Ross Douthat's APPI Scherer Lecture: “Catholic Ideas Versus Catholic Realities?”

i'm dr daniel burns i'm an associate professor of politics here i am interim associate dean of our college of liberal arts for another two months and 15 days counting i'm the vice president of the american public philosophy institute which is sponsoring tonight's lecture by ron stephen as part of this larger conference that we are co-sponsoring with the provost's office through the john paul ii fellowship held by dr ryan anderson i'd just like to explain what the appi is and then introduce our speaker the adpi is an independent nonprofit institution founded in 1989 by our own doctor chris wolfe on the mooring moment the board of the ap api has recently approved a new mission statement describing what the apdi has been doing since 1989 and what we'll be doing even more of over the coming years i'll read that statement to you in fall the adbi is a scholarly institute dedicated to understanding contemporary american life in light of timeless truths about human flourishing in past times of crisis great american leaders have sought guidance from norms derived from nature and the offer of nature the appi fosters a community of scholars students and professionals who seek to recover this lost wisdom for the direction of american public life the adbi's academic programming offers intellectual formation to both future and current leaders in government law education business and society it sponsors careful and well grounded analysis president it sponsors careful and well-grounded analysis of the most pressing issues political legal cultural social and religious in american public life today and guided by the ancient greek and roman ideal of educated statesmanship the apti promotes the recovery of the western natural law tradition that has formed and guided american statesmen from the founders of dr martin luther king jr whether on concrete policies or on philosophical first principles the apdi encourages intellectual reflection that sheds light on the practical challenges that face our nation and our world i'm still quoting the mission statement in our nation's civic discourse today too often we hear reason reflection replaced by cheap slogans and ephemeral fads respectful debate replaced by performative rage and vain virtue signaling and essential elements of human flourishing subjected to contemptuous judgments as supposed experts we need to re-learn how to listen to the voice of nature and of nature's god over the tumult that surrounds us this effort requires respectful dialogue both with those who share the apis on premises and with those who question them therefore following the example of educated statesmen from cicero to our nation's founders the adpi put special emphasis on the fostering of discourse and debate between citizens with a range of different philosophical and theological views so that's our mission we are not a catholic organization although a lot of our events such as this one are hosted on the campus of this catholic school this conference does happen to be about catholicism which is the largest religious denomination in our country so the relationship between it and american liberalism is of intrinsic interest to any american and i would add catholic political thought will always give special interest to anyone trying as the fbi tries to understand the nature of our american regime catholics have never shaken off fully the feeling of being outsiders in this largely protestant country and as a result catholics often have a gift for seeing things about the american regime that the insiders don't notice quite as easily the atp guy is entirely the grandchild of dr chris wolfe who brought it here with him when he joined our faculty seven years ago chris is retiring this summer and he and the board very graciously elected me as a successor effective august 1st there is much more to be said about chris and i will make sure we have an opportunity to say in the fall but for now i would just like to recognize the tremendous benefits that the adi under his 23 years of leadership has been conferring on ud on dallas and on our nation i'd like to ask you to join me in thanking christ as part of this conference tonight the apbi brings you the sixth annual shareholder lecture the sharer lecture is named in honor of the late mary sharer daughter of frank and gene o'brien of st louis long time benefactors of the api to when we owe a deep debt of gratitude mary sharer was actually the sibling of several ud graduates she received a teaching degree from franciscan university at superville and then taught her entire career at st ambrose parish on the hill the italian neighborhood of st louis where she was a teacher much beloved by her students we're proud to honor mary's memory by this annual series of lectures and we've got a great one for you this year ron stafford hardly needs an introduction that didn't stop me from giving him a pretty long one when he was last here three years ago was all sure was probably still on youtube [Laughter] since that time three years ago ross has published two more genuinely brilliant books one called to change the church which is about pope francis and his must reading i think for anyone who wants to understand the stakes of this pontifica the second is called the decadent society we have lots of chairs please come in lots of chairs the second is called the decadent society and it's about everything it's really the most incisive and comprehensive work of cultural criticism that i'm aware of having been written in my lifetime i used to say that about his previous book bad religion but he has topped himself he's also written a third book in that time called deep place at the deep places it comes out this fall and it will be a memoir of his own history with lyme disease all this while retaining his perch at the new york times and the film critic for national review and recently finally resuming his old habit