I’m falling even farther back in my posts. Yesterday, Sunday, I gave up after ‘ShockWave Flash’ – which I have no need for – kept crashing, and in the process, closing down Chrome – which in itself, has lately been shutting itself off too often. I’ve tried all the online tips I can find to get rid of Shockwave Flash, but it is bundled with Google Chrome and their instructions for unbundling it just do not work.
This morning, intending first to insert the info about the dumb tweets by Melloni and Faggioli, and new photos of the Meisner funeral, it was the Forum server back to its old tricks of opening slow, taking several seconds before I can see onscreen what I have typed, and taking even longer to enable me to correct whatever is wrong on what I could not see as I typed! Or the program suddenly is ‘Not responding’, and when it does that, Chrome itself eventually shuts down. It took me at least one and a half hours before I could post my addenda, so I have not even been able to check out what’s in the usual sites I check at the start of the day… Let me see if this note and the ff article will post properly after I have composed them on Word, and then copying onto the Forum reply box, hoping that at least 90% of my text enhancement commands, painstakingly written out, will come out properly. Because they never do, and I can’t tell where I went wrong unless I see it on Preview in the Forum… And then comes the terrible ordeal of having to make the corrections because entering just one correction can take forever – which is exactly what happened in posting the original Civilta Cattolica article that Dr. Gregg criticizes here.
On that strange, disturbing and anti-American
article in ‘La Civilta Cattolica’
Whoever signed off on this article (assuming it was properly vetted) at the Secretariat of State didn’t pick up
on the authors’ conflation of tangentially related matters, or raise questions about the article’s emotivist tone,
or even noted the authors’ distinctly amateur grasp of American religious history and the finer points of US politics.
[Perhaps because the supposed vetters do not know better themselves and simply consider
Spadaro and Figueroa unassailable because after all, they have the pope’s full confidence]
By Samuel Gregg
CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT
July 14, 2017
Anti-Americanism is as old (if not older) as the American Revolution itself. Like all nations, America has its flaws. But these defects attract disproportionate attention from the rest of the world. This is partly because of the size and worldwide reach of America’s media as well as the United States’ superpower status. On a global scale, the choices made by, say, Argentina and Italy, just aren’t as important for international affairs as decisions made by the United States.
Some of the most insightful analyses of America have been written by non-Americans. The exemplar is Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America (1835/1840). Yet despite the scale and intensity of the attention given to the United States,
it’s not hard to find articles written by intelligent non-Americans which reflect serious misunderstandings and occasional outright ignorance of the political, economic and cultural currents shaping America.
This brings me to a very odd article that recently appeared in
La Civiltà Cattolica: the Italian Jesuit periodical published twice a month and which enjoys a quasi-official status inasmuch as the Vatican’s Secretariat of State exercises oversight over the articles it publishes.
Entitled “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A Surprising Ecumenism,” its authors Father Antonio Spadaro SJ (Civiltà Cattolica’s editor-in-chief) and Rev. Marcelo Figueroa (a Presbyterian pastor who is editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano’s Argentinean edition), make various assertions about specific political and religious trends in the United States - claims which are, at best, tenuous and certainly badly informed.
Consider, for instance, the authors’ analogy between the theological outlook of particular strands of American Evangelicalism and ISIS. As far as I am aware, American self-described fundamentalists are not destroying 2000 year-old architectural treasures, decapitating Muslims, crucifying Middle Eastern Christians, promoting vile anti-Semitic literature, or slaughtering octogenarian French priests.
Another questionable contention made in the article is that the Holy Roman Empire was constituted as an effort to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. This particular analysis will come as news to serious historians of that complicated political entity which became, as the saying goes, neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.
Various links are also made between climate change skepticism, the faith of white southern Christians (comments which, if applied to other racial groups, would be denounced by some as verging on bigotry), and apocalyptic thinking among some American Evangelicals. Taken together, it is claimed, these things reflect and help fuel a Manichean view of the world on the United States’ part. Then there is the article’s peculiar association of the heresy of the Prosperity Gospel with recent efforts to protect religious liberty in America.
