US President Joe Biden’s decision not to run for a second presidential term is a major event in US history, but also for American Christianity.
It marks the end of a generation of Catholics in politics, those who arrived on the national political scene in the wake of World War II and the GI Bill of the Kennedys and Vatican II.
They were finally able to leave behind the marginalisation of the “papists” from the mainstream, where American Protestantism and the liberal establishment dominated, making the idea of a Catholic in the White House uncomfortable, to say the least.
Thanks to the presidency of John F. Kennedy and Biden, there are no longer suspicions about Catholics’ loyalties.
But questions about the real content of liberal democracy today have ecumenically spread beyond the confines of Catholicism.
The end of an era
It’s the end of an era that had begun some time ago and is now coming to pass.
The most evident change is that America is no longer, such as during the time of Kennedy, a “three-religion country” of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
Catholics hold 29 percent of the seats in the 117th Congress, but it’s not necessarily a growing influence. It’s more than the disappearance, in the last two decades, of pro-life Catholic politicians among the Democrats.
The focus on “social justice” has often swallowed up the rest of the Catholic imagination on the political and ecclesial left, and this has given space to a deep-seated revanchism from fellow Catholics on the right.
The fact that there is a majority of Catholic justices on the US Supreme Court today has not exactly benefited the credentials for the democratic culture of Catholicism in America.
Parallels have been drawn, both in America and at the Vatican, between Biden’s decision and the late Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation in 2013.
Besides the differences, especially in the freedom with which that decision was taken, there is the fact that, unlike Benedict XVI, Biden leaves no epigones, much less a Catholic movement behind him.
There are Catholics among the younger generations of Democrats in politics, but their Catholicism plays a more marginal role in their personal identity and political values.
The rift and the void
The void that Biden leaves behind is bigger than the rift with the majority of Catholic bishops on the issue of abortion as well as gender, and that made many of them quietly or openly favor Trump in the previous election.
Some bishops became even quieter – actually silent – when the former president and his cabal tried to overturn the results of the elections between November 2020 and January 2021.
That rift between Biden and the bishops on the admission to Communion for Catholics in public office who support legislation permitting abortion, euthanasia, or other moral evils did not become formal-sacramental.
That was thanks in part to the extraordinary intervention of the Vatican in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in May 2021.
However, it has never truly healed.
New era
Biden’s exit marks a change in internal relations within US. Catholicism.
It is not simply the disappearance of conciliar Catholicism in favor of anti-conciliar Catholicism in a neo-conservative or traditionalist fashion.
The National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis (July 17-21 quite different from the previous one, in Minneapolis in 1941) has shown how the triad doctrine-life-worship of US Catholicism is a complex mixture.
It involves: forgetfulness (sometimes outright rejection) of Vatican II but also an anonymous reception of it; Catholic pride but also embrace of styles of worship that have a lot in common with American Protestant revivalism; quest for interior peace but also drive for emotional entertainment shareable on social media.
The push to include ecclesial identities other than the Irish and continental European ones, which have dominated for a century and a half, now finds support.
That support is not only in theological progressivism descending from the Enlightenment but also in the globalised traditionalism of the ethno-culturalist brand.
Certainly, an illiberal traditionalism is very active and well-funded in the United States, both at the theological and political level.
But the situation is more complicated and must be seen honestly in the context of the crisis of progressive Catholicism, the “spirit of Vatican II” Catholics, even in Europe.
This recent phase of identity-driven secularisation has created a void that was filled by intellectual, ecclesial, and ecclesiastical forces that cater to the post-modern self with ready-made answers (simplified as much as you want).
They appeal to the younger generations more directly than the ones projected by academic and collegiate Catholicism (to which I belong as a member of the professoriate).
A Catholic like J.D. Vance, Trump’s choice for vice president, exemplifies a generation of post-liberal, anti-“woke” political-intellectual operatives who constantly shift ideologies in an attempt to define family, community, and polity — without paying much attention to Catholic social thought.
Biden’s departure is certainly the end of an era but for reasons beyond the lack of a generation of Catholic politicians on the left.
It’s a discontinuity that has to do with the interruption in the transmission of Vatican II Catholicism, in its comprehensive “catholicity,” in many quarters of the Church in the United States, especially in the seminaries for the formation of the clergy.
Indeed, US militant and conservative Catholicism has largely cut its ties with the theology of Vatican II, but this is not just an American problem.
What is happening in the United States could be a good opportunity to look also into the Catholic Church in Europe, which is largely in denial.
What is happening in American politics with the retirement of a “Vatican II Catholic” like Joe Biden and the emergence of a politically expedient “cultural Catholicism” is also happening in Italian politics, for example.
As seen from the Vatican
The new configuration of the American electoral campaign opens two fronts of uncertainty for the Vatican.
With Biden’s exit, Pope Francis loses a predictable interlocutor on internal issues and a reliable one on international issues (despite the differences in opinions and policies about Ukraine and Israel).
The post-Biden Democratic Party will be more distant from Rome and Europe: today’s America is no longer an extension of the old continent, the last province of the Roman Empire of the neo-conservative dreams.
The relationship between a Trump-Vance administration and the Vatican (migration and environmental policies, Ukraine, Israel, China) is anyone’s guess.
But it also opens an internal front within the Church, with the Vatican grappling with two different and opposing radicalisms (in different ways) on the abortion issue and on gender.
Culture war
If Kamala Harris were to be dragged into culture war fights, this might influence her relations with the Catholic Church both domestically and internationally and deteriorate the alignment with the Vatican that Biden was able to create and keep.
Some US bishops probably felt orphaned by the new GOP that, in its platform for the 2024 elections, demoted the abortion issue: the 2022 “Dobbs” ruling of the Supreme Court transformed the pro-life cause into an electoral liability in many districts.
But if Harris campaigns as a culture warrior, it is predictable that even more bishops will return to placing their hopes in the Republican Party, which has become a risk to the survival of constitutional democracy in America.
If Trump is elected, J.D. Vance could become the highest-ranking Catholic in a post-democratic or authoritarian United States.
One of the paradoxes of this American moment is that it was a Catholic president, Joe Biden, who in 2020-2021 helped save American democracy, which, at least until Kennedy and Vatican II, Catholics were accused of not believing in.
Now, the relationship between the political cultures of US Catholicism and American democracy enters a new territory.
- First published in La Croix
- Massimo Faggioli is an Italian academic, Church historian, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, columnist for La Croix International, and contributing writer to Commonweal.
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