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There are important parallels between the “Catholic” opposition to Pope Francis since 2013 and the formation of a Trumpian Catholic front, destined to remain, albeit under another name, after the departure of the so-called New York magnate from the White House. These past five years, between 2016 and 2020, have represented an extraordinary moment in the history of relations between the papacy and the presidency of the United States. In some respects, the Trump phenomenon was a sign of failure. gathering from American Catholics to Pope Francis, gathering he attempted the papal trip to the east coast of the United States in September 2015. By then Trump had already announced his intention to run for president, but to most observers it seemed an outlandish and unlikely prospect. With the beginning of 2016, during the Republican primaries, Trump during the press conference flying from Mexico, the Pope described the migration policies proposed by the candidate as “non-Christian.” Trump responded by calling Pope Francis’ statement shameful.
The clear collision course with the Jesuit Pope did not hamper, in fact helped candidate Trump defeat all other Republican candidates (none of whom, not even Catholics, were inclined to defend Francis). As president, Trump has adopted a double record in relations with the Vatican. The visit of Trump and the first lady to the Vatican in May 2017 gave the impression of a certain normality in the diplomacy of the new administration. But that second protocol hearing was accompanied by the plan of Trump and the operators close to him (Steve Bannon and Breitbart News, Newt Gingrich) to settle in Rome, also thanks to the high prelates hostile to Francis, a bridgehead for development. . of a political project aimed at subverting the status quo both in Europe and in the Catholic Church.
The idea was to implant the political-religious Vendée that is Trumpism in the symbolic and administrative heart of Catholicism, and to make Rome the parallel capital of a new anti-European Europe. On the American side, media empires such as Fox News and EWTN (a kind of Radio Maria “made in the USA”, widespread among conservative Catholics and not just in the US) followed the clash, continuing the narrative about the papacy of the Pope Francis that began in 2013. that, if it does not favor oneFormal schism is typical of a nationalist Catholicism with a very poor sense of Church unity.
Between 2018 and 2019, this political-religious project failed, as can be seen in the frustration expressed in September by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with his extraordinary attack on the diplomacy of the Holy See for the renewal of the provisional agreement of September 2018 with China. . But at the ecclesial level, it is clear that the problem of alignment between Trumpism and anti-Bergoglism will continue to plague both the American Church and transatlantic relations with Rome.
The presidency of Catholic Biden will not be able to cure the ongoing soft schism: a schism not only for the horizontal ideological lines on the right / left axis, but also for the vertical lines. In an American Catholic Church that in recent years has become increasingly welcoming to the well-to-do, middle-class, and suburban classes, but less representative of the demands of the poor and marginalized classes, there is a disconnect between the episcopate and its own. church in America and in the Vatican. The alienation between very different Catholic identities from a generational, social and ethnic point of view has led to the formation of Catholic sub-churches: the rate of mutual hostility between these sub-churches goes far beyond the phenomenon of new ecclesial movements, and recalls the historical experience of the national immigrant churches between the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Political attempts to call for an American schism have failed, but Trump’s defeat is also the removal of a scapegoat to hide the gap that will continue to exist between Pope Francis and American Catholicism, both Trumpian and that. liberal.
The most important documents of this pontificate address the US in a particularly direct way: Praised, Joy me All brothers. Francisco’s way of seeing the world is not anti-American, but certainly post-American. On many issues in the wake of the American “culture war”, Francis called for a truce, he did not proclaim a winner. American liberal Catholicism runs the risk of lulling itself into the illusion of having won the “culture wars,” when in reality it is just a battle, bringing a 78-year-old Catholic like Biden to the White House who does not represent American Catholicism. of the 21st century.
There is clearly a parallel between the progressive sedevacantism of right-wing Catholics since 2013 and attempts to paint Biden as non-Catholic due to his pro-legal stance on abortion. The history of American Catholicism today is inseparable from the polarization of political identities: the situation of radical rupture within the American church is destined to continue. Biden’s election gains valuable time while Francis remains Pope, but the subversive dissent of Catholics funded by financial elites against Francis’s evangelical radicalism and Biden’s Catholicism will not disappear on inauguration day. The role of Monsignor Viganò, former Apostolic Nuncio in Washington, as a vate of Catholic Trumpism (publicly recognized by Trump himself) will be assumed at some point by someone else. In America such characters abound, clergymen or laity. But the stain of August 2018 remains, when more than two dozen bishops supported Viganò and his threats to Pope Francis.
The paralysis of the episcopate is ecclesial and also in many public affairs. The American bishops have refused to pronounce themselves, at this critical moment for democracy in America in 2020, on the need to respect the electoral process and the immorality of the manipulation of constituencies with the gerrymandering and the limitation of the exercise of the right to vote (in which the Republicans have been concentrating for some twenty years). For decades, the scene has been dominated by an undeniable polarization and radicalization of positions on moral and ethical issues between the two sides, mirroring the polarization and radicalization within the American religious world: on issues of sexuality, family, and ethics. marriage, sexual identity; on immigration; on religious freedom. But today we are in a different and later stage than the one that began in the 1970s and 1980s. The new factor is the reappearance in culture conventional of zombie ideas (resentment against science, neo-medieval imagery, world conspiracy theories) that Euro-Atlantic academic theology had deemed dead and buried. As former President Obama recently said, this is an epistemological crisis: you no longer know how to distinguish true facts from fake news. which represents a mortal risk for democracy.
It is not just an American problem, if you know what Father Livio Fanzaga says on Radio María. But the Catholic Church in the United States is the daughter of a two-century project that culminated in the second half of the 20th century with the contribution of the American Catholic experience both to the American democratic ideal and to the Church’s teaching on religious freedom. But that was the 20th century. The moral and cosmological chaos embodied by Trump and that has infiltrated Catholicism will continue to undermine the political-religious consensus underlying democracy in the United States, but also the viability of the American Catholic project itself.
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