How to Recognize ‘What Is Right’?
In the first two weeks of the Trump presidency, J. D. Vance gave two television interviews. In one he challenged fellow Catholics on the understanding of the hierarchy of love (which he got wrong); in the other, he accused the U.S. bishops of having a financial incentive in their support for the rights of migrants. The vice president thus quickly dispelled any remaining doubt that right-wing, nationalist-populist Catholicism had reached the White House.
Vance’s tone and the sources from which he draws his views represent quite a shift from the previous Catholic vice president. In delivering keynote remarks to the Global Hunger Conference at the State Department in 2011, Joe Biden quoted Paul VI: “Development is the new word for peace.” A few weeks before that, Pope Benedict XVI had addressed the Bundestag in Berlin on democracy. He drew on the first book of Kings in commenting on how power corrupts the powerful in words that are remarkably striking at this moment:
Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action at all. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without justice, what else is the State but a great band of robbers?” as Saint Augustine once said. We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right—a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.
Benedict XVI was aware of the debate over the “Christian roots” of the continent and of the European Union at that time:
The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome—from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.
Fourteen years later, the second Trump presidency is making clear that the first was a harbinger of the widespread threat to western democracies. We have moved from a post–World War II and post–Cold War order marked (at least rhetorically) by cooperation and consensus, to a twenty-first-century order of global competition among the United States, China, Russia, and India, with Europe (the old continent) basically staying on the sidelines. But there, as in the United States, immigration is a leading political issue. Steve Bannon’s plan for a Europe-wide nationalist and populist movement now has better chances of success than it did in 2018-2019. Right-wing governments are firmly in power in Hungary and Italy. The continuing uncertainty in France, along with upcoming elections in Germany—to be followed by Poland, Norway, and the Czech Republic—could turn the continent closer to what Bannon had in mind. And Elon Musk now has more power to help make it happen.
European Catholics are visibly divided. This month’s elections in Germany are the most important test. We’ll see how German Catholics position themselves vis-à-vis the rise of the far right. In the last few years, the German bishops’ conference has published an impressive series of deep theological statements on democracy and against populism; one released in February 2024 was bluntly titled “Ethno-nationalism and Christianity are Incompatible.” Yet there are other voices. This month, Communio, a key journal in post–Vatican II Catholic theology, featured on its website an article on immigration (in German) by editor Ludger Schwienhorst-Schönberger, titled “Migration Policy and the Order of Love: A Theological Correction,” which concluded this way: “A party that still explicitly refers to the Christian view of humanity should not allow itself to be intimidated by some bishops and theologians and defamed as unchristian if, after careful consideration, it comes to the conclusion that migration policy needs a radical correction.” The article appeared the day after Christian-Democratic party leader, Friedrich Merz—hitherto the favorite to become Germany’s next chancellor—suffered a blow when twelve of his own legislators refused to support him in backing a strict migration bill, which then failed to pass in parliament. Opposition arose in part because Merz had also sought the support of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). In many European countries, Catholics are far from being—or even trying to be—a firewall against the far right. The elections in Germany will be an important test to see where European Catholicism is going.
The Vatican and Francis
Catholic cardinals are divided too, with some happier than others since last November’s U.S. election. On January 29, German cardinal Gerhard Muller (prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017) told Il Corriere della Sera that he prefers Trump to Biden—“better a good Protestant than a bad Catholic”—and that “Trump will help the Church because it represents the values of natural law: inviolability of life, importance of marriage, religious freedom.” Pope Francis obviously sees the situation differently, given his appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy as the archbishop of Washington D.C.
Trump himself seems more proactive regarding the Vatican this time around, but Francis appears to be more cautious on the general topic of Western democracy. In a January speech to the diplomatic corps, he talked about the value of diplomacy—“diplomacy of hope, of truth, and of forgiveness” but did not focus on the state of democracy at this moment. During the 2021-2024 synodal process, Francis repeatedly mentioned parliamentary democracy as a foil, in order to explain what the Synod was not. What seemed forgotten was that the path of the Catholic Church in the last two centuries was in large part laid out through democratic systems, and that democratic values are a “secularized legacy of Christianity that the Catholic Church has had a hard time reintegrating and realizing within itself,” as French Jesuit Christoph Theobald wrote in his book on synodality. Francis’s efforts to avoid linking synodality with “democratization” actually prohibited him from reminding us clearly that synodality relies on an ethos that much more closely resembles democracy than populism and authoritarianism. Vatican II made this unmistakably clear.
There are other indicators of his views on democracy. One example is the tendency to construct the juridical and constitutional foundations of papal power in Vatican City State in incautious ways. This was most visible in the constitutional law promulgated in 2023, which utilized some unprecedented language (for the modern papacy), creating the wrong impression that Jesus also gave Peter temporal power as a king. The reforms of Vatican City State and in the Roman Curia reveal a mixed picture. Those on the management of financial and economic resources were inspired by international standards. The appointment (unceremoniously announced by Francis on a Sunday-evening talk show on Italian television) of Sr. Raffaella Petrini to head the Governorate of Vatican City State—the highest post ever occupied in the Vatican hierarchy by a woman—was indicative of the pope’s policy of giving women “management, not ministry.” Policy concerning the Vatican City justice system (especially the trial against Cardinal Becciu) and the fight against abuse in the Church (the case of former Jesuit Marko Rupnik) also revealed inconsistencies.
