{"id":3191,"date":"2026-03-20T17:07:58","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:07:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/20\/how-american-politics-became-footnotes-to-catholicism-providencemag-com\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T17:07:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T17:07:58","slug":"how-american-politics-became-footnotes-to-catholicism-providencemag-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/03\/20\/how-american-politics-became-footnotes-to-catholicism-providencemag-com\/","title":{"rendered":"How American Politics Became Footnotes to Catholicism – providencemag.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jozef Andrew Kosc<\/a> on March 20, 2026
Anyone following American politics today will see the remarkable and dizzying array of references to Catholicism, Catholic theology, and Catholic moral and social principles. Prelates speak directly to politicians, as when the US Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned<\/a> the violent excesses of ICE deportations. In turn, politicians, industry leaders and commentators appeal to Catholic social and political thought. These references are hardly subterranean. Consider, for example, J.D. Vance\u2019s explicit use of the Augustinian and Thomistic concept of \u2018Ordo Amoris\u2019 (rightly-ordered love) to justify the Trump administration\u2019s more draconian immigration policies<\/a>. Or libertarian tech giant Peter Thiel\u2019s recent plea for American technological advancement and the deregulation of artificial intelligence<\/a>, wrapped up in the complex language of traditional Catholic eschatology<\/a>. For many months, influencers and commentators of all stripes have drawn on competing Catholic sources to either condemn or support the Trump administration\u2019s ardent support for Israel\u2019s various wars in the Middle East. Increasingly, Catholicism has become both the medium and the message of contemporary American political discourse. Indeed, all hot button debates today\u2014over immigration, the welfare state, foreign policy, environmentalism and gender\u2014can be described as mere footnotes to Catholicism, modern instantiations of age-old theological debates. 
How did an outsider religion of French, Italian, Polish and German immigrants\u2014once viewed suspiciously<\/a> by the Founding Fathers as foreign interference\u2014become the dominant cultural mode of much of the Washington power elite, industry leaders and the literati? There are many reasons for this turn. Some will point to the decline of the once-hegemonic mainline Protestant churches in elite culture, a gap that has been readily filled by Catholicism\u2019s vibrant intellectual tradition. Related to this is the growth of religion among the highly educated, the well-to-do, as well as Gen Z<\/a>. A key feature of this story is undoubtedly the desire for re-enchantment of public life, an inevitable backlash to the social ennui and atomism one finds so well-described in Charles Taylor\u2019s A Secular Age<\/em>. Here, I will highlight another reason.
Catholicism is at once culturally familiar, intellectually robust, and most importantly, politically diverse<\/em>. Within its storied corridors, across centuries of history, one finds the entire spectrum of political and ideological opinion, bolstered by nothing less than the supreme pathic<\/em> and ethic<\/em> authority of morality, religion, and (occasionally) the Vicar of Christ himself. \u201c[I]n every age, we see her members entertaining, frequently adopting and even blessing, but always ultimately discarding, the current orthodoxies\u201d, writes Monsignor A.N. Gilbey (a popular English priest of the last century, now experiencing a renewal<\/a> of interest in his writings). \u201cThe Church will work in and through a social or political or even an ideological system as long as she can and then, when it appears to be strangling her or when she is in danger of being identified with it, she will shake herself free.\u201d1<\/sup> To illustrate this point, Gilbey recalls how, as a young seminarian at the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century, he was warned that \u201cthe next Pope but five is now a member of the Balilla\u201d (Mussolini\u2019s fascist youth organization), \u201c[j]ust as at this moment the next Archbishop of Westminster but five is being indoctrinated in all the orthodoxies of the welfare state in a state school.\u201d Because of this inherent diversity of thought, today\u2019s politicians and commentators can draw from a multitude of traditional Catholic authorities to provide intellectual girth for competing policies, opinions, biases and prejudices.\u00a0
Consider the ever-growing cultural and political influence of those on the anti-liberal or post-liberal right. Here we find a motley crew of neo-monarchists, throne and altar integralists, genuine fascists like the Groyper movement, as well as more serious and thoughtful post-liberal public intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen. These and others on what can broadly be called the ascendent heterodox right find fruitful engagement with a long-established continental European tradition of pre-modern Catholic political thought. In France, since the Revolution, and during the long 19th<\/sup> century, and in Germany under Otto von Bismarck\u2019s Kulturkampf<\/em> (1871-7), liberal political reforms were used to justify the state seizure of Church properties and the expulsion of entire religious orders. The Papacy\u2019s century-long rhetorical battle with liberalism occurred in response to this milieu, producing no less than four popes (Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Pius X, and Pius XI) who criticized political pluralism, separation of church and state, and the cultural effects of secular modernism. Indeed, Pius IX had once \u201cdeclared that the Church had no need to come to terms with the nineteenth century.\u201d2<\/sup> The tenets of political integralism, arising in France under Charles Maurras and the Action Fran\u00e7aise<\/em> movement, are now frequently espoused by Congressional staffers overheard over drinks at Washington\u2019s popular Butterworth\u2019s restaurant (frequented by Steve Bannon, and co-owned by right-wing journalist Raheem Kassam).\u00a0
Liberals too can find their positions bolstered by the Catholic social thought tradition. Only a few years before Pope Gregory XVI decried separation of church and state in Mirari Vos<\/em> (1832), the same arguments were used to push forward the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) across the English Channel, granting civil rights to Catholics for the first time since Elizabeth I. Catholic supporters of liberalism from this era include such giants as Cardinal Manning and Lord Acton. Later, free market liberalism was theologically vindicated in a series of papal encyclicals, Mater et magistra<\/em> (1961), and Populorum progressio<\/em> (1967). These texts interpret the task of economic development as the virtuous will of God, and signaled a break from previous skepticism of capitalism. American classical liberals have long cited these texts, as well as Catholic teachings on subsidiarity and localism. There is more than a hint of this perspective in today\u2019s Silicon Valley libertarians and techno-optimists like Peter Thiel, calling for economic innovation to lift us up to conditions \u201ca little lower than the angels\u201d (Hebrews 2:7). 
