The End of Prestige

True Confessions:
Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church
by francis x. maier
ignatius, 284 pages, $24.95

The Future of the Catholic Church in the American Political Order
edited by kenneth l. grasso and thomas f. x. varacalli
franciscan university, 312 pages, $25

For most of the Church’s history in the United States, Catholics have sought to demonstrate to their often suspicious neighbors the possibility of being a faithful Catholic and a patriotic American. This has been no easy task, given the modern and Protestant character of the nation’s founding and its majority culture. Nonetheless, Catholic devotion to American principles was never motivated primarily by fear of persecution. Rather, Catholics were from the beginning convinced that the freedoms afforded by the U.S. Constitution allowed the Church to flourish in unique ways. Such were the enthusiasms of the late-nineteenth-century bishops that Pope Leo XIII felt compelled to warn them not to prefer the American political system to a confessional state.

Things changed with the election of the first Catholic president and, almost simultaneously, Vatican II’s qualified but real endorsement of religious freedom, American style. It should have been a springtime for the Catholic Church in America, but it was not. The acceptability of John F. Kennedy’s faith was dependent on its lightness, and elite America was turning against the very elements that constituted what John Courtney Murray called the “evident coincidence” between the guiding principles of the American polity and the Western Christian political tradition. The sixties witnessed more restrictive interpretations of the establishment clause, the fall of traditional morals concerning sexuality, and an all-out cultural assault on Christianity’s place in public life. This turn has gone from bad to worse. The second Catholic president, for example, is making his devotion to abortion rights a centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

The two books reviewed here approach the relationship between the Church and America in their own ways, but each registers that the America of 2024 is not the America of 1776, 1884, 1960, or even 2008. The determinative powers are no longer friendly to religious belief and are reliably hostile to the particularities of Catholicism. At the same time, neither book indulges in integralist dreams or escapist fantasies. As they recognize, the Church is always incarnated in a particular nation and shares in its history, aspirations, and challenges; and whatever one thinks of the founding principles of the American nation—whether fatally Lockean or open to being grounded in natural law—it is in this nation, and no other, that the American Church must fulfill its mission.

Few laymen are as qualified to write a book on the Church in America as Francis X. Maier. As far as I can tell, he knows every nook and cranny of the place and has held almost every Church job that is open to the laity—most prominently as senior aide to Archbishop Charles Chaput. (Maier is also a consulting editor of this journal.) It is therefore worth noting that despite the depth and breadth of his personal experience, he has given us a book crowded not with his own thoughts but with those of others. Maier is both humble and astute enough to realize that if one wishes to know the Church at a particular time and place, one must learn the hearts and minds of those most involved in its day-to-day life. Between 2020 and 2022, Maier interviewed thirty bishops, sixteen priests, deacons, and religious, and a host of lay people from different backgrounds. These interview subjects share sincere faith and love of the Church, warts and all. We do not hear from theological dissenters or from those who wish that Vatican II had never happened. In this sense, Maier admits to a lack of comprehensiveness. He insists only that the collection of voices he has assembled reflects truthfully the opinions of a large and important segment of the American Church “at a specific point in time.”

Although the interviewees focus on different aspects of our present moment, themes emerge. One notices that virtually everyone believes that the American Church is in a unique situation of crisis and that the days of institutional prestige and influence in the wider society are over. America is no longer friendly ground for the Church. The bishops who feel this most acutely are those in now secularized urban centers (Maier withholds names but tells us whether the diocese is urban, rural, or mixed), who find themselves weighed down by the vestiges of previous glory in the form of empty buildings and schools that have ceased to be distinctively Catholic. They yearn to do new things yet feel the dead weight of the institutional past. The challenges facing bishops in rural areas are different: more often a lack of financial resources than a lack of faith.

Yet, for all that, hope springs among the leaders of the American Church. They point to positive signs: energetic seminarians, dedicated priests, young people attracted to traditional liturgies and new movements such as FOCUS, and the commitment of their brother bishops. These are men firm in faith, hope, and love in difficult times. None desired major reforms such as elected bishops or optional celibacy. The one constant negative note concerns Pope Francis. Although all the interviewed bishops believe Francis sincerely works for the good of the Church as he sees it, there is pained confusion regarding his animus toward American Catholics and resentment regarding his authoritarian tendencies. Perhaps the most alarming remark is that “not one of the men who has entered our seminary since the election of Francis did so because of him. Not one.”

