The American church divided

From this week's The Tablet

Interesting piece. 

A number of Irish religious congregations have unfortunately been influenced by the American conservative-traditionalist church.

The story of the Catholic Church in the United States of America is a success story. A small community of poor migrants and missionaries, barely tolerated and often unable to worship freely in a new nation founded by religious dissenters fleeing from European Christendom, grew to become its single largest religious denomination. 

This is the Church in which my wife was received as a convert to Catholicism just two years before we got married, and in which our children were born and are being raised. It is the Church that welcomed me ten years ago, when I moved from Europe to take up an academic job in its impressive network of Catholic schools and universities – the largest in the world.

I grew up in a Catholic family in Italy, and spent part of my academic and cultural formation in France and Germany. From the moment I arrived in the US, I experienced something quite new. The first surprise was the encouragement from colleagues to go “parish shopping”, in other words, to traipse around different parishes from Sunday to Sunday until I found the one that was “right for me”. 

The assumption was that I should look around not just for a community I found friendly and welcoming, but for a parish where I would find the theological views congenial and the liturgical performances to my taste. 

This was something I had never thought to do before. I soon came to discover the huge diversity between, for example, the diocesan downtown Euro-American parish with wonderful pre-twentieth century liturgical music and the LGBT-welcoming university parish. 

I remember, a few years ago, spending a weekend in a monastery so assiduous in observing gender-inclusive language that I never heard the word “Lord” spoken in three days of liturgies, homilies included. This polarisation extends to social and political issues, where Catholics of a conservative stamp have crafted an alignment (shocking to the average European Catholic) between opposition to “socialised medicine” (in the language of the Catholic Social Teaching: universal access to health care), opposition to gun control, and support for the death penalty.

Some years ago, before we moved to the Philadelphia area, our parish organised a debate on the death penalty, and I was astonished to hear that the speaker defending the proposition that the death penalty was an integral part of current Catholic teaching was a Catholic theologian teaching at a local Catholic college. 

During a panel discussion of the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century I was dumbfounded when a professor of theology and business at a Catholic college dismissed Piketty’s critique of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a diminishing minority as the fruit of his “envy”. 

Trying to reduce wealth and income inequality was, he told us candidly,  basically sinful. My wife and I decided to baptise our second child in the parish in Italy where I had been raised and where we had got married, rather than in our parish in the US.

The history of Catholicism in the US is chronologically shorter and very different to that of most Churches in Europe, and it can be read as a history of shifting internal tensions and divisions. 

There was a first period in which immigrants from different national Catholic cultures co-existed uneasily: the predominant Irish American Catholics jostled with German, French and Polish Catholics, but these communities and others of European origin together asserted supremacy over other cultural and theological expressions of Catholicism (especially the Latino). 

But they were united in being the butt of anti-Catholic prejudice at the hands of the undeclared religious establishment of the US, that is, Protestantism.

Despite the deep divisions that emerged within Catholicism about the legitimacy of slavery, in the nineteenth century American Catholics were kept together by the fact that they belonged to a Church that was growing not only demographically, but in influence and social status. 

They also united around deepening allegiance to the papacy: the growth of the US Catholic Church coinciding with the “Romanisation” of Catholicism in the nineteenth century.

In Europe, the Church declared itself under siege from liberalism and the rise of nationalism, and unity with the Pope became an implicit silencing of voices questioning the unity of the Church. 

The Americanisation of the US Church followed a different trajectory from Catholicism elsewhere: in Europe, nations tended to be built at the expense of the Church, while American ideals and rituals – such as Thanksgiving – took on almost sacred significance, and nationalism had many of the features (to quote Robert Bellah) of a “civil religion”.

The twentieth century was “the American century”, in which the US came to assume an increasingly unchallenged role as the sole global superpower. This was a factor in keeping American Catholicism together, but fault lines around attitudes to social issues, mostly to do with sexual morality, were visible as early as the 1930s. 

But there were no serious tears in the fabric of the Catholic Church until the closing years of the century. The Second Vatican Council provoked a period of tumultuous change almost everywhere in the global Church, creating a new balance between different sensibilities; it produced different kinds of Catholicisms, usually described as “liberal-progressive” and “conservative-traditionalist”. 

There’s a certain degree of approximation in these labels, which are borrowed from Western political history, and they conceal the diversity within both camps.

