As thinking/political (communal) creatures, we all have a political philosophy or ideology, however intuitive, inchoate, unarticulated or even self-contradictory. The Catholic Church, in her teaching, does not propose nor endorse any such system in the way of sharia law, divine right of kings, or even the liberal, democratic, capitalist, rule-of-law constitutionalism of the USA. As "Catholic" she gathers to herself those from every class, nation, ethnicity and ideology (with some exceptions like communism, jihadism, genocidal racisms, ). At the Eucharist, we are in communion with each other: capitalists, libertarians, socialists, anarchists, Democrats and Republicans. Thus it is offensive when priest/bishop/pope (who are entitled to their opinions like everyone else) crosses the line to endorse or attack any specific philosophy, system, party, or politician at mass or in an official capacity.
In Catholic Social Teaching, especially since Pope Leo XIII, we enjoy a fluid, creative, dynamic organism of values, ideas, and principles that can act as a leaven within a variety of political systems, renouncing and minimizing the bad and affirming, enhancing and fortifying the good. Herein we will briefly summarize the highlights of this body of thought and then use it to evaluate the six most significant ideologies in the USA over the last 80 years.
Fundamentals of Catholic Social Teaching
1. The inviolate, sacred dignity of every human person, especially the weak, suffering, disabled, incompetent, poor, powerless, refugee, elderly and unborn.
2. Religious liberty, the ability to follow ones own conscience in regard to the ultimate, the true and the good; as well as associated freedoms of speech, press, political assembly, economic agency, etc. This requires a constitutional openness to the Transcendent and the practice of religion, including Catholicism.
3. Primacy of the family...natural, faithful, fecund, responsible...as the first building block of society. Parents are educators of their children. This precedes every other societal form: government, etc. And from it flows:
4. Sacredness of sexuality and gender as constitutive of the person and the family and the urgency of marital permanence, spousal fidelity, and chastity in all states of life.
5. Moral or "natural law" as given in the created order as guidance for all human governance and law.
6. Common Good, in all its diversity and richness, as the intention of all politics, at every level of society.
7. Solidarity of all people...across the globe, nations, classes, ethnicities, ideologies, etc...as we are all children of our heavenly Father and therefore brothers and sisters of each other.
8. State is required to protect common goods, peace and innocent life with the use of force, lethal if necessary, as in war, police work and capital punishment, only if necessary. This includes secure, protected national borders.
9. State protects private property and economic initiative along with provision of public goods, prudent regulation/taxation, and just distribution of the goods of the economy/society.
10. Subsidiarity: Performance of every social task by the smallest possible unit, delegating to the larger, more abstract and distant levels (national, global, etc.) those which cannot be properly handled by the lower. In our time this inclines a preference for the immediate//local along with a caution and suspicion of bureaucracy, intrusive technology (AI, social media) and gigantism in industry and government.
These principles, part of the moral teaching of the Church, are themselves defining for every Catholic. But we differ in the weight we give them and in application to concrete situations. Now we consider six ideologies that have competed for the allegiance of Catholics in the USA over the last 80 years.
1. Political-Economic (not Cultural) Liberalism of the Democratic Party 1945-65: Party of labor and the working man, patriotic, anti-communist, internationalist, supportive of civil rights and farm worker movements, pro-capitalism. The Democratic Party was an alliance of contradictions: Catholic union men, southern racists, socialist and sexually-liberational Jews. But the strong Catholic presence insured that it was implicitly, but emphatically pro-family, pro-life, pro-chastity.
Representative would be John F. Kennedy. Even better, Sargent Shriver.
In its implicit cultural values and militant political agenda, it implemented to a high degree the elements of CST (Catholic Social Teaching.) It was a 20 year "Camelot," a honeymoon of Catholicism with the USA. Its flaws were minor relative to its strengths:
- Forgetfulness of subsidiarity and infatuation with national politics as the federal government was so effective in the war, emergence from the Depression, opposition to Soviet Communism, nationwide victory of Civil Rights for blacks, a national economy of prosperity and global hegemony.
- Prosperity led to certain a national arrogance, materialism, consumerism, an idolatry of science/technology, eventually (after a post-war religious revival) secularism, and spiritual/moral/intellectual superficiality.
