The nutshell of the article is this sentence: "Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to Church doctrine".

This news report is based on a few carefully chosen examples of Catholic parishes, schools, centres, and college campuses — it cannot offer the complete picture of a Church as big and diverse as Catholicism is in the United States.

But it tells a story of what those who work in the American Church today have seen in the last few years: students and colleagues on school campuses, new magazines and academic institutions, to say nothing of social media and various kinds of ministries available on the internet.

The article says that "despite their growing influence, conservative Catholics remain a minority. Yet the changes they have brought are impossible to miss."

Yes, it is hard to deny that we are seeing a slow process to replace a certain kind of "Vatican II Catholicism" (granted the many ways in which this expression can be interpreted) with younger Catholics (lay men and women, clergy, members of religious orders) who privilege different formulations of Catholic theology, spirituality, and mix between action and contemplation.

It is a generational movement of young Americans looking for a sense of identity that they can claim is distinct and different.

This quest is articulated in doctrinal leanings, individual and communitarian lifestyles, and liturgical styles.

But it is not just young people.

It's a moment of rebalancing, a swinging of the pendulum of theological thinking and religious needs that is trying to find a way to deal with a post-20th century material and intellectual world and its uncertainties, and in the United States especially, different from the expectations of the Vatican II period: persisting and heightened social and economic inequalities, the normalisation of war and militarisation of social control, the debate on gender, etc.

Discerning a healthy sense of the Church

This return of conservative Catholicism exists in different ways, not only in the United States.

It is a fact, and the sooner we stop denying it, the better.

The question is how to interpret and relate to it.

One option is to let these different identities develop in separate worlds and let a certain Darwin-like idea of life in the Church have its course.

Coexistence is possible but does not always happen naturally: unity takes work.

Putting this in the hands of "cultural warriors" would be potentially destructive, augmenting polarization and mutual alienation.

It would probably not lead to a formal schism but to a house divided, which, in the long run, cannot stand.

A different option would be to reconstruct spaces and moments for mutual recognition of the Catholicity of others' Catholicism and a process of discernment, in all these different identity camps, of what is conducive to a healthy sense of the Church, of the Catholic tradition, of a Jesus-like life, and what is instead just an ecclesial mirroring of identity politics.

The Synod on synodality is just the beginning of this.

However, we cannot pretend that the Synod will succeed, even in opening spaces for this process, without some acceptance of uncomfortable reality.

Liberal-progressive Catholics today must find a different and alternative way to deal with the past and the tradition of the Church.

They must avoid the "burn it down" blindness and willful ignorance of self-flagellating intellectuals who refuse to see how much is true and good in the Catholic tradition and are incapable of seeing its good use.

An ostracising reading of the past responds to goals that are more political or of academic politics than ecclesial ones.

The other side (and it must be said that there are so many variations of the traditionalist-conservative movement in the Church) needs to find a different and alternative way to a neo-traditionalism which is incapable of criticising and, when necessary, changing the theological and ecclesiastical Catholic traditions on the grounds that "it cannot change because it never changed".

A blanket glorification of the past is just a variation of the ideological fury of the self-righteous who think they are always "on the right side of history", and it's not how the Catholic magisterium deals with the past.

A sense of what the living tradition is

As French theologian Pierre Gisel wrote in a chapter recently published in a book, the central issue is the relationship with the past.

Gisel urges "a structuring relationship with the past [which] occurs in a scenario of differences".

The quest of younger generations for identity is a way of rejecting the slippage from equality based on imago Dei to (self)enforced uniformity.

Dealing with this quest requires leaving behind any fantasy of having direct contact with the truth in real-time immediacy.

This means restoring some trust in the importance of mediations for the faith: mediations that are intellectual, liturgical, and institutional.

It's a task that applies, in different ways, to both the neo-traditionalist and the post-ecclesial, futuristic Catholic imaginations.

