Counter-Currents
Political Catholicism Reimagined for the Liberal Elites
Robert Hampton
1,324 words
“Political Catholicism” can evoke a lot of things. Some on the Right may think of the Habsburgs, or some revanchist regime restoring throne and altar. Liberals may think it’s a hidden code for fascism, based on vague memories that the Pope supported the Nazis . . . or something like that. Evangelicals likely think of political Catholicism as the fulfillment of Know-Nothing nightmares. But most American Catholics wouldn’t know what political Catholicism is. They hardly attend church, much less listen to their bishops.
But even though this concept is absent from the American political scene, many Catholic intellectuals want to make it real. Matthew Walther, a contrarian conservative and editor of the Catholic publication The Lamp, offered his vision of political Catholicism to New York Times (NYT) readers last week. It was far from neoreaction or clerico-fascism. It’s merely pro-life social democracy.
Walther begins his article with a strong appeal to the sensibilities of his liberal readers. The first paragraphs discuss how a reactionary Catholic journal in the 1960s endorsed black power. That journal, Triumph, was founded by Brent Bozell. Bozell was one of the architects of the modern conservative movement. He founded National Review with William Buckley and co-wrote Barry Goldwater’s famous Conscience of a Conservative. But in the 1960s, he drifted toward what would today be called integralism and demanded a more active role for the Catholic Church in American life. While National Review condemned black power, Triumph praised it as a necessary reaction against white racism and “the soulless tyranny of secular liberalism.”
Walther doesn’t fully endorse this stance, yet his purpose is to let readers know that political Catholics share the same distorted view of race as NYT readers. “Reactionary” Catholics and atheist cat ladies can both agree that black lives matter, systemic racism rules our society, and black riots are good. Walther’s overall point is that Church teachings supports much of the modern Left’s racial agenda. Throughout the article, we see little that would upset liberal readers.
The conservative bases his political Catholicism primarily on the agenda of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops: “in favor of looser immigration policies, prudent stewardship of the environment and criminal sentencing reform, yet opposed to abortion, same-sex marriage and divorce.” Later on in the piece, he adds: “A new Catholic politics would ‘baptize’ Bernie Sanders’s health care plan, degrowth economics and bans on single-use plastics while drawing attention to neglected elements of our own political heritage that really are worth preserving, such as the presumption of innocence.”
He argues that the Church’s politics coincides with the “realignment” that mainstream populists love to harp on about. Walther says that most American voters support progressive economic policies, while nearly half favor socially conservative positions. The implication is that there’s a huge coalition of pro-life social democrats. People want single-payer healthcare to go along with restrictions on abortion and euthanasia (and whatever “degrowth enconomics” are). To believe this, you’d have to think President Trump won the 2016 election through appeals to Catholic Social Teaching. (Walther also implies Joe Biden became president through similar appeals.) But this ignores what issues actually motivated the electorate. Nearly all studies on Trump voters–including on those Democrats who crossed party lines–found that race and identity issues were the chief factors, not economics and certainly not social conservatism. These voters may like the welfare state, but they care far more about immigration and crime than they do about abortion or religious liberty. Trump barely touched on social conservative issues in both of his campaigns and Biden ran as the most pro-choice presidential candidate in American history. Neither showed the apparent popularity of Catholic Social Teaching (CST).
Walther does admit that the shared values of America’s political parties (”a bellicose foreign policy, free trade, social libertinism and the financialization of the economy”) are the opposite of CST. He argues that the church’s politics can serve to inspire a realignment of the future which would require voters to completely drop their present concerns and focus on what Catholic intellectuals care about. That’s an unlikely prospect.
The writer also offers a Catholic version of globalism: “Instead of lionizing the neoliberal banalities of Davos Man, Catholic social teaching articulates a morally inflected defense of internationalism that rejects most of what makes Americans suspicious of it — the obliging attitude toward corporate power, the soft cultural imperialism of liberal nongovernmental organizations — while insisting upon its indispensability for the common good.” This once again fails to consider the anti-globalists’ primary motivation, namely immigration. Saying globalism is for the “common good” does not change the fact that it sends millions of Third Worlders to the West.
The main goals for Walther are to bring Christian democracy to America and revive Catholic culture. Catholic culture, in Walther’s telling, is a conservative intellectual’s dream:
It would model virtues such as gregariousness, intellectual curiosity and munificence. It would offer an unapologetic defense of leisure and innocent entertainment by showing us the innate worthiness of everything from public barbecue grills and minor league baseball to regional theater companies and the miracle of hi-fi recording.
