through which men attain their end or purpose: theosis, union with God, “becoming God.” It is only thus that we are made happy with the happiness that is integral to our nature. As the happiness toward which we strive, in the possession of which we are blessed, virtue is the highest expression of the common good — the good that society and the state exist to protect and foster.

Such an understanding of the state has always been foreign to the American mind; hence, the Catholic’s difficulty in finding a place “at the table.” Nevertheless, historically, a general Christian sense in American society made it possible for the Catholic to participate in the political order; bigotry, not principle, stood in his way. In the current postmodern atmosphere, where the appeal to truth is seen as merely a play for power, principle has made it harder for Catholics to play a part in the political order, at least as elected officials.

3. The avenues by which Catholics may influence American society are as multiple as the conditions of Catholic life in our time. They may take the “Benedictine” model of intentional Catholic communities: providing models of Christian social life beyond the nuclear family. They may be more Dominican: living in the context of the world, passing on the fruit of contemplation. They may be Franciscan: embracing a voluntary poverty that witnesses to the simplicity of life and abnegation that are the soil in which virtue thrives. In a word, Catholics may influence American society by evangelizing it both by word and example.

Such evangelization includes preaching the Gospel, as well as “pre-evangelization” — preparing the ground in which the seed of the Word can take root. We till this field by recalling our neighbors and fellow citizens to a renewed understanding of the natural truths about the cosmos, man himself, and human community in all its aspects — familial, economic, cultural, and political. To accomplish this, we may form specifically Catholic groups or organizations dedicated to the full expression of Catholic social teaching. So organized, we may enter into temporary alliances with non-Catholic, even non-Christian organizations in the pursuit of limited goals, such as campaigns to protect human life, to advance economic justice, to protect the integrity of creation, and to oppose the injustice of war. Such groups would allow an unadulterated Catholic voice to address the issues of our time while not losing the effective interaction, support, and friendship of other men of good will.

Any proposal that would involve overturning our institutions and imposing a Catholic order by force is, at best, illusory. At worst, it would corrupt our cause, for it would involve acts of violence that we scarcely will be able to avoid and so conduce to the scandal and downfall of countless souls, not least our own. Our only path forward is through a personal dedication to holiness and a commitment to example, proposal, and persuasion — and, if necessary, martyrdom. If our cause is to be sealed with blood, let it be our own, not our neighbor’s.

Christopher Zehnder is the general editor of the Catholic Textbook Project and has written four of the books in its history series. He is currently editing a history of Christendom from the ancient world to the 14th century. He and his wife are lay members of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans). He is a Councilman for the incorporated village of Hartford, Ohio (pop. 404). The views he expresses herein are exclusively his.

Kan Ito

Is there any hope for Catholics in American political life? Yes! Let me explain.

I am not a Catholic. I do not hold to any particular religious creed. However, I believe there is something greater than us, some transcendence that made the universe and informs our consciences. Call me a Kantian, if you like, or perhaps a Neo-Platonist. Whatever the appellation, I am convinced there is a transcendental moral law, and we ignore it at the peril of our values and souls.

In my 40-plus years in the United States, during which time I have been both an observer of and a participant in Washington politics, I have seen what happens when the moral law is scorned. Not just in Washington, but in America at large. And not just in America, but in my home country of Japan, too. In Japan, Buddhist monks traditionally have taught morals to the people, instilling in congregations a sense of right and wrong. In the United States, pastors and priests, brothers and nuns, have done this. In both countries, the people have grown indifferent to the voices of moral awareness and the deeper meaning of life. The results are as we see today: Both countries have become morally apathetic. The rich profit off the destruction of nations, the elites are materialistic and shallow minded, and the poor are ground down deeper into despair and powerlessness.

Since the Cold War, the U.S. government has relied on raw military power to keep unipolar world order and has aggressively tried to strengthen U.S. global hegemony — without meaningful consent from ordinary American people. This imperium is waning, and American society seems to be falling apart. The list of things that dismay Catholics is probably similar to the list of things that dismay me: drug addiction, homelessness, artificially exaggerated LGBTQ issues, the loss of childhood innocence, violence in the streets, and the chaos of unregulated immigration and the ensuing destruction of national coherence. No amount of political or economic power can cure these ills, because they are, at root, spiritual-philosophical-moral issues. Without shepherds to guide and feed the flock, the flock descends into anarchy and ruin. Without Christian (or classical humanist) morality, American society loses its coherence and integrity. We are seeing it happen right in front of our eyes.

Some American politicians and thinkers, including prominent ones, have called to make America a Catholic nation. I agree with them. American politics cannot be guided wisely without a religious (or philosophical) people, and the Catholic Church is able to make the greatest contribution to this restoration effort. Though I am not Catholic, I honestly believe the Catholic Church has the greatest potential to restore sanity to the troubled nation. After all, it was the Catholic Church that stubbornly defended civilization and probity amid the collapse of the Roman imperium.

Kan Ito is a foreign-policy analyst working in Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. He is the author of five books on international politics, European diplomatic history, and Chinese military policy.

Jude Russo

It is the binding teaching of the Church, as articulated in Quanta Cura, the Syllabus, and other documents, that a Catholic confessional state is preferred to other arrangements. This follows naturally from the Angelic Doctor’s discussion of the laws, a foremost purpose of which is to cultivate true religion among the people. This once-uncontroversial position and the tradition that flows from it, championed by the excellent Pater Edmund Waldstein, has gotten the moniker “integralism” and caused a fair amount of heartburn, among both its Whiggish opponents and its more zealous adherents (more on whom anon). On the theory, though, there is no debate. Roma locuta est.

Politics, however, occurs in the realm of history and prudence, where the norm is not the philosopher-king but the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens after the Peloponnesian War. The Church always has recognized this. In the context of the revolutionary strains of Judaism that led to the Bar-Kokhba revolt a generation later, the First Letter of Peter is striking: “For love of the Lord, then, bow to every kind of human authority; to the king, who enjoys the chief power, and to the magistrates who hold his commission to punish criminals and encourage honest men.” More recently, in the 17th century, the Church declined to renew Pope St. Pius V’s bull Regnans in Excelsis sanctioning the overthrow of the British monarchy.

It is in these prudential terms that the more revolutionary integralists may be dismissed. Catholics, although America’s largest religious group, remain a minority in These States. Even granting a successful overthrow of the current government — a very generous hypothetical concession — true minoritarian rule, even by a group in the “right,” is a ticklish thing on the best of days. The salutary example of the Thirty again comes to mind. It is true that America’s broadly liberal Constitution and disposition preclude the establishment of a confessional regime (even at the state level, thanks to the 14th Amendment), and this is an inherent defect. (To deny this in the teeth of Church teaching, as certain members of an older generation of Catholic conservatives have, is to become as much a state-worshiper as the communists whom those same eminences see creeping around every corner.) There are also worse things on offer, and those liberal institutions afford certain weapons for advancing just causes. Nor do they seem to be going anywhere any time soon.

Political disengagement doesn’t offer much, either. “Intentional communities,” à la The Benedict Option of my onetime colleague Rod Dreher, are well and good but tend to suffer from two weaknesses: an inability to defend themselves in the face of a truly hostile regime, and the material difficulties of establishing a stable community. Founding a successful polity is a hard thing; this is why founders and lawgivers are honored with statues and, in antiquity, divine rites. American history is littered with the ruins of failed communes, and the Leviathan, even in its senescence, is tremendously powerful. Only a glancing blow when it is in its death throes can bring a swift end to a small group. Though building up communities is itself a good, it is not a sufficient answer to the question of what is to be done.

This leaves “regime change,” which, so far as I can tell, is an exciting phrase for the basically sane position that institutions should be reformed. This comes in various forms but always runs through the boring old hurly-burly of democratic politics. (Paradigms focusing on the administrative state tend to be rather quiet about how we’re going to get an executive who will cram the joint with dead-eyed and ruthless Catholic lawyers.) Nobody likes this answer, because it is slow and incremental, and our problems are imminent and severe. This, also, always has been the case. Between Constantine’s conversion and the final shuttering of the Roman state cult and state-sponsored bloodsport, a moral horror comparable to the American abortion regime, more than a century of tedious institution-building and politicking passed — and the final blow was still so precipitous that Theodosius II faced near-revolution at court.