In terms of his critiques of neoliberal capitalism and nationalism, Francis has been both more consistent and insistent. Fratelli tutti, for example, promotes universal aspiration toward fraternity and social friendship, and denounces the emptying of such words such as “democracy,” “freedom,” “justice,” or “unity” (par. 14 and 110). He has denounced “a populism that exploits [these words] demagogically for its own purposes, or a liberalism that serves the economic interests of the powerful” (par. 115). But that same encyclical, while arguing for a better kind of politics, is timid about the defense of Western-style democracy. In the global Catholic Church of which this pope is an expression, the post-colonial involves a de-dogmatization of European anti-fascism and its outcomes. This entails also a new discussion of the lessons that the Catholic Church was thought to have learned about democracy from the (European) tragedies of the twentieth century.
One of these lessons was that democracy was worth fighting and dying for. There was a link between theology of democracy and just-war doctrine. In the post-1945 theological and cultural elaboration of World War II, Catholics adopted a profile that guaranteed a certain cultural continuity with the tradition of the “just war” and therefore made the Catholic religion and the resistance against Nazism and Fascism compatible. John Paul II’s anti-communism was part of that, and as a German, Benedict XVI embodied the awareness that resistance movements against the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes did “a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole” (again, from his September 2011 speech to the Bundestag).
Francis’s theology of peace and war renegotiates much of this. He has affirmed many times that “war is always a defeat,” and in the October 2024 letter to Catholics in the Middle East he stated that “the spirit of evil foments war.” If war is always against the will of God because it is the fruit of Satan, one should draw the conclusion, to use the words of the New Testament, that the whole world history “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). It is a theology of history quite different from Martin Luther King’s “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” But it’s also a departure from a Catholic theology of democracy that had more currency in the second half of the twentieth century, and in a more European and Western Catholicism.
Catholics and Trump in the United States
U.S. Catholics are divided at a moment when different theologies of power, love, rights and duties are invoked directly to justify policy. The constitutional separation of church and state still stands, but the relation between religion and politics is mutating. The Trump-Vance administration looks almost like a third Catholic presidency, but one in which the vice president (who converted to Catholicism in 2019) has far fewer qualms than John F. Kennedy or Joe Biden in stating the theological reasoning behind major policy changes. It’s a form of “theology of the laity”—but shorn of a connection to Vatican II and Catholic social thought, if not outright contradicting it.
Conservative bishops are unsure about how much leeway to give to an administration that meets their wishes about “gender ideology” and abortion (about which the president is far less personally committed than the bishops pretend to believe), but challenges them openly, provocatively, and misleadingly on immigration and more. A real dilemma for Church leaders is what to say to Americans (especially recent legal immigrants who voted for Trump) about Trumpism as the latest incarnation of the American dream.
The right-wing exegesis of Vance’s mention of “ordo amoris” in his “Face the Nation” interview showed a chapter-and-verse approach to the theological tradition, indicative of the return to fundamentalist trends that have precedents in U.S. Catholicism (as Mark Massa’s forthcoming book shows). Especially with the presence of Vance, this presidency has the characteristics of an “übermagisterium” aiming to replace the teaching of the Church with a political-religious ideology. This is further unfolding amid a changing political order, in which third-millennium neo-feudal lords like Musk are a threat not only to democratic sovereignty but also to the independence and autonomy of the Church.
So a big question is: Who speaks for the Catholic Church today? Catholic politicians and political Catholics listen more to influencers and bloggers than to the pope and the bishops. It’s one of the effects of the systematic corruption of the word, in regard to which Church leaders have been culpably silent (or part of the problem). Democracy is made of rules, but it’s also a style that helps preserve content. Catholic leaders—usually so sensitive to the “true, good, and beautiful” triad—have ignored this aspect of democracy, or may be attracted to the “beauty” they see in MAGAism. Yet Trumpism is an aesthetic disaster, even before a moral one, that many Catholic leaders, clergy and lay, have failed to detect. The USCCB’s reflections on this moment—not on this or that particular policy or executive order—are nowhere to be found.
Catholic financial and political elites will find a way to rally around Trump or ride the wave of ecclesial de-establishment that he signifies. Catholic academia is dealing with its own crisis—a technocratic deconstruction of universities that is slowly destroying the profession—and is still trying to understand how to distinguish between “theology of the people” and populism.
Trump II is less a transition of power than a regime change, which has consequences for the place of the Catholic Church. This regime change is no less threatening to the Church than the most secularist impulses of some members of the Democratic party. On one side there is a post-humanist, trans-humanist, and weird-religious push for a multi-planetary brave new world, and on the other side there is a populist-nationalist rage that sees the bishops, the Vatican, and the teaching of the Church as enemies of the people. No matter who prevails within the Trump court, neither of these two cultures will have mercy on “the Catholic thing.” And those Catholic elites at Trump’s court (including some priests and bishops) who think they have a seat at the table might find they’re actually on the menu.
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