Professor of Theology and author Massimo Faggioli outlines the positioning of US Catholicism in relation to the global Church. 26/06/2021
1. A multi–layered Catholic crisis in the USA
On January 20th, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States, making him the second Catholic to hold the office – the other being John F. Kennedy. In the wake of Biden’s election, a storm has been brewing in the triangle between Biden, the US bishops, and the Vatican. It’s not merely a clash between different political cultures, but rather lays bare the heart of the divisions that are affecting the Catholic Church in the USA.
In terms of global Catholicism, the US is amongst the biggest players – in population, theological and cultural production, number of men and women in ministry, financial resources, media outreach, and missionary potential – and so events there will send shockwaves around the world . Despite its size and wealth, US Catholicism is a giant in crisis, as we have seen since 2013, when important sectors of the clerical and lay Catholic leadership in the USA became the center of the opposition to Pope Francis for reasons that are both theological and non–theological. So what is this crisis, and how did we arrive here?
There are three different kinds of crisis that are distinct but not separate. There is a crisis of ecclesial order: a vacuum not only in the authority, but in the legitimacy of the institutions of the Catholic Church, both structural institutions (the Bishops, the clergy) and non–structural (the priesthood, theology). There is a crisis of political order of which Catholicism in the USA is part: from the assault of Capitol Hill of January 6, 2021 to the ongoing attacks against voting rights, the leaders of Catholicism in the USA are reluctant to defend democratic and constitutional values. There is a crisis of geopolitical order: what is the role and position of US Catholicism in the world of today – both in terms of the secular–political world after the Cold War and War on Terror and also in the Catholic global sphere, with a traumatic interruption of the US bond with the Vatican, and weakened relations with other areas of the world).
2. From JFK and the “Catholic Sixties” to Joe Biden
What led to this situation in US Catholicism is historical development over the last sixty years, since the election of the first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy in 1960. This came after the debacle of the first Catholic candidate, Al Smith, who ran in 1928 and was crushed, thanks to a vicious and racist anti–Catholic campaign, waged (among others) by the KKK.
The Sixties was the beginning of the decline of the seamless confluence of Catholicism – for long assumed to be incompatible with American democracy – into the mainstream. It was JFK’s Catholicism itself that was the problem, not what kind of Catholicism (conservative or progressive) like Joe Biden’s in 2020–2021. Kennedy overcame that challenge by declaring his Catholicism private and irrelevant for his politics both domestically and internationally. The public split among Catholics created by Vietnam, the contraceptive pill, and the legalization of abortion now makes that option impossible for Biden.
In the sixties, thanks to the four–session assembly of all the bishops at the Second Vatican Council in Rome (1962–1965) global Catholicism tried to declare peace with modernity, with the Council bringing in changes to the liturgy, and a renewed spirit of ecumenicism, alongside reaffirming Catholic tradition. But the peace was fragile – like “dancing on the edge of a volcano”, as American Jesuit Stephen Schloesser put it a few years ago. Until the early 1980s, the US Catholic leadership (bishops and intellectual leaders) still pursued the project of modernization and adaptation to social and cultural modernity – for instance, the pastoral letter of the US bishops of 1983 on peace and war, and of 1986 on economic justice.
The delayed effects of the election of John Paul II (1978–2005) put a stop, in the mid–1980s, to that project of Catholic progressivism: the age of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II on the transatlantic axis, and of Reagan and Thatcher’s ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK. This inaugurated a second phase that saw the rise of a new movement – neo–conservative Catholicism, an American endorsement of John Paul II’s effort to moderate the progressivism of the interpretations of the Second Vatican Council and of his focus on life issues as the decisive battle for the future of the church and of modernity.
The traumatic opening of the new millennium in the USA, shaped by 9/11 and the revelations on sex abuses in the Church in 2001–2002, contributed to a mutation in the neo–conservative Catholic project of the 1980s–1990s: from neo–conservatism to neo–traditionalism. The problem is not, as it is for neo–conservative Catholics, merely some progressive interpretations of the Second Vatican Council: for Catholic neo–traditionalists, the problem is the teaching – indeed, the existence – of Vatican II itself.
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