Though I am less persuaded of (or invested in) the Declaration’s status as revealed scripture or a perfect articulation of whatever flavor of natural-law theory is in vogue at Princeton this week, the American experiment continues to give Catholics useful tools, particularly relative to those on offer from the more militant strains of American liberalism that wish to do away with or eschatologize that experiment. The freedoms of speech, religion, and association remain invaluable for any minority group that wishes to organize and effect policy. And, thanks to whatever strange providence governs our affairs, America remains significantly less demoralized than every other developed Christian nation.

Despite mass disaffiliation from religion, the Church in America is still relatively large, well-coordinated, and wealthy, although she probably will have to sell a lot of real estate in the near term. Catholics must be willing to act as a bloc, however, and that demands better formation than has been seen on these shores in at least a century. The failure of Catholic education has been the failure of the Church in America; it is evident in our churchgoing numbers, and it is evident in the quality of our hierarchs.

Yet we have been given a second chance. The COVID crisis revealed the public schools’ rot and sent parents seeking alternatives. A statesmanlike bishop (or bishops’ conference) would devote himself to a well-capitalized, high-quality parochial school system. Only thus will the Church form Catholic citizens, the first necessary condition for accomplishing anything else.

There is no hope for Catholics in political life, American or otherwise; hope does not reside in a president, prince, or pasha, but in the cross of Jesus Christ. Yet we can — and must — work to make things a little better on this mortal coil.

Jude Russo is Managing Editor of The American Conservative.

Al Kresta

Talk of Catholics’ getting a seat at the table reminds me of a story told by the late priest and author Henri Nouwen. Fr. Nouwen was a chaplain on a Holland America cruise liner. One day, while he was on the bridge of the ship, a dangerously thick fog settled in. The steersman could not see the bow, and the captain was pacing nervously while listening to a radar-station operator describe his position between other ships. Fr. Nouwen paced nervously, too, and he collided with the ship’s captain. The captain cursed the chaplain and told him to stay out of the way.

Fr. Nouwen started walking away, “filled with feelings of incompetence and guilt,” he later wrote in his journal. “But the worst wasn’t over. The captain came back and gruffly said: ‘Padre, why don’t you just stay around. This might be the only time I really need you.’” This priest was good for nothing except — maybe — to console the dying after a shipwreck.

Priests are helpful when needed to calm the people with prayers and other hocus-pocus. But for crying out loud, keep them off the bridge, out of the map room, and away from the wheel. And keep them out of the corporate boardroom and the congressional chamber, too.

Once we Catholics start longing for a seat at the table, we forget who we are. Who are we? We are exiles. This world is not our home. Our citizenship is in Heaven. We take our marching orders from a different King. The first papal encyclical begins with these words: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion…for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood.” We fool ourselves if we think exiles can set the terms of the cultural debate. Nobody owes us a seat at the table. We should be focused on bearing witness to the age to come.

If there is no seat at the table for us, and no expectation of such, then what is our task? Christ has placed us in the middle of the daily hustle and bustle to remind men that we live in the light of eternity, that our daily choices render us fit for glory or damnation. We are here to help people who live in this world of desecration — where human beings are routinely trashed through abortion, war, human trafficking, terrorism, and industrial carelessness — see that next to the Eucharist there is nothing more sacred than a human being. We are called to restore a sense of the sacred to everyday life.

Al Kresta, R.I.P., formerly CEO of Ave Maria Radio, was best known as the host of the popular radio program Kresta in the Afternoon. He succumbed to liver cancer on June 15. The foregoing is excerpted from a talk he gave, in the last months of his life, at a benefit dinner for a pro-life organization in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Preston R. Simpson

There are several problems with the set of questions in this symposium.

Most Americans would laugh at the question of whether there is any hope for Catholics in American political life. The outgoing president is a Catholic, the leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives for 20 years until 2023 was a Catholic, and a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court justices are Catholics. The question is nonsensical unless it means something other than what an ordinary American would consider a Catholic. Who are these Catholics who seek a “place at the table,” where much of the power is already held by people who identify as Catholics?