But the tension between liberal and conservative played out in the US in a dramatic way. I am familiar with the same tension between more progressive-leaning and more traditional Catholics in Europe. But it is only here in the US that have I found the Church to be so riven by the so-called “culture wars”. 

There is not only the theological drive to reverse the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s (the post-liberal and the neo-conservative theological movements), but this project is now hitched to a larger political and civilisational narrative – a narrative that is technically partisan, in the sense that it forces the citizen to select a political party in an electoral system where there are – in effect – only two parties to choose from. 

In a sense, a two-party system has created a two-party Church. This has led to a series of fault lines in the Church that build on the fault lines of the nineteenth century (the tensions between different national-ethnic Catholic tribes, the rift over slavery) and of the twentieth century (the divide over politics and economics and over sexual morality): fault lines always there but masked until relatively recently.

This polarisation of American Catholics in the US has become more serious and potentially fatal for the unity of the Church because it has followed – I’d say, has followed religiously – the political radicalisation of the cultures of the two political parties on a range of issues, especially social issues, where it is now very hard to find the middle ground. 

For Catholics such as Steve Bannon and Cardinal Raymond Burke, this is about the “defence of Judaeo-Christian civilisation” from its destruction by a pincer attack by liberal elites and “Islamic fascists”.

Enter the sexual abuse crisis, which is now in a phase very different from when it exploded in Boston in 2002: the old rift between conservative and progressive is complicated by the freefall of the credibility of the bishops. 

In this moment in the life of the US Catholic Church, the divide is wide open and there is some kind of analogy with the anti-establishment mood that elected Donald Trump: those who would like to root out gays from the clergy; those who would like to have women priests now; those who dream of a Church run by the lay members of the Church only; those who dream of lay members of the parish able to hire and fire the priest – and of course that new generation of young “anti-Roman Ultramontanists”, who since the very first months of his election have been convinced that Pope Francis is a near heretic.

The abuse crisis has revealed the anger of US Catholics across the board, but also the asymmetry between the two ends of the spectrum. 

At the progressive-liberal end there is a wide variety of ideas and aspirations (not yet concrete proposals) concerning the relationship between lay people and clergy, the role of women in the Church (from those who would like to see women deacons – this is where I sit on the spectrum – to those who want women priests, to those who want women cardinals); how the churches are funded; greater outreach to those on the margins of the Church; the urgency of radical reform of the Vatican establishment. This melange of ideas does not take into account the huge pushback against the baby steps taken by Pope Francis on these issues.

At the conservative-traditionalist end of the spectrum (and I apologise again for what is an overly schematic description of what is often a more blurry picture), the picture appears to me to be very much less confused: the call is for a reassertion of clear and firm teaching of traditional sexual morality, with a determined focus on the evils of homosexuality. 

The larger cultural moment seems clearer on the right than on the left: it’s been the fate of Pope Francis’ pontificate to coincide with a transition from a neo-conservative and post-liberal Catholic culture – less preoccupied with sexual morality – to a new generation of conservative Catholics: a neo-traditionalist, anti-liberal, and illiberal Catholic culture whose theology is very hard to distinguish from the schismatics of the Society of Saint Pius X.

The abuse crisis has entered a new phase, but not because of a new wave of cases. The grand jury report into incidences of clergy abuse in six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania was deeply disturbing, but the evidence would appear to be that the policies put in place by the “Dallas Charter” in 2002 are working. Yet the abuse crisis in 2018 has become an integral part of the increasingly ugly war between competing narratives about the future of the Church in the US. 

It is now an agent in the spread in Rome of the kind of American Catholicism championed by Bannon and Cardinal Burke. This brand of Catholicism is a small minority amongst American churchgoing Catholics, but it is the best-organised faction in the media, in the seminaries, and in the world of Catholic donors.

The “united” in “The United States” is now as aspirational as it is factual. The unity of the US is in question more now than at any time since the Civil War, 150 years ago. Something similar could be said for the Catholic Church in the US: it is more divided today than it has ever been. 

The “holiness” of the Church is something objective; it does not depend on the holiness of its members. And the “oneness” of the Church too, does not depend on the unity of its individual members with one another. But “the Church is one” means also “one Church throughout the world, united and non-sectarian”. 

This is why the increasingly bitter crisis in the Catholic Church in the US is not just a problem for US Catholics or for Pope Francis. It is a problem for all Catholics.

Massimo Faggioli is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia.