How the USA got over being anti-Catholic

The most significant thing about Pope Francis’ address to Congress is that it happened.

During most of American history, a majority of Americans saw the Roman Catholic Church as an enemy of American freedom and democracy.   Persecution of Catholic immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s was worse than persecution of Muslim immigrants today.

Anti-Catholic cartoon from the 1850s

This would be unthinkable today, and it reflects changes in both American public opinion and Vatican policy.

The Founders of the American republic defined themselves in opposition to the absolute monarchs of Europe.

The French Revolution was a revolution against the church as well as against the king and aristocracy, and, after the defeat of Napoleon, the Papacy aligned itself with the Holy Alliance, a union of Austria, Prussia, Russia to suppress any democratic uprising in Europe.

Vatican policy for more than a century was based on opposition to the legacy of the French Revolution, and, as a result, all revolutionary movements in Catholic countries were anti-clerical.

Catholics in Protestant countries were persecuted sometimes by law and almost always in public opinion.  Poor Catholic immigrants into the United States had equal legal rights, but in the early 19th century were targets of mob violence, both because they were poor and foreign and because they were regarded as proxies for the Vatican.

The Catholic Church vs. the capitalist ethic

The Roman Catholic Church has been critical of capitalism since before “capitalism” was a word.

This is old news.  I learned it as a college undergraduate in the 1950s when I was studying economic history.

The criticism of Catholic social teaching back then was not that it was radical or Marxist.  It was that it was out-of-date.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that you should put the common good above your personal self-interest. Supporters of the free market claim that if people are free to pursue their own interests, the law of supply and demand will produce a result that is best for everyone.

The medieval Catholic philosophers taught that people in business should charge no more than a “just price”—that is, enough to cover their expenses and provide a profit sufficient to live on.  Supporters of the free market claim that if prices are allowed to rise and fall, the law of supply and demand will direct production to where it is most needed.

The Roman Catholic Church historically has opposed “usury”—the charging of excessive interest rates.  Supporters of the free market say that if you limit the return on investment, you will stifle economic growth.

The USA’s Christian majority is shrinking

Although there are more avowed Christians in the United States than in any other country, the U.S. Christian majority in the United States is shrinking, Pew Research Center reports.

About 5 million fewer Americans identified themselves as Christians in 2014 than in 2007, and the percentage of self-identified Christians declined by nearly 8 percentage points.

The decline was most noticeable in the Millennial generation—those born in the period from 1981 to 1996.   Only 56 percent of this group identified themselves as Christian in Pew’s 2014 poll.

Evangelical Protestants are the strongest segment of American Christianity.  They grew in absolute numbers from 2007 and 2014, and declined only slightly as a percentage of the U.S. population.

But they are growing at a less rapid rate that the religiously unaffiliated.  And growth in that segment comes from the “nothing in particular” group, not the avowed atheists or agnostics.   I suppose this includes a lot of people who say they are spiritual, but not religious.

I don’t claim to know why this is so.

I can think of possible reasons.  One is the sexual revolution and the decline in the belief that marriage is a sacrament received through a church wedding.  Another is the growing awareness that scientific belief is incompatible with the literal belief in the Bible.  A third is the identification of Christianity in the public mind with conservative politics.  The so-called religious right, which is strongest among evangelical Protestants, is a backlash against these trends.

I would be interested in your thoughts.

For the full Pew report, click on America’s Changing Religious Landscape.

Garry Wills: The Pope Is a Christian!

Garry Wills wrote in the New York Review of Books that contrary to appearances, Pope Francis is popular with the Catholic laity.  A Pew poll indicates that 90 percent of Catholics approve of the Pope’s statements, and 95 percent of the Catholics who are most observant.

What makes Pope Francis controversial, Wills wrote, is that he follows the teachings of Jesus.  In fact, he said, the Pope, in his preaching of charity to the poor, is less radical than Jesus, who said it was harder for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Perhaps it is wrong to think of a “Catholic right” and a “Catholic left.” It may be more fitting to think of the former as the defenders of Dives, or the Pharisees who do not want people to eat with Jesus, or the flushers of the homeless, or the priestly Levites, or the prodigal’s elder brother—while their opposites are the lovers of Lazarus, or the sinners who eat with Jesus, or the bedroll people, or the “outcast” Samaritan, or the prodigal’s father.  These are the two forms of Christianity now on offer.  Let Catholics make their choice.

via The New York Review of Books.

The passing scene: Links & comments 11/17/14

What really happened in Beijing: Putin, Obama, Xi—and the back story the media won’t tell you by Patrick Smith for Salon.

Patrick Smith explained why the real winner in the new U.S.-Russian cold war is China.

