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WHITHER AMERICAN CATHOLICS?  
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Harold Meyerson
April 22, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ The Church in the U.S., as in much of Europe, is shrinking. In
exiting the Church, liberals and radicals and the just plain disgusted
have left in their wake a right-wing laity and priesthood arrayed
against liberalism’s embrace of the marginalized. _

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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
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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
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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
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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
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“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.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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* Pope Francis
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* religion
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