Heavy Lift?
John Gehring’s exhaustive account of Catholicism in the Trump era suffers slightly from having been in press when Pope Francis died, and somewhat more for having been completed before the current Trump presidency. It reads like a message from another age, if not another planet, and perhaps one that we wished we still lived in. Kamala Harris gets two brief mentions, J. D. Vance is entirely absent (save from the page-and-a-half preface hastily added in three months before the 2024 presidential election), and President Biden is everywhere. Cardinal McElroy is still in San Diego and Robert Prevost is nowhere to be seen. “Former President” Trump is nothing more than a threat.
Timing, however, isn’t everything. John Gehring knows how much has changed since he finished writing the book. We readers are no less aware, but what we encounter in the pages is not so much old news as a chilling history and a forecast of the dangers ahead for the Church—dangers coming daily to pass in the first year of the second Trump presidency. What Gehring gives us is what has been developing for decades unbeknown to most Catholics, both progressive and traditional. All he discusses was already in place in the relatively golden age we might be hankering for. Above all else, Gehring’s book shows the extraordinary interconnections of political power, conservative religion, and plain old money, and how such an unholy trinity threatens the integrity of the Church. If we are indeed going to reclaim it, we will need to do some heavy lifting.
It may be that coming a little late in the day, the book is more valuable than it might have been had it appeared two years ago. Then, synodality was in the air; Francis was still charming and inspiring the Church, even if from a wheelchair; and many of us would have laughed off any notion of a second Trump presidency. We might not have taken Gehring’s warning sufficiently seriously; now we know better. We might have found fault with the Trumpian leanings of so many bishops, but might not have suspected just how many Catholics would vote Republican. So just what are the takeaways from the analysis of the immediate past that Gehring’s book so brilliantly achieves?
The seven chapters break down into an initial four that lay out the looming challenges of the political-religious interactions, and three that suggest ways forward for what Gehring calls “the struggle to define the public voice of Catholicism in political life.” The opening chapter explores the roots of the present polarization in the American Church, beginning with Vatican II and going on to examine the issues underlying the ethical teachings of the episcopate and “the fate” of Cardinal Bernardin’s Common Ground initiative. It ends with the bishops’ increasingly public resistance to Pope Francis’s efforts to promote a consistent ethic of life. The second chapter is a detailed look at the run-up to the 2016 election and the first Trump administration, focusing on the extent to which Trump drew on wealthy conservative Catholics (and not a few bishops) for support. Chapter three primarily addresses the role of the U.S. bishops in anti-abortion politicking and the “Communion wars” waged by a few of them against Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Chapter four, to me the most alarming section, outlines in extraordinary detail the carefully managed program of ultra-conservative “culture warriors” to reduce Catholicism to a few issues that handily coincide with the agenda of the first (and second?) Trump term of office. The fifth chapter turns to remedies for the plight laid out in the first four. It is something of a laundry list of liberal Catholic stances that coincide with the concerns of many Democrats: critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, gun control, the climate crisis, restorative justice, white supremacy, and clerical sexual abuse. The penultimate chapter explores the Catholic position on LGBTQ and transgender rights. The book concludes with a hopeful look at the role of synodality and the place of women in the Church in the context of “the steady erosion of institutional Catholic life.”
Reading Gehring’s excellent account of all that we face to “reclaim” Catholicism, and how fragile the positions are that we might adopt in order to succeed, I found myself thinking of that lone Chinese man in Tiananmen Square, standing in the way of a huge tank, defying it to crush him, and with him, the values of his culture. And as I wondered what was going through his mind, I also kept being drawn to the example of the prophet Amos, the simple soul who reluctantly but honorably shouldered God’s call to speak truth to the powerful of his time, to tell them that their religion condemned their trampling upon “the poor and needy.”
The parallel with Tiananmen Square is more a challenge than a comfort. Does the lone human being facing the technology of warfare represent the Church standing up to authoritarianism, threats to democracy, and the undermining of the rule of law? Or does he symbolize grassroots Christians confronted with a morally compromised episcopate? Or is he the Church of Vatican II contending with an unholy alliance of ultra-conservative Catholics and the forces of extreme right-wing politics? The first is pretty much what Gehring would like to see. The second is the sad reality of the failure to confront clerical sexual abuse and the inability of the bishops as a whole to look beyond abortion to the entirety of a right-to-life ethic. And the third is the struggle to maintain the freedom of the Church from co-option by any political party that does not care for the dignity of every human being.