No doubt, Evangelical scholars and others will highlight the many problems characterizing the article’s grasp of the history of Evangelical Christianity and fundamentalism in America. One agnostic friend of mine who happens to be a leading historian of American Evangelicalism at a prestigious secular university described the article’s take on this subject to me as
“laughably ignorant”.
I also suspect Rev. Figueroa and Father Spadaro are oblivious, for instance, to many Evangelicals’ embrace of natural law thinking in recent decades: something that, by definition, immunizes any serious Christian from fideist tendencies. But two particular claims made by the authors require a more detailed response.
As noted, the authors assert that Evangelical Fundamentalism has contributed to America adopting a Manichean understanding of international affairs. They argue, however, that
Pope Francis rejects any outlook which sees the world in terms of forces of light and forces of darkness. Instead, they maintain, the pope wisely recognizes that at the root of conflicts between nations “there is always a fight for power.”
[True, Manichaeans were distinguished by their philosophy of dualism which sees everything as black or white – light vs darkness, good vs. evil, love vs hate. As a young man, St. Augustine was a Manichaean for nine years, believing it was better than Christinaity, before he was finally convinced that it was a very flawed belief system and he was baptized into Catholicism. But Bergoglio’s theoreticians, in this case Spadaro and Figueroa, do not seem to see that what they claim to be Bergoglio’s root cause for all conflict – ‘there is always a fight for power’ – is inevitably and inherently a fight between two opposing factions who can only see things in black and white, with respect to the opponent. Is that not therefore, ‘Manichaean’ itself? But Bergoglianism seems to prefer name-calling and labeling others with ‘demonizing’ epithets, instead of presenting solid rational arguments. Witness their handling of the DUBIA! ]
No doubt, the desire for power motivates some international actors. But it is also important to acknowledge that certain ideas — such as Marxism-Leninism, Islamist jihadism, or National Socialism — have driven transnational movements and nation-states to act in ways that are evil because the ideas themselves are evil.
For Americans (and anyone else) to recognize this and call these things by their name is not to buy into Manichaeism. It is simply recognition that some ideas are indeed wicked and lead to many people, even nations, engaging in gravely evil acts.
You can’t understand, for example, the left-populist regime that’s presently destroying Venezuela unless you grasp that its leadership and many of its supporters are partly motivated by a deeply conflictual view of the world. Much of this comes straight from Marx and Lenin (as anyone who has listened to any of the late Hugo Chávez’s short three-hour television rants will tell you). It’s worth recalling that when President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” in 1983, millions of people behind the Iron Curtain instantly understood what he was talking about. They
knew that the systems under which they lived were grounded upon evil ideas about the nature of man and society.
Furthermore, the fact that some Americans describe (often accurately) particular regimes as evil doesn’t mean that they view America as an embryonic Kingdom of God on earth. Plenty of American Evangelicals today are deeply distressed, for example, by the state of elite and popular culture in the United States. Nor are they slow to point out these failings, including when these weaknesses manifest themselves in their own ranks. That should make any Western European or Latin American pause before they start attributing Manichaean views of the world to millions of American Christians.
A second problematic thesis characterizing the Spadaro-Figueroa article which requires more attention is its characterization of the relationship between many Catholics and Evangelicals in America: a rapport which the priest and the minister plainly have great reservations about.
Father Spadaro and Rev. Figueroa correctly observe that many Catholics and Evangelicals have found common cause in recent decades around issues such as “abortion, same-sex marriage, religious education in schools and other matters generally considered moral or tied to values.” They then add that [colore-#b200ff]
“Both Evangelical and Catholic Integralists condemn traditional ecumenism and yet promote an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state.”
By “Catholic Integralists,” we can safely presume that the authors mean the many American Catholics (routinely labeled as “conservative”) who have chosen to ally themselves with Evangelicals to defend things such as the culture of life and religious freedom from the type of doctrinaire secularism which ran rampant under the Obama Administration. But the vast majority of these Catholics aren’t “integralists,” let alone theocrats-in-waiting. Quite the contrary. Nor are the vast majority of Evangelicals in America pushing theocratic agendas.
