The End of a Catholic Moment. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, February 16, 2013.
Douthat:
Perhaps
not coincidentally, the mid-2000s were the last time the Catholic vision of the
good society — more egalitarian than American conservatism and more moralistic
than American liberalism — enjoyed real influence in U.S. politics. At the time
of John Paul’s death, the Republican Party’s agenda was still stamped by George
W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which offered a right-of-center approach
to Catholic ideas about social justice. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, was
looking for ways to woo the “values voters” (many of them Catholic) who had
just helped Bush win re-election, and prominent Democrats were calling for a
friendlier attitude toward religion and a bigger tent on social issues.
. . . . . . . . . .
The
collapse in the church’s reputation has coincided with a substantial loss of
Catholic influence in American political debates. Whereas eight years ago, a
Catholic view of economics and culture represented a center that both parties
hoped to claim, today’s Republicans are more likely to channel Ayn Rand than
Thomas Aquinas, and a strident social liberalism holds the whip hand in the
Democratic Party.
Indeed,
between Mitt Romney’s comments about the mooching 47 percent and the White
House’s cynical decision to energize its base by picking fights over abortion
and contraception, both parties spent 2012 effectively running against Catholic
ideas about the common good.
This
transformation suggests that we may have reached the end of a distinctive
“Catholic moment” (to repurpose a phrase from the late Catholic
priest-intellectual Richard John Neuhaus) in American politics, one that began
in the 1980s after John Paul’s ascension to the papacy and the migration of
many Catholic “Reagan Democrats” into the Republican Party.
. . . . . . . . . .
The
recent turn away from Catholic ideas has also been furthered by a political
class that never particularly cared for them in the first place. Even in a more
unchurched America, a synthesis of social conservatism and more
egalitarian-minded economic policies could have a great deal of mass appeal.
But our elites seem mostly relieved to stop paying lip service to the Catholic
synthesis: professional Republicans are more libertarian than their
constituents, professional Democrats are more secular than their party’s
rank-and-file, and professional centrists get their encyclicals from Michael
Bloomberg rather than the Vatican.