Just what America needs: a culture to gush over minor league baseball. That’s really what’s missing in our country right now.
The article’s chief failure is imagining that there is a constituency for Christian democracy in America. There isn’t. As stated before, most American Catholics don’t attend church. Only 39% say they regularly go to mass. The number of supporters of traditional Catholic teachings are even worse. 56% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most cases, in total contrast to Church teachings. Meanwhile, a majority of Protestants, whose churches are less emphatic about abortion, believe the practice should be illegal in most cases. Most American Catholics believe the Church should be more welcoming to gays and divorcees.
The Church itself is incapable of acting as an effective political force in the West, outside of barring contraceptives to Africa and helping Third Worlders migrate. It failed to stop abortion and gay marriage throughout Europe, despite its bishops trying to rally the masses. And Christian democracy is a decrepit ideology throughout Europe. There is no longer a Christian Democrat party at the forefront of Italian politics, despite the fact that they ruled the country for much of the post-war era. The Christian Democrats still govern in Germany, but they can hardly be said to stand for Christian values anymore. Both of these parties were only really able to succeed politically thanks to the money and support of the American State Department. America needed non-fascist anti-Communists to govern Europe, and they found them in the Christian Democrats. With the Cold War over and Europe becoming increasingly secular, these parties no longer uphold the political Catholic ideal Walther wants for America.
It’s unclear how Christian Democracy could take root here. It only appeals to Catholic intellectuals who feel that the Republicans are too racist and the Democrats are too pro-choice. This is a very narrow demographic that is overrepresented at the American Conservative magazine, but does not represent a significant portion of the Right or even of the Catholic faithful. Walther constructs a fantasy constituency in his appeal to liberals.
The only political Catholicism that liberals would tolerate is one that devotes itself completely to open borders. Case in point: Catholic bishops recently admonished Catholic politicians for supporting abortion and threatened to withhold communion from serious offenders. This announcement drew a swift backlash, particularly from Catholic Democrats. It doesn’t appear the Church can get the faithful to act in accordance with their wishes, much less the rest of society.
Political Catholicism, Christian Democracy, whatever you want to call it: It’s not going to work in modern American politics. It doesn’t address the root crises in our nation and seeks to direct populist energies in a silly direction. Its representatives are goofy Catholic intellectuals who could never win mass appeal or organize a mass movement. It’s merely another harmless “anti-liberal” ideology that reinforces the liberal system.
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9 comments
No, of course this political Catholicism does not speak to our people. What is hungered for is something, someone, somehow to say publicly and encourage us, “It’s OK to take your own side as a White person.” That is what is behind the immigration issue and most all else that matters. We are constantly told it is not OK to think of ourselves in racial terms, when it is actually the most important and transforming aspect we need to pay attention to, wherever we may be in the political/religious spectrum.
Cogent.Speaks to me. Core issues.
Honestly who cares about abortion/gay rights….when we have far more important issues.
A Catholic agenda that is pro-open borders and pro-life is incoherent. The non-White masses streaming over open borders with the active help of the Catholic Church are providing the votes that let pro-abortion, anti-fertility leftists out-vote the relatively pro-fertility White base, generation after generation.
This contradiction has been apparent for a long time. Catholics, and conservative Christians generally, used to say that those who believed in raising babies would inevitably out-vote those who believed in aborting them. There has been ample time for that to happen but it’s not happening, and everyone knows why.
The resolution, unstated but immovable, is that White genocide goes ahead with Catholic support, and whatever happens on the abortion issue happens. Whites must disappear along with our cultures and our values, and what happens after that does not concern us.
Catholics that support the full Catholic social Gospel, which is pro-Jewish, “anti-racist,” and anti-White, are choosing to die. This death is not only individual but collective. It means the erasure of the posterity of our race. All the sacrifices of our ancestors are also rendered meaningless.
The White genocide agenda is the opposite of honoring our fathers and our mothers. It is the opposite of keeping our possession of the land which was given to us. It is the opposite of having life more abundantly. It is the opposite of choosing life.
