Massimo Faggioli's new book Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States comes just in time for those of us trying to make sense of the estuary where politics and religion meet in the U.S. at this moment in history. It is a moment in which so many foundational issues are implicated, a moment so pregnant with possibilities and so fraught with difficulties.
Faggioli's book explores those foundational issues with depth and insight. He is excellent in elucidating the immediate context of this hopeful moment when a Catholic president and a profoundly pastoral pope can make common cause on a variety of issues. "Relations between the United States and the Vatican clearly suffered during the Trump administration, a result of the undeniable incompatibility of the worldviews of Pope Francis and the 'Make America Great Again' president," he writes. "But equally obvious is the overlap that exists between support for Trump among practicing Christian voters (including many Catholics) and the attempt by influential sectors of the American Catholic Church to delegitimize Pope Francis both ecclesially and politically."
Nonetheless, he goes deeper. The heart of the book is an exploration of the fact that:
Both [Pope] Francis and Biden have the arduous task of exercising institutional leadership through a period of upheaval at all levels: environmental, economic, social, cultural and political. Their elections are both encouraging signs of the vitality of the institutional systems they lead. But it is not clear how much the institutional level can do to deal with the breaking of the balance at all other levels.
For both men, their task is both complicated and defined by the fact that the opposition to them tends to cohere in the same persons: The anti-Francis wing of the Catholic Church consists of the same cabal of the anti-Biden zealots who drafted or applauded the offensive Inauguration Day statement from the bishops' conference.
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No theologian is better than Faggioli at explaining and critiquing the varieties of right-wing nuttiness that have flourished in the vineyard of American Catholicism the past 30 years. No one, so far as I know, has previously noted, as Faggioli does, that understanding the tensions between the arch-conservative Catholics who resist and resent Pope Francis and those Catholics, like the new president, who love him "must be understood in the context of the transition between two very different paradigms typical of conservative Catholic intellectual circles in the United States during the last decade. It is the transition from the Catholic neoconservative movement of the 1980s and 90s to an upheaval of revolt and ressentiment closer to anti-Vatican II traditionalism than to a legitimate cultural and theological critique of some aspects of the post-Vatican II period."
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