As I am not a Catholic, I can only make an educated guess. I assume the question defines Catholics as those who adhere to the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church — who reject, for example, abortion, in vitro fertilization, artificial contraception, transsexuality, and remarriage after divorce, and who would like to see these prohibitions enforced in civil society. Furthermore, they believe the Roman pontiff is infallible when speaking on faith and morals and, therefore, could command the obedience of ruling American Catholics to unknown future moral pronouncements. Would these hypothetical pronouncements have the force of law in American life? As people who self-define as Catholics have widely divergent views on moral issues, this prospect is anathema to the vast majority of Americans, including, undoubtedly, many (most?) who call themselves Catholics. Indeed, John F. Kennedy, when he ran for president in 1960, had to assure his countrymen that he was not beholden to the Church.

The question of whether the American experiment is an exhausted project is difficult to answer. Certainly, some developments suggest it is. When the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties makes it her signature issue that women should be allowed to kill their children; when mainstream medicine endorses chemical and surgical mutilation of children who are temporarily confused about their sexual identity; when many leaders and would-be leaders desire a completely open and unregulated border; and when many politicians and academics claim that freedom of speech is a dangerous and outmoded idea (to name only a few disturbing developments of recent years), there certainly is concern for the future of the enterprise.

America has been through and survived severe divisions in the past. The American Revolution was, in some respects, a civil war. In the period around the War of 1812, there was not insignificant talk of secession by Northeastern states. From 1861 to 1865 there was an actual attempt at secession by Southern states, eventuating in a very bloody Civil War. Yet America survived those events and emerged as the leading power in the world and a beacon of freedom to people across the globe.

The biggest problem with the symposium questions is that they rest on a false assumption. They seem to assume that “the American experiment” has some relation to the Catholic Church. But the American experiment was never a Catholic project. You could almost say it was an anti-Catholic project. Nearly all the founders were Protestants, Deists, or Unitarians. Only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence, and only three signed the Constitution. The Roman Church is a monarchical organization headed by someone with nearly absolute power over the organization. The American experiment is a complete rejection of that principle. It assumes that ordinary citizens (think of them as the people in the pews) have the ability and should have the power to choose their leaders, participate in the making of laws, and serve on juries. And yet, over its history, millions of Catholics from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and countless other places have fled their Catholic homelands to participate in the non-Catholic American system.

If the Catholics addressed in the questions desire a truly Catholic society, it will not be the United States of America as presently constituted. And if the American experiment is to survive and flourish, it will need to find people of integrity, vision, and persuasiveness like Washington, Madison, Lincoln, and Reagan — none of whom was Catholic or even particularly religious. Catholics need to decide if they are willing to work within the present system, which may well degenerate into totalitarianism. But the Catholics here in the United States have, along with those of other faiths and no faith, already rejected rule by the Roman Catholic Church.

Preston R. Simpson, M.D., is a retired pathologist who lives in Plano, Texas.

Edwin Dyga

We are asked to consider whether the “American experiment” is “exhausted.” The answer largely depends on how this experiment is characterized, and a distant observer of American social and political trends such as I is perhaps not the best diagnostician. Nevertheless, setting aside the merits of the experiment itself, and assuming a polity has self-propagation as its core functional interest, it could be argued that America’s exhaustion is proportional to the extent to which her citizens still retain some semblance of civic vitality. Judging by the willingness of many to engage in the bitterly litigated controversies of the present era (often at great risk not only to their professional standing and livelihood but their physical safety), the collective American public certainly retains a will to live. Symposia such as this are a reminder that evidence of resistance is evidence of hope, and the promise of a better life. The problem is, therefore, how to channel this remaining vitality in an increasingly hostile environment. But before this can be properly addressed, what of the “experiment” itself?

Ernest Lee Tuveson’s Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968) is an invaluable study of American political theology, its inherently utopian tendencies, and their dystopian consequences. Tuveson illustrates how a deformed Protestant reading of the Book of Revelation set the intellectual scene for our age of progressive ideology. By confusing the City of God with the City of Man, American Protestants saw redemption as attainable in the mundane world by vanquishing the enemies of God, and this was to be a temporal, historical process. Secularized through the Enlightenment, this view has produced what Tuveson refers to as an “apocalyptic Whiggism” in American thought. It can be detected in political agendas across the spectrum: from progressivism’s projects of social re-engineering at home to faux-conservatism’s messianic export of liberal democracy abroad. Both spring from the same source: a belief in the perfectibility of the individual and society. “The discovery of America,” Tuveson writes, “and later the American Revolution, were placed in a sequence of victories beginning with the Reformation.”