- Along with the above, an unbalanced confidence and optimism, loss of humility and of the sense of the supernatural, left the Church entirely unprepared to combat the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and following.
Notwithstanding its flaws, this at its best, rates a solid 8 on a scale of 10.
(Realistically, an 8 is the high end of the spectrum. Given human finitude, fallibility and sinfulness, we know that systemic error and evil penetrate every human system. A 10, in this life, in inconceivable; a 9 virtually impossible in practice.)
This political synthesis died around 1970 as it was subsumed by a voracious sexual liberalism.
2. Cultural Liberalism of the Democratic Party 1970-2025. Catholics succumbed to the Sexual Liberationists without a fight. This was the defining tragedy and catastrophe of our age. The greatest generation prevailed through Depression, World War, Cold War, build a prosperous Church and society, raised large families and prevailed as THE global power; they surrendered without resistance to the Sexual Revolution. This is in large part due to an admirable and ancient Catholic reverence, shyness and reticence about sexuality. To this day, about half of Catholics in the USA vote for the left for the traditional economic issues, oblivious in denial of the contradictions of so much that is precious to our faith. The DNC became the party, not of the Catholic worker, but of the affluent, educated professional, sexually liberated classes. It embraced a libertarianism in private life as it retained a moderate collectivism in economics.
This new, now cultural, liberalism retained the previous commitment to unions and the poor; but located this within a firm allegiance to the liberation of sexuality from marriage and children, militant feminism of contraception/abortion/reproductive technologies, radical individualism, secularism, break with religious traditions, exultation of science/technology, triumph of the therapeutic, identity politics (BLM, CRT, LGBTQ) and messianic trust in an expansive, centralized, sovereign state.
It affirmed the worldview of the successful, prospering bourgeois: education, meritocracy, sexual license, financial security, trust in expertise/technology/bureaucracy. It viewed with condescension the uneducated, low-wage conservatives as it assumed a posture of moral superiority in a "wokeness" that actually secured its own upper class privileges.
Exemplary Catholics of this stripe: the Kennedys, Cuomo's, Biden's, Kerry's, Pelosi's.
While it retains a (confused) concern for the poor/marginalized, respect for women, and international alliances of peace and cooperation, it violates in blatant manner almost all of the ten principles above.
It rates a 2; possibly a 3 if it leans into its traditional economic concerns and away from its moral/cultural agenda of depravity. It is the Anti-Catholic of our age, our primary antagonist.
3. Reaganite, Tripod, Fusionist Republican Conservatism 1980-2016. Developing in the National Review of William Buckley in the 1950-60s, this coalition came to power with Ronald Reagan and was recently replaced by Trump. It's three pillars: militant anti-communism, cultural protection of traditional family/religion/ethos and libertarian or "neo-liberal" economics. It was embraced by many Catholics, largely for its global resistance to Soviet and later Jihadist imperialisms and its protection of family and faith. In economics, however, it embraced an individualism, a libertarianism, a "neo-liberalism" that built philosophically upon the primacy of the autonomous individual, rather than the person within family/church/community. It opposed an expansive state but approved of a malignant, corporate capitalism which was itself corrosive of religion and community at all lower levels. Like the FDR/JFK synthesis earlier, it was eventually unstable.
Along with Buckley, many Catholic intellectuals embraced it for its defense of crucial values and its appealing intellectual clarity and coherence: Scalia/Alito/Thomas, Barr, Novak/Neuhaus/Weigel, Boehner, Ryan.
It's fatal flaw: libertarian individualism, weakened solidarity/solidarity/concern for the poor.
Depending upon the emphasis given to this individualism versus the stronger Catholic values, it earns a respectable 6-7. Lower than the earlier Catholic liberalism; but far superior to the contemporary cultural liberalism.
