What to make of a Catholic president?
The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., I always thought, exaggerated by claiming anti-Catholicism the “deepest bias in the history of the American people.” The claim is quite embarrassing now, and I doubt many seriously believe it. Save those who rhetorically exploit the power of the victim, it’s hard to suggest Catholics suffer hatred more intense than any other identifiable group. Even if once true, society’s victims today aren’t Catholics. Not anymore.
Far from the fears of old fundamentalists — from Bob Jones and Norman Vincent Peale to W.A. Criswell preaching that a Catholic president would “spell the death of a free church in a free state” — it seems that except among those with quaint retrograde prejudices Americans are now comfortable electing a Catholic president. And that’s because, assimilated, thoroughly American for better or worse, Catholics today belong to the cultural and economic hegemony of society. Catholics are no longer the object of nativists’ fears, because nativists now fear and hate others. Adapted to the sometimes moral and at other times immoral evolution of American society, Catholics are less hated today. It is, therefore, less surprising that we would elect a Catholic president than it was 60 years ago, as both Americans and Catholics have changed.
That change is acceptable because of the distance President John Kennedy put between himself and his church. Running for office in 1960, Kennedy said, “I believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute.” He was adamant that “no one in that Church speaks for me.”
Such is the renegotiated spiritual relationship he and every Catholic politician since has necessarily assumed, a Catholicism of qualified observance. Renouncing the obedience all Catholic faithful are bound to show to “what the sacred Pastors, who represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith,” as canon law demands, electable American Catholic politicians have understandably embraced this strange heterodoxy. Which, however successful for Catholic candidates in the last half-century, is of course, spiritually speaking, a grave mistake.
So, to repeat the question: What to make of a Catholic president? To speak about the Catholic who will be president, we may candidly admit that he is clearly a bad Catholic. I borrow here the precise terminology of St. Augustine. Each year at Easter he would warn new Catholics against what he called the “bad faithful,” among whom, as he would in Augustine’s day and in ours, Biden certainly belongs. Clearly, for one thing, his support of abortion rights is inhumane, wrong, and (I think) excommunicable. His willful refusal to embrace fully the integral moral vision Catholicism describes (which, I believe, is but the world’s only genuine humanism) is a tragedy, especially considering what he could do were he a good Catholic and not a bad one.
But bad Catholicism doesn’t distinguish him. He is, you see, but one among innumerable bad Catholics. What this election has brought to light, painfully for many, is the soft schism of American Catholicism. Biden, undoubtedly, represents a highly educated but poorly catechized, barely converted, cultural Catholicism, formed quite nobly but equally vaguely by a faint account of social justice but which is as substantially Catholic as having once gone to parochial school or Notre Dame. Which is to say, very little. Yet it is a bad Catholicism that differs from another bad Catholicism, a religion itself deformed, principally economically. These, of course, are the bad Catholics of the political right, but who didn’t win.
But what does any of this matter to the broad American public? It doesn’t. That a bad Catholic will soon replace a bad Presbyterian in the White House doesn’t mean anything. Which is the important point.
That Biden is a bad Catholic may very well make him a good president; likely, though, because he is a bad Catholic, the effect of his Catholicism, if anything, positive or negative, will be merely accidental. But again, it doesn’t matter. Which was precisely Kennedy’s bad spiritual but good political wisdom.
“I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens to be Catholic,” he said. Because it genuinely didn’t matter that Kennedy was Catholic; it’s just that everybody mistakenly thought it did. Because they didn’t realize he was ready to be a bad Catholic for the sake of being a good president.
And it’s why, as we welcome this new president, we shouldn’t make much of his Catholicism. Biden shouldn’t make much of it himself; but instead, like me and his fellow bad Catholics, work out his own salvation in fear and trembling. It’s also why Catholics must resist the cheap identarian pride of having a co-religionist in the Oval Office. That, and because the religious veneration of politicians always deforms the venerators. Of this we have had enough.
If you want to emulate good Catholics, again I borrow St. Augustine’s advice to “stick to the good ones,” to saints and not politicians or presidents. Such is my earnest spiritual advice.
But for the American project, more uncertain now than it’s been in a long time, let’s set aside momentarily our schisms and our pride, religious or otherwise, for something more socially pressing: our work together to become a nation united, a nation strengthened, a nation healed. Which just might be possible.
This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.