If I read Tuveson correctly, he believes that the foundation of America was based on the presumed truth of this heretical proposition. America, of course, is not a “project” but a homeland — conceiving it otherwise risks fostering a universalistic agenda that recognizes no terrestrial borders. By identifying the Puritan spirit of democratic idealism as fundamental to the development of American national identity, Ralph Waldo Emerson similarly wrote that the “history of America is the history of the conquest of the world by Massachusetts.” Though American vitality has not yet been completely exhausted, the experiment to which its people have been subject may indeed have proven itself morally bankrupt. The process has deformed even the attitudes and worldview of those who ostensibly oppose it. Writing for The New Criterion’s “Symposium on Democracy in America” (Oct.), Daniel J. Mahoney acknowledges that supporters of Donald Trump are “very much a product of the social and moral dislocations that have transformed the country over the last half century.” When elites become “addicted to ideological abstractions,” he writes, civil institutions and the intellectual life become destabilized.

American Catholics are fortunate because their faith has spared them despair at this grim situation. Present circumstances bring to mind the history of Zentrum, a German political party founded on the principles of Catholic social thought, which gained significant influence despite operating in a political environment that was not only explicitly Protestant but embraced an official Kulturkampf against the Church. In his Historia Antykultury (2019) Krzysztof Karoń credits the success of this small party to the comprehensive worldview it offered: “a social program which, while supported by Catholic social thought, was nevertheless a rational program capable of being accepted by adherents of other religions” (my translation and emphasis).

Apocalyptic Whiggism renders attempts at forming an archipelago of Benedict Options a fool’s errand. The erasure of borders does not affect the national frontier alone but also makes establishing autonomous Catholic communities impossible within the political sphere. No alternative to the secular progressive order — even if privately practiced — can be permitted to exist in the face of an ideology animated by a religious zeal and belief in its own eschatological righteousness. Withdrawal is just a euphemism for retreat, and cowardice will only embolden the fanatical vindictiveness of those who hate the Church for the promise of civilizational renewal she offers.

What would be more effective than disappearing into the hills is a steady but uncompromising reassertion of the Catholic presence in the public square. To achieve this, a collective awareness of our intentional Catholic identity must be rekindled. But for this one key defect — caused mainly through the collapse of Church leadership — we find ourselves in a similar position to the late-19th- and early 20th-century Catholics of Protestant Germany. Society is starved for alternatives to the stale status quo, but one is available, if only it could be systematized into a form that can be rationally communicated to those most receptive to its message. Perhaps this is the task to which our remaining vitality ought to be directed.

American national identity — its genesis and nature — need not be rooted in heretical abstracts. A literary and cultural tradition exists that does not play into this framework. It is a tradition that recognizes the fallen state of mankind and seeks redemption before God but also recognizes our responsibility to the res publica. It is a tradition rooted in the particularities of place and people. Though it is often associated with the cultural heritage of a traditionally “WASP” Southern agrarian civilization, or the political legacies of paleoconservatism, it is not surprising that its revival is dominated by Catholic thinkers and men of letters. These worlds and worldviews may seem vanquished by rapacious modernity, but what appears defeated is merely latent, and thus ripe for rediscovery.

Edwin Dyga is Editor of the Observer & Review. He writes from Sydney, Australia.

Casey Chalk

Across two millennia, Catholics have participated in a remarkable variety of political arrangements — some hospitable to the Church, others openly hostile. There were converts among the patrician families of the pagan Roman imperium. In medieval Europe, the Church enjoyed pride of place, anointing kings and influencing governing decisions (and, inversely, suffering those rulers’ meddling in ecclesial affairs). More recently, Catholics have taken to liberal democracy, sometimes forming (or dominating) political parties that led ruling coalitions, such as the Christian Democrats in Germany and Italy, the Popular Republican Movement in France, and Fianna Fáil in Ireland.