There remains also a certain type of influential conservative Catholic who harkens back to Cold War visions of a divinely inspired Pax Americana. Though this discourse often falls flat for younger Americans, it too has its storied predecessors. During the 20th century, St. Paul VI and St. John Paul II recognized the merits of a political liberalism that halted in its path the dual threats of fascism and communism. Behind the Iron Curtain, Christian political movements\u2014spurred by St. John Paul II\u2019s historic visit to Poland in 1979 and the Monday Demonstrations in East Germany\u2014precipitated the demise of the Soviet Union. Far from being a purely ideational alliance, the links between the institutional Church and Reagan\u2019s transatlantic Imperium Libertatis <\/em>ran very deep. Reagan\u2019s CIA director, Bill Casey, was a prominent member of the Catholic Knights of Malta and a daily Mass participant, while the broader connections between the US intelligence community and the Catholic Church of the 1980s are well-established<\/a>. Other histories have shown how Reagan moved great funds through the Vatican Bank, under the watchful eye of St. John Paul II, and into the hands of Solidarity freedom fighters in Poland. Once-prominent American political theologians like Waldemar Gurian, a disciple of Jacques Maritain, were known to argue that, in the fight against Marxism, the US was \u201cnot imperialist enough.\u201d4<\/sup> Today, we hear echoes of this mode of thought in the ruminations of public intellectuals like Bishop Robert Barron, who has taken up charge<\/a> against the allegedly \u2018communist\u2019 policy agendas of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez\u00a0and Zohran Mamdani.
Finally, it is obvious that those on the progressive left are pregnant with Catholic ideations and sources. Much of this influence comes directly from the Papacy itself. Recently, the Vatican made a splash by declining to participate in Trump\u2019s Board of Peace initiative to oversee the end of the Gaza conflict. The official justification<\/a> provided by Rome was the United States\u2019 attempt to usurp the rightful role of the UN in overseeing peace-building and crisis management. The not-so-subtle subtext was a clear condemnation of the Trump administration\u2019s brazen style of unilateral geopolitics. A few days later, Pope Leo XIV publicly rejected J.D. Vance\u2019s personal invitation to participate in America\u2019s 250th<\/sup> anniversary celebrations on July 4th<\/sup>. The pontiff\u2019s reply\u2014that he was instead<\/a> spending the day with refugees\u2014was a made-for-politics moment, greeted warmly by opponents of the Trump administration. That both the Pope from Chicago and the Vice President are American Catholics is instructive; both represent radically different instantiations of Catholic social and political thought. 
The principal allure of relying on Catholic themes, ideas, and authorities today to advance political interests is also the root of much discord and division; there is no singular universal Catholic political prescription, there never has been, and there never will be. The observed history of Christianity teaches this; those institutions that once served the interests of man are perverted and, in another age, or another place, make victims of man. The Roman Empire was first oppressor before it became the bulwark of Christendom. The system of feudalism, under which Christian culture flourished in the High Middle Ages, eventually gave rise to corruption and civil strife during the 14th century (Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century,<\/em> Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). \u201cThe mistake is ever to attach undue importance to the process and above all to imagine it final and enduring\u2014to think that the Church has at last found the ideal material framework in which to express the unchanging truth\u201d, writes Gilbey. \u201cThis is a temptation which assails equally, let us say, those who idealise the achievements of the thirteenth century and those who idealise the aggiornamento<\/em> of today.\u201d Many centuries earlier, St. Augustine similarly rejected \u201cthe assumption that any slice of secular history, of any nation, institution or society, could have an indispensable place in the historical realisation of God\u2019s purpose.\u201d3<\/sup>
Much of the use and misuse of Catholic social and political thought today, taken anachronistically and out of historical context, is depressing. No appeals to ancient encyclicals can ever excuse the return of racism, anti-Semitism, neo-imperialism, or authoritarianism, all of which strike violently against the doctrinal core of Catholicism. A distinction must always be made between what Gilbey calls unchanging doctrinal \u201cfundamentals\u201d versus social-political \u201caccidentals\u201d (or \u201cinessential trappings\u201d). Much of the contemporary discourse is also, quite plainly, absurd (who can seriously posit that the decrees of Pope Boniface VIII in 1302 A.D. are a valid policy platform for the 21st<\/sup> century?). The Vatican itself would reject the grotesque enormities of contemporary integralist thought. And yet, despite these challenges, for many Catholics (including this author), there remains something deeply amusing and heartening about the fact that all American political discourse today is footnotes to Catholicism. Some seventeen hundred years ago, the religion of outsiders, of the oppressed, and of the marginalized, had somehow managed to creep into the halls of the great and the good under Constantine I and Licinius. Today, in many quarters of Washington, it has done so again. 
1. We Believe<\/em>, Bellew Publishing Company Limited, 1994: p. 251
2. Gilbey, We Believe<\/em>, p. 252
3. R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, <\/em>Cambridge University Press, 2007 [1970]: p. 157.\u00a0
4. James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church<\/em>, Harvard University Press, 2018: p. 167.<\/p>\n

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