If one looks, for example, at statements put together by various scholars and intellectuals involved in movements such as “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” they contain not a shred of theocratic aspiration. The ecumenical discussion between those involved in these endeavors have led over time to genuine fruit in terms of clarification of points in common, removing misconceptions, identifying real doctrinal road-blocks, and identifying areas where practical work to promote the common good can be pursued together. This stands in stark contrast to the bromides and non-sequiturs that characterize ecumenical discussion with the rapidly declining liberal mainstream Protestant confessions who long ago abandoned very basic Christian orthodoxies on faith and morals which most Evangelicals continue to rigorously affirm.
Moreover, when it comes to Evangelical and Catholic Christians in America making the argument that, for example, unborn human beings are entitled to the same protections from the unjust use of lethal force as any other human being, or that religious liberty is more than just freedom of worship, or that parents are entitled to insist that their children not be subjected to the nonsense of “gender theory’ at school, these arguments have increasingly been presented in terms of public reason. Catholics have a long tradition of doing this. Yet it is also an approach that many Evangelicals have started embracing in recent years.
This does not add up to the imposition of theocracy or the claiming of special privileges, let alone trying to facilitate quasi-Throne-and-Altar arrangements or some type of Evangelical/Catholic American Nationalism. Contrary to the claims of Father Spadaro and Rev. Figueroa, this is not “a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.”
It’s about maintaining that the truths knowable by all people via their natural reason may be legitimately reflected in the public square of pluralist societies like the United States. Furthermore, the assertion of these truths in this way not only helps facilitate freedom and genuine pluralism (as opposed to the ideology of “diversity”) in America; they also help protect non-Christians and non-believers from unjust coercion as much as any other American.
If the
Civiltà article simply reflected the views of a random Western European Catholic priest and an Argentine Presbyterian minister, few would be concerned about its content. But
Civiltà articles are subject to scrutiny from the Vatican’s Secretariat of State. Hence, it’s curious that whoever signed off on this article (assuming it was properly vetted) at the Secretariat of State didn’t pick up on the authors’ conflation of tangentially related matters, or raise questions about the article’s emotivist tone, or alert Father Spadaro and Rev. Figueroa to their distinctly amateur grasp of American religious history and the finer points of American politics.
If it is the case that red flags were not raised—or were ignored—then all Catholics, American or otherwise, have reason for concern. It is simply not in the universal Church’s interests to develop or encourage substantially false understandings of the United States or the Anglosphere more generally.
People — including the pope and his advisors — are free to form views of different nations and the conduct of international affairs. No one expects the bishop of Rome to be uncritical of the United States, or any other country. There is plenty to criticize about America, just as there is to criticize about Argentina (such the economic delusions, systematic envy, and personality-cults encouraged by the poison of Peronism) or Italy (such as the corruption and rampant clientelism in its political and economic culture to which Vatican officials and Italian clerics have not, sadly, proved immune).
Nevertheless, the development of such views should be informed by careful reflection, a command of detail, and an accurate understanding of the history and development of a country. Regrettably, these are lacking in the Spadaro-Figueroa article and it shows. The greatest damage, however, is to the Holy See’s credibility as a serious contributor to international affairs. And that benefits no one, least of all Pope Francis. [Who, obviously, does not care enough – or know enough – to disown such shoddy claims made in his name by a couple of pseudo-scholars!]
Maureen Mullarkey's take on the Spadaro-Figueroa tract is, as usual, inimitable!
All hail the naked Emperor! Mullarkey provides the illustration by Munro Scott Orr (1874-1955), a UK artist apparently best known for his Art Nouveau illustrations of classic fairy tales.
In God they don't trust:
That anti-American syllabus in Vatican journal
by Maureen Mullarkey
RORATE CAELI
Ju;y 17, 2017
My initial response — unbidden, unguarded — to the
Civiltà Cattolica broadside against American conservatives was relief. Almost a kind of glee.