A similar picture emerges from those below the episcopacy, although the chiaroscuro is sharper. With respect to priests, in place of the common impression of lonely and exhausted men, this book shows men who are fully engaged in their work and astute analysts of the particular challenges and opportunities of the present moment. Maier draws this out with a more or less standard set of questions. As expected, Covid looms large. There are the now usual regrets about the Church’s anemic response, but also the detection of an evangelical opportunity in the loss of community and the fear of death that paralyzed so many. The aftershocks of the sexual abuse scandal in the form of social ostracism are still felt, although they are waning. Though most priests embrace the discipline of celibacy as a needed witness in a hypersexualized culture, they express a healthy realism regarding the struggles and temptations it entails.

Mostly, however, those interviewed are aware that the past cannot and must not determine the future of the American Church. New wine must be produced and the skins to contain it. All recognize the absolute necessity of inculcating in Catholics an intentional faith. The cultural Catholicism that long propped up the American Church is gone with the wind; only those with a personal and life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ will survive the coming onslaught. I consider this development a healthy Catholic appropriation of the best of evangelical Protestantism—the emergence of a truly American Catholicism.

A distinctive feature of Maier’s book is the attention it gives to the laity who keep the machinery going. Maier’s focus is on money: those who look after the finances, as well as donors. He has worked for the Church long enough to appreciate why Jesus called not only apostles but supporters like Joanna, wife of Chuza. Without fiscally savvy lay professionals willing to work for the Church and wealthy Catholics willing to fund various ministries, apostolic work grinds to a halt. The tales these lay Catholics tell are worth hearing. Some financial advisers have had better experiences with their bishops than others, but all credit the payouts related to the sexual abuse crisis for making their work easier. The financial costs of mismanagement could no longer be denied. Of equal interest are the interviews conducted with donors. Maier probes how these men and women go about determining when to give and when to withhold funds. Anyone interested in a Catholic start-up would do well to heed what is said here. For example, donors never want to be the sole supporters of a project, and they must be convinced that a legitimate need is being addressed—and that the leadership and support team are up to the task. It is also clear that Catholic donors think of their gifts as part of an ongoing relationship with the recipients.

Maier next turns to the average Catholic in the pews. The wide array of views presented are united by a common worry that the leaders of the Church are too accepting of “zombie” institutions that look Catholic from the outside but are secular within. Catholic-in-name-only schools and colleges come in for a special and righteous drubbing. Parents express frustration that Church leaders seem more interested in managing decline than in providing evangelical alternatives that can combat the cultural toxins threatening their children. An especially beautiful section consists of conversations with parents of special-needs children. Maier frames this chapter with a powerful tribute to Matthew Hennessey’s daughter, Magdalena. Again, romanticism is eschewed for an aching realism infused with faith. The experiences related in this chapter are alone worth the price of the book.

Maier concludes with an interview of his longtime friend Archbishop Chaput, an exchange that demonstrates the basis for Maier’s loyalty and dedication to this successor of the apostles. Chaput is a sharp analyst of the present state of things, how things went wrong, and what will be needed to right them. His call for the need to retrieve a simpler view of the papacy—in which the pope is no longer “seen as a universal pastor in the sense of having his fingers in all the dioceses”—gives some idea of why the Holy Father was so quick to accept his retirement. Yet, though Chaput is brutally frank about the fact that many of the Church’s problems are home-brewed, he is equally clear about the threat American culture poses to the future of Catholicism in the United States. In particular, he points to a connection between America’s increased secularism and its retreat from its original commitment to religious freedom. He grants that this development gives support to critics of America such as Patrick Deneen and Michael Hanby. Nonetheless, he ultimately sides with Murray in holding that “the founding didn’t determine our current problems; we created them by our actions. Now we need to do what we can, to save what we can.”

Maier clearly intends his book to be hopeful, even inspiring. In many ways it is. One comes away believing that if these people are in charge of things, the Church is in good hands. Nonetheless, almost everyone interviewed is convinced that powerful cultural and governmental forces are poised to make the work of the Church very difficult and, in some instances, impossible. This feeling is found as well in the book of essays edited by Kenneth L. Grasso and Thomas F. X. Varacalli, which could be understood as a scholarly companion piece to Maier’s book. The writers gathered therein are convinced that the American Church is facing a “fundamentally new situation” characterized by “an ever more centralized and increasingly omnicompetent state” and a “cultural ethos fundamentally incompatible with—and hostile to—Catholicism.”

The direness of the present is heightened by the fact that every Catholic over the age of forty-five can remember brighter days, when the heights of American and Church power seemed to be moving in concert. Such a quick and steep fall requires explanation, and we find various accounts of how we arrived at our present condition. Some observers seek clues in the mixed theoretical sources of the Founding or the differing valuations of religion by the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. They ask whether we are now simply witnessing the original flaws in their full destructive power. Others look for a pattern in the history of Catholic political figures such as Roger Taney, Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, and Joe Biden. Unknown to me was the tale James R. Stoner tells of state senator John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, who defeated the richer and less faithful John F. Kennedy’s attempt to deny federal aid to parochial schools. There is also Gov. Robert Casey Sr. of Pennsylvania, who will go down in history as the last prominent pro-life Democrat.

Yet, despite the occasional bright spot, the overall story is one of decline, especially for believing Catholics in the Democratic Party. The signal that something had changed was the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate issued by the Obama administration requiring employers to cover contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization in their insurance plans. This act of governmental overreach and blatant disregard for the freedom of Catholic business owners to live out their faith publicly served as a bell in the night, announcing that the future would not be like the past. The America Catholics had embraced was no more. As Ryan J. Barilleaux puts it: “Catholicism did not change; America did.”

Among the many virtues of this volume is its careful reading of John Courtney Murray. It has become fashionable in some circles to cast Murray as part of the problem, a Jesuit whose desire for assimilation with American society produced a fatal naivete with respect to the dangers of modern liberalism. The essays by Robert H. Hunt and Kenneth Grasso make a powerful counter-case. They recall that Murray’s concern was not to demonstrate the compatibility of Catholicism with American democracy. In fact, he viewed such framing of the issue as an act of impertinence. The question is not whether Catholicism fits American democracy, but whether American democracy can be made compatible with American Catholicism. Moreover, the positive answer Murray gave was conditional, dependent on the success of a “retheorization” of the American concept of freedom to the extent that it was beholden to Enlightenment philosophy.

Murray considered such retheorizing a real possibility because he judged that the American Founding, in contrast to the French Revolution, was part of a tradition of reflection that reached back to classical and Christian sources. Here Murray found a consonance between a government limited by constitutional protection of certain rights and the Christian insistence that human affairs are ruled by not one order but two. A state to govern earthly matters is not sufficient: There must also be a Church. This rejection of “political monism” stems from the Christian conviction that each human being has a destiny beyond this earthly life and therefore must be free to enjoy a sphere of life beyond the competence of the state. Murray believed that without Christian contributions to political thought, liberalism inevitability tended toward monism.

The job of Catholics in America was to preserve and strengthen this aspect of the American polity by convincing their fellow citizens to adopt a view of freedom grounded in the truth about the human person. Though Murray could at times be optimistic about the chances that this would happen, he recognized the very real possibility, even probability, that things would go the other way. Even in his earliest writings, he saw monistic forces at work in American politics and culture. His early death in 1967 meant that he never witnessed the full upheavals of the late sixties and the dissolutions of the seventies. We will never know how his calculations would have changed. In any case, the writers of this volume make a forceful case that the monistic tendencies Murray feared have the whip hand for the foreseeable future. The American Church has no choice but to come to terms with this reality.

It is not inconsequential that the editors conclude their volume with a plea by James Kalb for Catholics to consider “Benedict Options.” Kalb is aware of the charges of insularity and defeatism but makes a strong argument that forming like-minded and mutually supportive communities is natural to human beings and compatible with the dictate to love one’s neighbor. Catholics, he says, “need to find ways to counter the world’s intrusiveness,” primarily by limiting their exposure to popular culture as mediated by social media. His counsel, however, is not one of ultimate despair. Evils tend to conflict with each other, and nature can be denied for only so long. In this sense, our contemporary insanities possess no lasting power against what the Church offers. Maier would no doubt agree.

James F. Keating is associate professor of theology at Providence College.

Image by Justin Brendel.