First as tragedy, second as farce. The second Catholic U.S. president, a liberal like the one who came before him, will go down in history as the man who stood behind the most barbaric ethnic cleansing in recent history, thereby discrediting American leadership and international law in ways it will be difficult to recover from. It cannot be denied, it cannot be overlooked, and it cannot be forgiven. President Biden’s feckless and ineffectual failure to rein in the Netanyahu regime has already ruined his legacy.
There is a story this week in Axios about the family drama embroiling the Bidens when Joe made his decision to run. Only his sister spoke up that it was probably a bad idea. There is a lesson here about the perils of ambition or the sin of pride. It’s difficult to muster any more sympathy than a parent in Gaza. We have a liberal Catholic president and a pope from the liberal side of things, but how hollow the victory must seem.
Lots of ironies abound. We spent the Trump years in a national hysteria over the presumed rise of “fascism”—every Republican is a fascist to most of these people—but it’s a Democratic president who is presiding over this. It is against the interests of this country, and it also cuts against the general perspective of President Biden’s own church. At some point Massimo Faggioli, who appeared out of nowhere to try to vindicate in theological terms the type of politics President Biden supposedly represented, is going to have to reckon with this.
There aren’t many groups in American public life with a worse track record over the last decade than liberal Catholics. They’re all wet, and their instincts are very bad. To their credit Commonweal called for cutting military aid to Israel in March, but they seem like the exception.
One general pattern you see across the Church is that the conservative prelates are more impressive men, intellectually and as shepherds of souls, and they also have a better sense of their own limits. Cardinal Müller once told a room full of social conservatives when I heard him speak a few years ago that “Jesus has wounds on his left foot, and his right foot.” It’s a line that sticks with me.
One thing we often heard before the Trump years and right up until the end was that supporting him was going to prove discrediting for religious people. Most people who said this didn’t have a high opinion of religion anyway, but maybe if they said it, religious people would do what they wanted. This argument tended to work better on highly moralistic evangelicals; politics as a matter of simple horse-trading is a style Catholics, both here and in Europe, are much more comfortable with. The smarter liberal Catholics would contend back then that, looking at the social liberalism of the money behind the Republican Party, that the overturn of Roe wasn’t going to be in the offing anyway, so prioritizing abortion was silly.
They were dead wrong. Objectively, there’s some evidence to suggest abortions are actually up since Roe has been overturned, so I’m not sure that it’s clear-cut that more lives will be saved because it’s happened. But the basic bargain religious voters made with Trump paid off, it’s impossible to deny that. And if we can’t find an upshot in actual lives saved, the big upshot in principle is that the law of the land no longer recognizes a federal constitutional right to kill one’s children.
The knock-on political effect, which the left is having a hard time coming to terms with, is that at a minimum they will find they have to set abortion laws by passing laws. That should be regarded as normal in a democracy—it’s how it’s done in Europe, for instance—but a great many feminists have been up to this point unwilling to concede that abortion is an issue up for democratic negotiation. At least as a practical matter, they have to concede that now.
Then there’s immigration, which is one of the few issues on which liberal prelates and Catholic organizations preserved a relationship with the Democratic Party. It’s a loser with voters in Europe and America. There is an unwillingness by bishops to state the obvious, that nothing in the Catholic tradition denies the right of a nation to decide who comes and goes. The idea that a personal Christian duty to welcome the stranger can be written as national policy is not going to be seen as very credible going forward, because it isn’t credible. There’s a basic Aristotelian perspective that very few are willing to voice, which is that states exist to serve their citizens first. Much of the tumult going on in Britain, France, and the U.S. has to do with the perception that elites in these countries have tried to fix the world while neglecting their own people.
It’s hard to appeal to a sort of cosmopolitan urbanity that a lot of these people depend on when Europe is trending in a more conservative direction. E.J. Dionne tried the standard hectoring line about “our friends in Europe” this week just before Emmanuel Macron called an election amid a massive setback for European liberals in the EU parliamentary elections.
Francis’s papacy seems to be somewhat out of control—and that’s a perception he himself seems to relish. You can see God’s sense of humor in these liberal church-bureaucrat prelates everyone is sick of being forced to defend a president who’s backing an ethnic cleansing and a pope who’s popping off in multiple fora about “faggotry” in high places.
The Rupnik scandal, with its nauseating and evil details, has implications that are hardly confined to the liberal side of things—his mosaics are on the Opus Dei-KofC boondoggle of the John Paul II Shrine as well—but it has posed enough problems for the Francis Internet Defense Force that even they have had to admit it’s been handled badly. It has also tainted the ongoing synod and a fair number of prelates seen as liberal champions.
If you’re a liberal Catholic, of the kind Joe Biden represents, what are you left with? The Church is trending in a direction that may be more multicultural, but not more liberal. It seems like liberal Catholics are mostly defined today by what they’re against—the Latin Mass, certainly, and maybe also an affinity for the reflexive anti-Americanism that Francis himself has, which fits well with lefty assumptions about the United States’ role in the world. They’ll have the Vigano trial in the upcoming months to make hay about, too, who was unwisely promoted by a lot of the conservative movement’s influencers.
But even the standard issues of the 20th Century Catholic left are mostly spoken for on the right today, at least in the U.S. It’s conservatives that are making the most forceful and effective anti-war arguments. The anti-death penalty people have overplayed their hand, too.
There isn’t nothing to like about Francis’s papacy. What has been coming out of the Vatican in relation to AI, surrogacy, and the environment does seem like the Church doing what it should to play an active role in issues relevant to the 21st century. But a certain liberal style that has certainly been a feature of American Catholic life seems like it’s deader than a doornail today. It’s also pretty hard to miss that President Biden’s failure to act to rein in Israel’s ethnic cleansing has helped to kill it.