The Emperor has thrown his New Clothes on the floor in a fit of pique; his courtiers bend low to pick up what is not there. The pantomime is fully in the open. Here, thankfully, is a barefaced specimen of intellectual sterility too obvious for a cosmetic gloss.
The Spadaro-Figueroa tirade is as nasty as it is ignorant. Writing as proxies for Francis, the pair make plain their boss’s uncomprehending distaste for America — its history, its politics, and its Christianity.
They have given us an accidental exposé bereft of critical reflection and with no ear for its own cant. Of a piece with longstanding European disdain for the American character and manners, the invective suggests a crippling case of status anxiety vis-à-vis the global intellectual elite it aches to ingratiate.
Our authors bolt out of the starting gate snorting suspicion of ‘In God We Trust’. The first sentence quivers with implication: “This phrase is printed on the banknotes of the United States of America.” (Hint: These notes are the very stuff of Bergoglio’s “economy that kills.”) The motto represents
“a problematic fusion between religion and state, faith and politics, religious values and economy.”
On exhibit in this chosen opener is
the post-modern denial of the existence of objective reality. The past’s own utterances are not steadfast. The truth of them, like that of any text, is unfixed, determined by current ideological needs.
What In God We Trust represents is the temper of an agonized nation in the throes of the Civil War. First stamped on the two-cent coin in 1864, there is nothing problematic about it. After war began in 1861, a campaign grew to acknowledge God on the small change of quotidian life that passes hand to hand.
The motto originated as a non-denominational prayer — part talisman — against dissolution. Replacing the goddess of liberty, the words were meant to signal future generations that we were not a pagan nation. In the words of one supplicant to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase:
From my hearth I have felt our national shame in disowning God as not the least of our present national disasters.
Why would a contemporary pontificate not second the emotion?
Not engraved on paper bills until the mid-twentieth century, 'In God We Trust' - declared the National Motto of the United States in 1956, in the height of the deadly global struggle of Christian Civilization against Communism, remains on our currency as a daily reminder to put not our trust in princes.
That ancient caution gets under the skin of Vatican rajahs. Their naked irritation brings to mind Dickens’s dismay during his visit to America in the 1840s. The great social critic, the people’s tribune, was distressed that the American merchant class — mere tradesmen — often neglected to remove their hats in the company of their betters.
Fusion between religion and state, faith and politics? Any talk of fusion has to acknowledge the breathtaking synthesis, achieved in our lifetime, between atheistic Leftism and radical/liberal religion.
Spadaro & Co.’s writ of censure projects the current pontificate’s own pretentions and ambitions onto conservative American Christians. This Vatican is up to its gullet in the politics of climate change, of mass migration, of Islamic appeasement, of image-making as a tool of propaganda.
Bergoglio, self-ordained as a geopolitician - and here lauded as one -is elbow-deep in a sly, treacherous politics of class animus. What was Laudato Sì, addressed to the entire planet, but a megalomaniacal synthesis of established religious idiom and radical statist over-reach? Projection is the narcissist’s most characteristic move.
In fine postmodern style, the Vatican’s [putatively] learned toadies upend traditional catechetical insistence on objective evil by muttering darkly about Manichaean visions. They swat at Presidents Bush and Trump for calling evil by name. Where is that delicate papal regard slathered on the Castro thugs?
They deplore the American “bond between capital and profits and arms sales,” a Bergoglian
idée fixe.
Francis’s men cite the meme as if it were an accepted tool of analysis rather than a facile slogan meant to silence prudential concerns about national sovereignty, civic well-being, and the rule of law.
Derrida notwithstanding, there really is a bottom to the abyss of deconstruction. Our high priests of defamation hit it in their equation of George W. Bush with ISIS. Both, you see, share a theopolitics based on “some cult of an apocalypse.” Kudos to Osama bin Laden for having the wit to call Bush a “great crusader.”
The ugliest point in Spadaro & Co.’s lunatic Syllabus of American Errors is its contempt for “religious groups composed mainly of whites from the deep American South.” Sound familiar? It is a riff on [Hilary Clinton’s] “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” but more candidly racist. An insinuation appropriate to academic pit stops like Evergreen State College is grotesque in the pope’s own house organ. It brings to the surface what hovers beneath Francis’ s touted sympathy for the oppressed.