For most of my life, as a Catholic born five years after the end of the Council, I found it easy to wear lightly and comfortably my Vatican II theology and spirituality as both a lay member of the Church and an academic.

This has become more complicated lately.

Sometimes, conservative Catholicism claims or attempts to be a return to the "real" Vatican II.

Sometimes, the return of traditionalism is dismissive of the theology of Vatican II or outright anti-conciliarism.

This has dangerous consequences on all levels—the return of antisemitism in some Catholic circles, for example.

The fact is that to respond to the ills of neo-traditionalism, you must have a sense of what the living tradition is, how it has worked in the past, and how it can work in today's world.

And this is where we need to begin.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

The last 10 years have been hard on this kind of confidence.

A college of supposedly conservative cardinals elected a surprisingly liberal pope.

Moral and theological debates supposedly settled by Pope John Paul II were conspicuously reopened.

The Latin Mass, rehabilitated under Pope Benedict XVI, was partially suppressed.

Progressive theologians found themselves back in favour; formerly conservative bishops suddenly evolved.

It seemed as though liberal Catholicism had been merely hibernating, awaiting a new pope, a new spring.

But lately, in both Rome and the United States, I've had conversations with well-informed Catholics in which the old conservative confidence has made a comeback.

The idea of the Francis era as a "last gasp" for the Catholicism of the boomer era has figured prominently.

The assumption that progressive Catholicism has no real long-term viability has returned.

The fear that the next pope might be another liberaliser, younger and more ambitious than Francis, has largely receded.

This new confidence reflects a specific reading of the waning years (or what are probably the waning years) of the Francis pontificate.

First, there's a sense that the current pope's liberalising program has reached its limits: The Vatican's halfway-opening to blessings for same-sex couples was essentially rejected by many of the church's bishops, and the subsequent papal document reiterating church teaching on gender identity felt like an acknowledgment that the space for innovation had (for now) run out.

Second, there's a view that Francis' capricious governing style has alienated even many churchmen who are not especially conservative and created little appetite for a sequel or "Francis II" successor. Continue reading

• Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of "The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery."

The comments come from the Vatican's new doctrinal chief, Cardinal Victor Fernández.

However, he is not ruling out the possibility of future change.

Fernández says that those who fear unorthodox doctrinal shifts or hope for sweeping changes will be disappointed.

According to Fernández, this year's Synod on Synodality is not designed to bring about immediate changes.

Speaking of possible changes, Fernández comments: "Not this year, at least.

"Afterwards, we will see what emerges and next year we will see what happens but, for this synod, this year, we cannot expect too much."

The newly elevated cardinal did however indicate that the Synod could lead to a greater self-understanding within the Church.

Commenting on what the Church can expect, Fernández suggests there will be a "deepening of our self-awareness, of what we are as Church, what the Lord is asking of us and what the world of today expects as well, and how we can better reach people with the same message we have always had".

If we can gain a guiding light for our future role in serving both the faithful and the broader world, that in itself would be a significant achievement, even if it doesn't make headlines" he noted.

"If we manage to attain a light that guides us, that orients us, for the future of what we have to be before the people of God and before the world, I think that would already be immense but it will not attract anyone's attention. You can't make a headline out of it," he commented.

Fernández is the former archbishop of La Plata, Argentina.

Since mid-September, he heads the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith whose responsibility is to promulgate and defend Catholic doctrine.

Source

• CNA

In fact, that animosity has become even more virulent and graphic.

One American bishop (a Catholic bishop!) even called Francis a "serpent", a slur reminiscent of 16th-century anti-Catholic tropes against the papacy and the Jesuits.

The assimilation to animals as a way to disparage the pope is a bizarre reception of Francis' encyclical Laudato si'.

But it's the only reception there is in some places. (The bishop in question later deleted the offensive tweet and apologized, but he kept tweeting polemically about the pope's meeting with Biden.)