Saudi Arabia is driving down the world price of oil, now about $80 a barrel, by putting oil on the market.  The main point, Smith wrote, is that the Saudis can make a profit so long as oil is priced at more than $30 a barrel, but the Russians, whose oil is harder to get, need a price of $104 a barrel.

The Saudis oppose Russia for supporting Syria and Iran, which are obstacles to Saudi influence in the Middle East.  Other oil-producing nations suffer collateral damage.  Venezuela is currently going through a political and economic crisis due to the fall in the price of oil.

Russia had helped the United States in its negotiations with Iran, by agreeing to reprocess uranium for the Iranians, which would remove the possibility that the reprocessing might be used to make Iranian nuclear weapons.  U.S.-Iranian negotiations also are collateral damage.

All this benefits China, which gets to buy Russian oil and gas at a bargain price.  China is expanding its influence in Asia offering attractive trade deals to nations that don’t want to be drawn into U.S. conflicts.

Ronald Reagan’s secret tragedy: How 70s and 80s cynicism poisoned Democrats and America, an interview of Rick Perlstein by Thomas Frank for Salon.

Rick Perlstein, author of the newly-published The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, said the roots of present-day politics go back to the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon governed based on short-term political gain, and candidate Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to believe in the myths we tell ourselves.

Democrats meanwhile turned away from working people and New Deal liberalism and embraced an illusory non-partisanship.  This created a politics in which big-business conservatives can pose as  populists and the true representatives of working people.

Act of Faith: the Catholic priest who puts his life on the line to save Muslims in the Central African Republic by Sam Jones for The Guardian.

Father Bernard Kinvi is a true hero who lives up to the best teaching of his church.  His story is well worth knowing.

Is the Pope Catholic? Why, yes, he is

Inequality is the root of social evil.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) April 28, 2014

Statements by Pope Francis on social justice, like the one above on his Twitter account, have astonished the world.  But maybe they shouldn’t.  There is nothing that he has said that departs from historic Catholic social teaching.

Pope Benedict  XVI and Pope John Paul II are known for their statements condemning abortion and gay marriage, but if you check their record, you’ll see that their statements on social justice not greatly different from what Pope Francis is saying now.

Nor has Pope Francis said anything that contradicts historical Catholic teaching about sexual morality.   It is just that he speaks louder about social justice and inequality.  Or maybe the public and the press listen selectively to his social justice teaching.

When I read the Gospels, it seems to me that Jesus believes in a code of sexual morality more strict than what most people do today.  No-fault divorce is just as contradictory to the teaching of Jesus as gay marriage.  Jesus taught, according to my reading, that divorce was either forbidden or was allowable only in case of adultery by the other partner, and that, in any case, divorced people should not remarry.

At the same time, Jesus was forgiving of sexual transgressions, and regarded them much less seriously than sins of pride and avarice.  The two things he condemned most strongly were lack of faith in God and lack of charity to the poor.  But concerning the woman taken in adultery, he said that only someone without sin (in other words, nobody) had the right to cast the first stone and that the woman herself should go and sin no more.  To the sinful woman who washed his feet with her hair, he said she was forgiven much because she loved much.

I find the same spirit in the prophets in the Hebrew Bible.  What they care about is worship of heathen idols and oppression of the poor.  The prophet Amos asked what the Lord required other that to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

All this is reflected in the official social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant churches.

I have watched the depiction of the Book of Mormon in the annual Hill Cumorah pageant in Palmyra, N.Y., and I see the same emphasis as in the Hebrew Bible.

Pope Francis’s ideas about inequality and social justice didn’t come out of nowhere.

How many ombudsmen has the Pope?

Autocrats at the top of hierarchical organizations—whether governmental, corporate, religious, military or political—have a lot of power when it comes to crushing dissent or doing battle with outside forces.

But when it comes to internal reform, that autocratic power commonly melts away.   Autocrats who try to reform the institution they supposedly control run into mysterious resistances and obstacles.  An autocrat is only as powerful as the willing obedience of those lower in the hierarchy extends.

Pope Francis

That’s why I admire and sympathize with Pope Francis in his struggle to clean house at the Institute for Religious Works, also known as the Vatican Bank.  Originally set up to finance the church’s charitable activities, the Vatican Bank operates outside Italian law and financial reporting requirements, and is understood to have been infiltrated by the Italian Mafia for the purposes of money laundering.

I don’t think Pope Francis really is targeted for assassination, as some Italian prosecutors have suggested, but I do think the various Italian Mafias are powerful institutions, and not only in Italy, and they did their utmost to frustrate the Pope’s efforts.

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope, I wrote about his ambiguous role in Argentina’s “dirty war” under the dictatorship.  I now think that what I wrote was uncharitable and based on incomplete information.