He is concerned only with those poor-and-oppressed whose interests are useful to the Left. And the Left finds it useful to see white skin as a sign of moral defect.
Like Humpty Dumpty, postmodern minds believe words can mean . . . whatever. Accordingly, this foray into sociology collapses evangelicalism into fundamentalism. Others are far better suited to correct the article’s virulent caricature of evangelicalism than I am.
Still, no one can miss one conspicuous contribution to Vatican hostility: pentecostalism and evangelicalism are fast gaining ground in Latin America.
Let bush-league intellectuals mock the prosperity gospel and Norman Vincent Peale’s popularity of sixty years ago. In the end, Horatio Alger stories and work ethic offer poor people as individuals alternatives to collective imprisonment in Francis’s cherished mystical category, The Poor.
Francis, we are told, delivers a “counter narrative” to the American “narrative of fear.” This is the language of leftwing academia, not of the Church.
he Church speaks of truth and falsity. Despite time-bound burdens on clear expression, aspiration to truth is its sacred trust. Narratives, by contrast, are rhetorical devices, elements of fiction. Paul tells us we see but through a glass, darkly. Yet we labor to pierce the obscurity, not to devise scripts that suit the moment.
The value of this diatribe in Civiltà Cattolica is its exposure of just how far down the rabbit hole Francis has taken us. An intellectually degraded pontificate is incapable of moral or theological lucidity. As Pascal Bruckner noted more than a decade ago, “In Europe, anti-Americanism is a veritable passport to notoriety.” And this pontificate lusts to be noticed on modernity’s own terms.
GOD HELP US!
Then there was this early reaction in the UK's Catholic Herald...
Why is 'Civiltà Cattolica' attacking American Christians?
If the essayists are allowed to engage in corny psychoanalysis, then permit me to do the same
by Tim Stanley
CATHOLIC HERALD
July 16, 2017
The Jesuit magazine
La Civiltà Cattolica has just published
an essay on US religious politics that beggars belief. I cannot comment on the theology, but I know my American history – and
this article is full of so many errors that it’s impossible to keep silent about it. It matters because one of the authors, Fr Antonio Spadaro SJ, the magazine’s editor, is said to be a confidant of the Pope.
[More than confidant, he has become this pope's surrogate, unofficial spokesman as well as primary adviser on anything that has to do with the media.]
Where to begin? The essay asserts that an alliance between evangelical fundamentalism and Catholic “integralism” has driven the Republican Party towards a Manichean, materialist, economically regressive Right. There’s a lot of words in that summary. Not all of them are accurate.
Let’s begin with the Catholic bit. I have never once met an American Catholic politician who has described themselves as an integralist
[‘Integriste’ is the French word they tried to adapt]. The phrase is European in origin: it refers to a supposed Catholic traditionalism, bordering on fascism, that seeks to close the gap between church and state. To repeat: I have never met an integralist. The essay quotes the website Church Militant, which may well travel that path [For all its defects, the site most certainly does not!], but I strongly doubt that House Speaker Paul Ryan, one of America’s most powerful Catholics, reads it.
We are told there is a
“surprising ecumenism … developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists brought together by the same desire for religious influence in the political sphere”. This is an odd reading of history. Catholic and evangelical alliance-building began openly in the Seventies over abortion – an alliance that fought for the rights of the unborn and which can be credited with reducing sectarian prejudice and tension.
That said, the political coalition has been tenuous ever since. The two groups typically divide over immigration; they have very little in common when it comes to economic or health policy. Obama reunited them in defence of free speech, but Donald Trump will slowly divide them over his Mexican wall, Muslim-migration clampdown and reform to Obamacare.
I suspect the essayists confuse Republicans who happen to be Catholics, many of them cradle Catholics rather than fanatical converts, with Catholics who have gone out of their way to hijack the GOP as a vehicle for their theology. The latter are probably few in number, if they exist at all. Even those Catholics who are explicitly linked to social conservatism are difficult to define in black-and-white terms. Do the essayists consider Sarah Palin to be one of these dangerous integralists: born Catholic but converted to evangelicalism? Or how about Vice President Mike Pence, who has become less denominational the further he has moved to the Right?