of blogging now at doubtfit.substance.com a sub stack account that i add with gratitude from all my fellow academics ross has decided to keep free of charge it's a privilege for us to welcome him here as always please please join me in reminding himself thank you dan for that tremendously kind introduction um and there are so many different people to thank i suppose from ud to brian anderson to chris wolfe to all of you for being here tonight for a lecture that well for those of you who have followed with sort of intense scrutiny um the fascinating debates within american catholicism about its relationship to liberalism especially over the last four or five years i'm worried that you might find parts of it slightly boring because i'm going to try and um as what i hope is sort of a useful compliment to the rest of this fascinating conference and the debates um that have already begun happening and will continue to happen tomorrow i'm going to try and give a kind of overview of um where i think the different places that catholic political thinking in the united states has ended up or with a kind of taxonomy or categorization of different sort of emergent schools um so that's going to be the first half of the talk but the title is called i think catholic ideas and catholic realities so in the second half of the talk i'm going to try and talk a little bit about how the realm of catholic intellectual and political debates relates to what is likely to happen to the life of the institutional church in the u.s over the next 20 to 25 years and then i'll try and draw tease out some at least provisional thoughts about what that means for sort of the intellectual factions and the fascinating debates that they've been having so that's so that's a preview um but let's dive let's dive in so since the second vatican council and especially since the 1970s the two most important forms of american catholic political thought have shared two features in common they have assumed a basic congruence between catholicism and the american system and they've been polarized along roughly the same lines as wider american political debates so after vatican ii even more than previously it made sense to speak of an american catholicism fully reconciled to liberal democracy even if on the fringes there were still some noteworthy anti-liberal catholic periodicals and writers and it made sense to speak of a political debate between a liberal catholicism and a conservative catholicism that were broadly aligned with the democratic party and the republican party respectively even if the bishops and the popes might sometimes argue for a different synthesis a political catholicism beyond the existing american categories of right and left in partisan politics the more liberal catholicism found its most famous political embodiments in figures like mario cuomo and well joseph robinette biden whose careers illustrated the attempt and biden's case continues to illustrate the attempt to sustain the new deal-era relationship between catholics and the democratic party while compromising or privatizing those elements of catholic teaching on abortion above all where the democrats and the church increasingly diverged then the more conservative catholicism lacked quite so distinctive an embodiment or set of embodiments but i think figures like paul ryan and john boehner in different ways were reasonably representative cases marrying a pretty firmly catholic view on social issues on abortion and marriage to a more unstable view of the welfare state one that sometimes seemed to want to correct right-wing libertarianism from a catholic perspective sometimes find a religious way to justify it and sometimes promote a kind of corporatism that probably owed more to the chamber of commerce than to the social doctrine of the church and then intellectually the equivalent polarization was between let's say common wheel catholicism and first thing is catholicism between a more theologically liberal catholic perspective that emphasized a seamless garment theory of the church's social teaching as a reason to generally support the democratic party despite its position on abortion and then a more theologically conservative perspective that found its home in the gop as that party became more consistently pro-life and that found its moment of maximal political influence in the evangelical christian presidency of george w bush these intellectual camps had dramatic differences but also a substantial commonality they took the harmony between their respective interpretations of post-vatican ii catholicism and their interpretations of the liberal order for granted and they differed most substantially on whether after the sexual revolution and the rise of the conservative movement the leftward or the rightward sword of liberalism had gone more dramatically astray now this basic intra-catholic polarization has hardly disappeared and the most prominent catholic politicians in america today from biden to nancy pelosi to a figure like former attorney general bill barr still embody i think that basic post-1970s division but among younger catholics in the catholic intelligentsia especially it's fair to say that that duality has come under severe strain or you wouldn't be here for this excellent conference otherwise so on the one hand the further secularization of liberalism and the democratic party has made the position of catholic democrats more difficult as elite progressivism increasingly seeks not only to preserve abortion rights or same-sex marriage rights but to harry private religious institutions that retain any traditionalism at all i would say the generational transition from a figure like mario cuomo to andrew cuomo his somewhat less pious son is illustrative perhaps of what this has meant for the practice of the faith meanwhile the conspicuous political failures of republican administrations and mainstream gop politicians and the general post-christian drift of american society