Opinion | This Is Why America Needs Catholicism – The New York Times

Today, perhaps more than ever, the church presents a refreshing response to our nations enforced ideological bifurcation. Polling suggests that about 75 percent of Americans have moderate to progressive views on economic questions and slightly more than half are socially conservative. The median voter has both of these traits, and there are good reasons to think that it was this unnamed coalition of anti-libertarians who decided the outcomes of the last two presidential elections.

Both of our major political parties try to placate voters by triangulating occasionally, tactically co-opting stances from the other side. But the most striking thing about both parties is the wide range of positions they share that are at odds with the enthusiasms of the median voter: a bellicose foreign policy, free trade, social libertinism and the financialization of the economy.

In contrast, the church offers a consistent ethic of solidarity: against pre-emptive war of any kind (which the church tells us cannot be waged in a just manner under modern conditions), against the enrichment of the wealthy in poor and rich nations alike at the expense of the working and middle classes, against the increasingly nebulous claims of academic progressives and activists about the nature of the human person and against the pursuit of maximal shareholder value to the detriment of virtually every other meaningful consideration.

It is not just the wide range of issues addressed by the churchs social teaching that might inform a future large-scale political realignment but also the manner in which it does so. Consider the problem of cooperation among nations. If the events of the last year have revealed anything, it is the importance of what Benedict XVI, the pope emeritus, referred to as supranational institutions with real teeth. Instead of lionizing the neoliberal banalities of Davos Man, Catholic social teaching articulates a morally inflected defense of internationalism that rejects most of what makes Americans suspicious of it the obliging attitude toward corporate power, the soft cultural imperialism of liberal nongovernmental organizations while insisting upon its indispensability for the common good.

The idea that Catholic social teaching can inspire secular politics is not new. The papal encyclicals of the interwar period, which spoke to the anxieties of a world torn between the failures of laissez-faire economics and the growing threat of totalitarianism, were read enthusiastically by Franklin Roosevelt. Today Pope Francis, in keeping with many recent occupants of the Chair of Peter, addresses his writings to all people of good will rather than to the Catholic faithful alone as he inveighs against the spoliation of the Amazon region and its Indigenous peoples, wage slavery in Asia, the theft of natural resources in Africa and the replacement of civic life with algorithm-abetted consumerism in the developed world.

We already have a test case for what Catholic social teaching can offer to a population disillusioned by the collapse of a civilization and its supposed ideals: the European political tradition of Christian democracy. More than half a century ago, Christian democracy arose in Europe as a response to the ideologies that had given rise to a global economic depression and two successive world wars. The new postnationalist Europe to which this political movement gave rise a Europe of robust trade unions and generously subsidized orchestras was the dream not only of the onetime imperial heir Otto von Hapsburg and Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the longtime prefect of the Holy Office, but also of Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, the fulfillment of the promise of centuries of European humanism.

Like its predecessor in Europe, a revived Christian democracy in the United States would draw upon official church teaching as well as pilfer from the best of secular culture. A new Catholic politics would baptize Bernie Sanderss health care plan, degrowth economics and bans on single-use plastics while drawing attention to neglected elements of our own political heritage that really are worth preserving, such as the presumption of innocence. Such a politics would also remind us, in ways that transcend politics in the narrow sense, of the value of forgiveness and contrition, as opposed to the self-aggrandizing quasi-therapeutic apologies to which we have become accustomed from public figures.

Read the rest here:

Opinion | This Is Why America Needs Catholicism - The New York Times