Meanwhile, there are plenty of liberal Catholics who have entered the Democratic Party, stuck with their Church and routinely invoke Catholicism to explain their policy positions.
Why do the essayists not condemn Nancy Pelosi or Tim Kaine for engaging in a “surprising ecumenism” with liberal Episcopalians?
My biggest gripe with the article is its lack of clarity [but before that, its shameless display of ignorance]. It makes sweeping generalisations that are untrue. Not all evangelicals are fundamentalists, for instance, and not all evangelical fundamentalists are Right-wing activists. Pat Robertson, the charismatic evangelical, certainly is – he even ran for President in 1988. But the essayists tell us that religious conservatives are anti-ecological, which Robertson is strictly speaking not (he once appeared in a commercial with African-American preacher Al Sharpton to warn about climate change – another “surprising ecumenism”).
The essay makes a number of statements about American Protestantism that are inaccurate. It begins its narrative of evangelicalism in the early 20th century, even though most historians would stress the influence of early Calvinist thought and the Great Awakenings that preceded the fundamentalist surge. It highlights Dominionism and the Prosperity Gospel, which really only had serious political purchase in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were influential, it’s true, but also hugely controversial and routinely sidelined.
It is implied that Richard Nixon fell under the influence of the fundamentalists, but he came from a Quaker family and reportedly considered conversion to Catholicism. If Nixon is part of this “surprising ecumenism”, I’ll eat my hat. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, desegregated Southern schools and backed the Equal Rights Amendment.
The Catholic/evangelical coup in US politics is a pretty ineffectual one. [A great point to make, and one that is generally ignored.] Abortion remains legal; gay marriage is now regarded as a civil right. Its influence is occasionally liberalising. Newt Gingrich, a Catholic convert and former Republican House Speaker, is part of the conservative campaign for criminal justice reform.
The essay betrays a European’s take on America, forcing the template by which we might read European history on to the United States. It doesn’t fit.
- For instance, far from being a 99 per cent white movement, as the essay suggests, some of the most outspoken religious conservatives in America are black.
- Fundamentalists in the Twenties often denounced Darwinism because they linked it to eugenics. Until the Seventies, fundamentalists withdrew entirely from politics on the grounds that saving souls was all that mattered; many opposed prayer in schools.
- And yet, in a fine example of reductio ad absurdum, this essay goes so far as to equate George W Bush with Osama bin Laden, because both were influenced by philosophies that divide the world between good and evil:
“At heart, the narrative of terror shapes the world-views of jihadists and the new crusaders and is imbibed from wells that are not too far apart. We must not forget that the theopolitics spread by Isis is based on the same cult of an apocalypse that needs to be brought about as soon as possible. So, it is not just accidental that George W Bush was seen as a ‘great crusader’ by Osama bin Laden.”
This is offensive. I suspect I know what’s behind it. If the essayists are allowed to engage in corny psychoanalysis, then permit me to do the same.
Many Europeans and Latin Americans, ashamed of their countries’ dalliance with fascism [Often much more than dalliance, as in Argentina’s history since Juan Peron to Cristina Kirchner], often try to implicate America in the same historical forces. But it’s more a more complex job than they think.
There is such a thing as American fascism: slavery and segregation are its most obvious outward signs, and Catholics engaged in both alongside Protestants. But in the Thirties, democracy held out in the US in the way that it didn’t in Europe. And part of the reason for that was a history of resistance to state power and corporatism that is part of the DNA of America’s vibrant, violent, sometimes quite insane religious culture. American history is complicated. It defies lazy caricatures. [Especially by a couple of pseudo-scholars who obviously did not even bother about fact-checking, thinking that their personal opinion substitutes for fact.]
Another one from CH...