even or especially under conservative governance has raised serious questions on the catholic right about the effectiveness of the catholic alliance with movement conservatism and also the ultimate destination of liberalism and liberal democracy itself and then the papacy of francis added to these strains by breaking to some debatable extent we won't be debating it tonight thank god um with both the neo-conservatism of john paul ii and the soft traditionalism of benedict xvi this pontificate has created an atmosphere of crisis among theological conservatives even as its mix of populism and anti-modernism on economic and ecological matters has stirred the waters of the catholic left and then the presidency of donald trump was disruptive as well by simultaneously suggesting in its populist forays the possibility of an american conservatism somewhat more in tune with catholic social teaching than the libertarian variety but also suggesting in its race-baiting and conspiracy theorizing the peril of an american conservatism that's functionally post-christian with a kind of conservative identity politics rather than any kind of religious conservatism at its heart so all these strains on the post-60s paradigm have not really radically altered the political behavior of most american catholics among white catholics the liberal conservative split still defines national voting with white catholics drifting rightward along with sort of secular non-church-going white voters in their respective social classes and even the ethnic divisions between white and hispanic catholics haven't been dramatically widened or weren't dramatically widened during the trump era but among catholic writers god love us there has been substantial experimentation realignment division the older categories persist in this new environment there are still conservative catholics who believe in the fusionist project of american conservatism or perhaps the neoconservative adaptation thereof or the catholic reading of the american founding advanced by figures like john courtney murray and michael novak who came in for slightly harsh treatment from patrick dineen at our at our earlier session and who believe in the virtues of the pre-donald trump gop would like to return to it as expeditiously as possible and then in the biden presidency especially there are still definitely liberal catholics who believe that the democratic party as it exists is their natural home and that a kind of mealierist welfare state liberalism is still the obvious way that catholic social teaching cashes out but there are also exciting new categories revived and reinvented movements and tendencies that matter much more to intellectual debate right now i think than they did in 1980 or 2000 and may eventually matter if they don't already substantially to catholic politics as well so let me suggest a very tentative taxonomy of these new categories so it might run as follows first you could say there are the catholic populists who regard the sort of nationalist turn in conservative politics in the us and western europe as welcome and necessary and largely congruent with church teaching and a corrective to the libertarian errors that they associate with figures like paul ryan as an alternative to that kind of libertarianism the populists tend to champion a sort of catholic corporatist turn in economic policy seeking ways to recreate a family wage through industrial policy or family subsidies or some mixture thereof and they generally favor immigration restriction to protect domestic workers and rebuild social solidarity they're amenable or more than amenable to antitrust arguments deployed against silicon valley behemoths and they seek a more aggressive culture war strategy a counter-attack after a long retreat on issues like internet pornography or transgenderism and while they were and are divided on the capacities and morals of donald trump they mostly regarded his rise as basically salutary and his presidency as at least the lesser of evils and probably a good now philosophically the populists especially from outsiders to these debates often get described as post-liberals or anti-liberals and sometimes maybe especially in the heat of twitter debate they describe themselves that way but i don't think it's clear the label fits to take it to take a case study the editor of first things the current editor rusty reno has argued explicitly for catholic populism as a kind of solidarity and religious corrective within the liberal order rather than an alternative to american constitutionalism and i think one can assume that the politicians who have championed ideas associated with catholic populism the catholic marco rubio the protestant josh hawley among others would wholeheartedly agree the populists are clearly different from the christian libertarians and classical liberals with whom they often feud but they may not be so different from a figure like richard john newhouse the prior editor of first things in their primary commitments like him they believe that liberal democracy requires a strongly religious politics an alliance between evangelicals and catholics and other religious people of goodwill they just don't quite accept the vision of political economy and foreign policy that newhouse and other neoconservatives came to be associated with late in their careers so this sense of populism as a corrective within the liberal order separates this group from the next group the actual catholic integralists for whom liberalism is beyond correction because it was rotten from the start the integralists are arguably the heirs of triumph brent bozell's disputatious magazine further back of the 19th century popes and their ringing anti-liberal anathemas and of course they would say that they're heirs to the catholic political tradition in its entirety like king josiah who lends his name to a leading integralist website they believe they're calling catholics back to the true and only catholic