4. Trumpism. Trump strikes a deep resonance with the Catholic conscience in his defense of religion, liberty and the family as well as his resistance, on behalf of the lower classes, to the priviligies, power, and contempt of the upper levels. His personal depravity and bad personal influence are a contradiction of our values. Policy-wise he is a mixed package: restoration of our southern border, but reckless disregard for rule of law for the undocumented; xenophobic, jingoistic impulsiveness; inconsistency towards China; tariff incoherence and chaos; financial policy that promises to increase prosperity for all but favors the investor class, increases the debt, and adds to inflation. Highly volatile, on any given day he can score from a 2 to an 8 but averages about 5. The first respectable Catholic intellectual to endorse him, to my knowledge, was Reno of First Things. He now counts Rubio, Vance and RFK Jr. in his coterie.
5. Benedict Option. Rod Dreher articulated the widespread disgust with our politics, on both sides of the aisle, and the urgency to disconnect from mainstream culture in favor of a localism centered on family, Church, local community and small organizations. This is a kind of a monasticism. It is not entirely indifferent to the broader world but hopes to eventually influence it, in the way of medieval monks, by slow, incremental influence.
The Catholic Worker of Dorothy Day was an earlier example of this separatism, with a harder leftism of pacifism and anarchism. That movement was militantly anti-bourgeois in embrace of simplicity of life, care for the poor, absolute rejection of war, detachment from government including non-payment of taxes.
Other strands within contemporary Catholicism enact a similar separation without ideological clarity. The Neocatechumenate focuses immense energy interiorly, on developing intimate fraternities in worship, attention to Scripture, simplicity of life, and strong, large families. Other than being prolife, they are largely indifferent to politics in the broader society. Homeschooling detaches from public, private and parochial systems to center education within the family. A network of new, smaller, intensively Catholic colleges also detach to heighten Catholic identity and values. In a more abstract, intellectual vein, philosophers like Andrew Willard Jones (Franciscan University), and D.C. Schindler (John Paul II Institute) radically critique the entire liberal order and the concept of state sovereignty as they envision a distant, ideal Catholic order built entirely upon the principles of CST.
Its weakness is, of course, utopian, vague, impractical nature. In practice it is a localism which directs all energy to the immediate, the intimate, the most sacred. It is an extreme of subsidiarity, the opposite of the ideologies above that compete on the national scene for the big prize of power. It prefers the allure of the wholesome and the holy to the exercise of power and coercion.
If practiced, however, by saintly people who are drawn to such groups, it is deeply Catholic and might move towards a 9.
6. New Catholic Right? Out of the Trump revolution, we find a small but promising new Catholic political synthesis that is populist culturally and politically: conservative culturally and economically liberal, the best of both worlds. It revives the FDR/JFK defense of the poor and the worker in unions and an assertive government that countervails capital. At the same time it wages the culture war against sexual libertarianism. This party is fighting for control of the Republican Party against the establishment libertarians of capital and the technocrats (Musk). Trump himself is unstable and unpredictable as to which of these three camps he favors.
In theory, it affirms all of the ten Catholic principles of social justice. In practice, however, it is currently aligned with Trump and all his contagious decadence. In the abstract it is close to perfect from a Catholic perspective. But it remains to be seen if it can take charge of the Republican Party or if it will remain marginal with some influence. It will have to detach from the person of Trump and his narcissistic universe of disorder and dysfunction.
It's flaw, discounting the person of Trump, is a jingoistic, xenophobic, separatist nationalism that is low on compassion for the refugee and weak on international solidarity and global alliances for peace/prosperity. Its most hopeful figures are Rubio and Vance who currently remain in bondage to Trump. If it is able to divorce Trump, embrace compassion and renounce isolationism, it might well rival the post-war Democratic Liberalism with a 8 or even 8.5.
Conclusion
Moving forward to implement the Catholic principles above in a manner that is "catholic," realistic, and hopeful, we will want to:
- Agree with the Benedict Option in its negative evaluation of our overall culture and focus on strengthening our immediate families, Churches and organizations.
- Retain what is best from our finest Catholic syntheses: Democrat Liberalism after WWII and Reaganite Conservatism of the 1980s.
- Combat the Cultural Liberalism of the current DNC.
- Support genuine Catholic elements of the emergent populist right as we detach it from the pathologies of Trumpism.
- Practice the "Christian Strategy" of Adrian Vermulle which is a relative detachment from any specific party or polity but an allegiance to the community, nation and state in an openness to collaborate in the good as it manifests in any group. Yes, even the DNC,. Yes, even Trump.
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