This has been the case even in countries where Catholics are a small minority. Predominantly Shinto Japan has had no fewer than three Catholic prime ministers. Catholic politicians currently serve in the legislatures of Hindu-majority India, Muslim-majority Indonesia, and Buddhist- and Taoist-majority Taiwan. Of course, Catholic participation in the polis does not mean the faithful aren’t often engaged in a delicate and tense game in which they must navigate (often competing) allegiances to both Church and state.

This was true even in the medieval French kingdom of St. Louis IX — which integralists and post-liberals present as the apotheosis of collaborative Church-state relations — given the inevitable competition between these two sources of power. The investiture crisis, the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, and the Hundred Years’ War, among many other examples, demonstrate that medieval European Catholicism, whatever its many virtues, was a contentious, confused, and violent period of Church history. It was, after all, an ecclesial court that convicted St. Joan of Arc of heresy and permitted her burning at the stake.

As far as I know, no Catholics have been executed for practicing the faith here in America. That is not to downplay the very real persecution Catholics are facing today — witness the crackdown on pro-life Catholic activists by the U.S. Department of Justice. But we should keep things in perspective. Approximately one in seven American patients receives medical care in a Catholic hospital. About 1.7 million American kids are educated in Catholic schools. Catholics comprise 28 percent of Congress, a percentage greater than that of self-identifying Catholics in the general population. Our nation has more Catholic media outlets and publishing houses than any other country in the world, exceeding those of even predominantly Catholic nations with far higher rates of Mass attendance.

Granted, a growing number of Americans don’t like this. They don’t want Americans going to Catholic hospitals that regulate treatment related to pregnancy, gender confusion, or end-of-life care. They don’t want children educated with curricula that oppose the dogmas of the sexual revolution or critical race theory. And they don’t want Catholic media to be free to publish material that reflects magisterial teaching, which they deem “disinformation.”

Despite her obvious strengths, it is undeniable that the Church’s cultural and political capital is eroding. Mass attendance rates are likely to continue to fall, and dioceses are likely to continue closing or merging parishes. Those trends will consequently affect the Church’s ability to influence American society.

Nevertheless, Catholics still possess cultural and political capital. Roe v. Wade, at least for the moment, lies defeated by a majority-Catholic Supreme Court, and the March for Life, largely composed of Catholics, will likely continue to draw 100,000 people to Washington, D.C., each January. And, however cynical we may be about contemporary politics, Catholic elected officials at the local, state, and national levels still promote ways of life that align with the Catholic conception of human dignity.

To forfeit all that, whether because we are losing or because of some perceived defect in the American founding, seems naïve and irresponsible. It would be naïve because it implies that we will be safe in our retreat to Steubenville, Front Royal, Naples, or one of the other bastions of “conservative” Catholicism. If our enemies are as anti-Catholic as we perceive them to be, do we really think they’ll disregard our little Catholic enclaves? Imagine, instead, innumerable media exposés of our “patriarchal” or “bigoted” communities for alleged misogynist or transphobic discrimination, which in turn provoke federal investigations and prosecutions.

A withdrawal would be irresponsible because it would mean leaving to the wolves millions of our fellow citizens, Catholic or not, who will thus be susceptible to policies and propaganda that will harm their bodies and their souls. Such thinking is antithetical to the heroism of, say, St. Elizabeth of Portugal, who helped facilitate treaties between Iberian kingdoms and prevented a civil war, or St. Peter Claver, who ministered to hundreds of thousands of slaves in the exploitative New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia).

Each Catholic’s response to the Church’s loss of influence requires prudential thinking. For some, keeping the faith may mean moving from one place to another. For others, it may mean rising to combat evil by leveraging all the professional or political weapons at their disposal. For still others, it may mean continuing quietly, faithfully to fulfill their vocations in places progressively more hostile to the Catholic way of life.

The American experiment is not exhausted, not as long as Catholics are permitted to participate in the current regime, warts and all. The testimony of Catholics over many centuries in many political scenarios should give us hope and caution us against doomsday thinking. Our place at the table may be less prominent, but it is a place from which we may still yet save lives and souls — and, I pray, make a few saints in the process. As Our Lord said when confronted with political threats far greater than our own: “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (Jn. 12:27).

Casey Chalk is a Contributing Editor of the NOR. His latest book is The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road Publishing).

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