politics obscured by fond delusions and americanism but now amid the crisis of liberalism visible as an alternative once again on public policy the integralists tend to align with the populists on pro-family economics industrial policy the noted integralist gladden papin who will be speaking at this conference tomorrow publishes consistently on these themes and edits on them as well but i would say that the sort of larger integralist category is more divided on other aspects of current right-wing politics like immigration restriction climate change skepticism the idea of the nation as a special repository of loyalty and genius the integralists ultimately believe in catholic empire not catholic nationalism they regard some of the leftward elements of pope francis's magisterium as implicitly integralist particularly the ecological and cyclical laudato c whose admonitions and prescriptions don't feature prominently in populist politics at the moment but despite this this sort of distinction the integralists also tend to be favorable to nationalist politicians from trump to victor orban i think in part out of a heightened contradiction spirit and a confidence that providence is using the populist liberal dialectic to prepare the way for a catholic insurgency within the west's elite because this insurgency is not entirely visible as yet and because the integralists can be a touch cagey about the steps between declaring for integralism and actually achieving it the practical impact of integralism's renewed appeal is a little bit uncertain but the integralists clearly intend to be practical pushing church officials towards a more vigorous assertion of the church's legal rights and judicial power over the faithful pushing both populists and traditionally conservative catholics towards a more fully catholic politics a more aggressive use of state power and they believe above all that the conditions for a reinvigorated church a christian revival in america can probably only come about if there is some sort of revolution from above and in this they make a stark contrast with my third taxonomical category the benedictines meaning not the religious order necessarily but those catholics who accept rodrigo's rather famous diagnosis in his 2015 book the benedict option of the near inevitability of continued secularization and continued christian retreat who agree with patrick deneen's conclusion in 2016 why liberalism failed that local experiments may be the key to revitalizing our once-christian culture and who are particularly interested with writers like brandon mcginley in his book the prodigal church leia labresco sergeant and building the benedict option in strategies for internal christian renewal as a precondition for any form of christian politics now i should note that um certainly rodrigo has shown sympathy for populist arguments patrick dineen has shown sympathy for both the sort of populist and integralist categories brandon mcginley recently co-authored an integralist tending book with scott hahn so as i said these categories are unstable and overlapping not fixed but i think the primary interest that people take matters while the benedictine tendency may incline people to vote for populist politicians or endorse integralism at some level of theory or abstraction they're skeptical about national political solutions doubtful of the prospects for a kind of top-down christian restoration more likely to pour their energy into institution building from below and their watch word tends to be joseph ratzinger's famous admonition about how christianity will become small and will have to start afresh she will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity as a small society she will make bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members she will be a more spiritual church not presuming upon a political mandate flirting as little with the left as with the right this instinct also means i think that benedictines are somewhat more ecumenically minded certainly than the integralists with predictable sympathies for a kind of anti-political protestant figures like stanley houerwass and wendell berry communities like the bruderhof they prefer alexis to tocqueville to carl schmidt strategies of community building and evangelization to strategies of power you can't really say they have national political influence because that's somewhat orthogonal to their purposes but i think their influence on the catholic mind waxes and wanes depending on the apparent prospects for catholic politics at the national level so the marginalization of religious conservatives in the late obama years made the benedictine option more attractive than the seeming widening of political possibilities in the trump era push that impulse more into abeyance but the benedictine impulse may return depending on events should the biden presidency usher in a longer liberal era and that possibility brings me to the fourth and final group which i will call the tradinistas borrowing from a 2014 manifesto whose signatories in the way of so many left-wingers in so many eras soon fell out with one another but their dispute's not withstanding i think the term is you know one tremendous and two fits fits an identifiable and important tendency a belief that it is late capitalism more than late liberalism that's fundamentally incompatible with the church's vision and that the recent revival of socialist and marxist thought could be adapted and deployed usefully by catholic social thought the tradinista tendency most often manifests itself in journals and spaces associated with the commonweal side of the older liberal catholic conservative catholic divide but it distinguishes itself it distinguishes itself i think from much of post-1960s liberal catholicism on the one hand in its economic radicalism and on the other in its disinterest in the sort of continuing liberal catholic project of accommodating church teaching to the sexual revolution instead