Spadaro's essay criticises
many ideas and groups that deserve it
But in the end it is wrong-headed and simplistic
by Stephen White
CATHOLIC HERALD
JulY 14, 2017
Antonio Spadaro SJ has coauthored an essay for the publication he edits,
La Civiltà Cattolica, in which he and his Presbyterian co-author, Marcelo Figueroa, take aim at certain strains of fundamentalism in the United States and their influence on both American politics and American Catholics. The essay is critical of many ideas and groups that are very much deserving of criticism, but in the end it sheds almost no light on the actual dynamics shaping the American religious and political landscape.
To begin with, fundamentalism is not the mainstream of American Protestantism, nor does it have the influence in American politics that the authors imagine it does. The notion, for example, that George W. Bush is a fundamentalist with a Manichean worldview is patently false. So is the suggestion that there’s some close affinity between the Biblical literalism of fundamentalism, on the one hand, and the God-wants-you-to-be-rich hucksterism of the Prosperity Gospel. That Donald Trump has been deeply shaped by some confluence or conspiracy of the two is ludicrous.
To these bizarre and hackneyed assessments of the Protestant religious scene in America, our authors add an attack on a fringe Catholic media outlet called Church Militant. The primary connection between the aforementioned problematic Protestants and the Church Militant seems to be that the Church Militant and Christian fundamentalists 1) both think they’re right and other people are wrong, and 2) really don’t like abortion. (Prosperity Gospel types don’t go in much for culture wars; they’re too busy praying their way to payday.)
In attacking Church Militant, the authors aren’t erecting a straw man; the outfit is real, and a problem. (Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit forbade them to use the word “Catholic”, in their name and Archbishop Charles Chaput had to kick them out of Philadelphia in the run-up to the World Meeting of Families in 2015 because they were being so obnoxious.)
But Church Militant is so
far out on the right-wing fringe that in calling attention to it [If they are, it does not make some of the valid things they say any less right or less Catholic], the authors are either radically overestimating its actual influence, or using it as a convenient whipping boy — a stand-in for everything they don’t particularly care for in American Catholicism.
Sadly, that seems to be the recipe for most of the piece: present a parade of horribles in a way that suggests to the reader that they’re related even if they’re not, drop in a gratuitous jab at George W. Bush for zest, sprinkle Donald Trump’s name generously, add one dash of Steve Bannon, and then contrast the whole thing to Pope Francis and voilà!
All of this is too bad, really. For one, America’s maddeningly complex religious landscape needs thoughtful analysis and critique. And theological trends have a way of bleeding from one denomination to another. American Catholicism has surely been influenced — for the better and also the worse — by the fact that America is overwhelmingly Protestant.
The Jesuits have a long history
['History' is right - it just ain't so anymore!] of protecting the Catholic faith from the more problematic aspects of Protestant Christianity — for the benefit of Catholics and Protestants alike. That’s still a worthwhile endeavour. Unfortunately, the essay in
La Civiltà Cattolica is not.
There's more - but this plethora of reactions to the Spadaro-Figueroa essay was predictable and inevitable.
Are Americans from Mars?
by Robert Royal
THE CATHOLIC THING
JULY 17, 2017
Percival Lowell was a member of the distinguished Boston Lowell family, graduate of Harvard, founder of the Lowell Observatory, the most prominent American astronomer – some say – until Carl Sagan. He also believed, on the basis of what he thought careful scientific observation, that there were canals on Mars, and wrote several books about what might have driven Martians to such a vast undertaking.
Unfortunately, his “observations” were an optical illusion (as several scientists already knew in Lowell’s day). Recent Mars probes have discovered no signs of the civilization Lowell thought once existed there.
Fr. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor of
La Civiltà Cattolica, and Marcelo Figueroa, a Presbyterian hand-picked by Pope Francis to be editor on the Argentine edition of
L’Osservatore Romano, have recently made quite controversial observations about America in “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism in the USA: A Surprising Ecumenism.”
They are, with good reason, destined to suffer the fate of poor Percival Lowell.
It’s not that they don’t have some data.
But like many distant observers who know little of the concrete reality they are describing, they mistake the relative size and significance of almost everything.
