I’ve said this time and time again, but it bears repeating. Unlike many news outlets, we don’t have a billionaire benefactor bankrolling our work. We don’t run glossy ads in our magazine from high-paying corporate advertisers. Our ability to publish without interference, and with the boldness required for these dangerous times, depends on readers like you. We’re committed to publishing uncompromising journalism to guide you through the chaos and give you the clear-eyed reporting that you depend on to take action.

I know economic uncertainty might make this a difficult time to donate. But your support, no matter how small, helps our reporters continue investigating the roots of this economic turmoil and the path forward.

If you value journalism that cuts through the noise to deliver clarity and context in these uncertain times, can you chip in to support our work today?

–David Dayen, Executive Editor

Today, I find myself—a secular Jewish democratic socialist—mourning Pope Francis more, I’m certain, than any number of self-proclaimed orthodoxer-than-thou Catholics. Surely, more than JD Vance, who traffics in the very Goebbels-esque calumnies about immigrants that the Pope explicitly condemned in February and that he returned to in his valedictory Easter message, which he had read to the world on Sunday. It included these words:

What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world! How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!

On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!

Even the conservative Church hierarchy in the U.S. shares much of Francis’s view of Catholicism’s support for immigrants; unlike Francis, however, they subordinate that issue beneath those of abortion, gays and lesbians, and other right-wing culture-war favorites. For that matter, Francis’s condemnation of the inherent abuses in capitalism didn’t really break ground that was altogether new to the Church; even his conservative predecessors authored documents that condemned the market economy for its spiritual hollowness, corrosive individualism, and feckless disruption of community and (in the case of John Paul and Benedict) tradition. In a sense, papal critiques of modern capitalism date back to the late 19th century, and their persistence led banker William Simon, who’d been Treasury secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, to try to build a wing of the U.S. Church that rejected such views in favor of might be termed the Milton Friedman subspecies of Catholicism. While that subspecies occasionally popped up on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, it never reached far into the pews.

Today, however, Francis’s embrace of gays and lesbians and the more overtly diverse humanity that is a feature of 21st-century life—an embrace he’d called Christian and that I term "humanistic"—has indeed encountered a backlash that reaches deep into the pews. As E.J. Dionne noted in a brilliant feature-length analysis of Francis that the Prospect ran a decade ago, the pope’s answer to a question on the Church’s position on gays—"Who am I to judge?"—was the definitive moment in his papacy, a thunderclap break with the kind of orthodoxy that had long defined the Church to both the faithful and outsiders.

It was John XXIII, during his brief papacy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who’d initiated, with Vatican II, the Church’s on-again, off-again outreach to the vast hordes of humanity that the Church had characteristically ignored or condemned, to a quest for more expansive forms of social justice, to messages and messaging (like the subordination of the Latin Mass to the vernacular) that a broader share of the laity and non-Catholics could find more compelling. To the guardians of orthodoxy, this edged to the borders of heresy, and Francis’s two predecessors sought to roll it back, even as Francis extended it to meet the needs of social justice and actually-existing humans in our current century.

But the backlash is flourishing among the priests, along many of the same lines that define our culture wars. A 2022 survey of 3,500 Catholic priests in the U.S. found that in the subset of those ordained since 2020, fully 80 percent identified as "conservative/orthodox," while virtually none termed themselves liberal.

By the same token, though, the Church in the U.S., as in much of Europe, is shrinking. According to the Pew Research Center, 19 percent of Americans today are Catholic, down from 24 percent in 2007. Some of the shrinkage is doubtless due to the sexual abuse scandals that have wracked the Church, some of it to its subordination of women and its overall deranged views of anything related to sexuality. Francis took a less censorious view of divorce than the Church had previously countenanced, but the idea that presumably celibate priests, no matter their actual conduct, should exercise a veto power over marital and conjugal relations has surely driven many to leave the Church.

The decline in church affiliation isn’t limited to Catholics. The increasing identification of religion generally and Christianity particularly with conservatism is both cause and effect of the demographic changes in religious composition. Pew found that the percentage of self-described liberals who identified as Christians has declined by 25 percentage points between 2007 and today, while among conservatives, that decline was a mere seven percentage points. Not surprisingly, then, the AP VoteCast 2024 exit poll showed Catholics voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by an 11-percentage-point margin.

Where have all the once-Catholic, once-Christian, once-denominationally-affiliated liberals gone? To faiths of their own devising or to some form of secular humanism. Michael Harrington, who as a young man educated by the Jesuits moved from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker to an atheistic democratic socialism, described himself in his autobiography as "a pious apostate, an atheist shocked by the faithlessness of the believers." Faithlessness, that is, in the causes of justice and the claims of the poor and the marginal articulated in the Sermon on the Mount, and more recently by Francis.

In exiting the Church, those liberals and radicals and just plain disgusted have left in their wake a right-wing laity and priesthood, no longer arrayed merely against women’s reproductive freedoms, but now increasingly also against liberalism’s embrace of those marginalized and in some cases against liberal democracy itself. Some share Vance’s admiration for the European anti-liberal far right; some would even be more comfortable in a theocratic regime like the ayatollahs’ Iran, if only it were Catholic.

Churches aren’t merely spiritual institutions; they’re temporal, too. They’re shaped by the political economies, the cultural pressures, the national and tribal allegiances that surround their priests and parishioners. The Eastern Orthodox Church now has its Ukrainian wing and its Russian wing. During the American Civil War, denominations split into Northern and Southern branches, the Southern preaching God’s support for Black slavery. Today’s Catholic doctrine as defined by JD Vance exhibits a similar dismissal of the claims of a common humanity.

Francis’s liberal appointments to the College of Cardinals may be sufficient to ensure that at least some of his radical spirit will live on in his successor, but at its base, the U.S. Church may soon become the kind of anti-liberal Trumpian sect that Vance personifies. That form of Catholicism calls to mind the late-in-life conversion to Catholicism of the right-wing attack-dog newspaper columnist Robert Novak, known far and wide as "the prince of darkness" among journalists. At the celebration following Novak’s baptism, his friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, "Well, we’ve now made Bob a Catholic. The question is, can we make him a Christian?" That quip, I fear, now pertains to the Trumpian rump of Catholicism now surging in the American Church.