it's naturally extremely favorable to the parts of the church's social magisterium that american catholics of the paul ryan style have tended to downplay it favors a kind of christopher lashian portrait of the sexual revolution as the market colonizing the intimate sphere it regards conservative populism as compromised by racism and easily bought off by capital and libertarianism is not its rival or sparring partner as for populists but its mortal enemy dorothy day and alasdair mcintyre are obvious american antecedents my new york times columnist a colleague elizabeth brunic is a prominent champion eugene mccarraher's recent book the enchantments of mammon would be a notable text weird catholic twitter has been this tendencies online home and if all this makes it sound marginal relative to the other tendencies i'm describing in certain ways it is but i think it has the current holy father in its corner and that has to count for something and finally even if it lacks the direct political influence of the populists or the vaulting ambitions of the integralists tradinista tradinistaism has a clear enough political theory that the conditions for christian renewal depend on breaking capitalism's chains and thus to ally with socialists maybe to seek the good of the church in the long run notwithstanding the gulf between a figure like bernie sanders and church teaching on just about every non-economic issue and to the extent that this catholic tendency participates in some small way in the larger revival of socialist thought which in turn participates in some way in the biden's presidency's more ambitious than expected economic agenda the traditions can claim at least a modicum of influence however distant over our second catholic president let me stress again that all these categories are unstable and shifting especially given the tendency of friends not just leftists to become enemies in the heat of internet debate i could subdivide them further or identify other categories lurking at their fringes there's clear overlap between them and lots of room to move from one camp to another or combine one could be an integralist tradinista for whom socialism is the political economy of the integralist state or a benedictine who's drawn to populism because it promises political protection for the local and experimental or a tradinista who drifts towards integralism because non-catholic socialism is so militantly pro-abortion or a populist who turns tradinista out of distaste for donald trump i can identify writers who've made versions of many of these moves in just the last few years now meanwhile allowing for the few sympathetic republican politicians that i mentioned in the orbit of the populists and the very distant influence of catholic socialism on biden in their fullness these tendencies belong to the intelligentsia and the intelligentsia alone they're especially distant as is most catholic punditry from the american church's burgeoning hispanic population yes the populists arguably represent some republican voting hispanics the tradinista sympathy for bernie sanders was shared by many latino voters on the left the integralists sometimes associate themselves with a future empire of guadalupe but still almost everyone having these debates is white and well-educated and there are no clear cadres for these theories among the kathleen working catholic working class as yet no mass movement equivalent to the role the pro-life movement played in defining conservative catholicism after the 1970s or the way that liberals sustain unions helped sustain liberal catholicism for a time likewise within the church there are definitely integralist or tradinista or benedictine priests maybe especially on twitter but i think those labels would still leave most bishops scratching their heads they still belong more clearly to the older liberal and conservative factions established in the 70s and 80s and most catholic institutions likewise so for now these ideas belong for the most part to a younger generation that hasn't fully put its stamp on the american catholic world which doesn't at all make the ideas unimportant it just means that absent a revolutionary moment of the sort that some integralists anticipate and some benedictines fear their influence is likely to filter somewhat gradually through american catholicism shaping the church or being reshaped by its realities in unexpected ways so it's worth considering them then here's the pivot of my talk in combination with the non-intellectual strictly practical trend that's most likely to shape institutional american catholicism in their lifetime and that trend that unfortunate reality is widespread structural collapse pause so decline is nothing new for american catholicism after the steep collapse of mass attendance and religious vocations in the 1960s and 1970s there was a period of stabilization in the 1980s and 90s and catholicism was saved from a mainline protestant-style decline in part by hispanic immigration but around the time of the sex abuse crisis and perhaps just as crucially the coming of age of kids raised by semi-practicing boomer catholic parents and a shift in immigration patterns from latin america to asia the decline resumed with catholic identification falling and mass attendance among catholics dropping below protestant church attendance for the first time i think several factors more than several are very likely to make this decline accelerate over the next 20 years so i'll list them first you have generational turnover in the pews or for the younger generation out of the pews as still relatively devout or at least christmas and easter baby boomer catholics pass away and their increasingly non-practicing children come of age identifying either as much more loosely attached catholics or as ex-catholic nuns not the good kind two continued institutional bleeding from the sex abuse crisis with further lawsuits revelations and district attorney investigations probably