Catholic Winter, Catholic Spring

Anthony Annett
October 18, 2016 - 11:19am

I have rarely seen such high chutzpah as with the reaction to the Wikileaks emails between Democratic operatives lamenting the influence of the political right in American Catholic circles. For sure, some of this banter was tedious and predictable. But to my surprise, some of it was also highly perceptive—including the fact that these right-wing elements distort and misinterpret concepts like Thomism and principles like subsidiarity, and that they foment a “bastardization of the faith” that neglects the long and noble history of Christian Democracy. I couldn’t have said it better myself!

And yet…the very people condemned for bastardizing the faith are now in all-out attack mode, insinuating a Clintonite anti-Catholic conspiracy. But this is akin to Donald Trump calling out other men for sexual assault—it merely invites us to turn the tables on the finger pointer. So let’s do that. Because the right-wing dominance of American Catholic thought is no accident. Rather, it is part of a deliberate strategy to mute the social justice tradition and align Church teaching with free market individualism. In other words, the accusers did exactly what they accuse their political opponents of doing. Isn’t imitation the best form of flattery?

A little history: how many people today have heard of the Powell memorandum? Probably too few, given its outsized influence on the evolution of political institutions and norms. Basically, Lewis Powell—whom Nixon would appoint to the Supreme Court—argued that corporations and the free enterprise system were under attack, and that big business needed to organize and fight back. And so it did, in a remarkably successful strategy. This helps explain the rise of powerful corporate-funded think tanks like Heritage, Hudson, and American Enterprise Institute. It helps explain the emergence of Fox News and the alternative media universe. It helps explain the tight ideological network overseeing business and economics education.

This strategy also had a Catholic dimension. Concurrent with these trends, there was a concerted effort to fight back against what some saw as a leftist economic drift within the church, especially after the council. Thus William Buckley could openly disdain a papal encyclical, Catholic intellectuals could safely use Catholic principles to defend economic libertarianism, and a whole movement could seek to marry Catholic with right-wing evangelical concerns. (Of course, Roe v. Wade was the best gift they could have possibly received.) This strategy over the past few decades has been well-documented in John Gehring’s recent book.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/catholic-winter-catholic-spring