I admire Pope Francis not just for his highly-publicized modeling of the behavior of Jesus toward the poor, sick and outcast, but his willingness to take action against church officials who abuse their power, such as the Bishop of Limberg, Germany, who was suspended for misuse of church funds for his extravagant lifestyle.  You don’t have to be a Catholic to wish him success.

The new Pope and the Argentine military junta

Many Latin American prelates, most famously Dom Helder Camaro of Brazil and the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romaro of El Salvador, spoke out in the 1970s and 1980s against military dictatorships, death squads and torture.  The new Pope Francis was not one of them.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio

[Jorge Mario] Bergoglio was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the military dictatorship of 1976-1983, during which the military murdered upwards of 30,000 people (as well as kidnapping hundreds of children whose parents the regime had tortured and murdered). Unlike Catholic officials in neighboring Chile and Brazil, where priests, bishops, and even cardinals spoke out against human rights abuses and defended victims of abuses, in Argentina, the Catholic Church was openly complicit in the military regime’s repression.

Bergoglio was not exempt from this involvement: military officers have testified that Bergoglio helped the Argentine military regime hide political prisoners when human rights activists visited the country.  And Bergoglio himself had to testify regarding the kidnapping of two priests who he stripped of their religious licenses shortly before they were kidnapped and tortured.

This isn’t just a case of Bergoglio being a member of an institution that supported a brutal regime; it’s a case of Bergoglio himself having ties, direct and indirect, to that very regime.  For those who hoped for a Pope who might represent a more welcoming and open path for the Catholic Church, the selection of Bergoglio has to be a let-down.

via Americas South and North.

In November 2005, Cardinal Bergoglio was elected head of the Argentine Conference of Bishops for a three-year term, which was renewed in 2008.  At the time he was chosen, the Argentine church was dealing with a notorious political scandal, that of the Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former chaplain of the Buenos Aires police who had been accused of aiding in the questioning, torture and death of political prisoners.

The church authorities had spirited Father von Wernich out of the country and placed him in a parish in Chile under a false name, but he was eventually brought back to Argentina and put on trial. In 2007, he was found guilty on seven counts of complicity in homicide, more than 40 counts of kidnapping and more than 30 of torture, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Father von Wernich was allowed to continue to celebrate Mass in prison, and in 2010 a church official said that “at the appropriate time, von Wernich’s situation will have to be resolved in accordance with canonical law.” But Cardinal Bergoglio never issued a formal apology on behalf of the church, or commented directly on the case, and during his tenure the bishops’ conference was similarly silent.

via NYTimes.com.

I never was bothered by the fact Pope Benedict XVI was a member of the Hitler Youth as a teenager.  He was a boy and too young to know better, he never personally participated in Nazi atrocities and he never supported or showed sympathy for Naziism as an adult.  Cardinal Bergoglio was an adult when he supported the fascist Argentine military junta, and, so far as I know, he never expressed regrets.  (If I am wrong on this point, I would be grateful for better information).

[Note added 3/16/13.  Argentina’s bishops in October 2012 issued a collective apology for failing to protect their flock during the dictatorship.]

The Papacy is important to everyone and not just Catholics.  The Roman Catholic Church is not only the world’s largest religious communion, it is the world’s largest membership organization—period.  There are more than a billion Catholics in the world.   A majority of the world’s Christians are Catholics.  What the Pope does, and what the Catholic Church does, are hugely important to the world, for good and bad.

Now it may be that as Pope, Pope Francis will be able to put his past history behind him.  Maybe he will support Catholic social teaching at its best, rather than Catholic authoritarianism at its worst.  I hope so.  It’s possible.  Such a change of heart wouldn’t be unprecedented.  But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Civil law, canon law, sharia law

Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church protest the refusal by the Obama administration to grant an exemption from federal regulations for certain Catholic charitable organizations.

Specifically, they say their conscience does not allow them to include contraceptive services in their employee health insurance plans, even though their non-Catholic employees might want such services.  Catholic churches, schools and other strictly religious institutions are exempt, but Catholic charities that employ both Catholics and non-Catholics and serve both Catholics and non-Catholics are not.

In other words, the bishops believe that they should not be required to obey American civil law when it conflicts with Catholic canon law.  My friend Bill speculated on what an uproar there would be if some Muslim charitable organization wanted an exemption from federal law on the grounds that it conflicted with Muslim sharia law.

Click on U.S. Catholics dismayed by Obama administration ruling and Religious Exemptions and Contraceptive Coverage for more discussion of this issue.

If it were up to me, I would have the federal government give up the effort to regulate private health insurance plans, and instead create a public insurance option.  If there was a public option, somebody who lacked insurance or wasn’t satisfied with their insurance coverage could sign up for the self-financing, non-profit government plan, which would provide all the benefits the government thinks people should have.  The public option would provide a benchmark for private insurance companies.  Either the private insurance insurance companies would provide satisfactory coverage, or people over time would migrate to the public plan.