Mary Jo McConahay's new book has attracted support - such as this review by University of Nevada law and religion scholar Leslie Griffin. Noah Feldman, is more skeptical of McConahay's critique of the conservative U.S. bishops.
- GWC
Book Review: ‘Playing God,’ by Mary Jo McConahay - The New York TimesBy Noah Feldman
March 13, 2023
Just how conservative is the Catholic Church? So conservative that, when Pope Francis recently said that homosexuality is a sin but not a crime, observers (correctly) took that for progress. The connection between Catholicism and conservatism runs deep. It goes back to at least the Counter-Reformation, when the church had to defend the religious status quo in Christian Europe against Protestants’ radical criticisms of its priests, its hierarchy and its doctrines. In its day, the Catholic Church opposed the Enlightenment. It rejected freedom of conscience. Church teaching was for a long time extremely skeptical of democracy.
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the most profound and sustained conservative critique of liberalism comes from within the Catholic intellectual tradition. It’s no accident that the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices happen to have been raised Catholic. (One, Neil Gorsuch, was brought up in the church but now identifies as Episcopalian. One of the liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, is also Catholic.) When the Federalist Society set out to develop an elite cadre of legal conservatives, brilliant young Catholic lawyers were more inclined and prepared to follow in the footsteps of Justice Antonin Scalia than were, say, young evangelical Protestant lawyers.
The conservative nature of the Catholic Church has long posed a challenge for postwar American Catholic liberals. Today, politicians like Joe Biden (only the second Catholic president) and Nancy Pelosi insist on their Catholic faith while holding mainstream liberal political positions. These include on issues like abortion and gay marriage, where their perspective contradicts the church’s official teachings. In this, Biden and Pelosi are following a path trod by John Kerry, Mario Cuomo and even John F. Kennedy.
In her new book, “Playing God,” the journalist Mary Jo McConahay, herself a liberal Catholic, aims to show the extreme conservatism of a handful of American Catholic bishops and connect them, directly or indirectly, to the Trump-adjacent far right. The conservative bishops on whom she focuses are, it must be said, very conservative indeed. Bishop Joseph Strickland participated in a Stop the Steal rally on the National Mall on Dec. 12, 2020. At the same rally, which was organized by a Christian group called Jericho March, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò told the story of how God brought down the walls of the besieged city after the Israelites surrounded it. (Viganò, who is notorious for having called for Francis to resign, is not a U.S. bishop but an Italian-born priest who was Pope Benedict XVI’s nuncio to the United States.) Then there is Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, who during the pandemic declined to wear a mask while saying Mass or distributing holy communion, and who rejected Pope Francis’ stance on Covid vaccines, telling a San Francisco Chronicle podcast in December 2021 that he had a strong immune system and that the vaccines approved by the government “are not really vaccines.”
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