A lot of what Gehring presents in the first two chapters in particular is not especially new, though his extensive data-mining is impressive. This is particularly important in the second chapter, where he charts the drift of Catholic politicos from the never-Trump camp into the ranks of MAGA, and introduces the figure of Leonard Leo, surely the Darth Vader of Gehring’s account. A Catholic lawyer and the head of the Federalist Society, Leo has had an enormous influence on appointments to the Supreme Court, as Gehring details, and perhaps an even greater role in championing the Catholic conservative influence in Republican politics, discussed at length in chapter four. I would bet that 95 percent of churchgoing Catholics have never heard of this man, though he has had a substantial role in shifting Catholic voters to the right, pouring money into right-wing Catholic ventures, and making Pope Francis seem irrelevant to many U.S. bishops. Readers of this book will soon understand how threatening the role of Leo and like-minded individuals is to the fortunes of a healthy Church, and perhaps a healthy politics. “Inspired by faith, flush with funding,” to use Gehrig’s phrase, Leo and his pals have thoroughly outmaneuvered any opportunity for the Church to either stand aside from political issues or speak prophetically to American society. All the initiatives of the second Trump administration are here in nuce, and everything the president favors is somehow acceptable to conservative Catholicism—or something to which it can turn a blind eye.
All of this would be enormously depressing if Gehring did not go on in three final chapters to outline some significant paths of resistance to the religio-political juggernaut of MAGA Catholicism. There truly are many wonderful people and a number of organizations devoted to saving the Catholic Church’s longstanding commitment to human decency. Gehring highlights the struggle to promote a consistent ethic of life; the promotion of justice for and full reception of LGBTQ and transgender Catholics in the faith community; and the need to recognize how radically the Church may have to change. The phrase “Kairos moment” is often heard in religious writings, but the more relevant term here might be the “Easter moment” of death and resurrection. Gehring’s proposals for the reclamation of American Catholicism identify the work of the good and the just, and we all have to hope they will succeed, but they come across as high-minded and worthy, lacking the teeth that we are going to need. I fear they may not be sufficiently radical to overturn the forces with which they have to contend—namely, a majority of Catholics favoring the policies of the present administration, and a sizable number of bishops who are either similarly supportive or simply cowardly.
Gehring is not a theologian, and he cannot be faulted for not turning to thinkers like Tomáš Halík, Simone Weil, and Gianni Vattimo for a more deeply formulated set of ideas. Perhaps he is right that we simply have to slog away at the corporal works of mercy, which is certainly Christlike in its death to self. One very important development that came too late for this book, but that has to have a huge role in the revised edition that Gehring ought to be working on right now, is the advent of an American pope. Leo XIV is already showing signs of impatience with the U.S. bishops, calling on them to engage with Trump. No American bishop can now claim that the pope just doesn’t understand American culture or any other such nonsense. Synodality gets coverage in Gehring’s final chapter, and rightly so. But only Leo can fertilize the synodal desert of the U.S. Church, where fear, inertia, and a substantial remnant of clericalism hold sway. Could there be a connection between the way in which the U.S. is becoming a pariah among the nations and the well-attested isolationism of the U.S. institutional Church? And do both need a grassroots revolution? Could a revived and healthy Church actually begin to insist on attention to the common good in American political culture? And could the Democrats swallow their secular pride and wake up to the gift of Catholic social teaching?
In the end, what’s needed in this ever more polarized Church and world is an orientation to what we might call the radical middle. For the Church, the message of the parable of the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25’s great surprise—that human dignity is paramount—cuts across all the battle lines one can imagine and insists solely on our concentrated attention to the many types of vulnerability on display today. So simple—yet Gehring’s book is an insightful and sobering assessment of just how difficult finding the radical middle might be.
Reclaiming American Catholicism
Faith, Politics and the Future of the Catholic Church
John Gehring
Georgetown University Press
$29.95 | 395 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment