[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What to make of a Catholic president?<\/p>\n

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The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., I always thought, exaggerated by claiming anti-Catholicism the \u201cdeepest bias in the history of the American people.\u201d The claim is quite embarrassing now, and I doubt many seriously believe it. Save those who rhetorically exploit the power of the victim, it\u2019s hard to suggest Catholics suffer hatred more intense than any other identifiable group. Even if once true, society\u2019s victims today aren\u2019t Catholics. Not anymore.<\/p>\n

Far from the fears of old fundamentalists \u2014 from Bob Jones and Norman Vincent Peale to W.A. Criswell preaching that a Catholic president would \u201cspell the death of a free church in a free state\u201d \u2014 it seems that except among those with quaint retrograde prejudices Americans are now comfortable electing a Catholic president. And that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

That change is acceptable because of the distance President John Kennedy put between himself and his church. Running for office in 1960, Kennedy said, \u201cI believe in an America where the separation between church and state is absolute.\u201d He was adamant that \u201cno one in that Church speaks for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwhat the sacred Pastors, who represent Christ, declare as teachers of the faith,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbad faithful,\u201d among whom, as he would in Augustine\u2019s 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\u2019s only genuine humanism) is a tragedy, especially considering what he could do were he a good Catholic and not a bad one.<\/p>\n

But bad Catholicism doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t win.<\/p>\n

But what does any of this matter to the broad American public? It doesn\u2019t. That a bad Catholic will soon replace a bad Presbyterian in the White House doesn\u2019t mean anything. Which is the important point.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t matter. Which was precisely Kennedy\u2019s bad spiritual but good political wisdom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party\u2019s candidate for president who happens to be Catholic,\u201d he said. Because it genuinely didn\u2019t matter that Kennedy was Catholic; it\u2019s just that everybody mistakenly thought it did. Because they didn\u2019t realize he was ready to be a bad Catholic for the sake of being a good president.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s why, as we welcome this new president, we shouldn\u2019t make much of his Catholicism. Biden shouldn\u2019t make much of it himself; but instead, like me and his fellow bad Catholics, work out his own salvation in fear and trembling. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

If you want to emulate good Catholics, again I borrow St. Augustine\u2019s advice to \u201cstick to the good ones,\u201d to saints and not politicians or presidents. Such is my earnest spiritual advice.<\/p>\n

But for the American project, more uncertain now than it\u2019s been in a long time, let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News<\/em><\/a>.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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