The White genocide agenda is consistent with choosing sin. The wages of sin are death. When the White race is condemned to death anyway, a major conflict between Whites and sin and its consequence is removed. A major moralizing force, the urge to provide for the long-term good of one’s race, is removed or suppressed.
How enthusiastic should Whites be for this agenda? Not very.
How enthusiastic are Whites in fact for this agenda? Not very.
Would White Catholics be more enthusiastic for a consistent social agenda, one that aimed to restore both traditional morals and (at least tacitly) to support the White race, which provides the only mass base for supporting them?
There is every reason to think we will never find out.
Libertarianism and Catholic social teaching, two forms of social and economic fantasy never seen in nature.
Well, Catholic social teaching wasn’t a fantasy in my country, Spain. In fact for more than four centuries (from the end of the XV century until the beginning of the XIX) Catholicism was the basis of every policy in Spain. And believe it or not Spain was based on a chaste system (sistema de Castas) grounded on a racial hierarchy, where the ‘old Christians’ [whites] were at the top taking care of the rest of the races. You can read the account of the travels of Alexander von Humboldt around Spanish America where he described all that.
About what in this article is called ‘Political Catholicism’ well, it is just Liberalism with a little of religious make-up, or like some would say: ‘Americanism’. Much of the Catholic mainstream has been infected by this disease since the 60′ of the XX century, there’s a book titled ‘The American proposition’ by David Wemhoff where he describes how the CIA tried to subvert the Catholic doctrine since the Vatican II. The recent clamping down of the Tridentine Mass is just a continuation of this trend, but this artificial uphold of Liberalism inside the Church is destined to fail since the only ones that take Catholicism seriously nowadays are the traditionalist sectors, that is, those who reject Liberalism and Americanism.
In an age where many whites are becoming aware that only through religion groups can endure and prosper, the religious question is becoming unavoidable. Many whites are converting to Eastern Christianity, others are even becoming Muslim, but many of us think like Léon Degrelle, that in the last interview he gave he declared: ‘Catholicism is the exact religion of the Europeans’.
Since I made the comment on my phone, on the subway, I neglected to follow the capitalization pattern which Mr Hampton used, “Catholic Social Teaching “or CTS. It is not at all the same as the historic and traditional Catholicism which Spain once embodied.
CTS is specific body of theorizing that begin in 1891 with Leo XIII’s attempts to grapple with the rise of working-class ideologies of resentment. It has been developed over the last 100+ years as a theoretical alternative both to socialism and capitalism, but especially since Vatican II, it has veered very left in practice and is now mostly indistinguishable from the anti-White drivel flowing from the UN. Having had some experience, I can say that even Catholic institutions don’t follow it.
All this social insanity in the Catholic Church began in the 1960’s with ‘Liberation Theology’ from priests in South America, in the Third World cities such as Rio. I don’t have my LT books anymore due to moving frequently since then, but those writings of Leftist priests had a massive influence on the Church, and resulted in the very visible changes in the Mass itself — such as turning the altar around, stopping the use of Latin, replacing resplendent choirs with guitars, etc. — which drove me away, along with millions of others. Nothing has changed on that stage.
What has changed is that now Whites are outnumbered 10 to 1 on this planet, and the Church has turned its attention to that ‘other’ 90%, and turned its back on ‘old time European religion’, which was once its base. Whites find it difficult to realize that their church has abandoned them, but I see that as the new reality.
The worst problem I see coming out of all this is the continued ban on birth control. American women just ignore the ban, and continue to have fewer than 2 kids. However, the lack of birth control advice and devices in the Third World is what is driving immigration, plain and simple. Catholicism, along with Islam and Hindus, all ban any form of birth control, which is driving the massive overpopulation in poor countries, and which is the reason the continue to be poor and ‘downtrodden’. Missionary work by Catholics just drives the further population explosion worldwide, except here.
Look up ‘Liberation Theology’ online to see where all this started.
Whites have long been outnumbered on this planet. The difference is we used to be proud of the fact we punched well above our weight, now are ashamed of it.
“A very narrow demographic overrepresented at the American Conservative magazine.” Boy, you really hit the nail on the head that time Mr. Hampton. The last time I read AC was a while back when they featured a blow by blow account of J.D. Vance converting to Catholicism.
If AC considers Catholicism to be the official (I can’t find that little ‘r’ with the circle around it on my iPhone keyboard) religion of the conservative movement that’s up to them, but they ought to change their mast head to reflect that.
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