This Isn't Cardinal Bernardin's Catholic Church

Somehow I ran into a piece in the National Review on the Catholic bishops' vote to draft a teaching document on eucharistic coherence, generally assumed to define the eligibility to receive communion for politicians who support policies that go against Church teaching. I had only time to scan it before a popup arrived to tell me I had to subscribe to read more.

Like the Wall Street Journal, NR now wants me to pay for nothing. The last time I spent much time at that site was around 1998, when they still ran Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg had a sense of humor. Anyhow, the point of the piece they wanted me to pay for was that the USCCB did nothing but debate and talk, and we couldn't expect much from the Catholic bishops. I can't quote from it, because they won't let me go back to the piece.

NR is generslly locked in a time warp. Under Buckley, it was a nominally Catholic publication, though as I reflect on things, Buckley himself was a Catholic for the 1960s, which is to say he was as much a Kennedy Catholic, a Bernardin Catholic, as anything else, just as he was a big-government, CIA Republican. But that kind of Catholic is a fading period piece, and NR isn't really even that kind of Catholic any longer. Of Cardinal Bernardin and the UISCCB, George Weigel wrote in 2011,

For the Bernardin Era and the style of governance characteristic of Bernardin Machine bishops were deeply influenced by the Roman-brokered “Truce of 1968,” an ill-fated attempt to settle the disciplinary situation in the Archdiocese of Washington, where dissent from Humanae Vitae was widespread and public. Whatever the Vatican’s intentions vis-a-vis the difficult situation in Washington, what was learned from the truce were two lessons that would shape an entire era of U.S. Catholic history. The first lesson was that the Holy See would retreat from rigorously enforcing doctrinal discipline if it could be persuaded of the danger of schism. The second lesson was that American bishops were ill advised to go out on a public limb in defense of Catholic teaching (as Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington had done by disciplining priests who had publicly rejected Humanae Vitae), for that could result in the Holy See sawing off the limb and leaving the bishop in question in a bad way.

Bernardin, as Weigel sees him, was an intensely political animal who was focused on making Catholics politically appealing in a post-Kennedy environment. But the US bishops of 2021 are no less political, as indeed is Abp Gómez, who now occupies Bernardin's one time position as head of the USCCB. But times, and politics, have changed. Last week I quoted from Abp Cordileone's preface to his challenge to the Catholic Democrats, with its strong implication that the Democrats have moved away from Catholics. Only days later, Bp Barron, who by the way works for Abp Gómez and is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman in the US, wrote in the New York Post,

I’m the son of a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Catholic Democrat. My father, whose family was very involved in city politics, would sooner have become a Lutheran than vote Republican. But my trouble with modern Democrats, I explained, has to do with abortion policy, where the party has lately staked out an especially extreme position.

The Church must operate, as it always must, in a political environment, something Cdl Bernardin clearly recognized. But the trouble is that politics have changed, something the US bishops are waking up to. The Catholic Church is on the side of the poor and vulnerable, which is where the US Democrats used to be, at least through the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, and even arguably Bill Clinton. But more recently, the Democrats have lost workers and legal immigrants, and their politics now reflect an alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, which includes the criminal class that preys almost exclusively on the poor.

Indeed, our own pastor in yesterday's homily that dwelt in part on the meaning of the Fourth, was careful to avoid conventional political alignment, but behind his remarks was a clear concern that leftist California policies toward the homeless were, whatever their expressed object, not working on behalf of either the homeless or the poor.

I think there's a real shift in alignment taking place in the Catholic Church, just as there's a shift taking place among Republicans. I'm not sure Cdl Bernardin would necessarily object on the Catholic side.