continuing throughout the 2020s three the impact of the church's vocation shortage which will be intensified too by generational turnover as the last large cohort of catholic priests passes into retirement four financial and institutional crisis hastened by the preceding factors and also by racial and ethnic change as an upper middle class white church increasingly becomes a lower middle class hispanic church which will almost necessarily be poorer with fewer donations fewer donors less money for schools and colleges and churches and charities and more closings and consolidations as a result five a combination of slowing immigration from latin america driven by lower birth rates in most latin american countries and the rise of protestantism in latin america which will make the latino immigrants who come north more likely to be protestant and especially pentecostalist than catholic six increasing cultural marginalization and hostility towards catholic institutions especially in more liberal states which is likely to hasten the secularization of catholic educational and health care institutions and finally the impact of the pandemic which is somewhat unknowable but i think extremely unlikely to be positive for mass attendance and donations over the next five years now of course the holy spirit may have other plans for the church than this grim picture but i think for renewal to come suddenly it would have to involve increasingly dramatic religious change not just sort of the reversion or return of lapsed catholics which is i think how both liberal and conservative catholics have sort of thought about the church's challenge over the last couple generations right you have this big population of people raised catholic who practice the faith for a little while and then fall away that's the old world right now american catholicism is passing from an era in which its dilemma was how do you reach that large population of baptized and confirmed catholics who drifted from the church and when it could an era when it could still rely on the ethnic and cultural loyalty of a lot of prosperous cradle catholics who no longer practice the faith rigorously but still supported catholic institutions that's the old era the new era is one where the heirs of those lapsed or culturally attached catholics haven't been baptized haven't been confirmed haven't been married in the church and don't have any real institutional loyalty to catholicism at all here are a few statistics to fill in this picture collected by the catholic leadership institute in the early 2000s there were almost a million catholic baptisms in the united states every year by 2015 that number was down to around 700 thousand projected forward there could be as few as 350 000 by the 2030s the share of catholics marrying in the church has dropped by 55 since the early 1990s when there were about 325 000 catholic marriages annually that trend projected forward yields fewer than a hundred thousand catholic marriages annually by the late 2030s first communions and confirmation follow a similar pattern with a falling off from baptism in each case one out of five catholics baptized don't receive first communion two and five aren't confirmed and a staggering 80 percent of confirmed catholics aren't practicing their faith at age 21. these numbers have financial implications as well the leadership institute study estimates that there's a 5 billion dollar gap between how much money the church takes in right now to fund its operations and how much money it's likely to take in once generation x my generation replaces the baby boomers as the generation with as it were the power of the purse in american life and as their report puts it after such a transformation and all these estimates predate the pandemic the current models of diocesan and parish life cannot be sustained i did an event a few years ago a sort of celebration of an anniversary for catholic charities in new york and i was on a panel with a bunch of people but one of them was a fundraiser for um for catholic institutions in new york city and he made i think the sort of obvious but to me sort of somewhat revelatory point that all catholic institutions in greater greater new york city depend on donors who are rich and have some sort of affection for catholic schools probably don't practice the faith that seriously are often married outside the church have spouses who don't have fond feelings towards the catholic church and who you can sort of sell on catholic education he said if you know you give them the data right that's what you'd say you know you bring the data and you say look catholic schools are outperforming secular schools in these metrics and so it's a good place for people to put educational philanthropy you know that that world is not going to exist in 20 years may not exist in five years with ideological transformations and american liberalism um the picture in new york is obviously different from the picture in dallas and a lot of things that i'm talking about a lot of this decline is going to be concentrated in the old industrial and northeastern heartlands of catholicism it's going to be a different picture in the south and southwest but the overall trend looks pretty grim so what might this mean for these fascinating intellectual debates with which i started this talk i think one possibility that a skeptic of intellectuals and their theories might invoke is that over the next few decades catholic ideas will just become irrelevant to catholic realities with catholic writers and intellectuals essentially building christendoms in the air while the actual church declines and decays some form of that scenario is possible but i think not actually that likely for one reason in particular all of the catholic ideas that i've just sketched represent attempts at an intensification of commitment quests for a more more fully catholic approach to politics and culture than what prevailed after the 1960s and in a