Many wonder what would have happened, under Francis' predecessors, if Catholic bishops had publicly insulted and showed contempt for the pope — something that the Code of Canon Law (can.1373) counts among the "crimes against ecclesiastical authorities and the freedom of the Church".

But the phenomenon has become too big to be treated from a canonical point of view alone. This phenomenon is a scandal but is no longer limited to isolated cases.

It has now become a fixture in the relationship between the most influential leaders of the American Catholic right and the current pope.

This animosity of the Catholic right and alt-right began, not with the 2020 election of Biden as president, but more than seven years earlier with the election of Francis as Bishop of Rome.

Disregard for tradition by those who profess to defend it

It's the rabid reaction against the fact that the trajectory of Catholicism - both in the US and globally - is not following the plans of those who envisioned not just a naturally conservative Catholicism, but conservative in the ways of conservative Catholicism in the United States.

Going back to the 2004 presidential run of John Kerry, another Roman Catholic, the Catholic right in the US has forcefully demanded that the Eucharist be denied to politicians who favour keeping abortion legal.

They invoke the Code of Canon Law. But they fail to mention that the teaching on communion as being "the medicine for sinners" is the doctrine of the Church and not an innovation of the current pope.

The Council of Trent (Session XXII) stated clearly that, in the Eucharist, the Lord "pardons wrongdoings and sins, even grave ones" — crimina et peccata etiam ingentia dimittit (cf. Denzinger, 1743).

This disregard for tradition on the part of those Catholics who would like to sanction Biden to advance a pro-life agenda (and a genuine pro-life culture is tragically urgent in the United States) is not due only to intentional or ideological ignorance. Often it is the result of real ignorance.

What we have seen in the debates among US Catholics - both in intra-ecclesial settings and in the public square - is a collapse of the sense of the tradition.

It has been replaced by a notion or idea of religious tradition that is politically expedient, but not genuinely Catholic.

This is one of the consequences of the crisis of the intellectual and theological reception of Vatican II and its doctrine on the Church.

An ecclesial crisis on the "sensus Ecclesiae"

There is obviously a scant knowledge of Church institutions.

In the case of the relations between the US presidency and the papacy, we have seen a total lack of understanding, even among some bishops, of the distinctions that exist between the Bishop of Rome, the Vatican, the Holy See, the universal Church, and the functions and roles of each of these.

In the small, yet vast world we call "Rome" or "the Vatican," certain things have become more complex from the time of Saint Peter, Julius II and Pius IX.

It is now a state government and a Church government with a diplomatic service. Inside its small territory, there is a cluster of churches, a monastery, a bureaucracy, a bank, a tourist site, a museum, a post office, a fire department, even a jail and so much more.

This is something both Francis and Biden know well. Some of the ideologues on the Catholic right also know that, but they choose to keep it hidden from their followers and sponsors.

This is not a theological crisis about the traditional teachings on abortion and the Eucharist, which are not in question.

It is a theological crisis on the sensus Ecclesiae, an ecclesiological crisis on the "sense of the Church", which risks being bent — even by the episcopal leaders of the Church itself — to the immediate needs of ecclesial and party politics.

Just "slightly Catholic"

The losers of the Civil War in Ireland took power in 1932.

One of the leaders was a man called Sean Francis Lemass. He had been asked a few years earlier if his political party, Fianna Fáil, was completely committed to the democratic ideals. He replied that his party was "slightly constitutional".

We might use the analogy for influential circles in US Catholicism.

In terms of their ecclesiology and their communion with a Church universal, they have shown and continue to show a level of contempt for the Bishop of Rome that would rightly lead us to say they are now just "slightly Catholic".

The issue is not Pope Francis. It has to do with a much larger problem.

In the same way that social and political concerns have shaped contemporary theology to the point that every field of theology has become, in one way or another, political theology, now in the US context Catholic ecclesiology has taken the shape of a political ecclesiology that has sectarian, and therefore, non-Catholic traits.

