The election in the United States is a few days away, and the outcome is more uncertain than ever, to the point that even the exuberant Pope Francis has preferred to keep quiet about his sympathies and wait and see what happens. Answering a question from Anna Matranga of CBS News on the flight back from Singapore to Rome, on September 13, he left to the voters the task of “choosing the lesser evil” between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, that is, between the one who “throws away migrants” and the one who “kills children.”
This too is a dilemma that is neither easy nor clear, given that Trump, on abortion, has also espoused the “pro-choice” position, leaving individual states free to legislate as they please and voters to “follow their hearts.” In November 2023, the fall assembly of the Catholic bishops in Baltimore had once again declared abortion the “preeminent priority” in guiding the faithful in voting. But the historic union between the pro-life movement and the old Republican party was at an end, and it is not known to what extent the selection of the Catholic convert J. D. Vance as his running mate may convince anti-abortion Catholics to vote for Trump, if nothing else as a “lesser evil” compared with the more unbridled pro-abortion policies of Kamala Harris.
Polls show Catholics split almost in half, with a slight pro-Trump prevalence. But the real new development of this election is that the religious factor carries much less weight than in the past.
In the Democratic camp the scene is one of a true end of an era. The withdrawal from the race by the Catholic Joe Biden, especially desired by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, also a Catholic, leaves no heirs or supporters. Biden had been at odds with the American bishops’ conference for some time, and the wars in Ukraine and the Holy Land had further chilled relations with the pope. Many of those who supported him were born and raised Catholic but had already left the Church in large numbers, and among them social justice had replaced both doctrine and the sacraments.
In 1970, more than half of American Catholics went to Mass on Sundays. But today only 17 percent go, according to a survey by CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University. And among those born in the ‘90s just 9 percent. During the same span of time baptisms have dropped from 1.2 million a year to a little more than 400,000. And this even though in the meantime Catholics have grown to about 70 million, thanks above all to immigration from South America.
The United States has long been the most religious country in the West, with a widespread sense of being a “chosen people” with a unique mission entrusted to it by God. But this exceptionalism is rapidly disappearing, albeit with timing and modalities that differ from those that have laid waste to Europe.
It is a decline common to all the Christian confessions. The great religious figures with strong influence in the field of politics, from Martin Luther King to Billy Graham, have completely disappeared. In one decade, according to the findings of the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, the Baptists of the Southern Baptist Convention have fallen by 11 percent, the Episcopalians and Methodists by 19 percent each, the Lutherans by 25, the Presbyterians by 40. The only ones to grow have been the “non-denominational” Protestant Churches, that is, small independent local groups more active on social media than on the ground. Overall, today 64 percent of Americans declare themselves Christians, when half a century ago they were over 90 percent. And a third of them are above the age of 65, while among those in their thirties one in three has abandoned the Christianity in which he was raised.
Among the Catholics still active in the public sphere, the most dwindling generation is that of postconciliar progressivism, of those who identified with the “spirit of Vatican II.” Pope Francis has tried to keep it alive by making cardinals of bishops who in his judgment represented this generation, from Blase Cupich to Robert W. McElroy, but neither have they succeeded in overturning the conservative majority in the episcopal conference, much less in creating a movement of people to come after them. Moreover, even in the little that remains of the progressive currents, the wars underway in the world have brought in division between those who support Ukraine and Israel, including militarily, and those who instead espouse radically pacifist ideas, to the point of completely rejecting weapons.
Something is afoot, however, on the opposite side, the more conservative and traditionalist one. The young clergy are largely of this orientation, according to a survey by the Catholic University of America.
But there is more. One of the most attentive observers of the changes taking place in American Catholicism, Massimo Faggioli, professor of theology at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, in a well-documented article in “Il Regno,” draws attention to the proliferation of “new intellectual magazines, edited and written also by young people, for a wide audience, that articulate more or less radical and fundamentalist criticisms of political and mercantilist liberalism with a gaze attentive to the religious perspective: The Lamp, Plough, UnHerd, Compact.”
There are no longer just the classic publications of Catholic conservatism like First Things or Crisis. “There are also,” Faggioli notes, “new academic initiatives that testify to the ability to recruit young intellectual vocations, but also to the cultural entrepreneurship of the Catholic right: The New Ressourcement is a kind of American version of Communio that promises to host a certain variety of voices from the spectrum of Catholic theology between right and center.”
Communio, it should be remembered, is the international magazine founded in 1972 as an alternative to the progressive Concilium by theologians of the caliber of Ratzinger, von Balthasar, de Lubac, Kasper, Bouyer.
Moreover, such a fine magazine with a clear Thomist stamp as Lux Veritatis has been born, and with new headquarters in Saint Louis the Augustine Institute, the most heavily attended school of theology in the United States, has gone from strength to strength. Just as a new activism has been discovered by associations among conservative theologians, more a‑conciliar than anti-conciliar, deliberately neutral in dealing with the documents of Vatican II.
But this is what is happening at the elite level. If one broadens the view, Faggioli points out, “the real systemic change is that in the United States there is no longer an ecclesiastical, ecclesial, and theological center of gravity. Also in Catholicism there is a proliferation of the most disparate start-ups jostling for space and attention: a ‘wild American Catholicism’,” without guidance or order, which is the real new development of these times.
By choosing J. D. Vance as his running mate in the race for the White House, Trump has fished out a typical representative of the new American Catholic right. But the real impact of this candidacy remains to be seen, in a Catholicism that has become so fragile, fragmented, wild, not to be compared with that robust Christian faith in which Alexis de Tocqueville saw the vital support of democracy in America.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.