shrinking church the influence and importance of its most committed members will become more important not less the fundraisers of the future will be hitting up populists and integralists maybe even a few tradinistas because they have nowhere else to turn the parishes of the future will depend on benedictines of both sorts for either renewal or simply survival in a smaller weaker church the influence of ideas that seem pretty weird to the average catholic today are likely to be in some way magnified or put more sharply groups that are currently seen as weirdos by many in the hierarchy and the more normal portions of the church will necessarily have more influence as the church becomes more of an institution for weirdos so in some form the way these catholic ideas play out in the life of the church is actually likely to be kind of essential to catholic realities as the church makes its passage through its likely period of decline and rearrangement towards whatever possible renewal and rebirth but how they play out will be shadowed for at least a time by a greater weakness than american catholicism has known in decades if not in a century and out of that reality i want to draw to conclude three broad admonitions for the intellectuals to carry with them into their discussions and debates the first is about the emphasis of catholic and focus of catholic thinking for all the groups i've described except the benedictines most of the inks spilled in debates with one another with liberal catholics the right and left with more secular or protestant writers have been about questions of public policy culture war political order the best regime partisan debate that's not a bad thing this is what i do for a living i certainly don't come to cast aspersions on it but much more ink needs to be spilled and much more thought and effort given to institutional questions internal to the church questions of how parishes and schools and diocese can make the transition to the likely reality of 2040 how renewal can be achieved within structures that appear to be decaying how more can be done with less how the 5000 can be fed when the supply of loaves and fishes seems in steep decline and while the group i've called the benedictines have the most natural connection to these questions the other schools of thought may have their own distinctive answers integralists may be able to help the church govern itself more effectively in an era when its relationship to state and society becomes more fraught than in the recent past traditions may be able to instantiate their radicalism at the local level in new movements and catholic worker style communities even if catholic socialism as a national ideology remains a lot more notional and populists who are likely to be the most politically influential faction in most futures that i can imagine have a particular obligation to think about how the public policies of the secular state are likely to shape the landscape in which the church tries to stabilize recover and grow so that's one admonition the second is on the question of political influence itself where i think the likely weakening of institutional catholicism doesn't mean at all that catholic ideas will cease to matter in the public square indeed especially to the extent that a certain kind of elite oriented catholic institution often displays more resilience right now than mass catholicism and to the extent that catholic political thought does seem well suited to a certain kind of mind seeking to escape the disorders of the times i think it's pretty easy to imagine the patterns of the present actually being accentuated in the future with catholics continuing to be over-represented at the highest levels of politics conservative politics especially but liberal as well to some extent even as their church's mass membership declines and with that over representation will come genuine opportunities for well what a leading integralist has called integration from within but with it too will come a pair of temptations first a temptation to count the strength of catholicism exclusively in its elite represent elite representatives to imagine that they have a direct relationship to mass cultural and political influence and to assume that elite power is not just a useful tool but one powerful enough to achieve goals that only haven't been achieved maybe because the prior generation of political catholics were too timid to at peace with liberalism unable to act decisively and shape reality from above some realities can be shaped from above but in a democracy power flows between the elites and the masses not just in one direction and there are things that any elite catholicism simply cannot win until a mass catholicism recovers then second there's the opposite temptation which is to make the church's growing weakness an excuse to allow oneself to be co-opted by uncatholic styles of politics that promise either simple protection from an enemy or the advancement of some partial and secularized version of populism or integralism or catholic socialism this has been a recurring problem for the church especially since 1789 catholic intellectuals and politicians are forever finding themselves forced or so it seems to choose between uncatholic forms of right-wing or left-wing politics and then this to subordinate the fullness of their catholicism to the partiality of faction the appeal of the new catholic schools of thought is precisely their argument that right liberal and left liberal catholics have fallen into that trap and that there are more fully catholic alternatives outside the paul ryan joe biden binary but in the relationship of these new tendencies to right-wing trump era populism left-wing socialism i think it's possible to see that the problem that's being critiqued just ends up recapitulated the same join the side you're on temptations come back again again exacerbated by the growing weakness of the church as a non-political community so those are