Within that particular Catholic culture, the political momentum will pass at some point, but the religious movement will last a little or much longer, also because the American "culture wars" have gone global.

Reactions against Francis' pontificate have demonstrated that we are past the moment when American Catholic neo-conservatism and neo-traditionalism could be liquidated as a passing fever, something that will have a life as short as the political season that generated it.

Basic criteria for remaining Catholic

It's something different. It is a religious movement within the Catholic Church and needs to be treated as such, by reminding them about some basic criteria of Catholic ecclesiology for remaining in the Catholic Church.

Here are three, just to start.

The first is that there must be a coherence between the goals, methods and behaviours in order to show a unity between one's life and the faith that is professed. Catholicism is not served well by the protection of political leaders whose private life is a manifest of wholesale contempt for Christian values and human decency.

The second is that there must be an acknowledgement and acceptance of the legitimate plurality of ways to live Catholicism.

Third, is that there must be a sense of visible communion with the bishops and the Bishop of Rome, the pope.

As the constitution of the Church of Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, states, the college of bishops and individual bishops have no authority unless they are in communion with the Roman Pontiff, the Successor of Peter.

The systemic crisis of the institutional Church has weakened our "sense of the Church".

But there is a danger of creating a false equivalence here.

Liberal-progressive Catholic dissent has never shown such contempt for the basic criteria of communion in the Catholic Church.

The controversy over Joe Biden and Eucharistic communion is important. But not because it's about the US president.

It's important because it is the story of non-conservative, non-traditional bullying by so-called conservatives and traditionalists who keep calling conservative and traditional that which actually is not.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

This remark is contained in a hacked email exchange between current Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP)

Halpin described the conservative Catholic position as a "an amazing bastardization of the faith."

"They must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations and must be totally unaware of Christian democracy," Halpin wrote.

CAP is a Democratic think tank with close ties to the Clinton campaign and the Obama White House.

Palmieri, who was at CAP at the time, responded that Catholicism "is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn't understand if they became evangelicals."

Republican politicians were quick to respond to the revelation.

"The Clinton campaign, when in private, expresses breathtaking anti-Catholic bigotry,"said American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp.

House Speaker Paul Ryan who has distanced himself from the Trump campaign, called the emails "staggering."

Ryan, who is Catholic, released a statement Wednesday saying: "If anything, these statements reveal the Clinton campaign's hostile attitude toward people of faith in general. ..."

"All Americans of faith should take a long, hard look at this and decide if these are the values we want to be represented in our next president."

The Clinton campaign has noted that Russian hackers have been known to fake information, but the campaign has not pointed to a specific example of a hacked email being altered.

CAP released a statement that did not authenticate the email exchange, but said Halpin, a Catholic, "has spent his career advocating and fighting for the common good and improving the lives of all Americans as a key tenet of his Catholic faith."

Source

• yahoo.com
• Image: wp.production.patheos.com

In an essay published by the National Review said Trump is "manifestly unfit to be president of the United States."

The essay, "An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics," was co-written by Princeton professor Robert P. George and St. John Paul II biographer George Weigel.

The call has been supported by about three dozen lay Catholics, many of whom are active in conservative academic and nonprofit circles.

The group called on Catholics "to reject [Trump's] candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate."

The article criticized Trump's "appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice" that are "offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility" and his promise to kill the families of terrorism suspects.

"There is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us ground for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government," read the article.

After a visit to the US-Mexico border last month, Pope Francis said politicians who advocate building border walls aren't Christian. Trump then lashed out at the pope, saying it was offensive for the pontiff to question anyone's religious beliefs.

Several US bishops have condemned Trump's rhetoric on immigration, suggesting the candidate is engaging in modern-day nativism, resurrecting the kind of bigotry once directed at Catholics.

Sources

• National Review
• Christian Today
• The Washington Times
• Breitbart.Com
• Crux
• Image: AP/The Washington Times