For example, they take Rousas John Rushdoony – a marginal figure unknown these days to most evangelicals and much criticized by many who do – as a major reference point because his theocratic views fit the thesis they’re trying to push about conservative religion and politics in America.
In dozens of other instances, they draw lines among widely disparate facts with even less justification than the old believers in Martian canals.
Their main fear is that the collaboration of Catholics and Evangelicals in fighting the culture war is really a bid to create a theocracy in America. You usually hear a charge like that from Planned Parenthood or gay-rights groups or fringe academics. Not from the Vatican.
Further, the authors opine, the participants in this “surprising ecumenism” indulge in a “Manichean” view of Good vs. Evil that sees America as the Promised Land and her enemies as enemies of God whom it’s only right to destroy, literally, with our armed forces.
Taking this as the heart of the Evangelical-Catholic alliance is so delusional that a Catholic must feel embarrassed that a journal supposedly reviewed and authorized by the Vatican would run such slanderous nonsense. The authors would have done better to get out and see some of America rather than, it seems, spending so much time with left-wing sociologists of religion.
There is something like an emerging theocracy in the United States, with a Manichean vision. But it’s the theocracy of sexual absolutism that cannot tolerate pluralism or dissent. The Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby, evangelical bakers, anyone who stands up to the contraception-abortion-“gay-marriage” (and now) “transgender” juggernaut risks legal jeopardy and accusations of being a “hate group.” (Spadaro and Figueroa echo this claim, saying the Evangelical-Catholic alliance represents a xenophobic, Islamophobic, purist vision that is really an “ecumenism of hate.”)
Fighting the sexual theocracy is imperative, for believers and non-believers alike who care about liberty and the common good in a pluralist society. The courts have – so far – found for defenders of religious liberty, largely Catholics and Evangelicals. But
that such cases even have to be brought tells us who is really trying to impose a kind of totalitarianism on America.
Most traditional Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and others would be happy, at this point, to be just left alone.
All this is invisible to Spadaro and Figueroa, or is dismissed as a cover for something sinister. They know not the heart of American Evangelicalism, which is generally closer to the thoughtfulness of a Russell Moore than to blind Fundamentalism (which is why we use two different terms for the two groupings).
Their labeling American Catholic conservatives as “integralists” is another slander and a sloppy misapplication of a term from one period of European history to something else entirely. They could easily have learned this.
The authors claim that Pope Francis has outlined an alternative to “militant” Christianity. But their obsession with “dialogue” over these matters is a plausible strategy only to people who have never had to confront the sharp edge of the culture war. And believe they can go on avoiding it forever. They can’t.
Pope Francis added to the international controversy last week. If his frequent dialogue partner, Eugenio Scalfari – editor of the socialist
La Reppublica – is to be believed (personally, I find about 25 percent of what he “reports” vaguely credible), Francis spoke just before the G-20 meeting in Hamburg of the “distorted vision of the world” of America and Russia, China and North Korea, Russia and Syria, especially on immigration matters.
The pope’s including us among such malefactors agitated many Americans. If he meant that he disagrees with President Trump, perhaps he should have said as much.
He went on to say, in Scalfari’s perhaps garbled telling, that a “federated Europe” is necessary or Europe will count for nothing in the world. This is curious for several reasons. In other contexts, the pope seems to have given up on Europe – and expects renewal from the “peripheries.” Further, the European Union is already “federated,” perhaps too much so.
I was at a conference in Portugal two weeks ago where repeated German calls for “ever closer ties” among European nations worried everyone except the Germans themselves. It’s a commonplace in such meetings to lament the EU’s lack of political accountability and arrogance – and Germany’s looming financial power.
In the last analysis, Europe counts for little, because it is in demographic collapse, is spiritually and culturally adrift, doesn’t have the means to defend itself, and seems to think its only reason for being is to be “open” to other cultures.
America has multiple grave problems, but still enjoys active religious engagement in the public square, is groping towards political and cultural renewal, and – not incidentally – still accepts over 1,000,000 legal immigrants every year.
Perhaps it would be worth noting such things, sometime, in Rome.