the two temptations and i guess the admonition is to resist them and then there's the final admonition which is about mutual charity conditions of catholic decline should forge greater solidarity among those catholics who remain with the church but quite often in such circumstances the opposite happens the fact of decline makes the stakes of debate seem desperately high such that no quarter can be given the very survival of the faith is at stake the diminishing institutional spoils of a weakened church are fought over ever more fiercely a sense of crisis magnifies differences that in a time of optimism and plenty might be debated in a more ironic and fraternal spirit and this of course then only makes the decline more likely to accelerate because people outside the church and the marginally attached look to see if catholics act like christians and see fracture side well or it's social media equivalent at least instead and this is an admonition i should stress for myself as much or more than others i would say my own occasional involvement in the theological debates of the francis era have brought home how easily a period of perceived crisis can become an occasion of rhetorical sin in debates over catholic political thought though liberalism and post-liberalism the school i've sketched out and probably others i'm not capturing i've been a little more of an observer than a full participant frankly it's been a tremendously fun and interesting debate to watch and one in which i've tended to see value in many different contributions and i felt that living through this period of likely catholic decline will exist in catholic decline and likely worse to come should make us widen not narrow the possibilities for catholic politics that we consider and from that perspective which may be way too above the fray which is a newspaper called this temptation i would just close with a reminder that no political system is perfect and no political system is final american catholicism has flourished immensely at times under the undoubtedly imperfect system of american liberalism and we cannot know for certain that the current decline of either is irreversible and that this flourishing simply cannot happen once again maybe it's the destiny of all these various schools to help renew liberalism and the liberal catholic relationship through challenge and critique to make liberal society more hospitable to catholic faith by re-importing pre-liberal or non-liberal concepts and ideas as a kind of invigorating ballast in which case some 22nd century version of richard john newhouse or john courtney murray may write gratefully of the influence of the 21st century integralists who like jonah at nineveh help save the liberal order precisely by prophesying its destruction or perhaps the system known as liberalism is fated judged and found wanting and what's happening in the schools i've described really is the stirring of a post-liberal era the tapping and feeling around a doorway that leads into a very different world in which case i would hope that some future political philosopher of the glorious empire of guadalupe might write gratefully about how the post-liberal schools refined one another through spirited debate and how their liberal critics challenged them constructively so that the post-liberal age did not simply return to the sins and errors and cruelties of the austrian regime that blazed a better and more christian course or maybe the difficult catholic realities i've spelled out are the only important aspects of our situation the ideas are all irrelevant and we are headed at great speed into a post-christian dark age in which only the benedictine prescription will have any relevance at all in all of these cases but maybe in the last especially we should argue our way into the unknown future but hopefully travel first of all as friends thank you [Applause] so questions how long how long do we have i don't wanna have an hour one thing i think that will be important as the sociological observation that you make about the church in the future as those patterns uh increase is like i think you don't mention converts much an untrustworthy lot i've found since of course you're wondering i do think that it's likely to have an impact especially in a church that in some senses is declining those converts might play an especially important role i don't know if you have any sense of where the converts lie with respect to all the different categories you've been describing but it seems to me that that would be something important to think about yeah i i completely agree my my jokes at my own expense notwithstanding i mean my my broad impression is that right now the converts are most likely to fall into one of these schools rather than be sort of the older liberal catholic conservative catholic in that in that older pattern um and in my own experience i've known you know yeah i i've known converts who've ended up in all of these in all of these camps you know with some variation you know people i people i've known who were sort of converts who taught in i you know who were graduate students in ivy league institutions would be more likely to be sort of a benedictine fusion right but then you know converts who live in republican states and hold republican jobs might be more likely to be a sort of populist integralist fusion right so there's there's sort of temperamental attractions to these different schools and then there's also sort of you know ways in which schools sort of schools of thought can sort of fit you know just the culture the religious and political culture that that that you find yourself set yourself in um i meant to gesture a little bit and i i probably should have elaborated the convert point i i think the the the point i tried to make about this sort of likely continued influence of the catholic intelligentsia in elite debates even in this larger period of mass catholic decline um will reflect in part the sort of continued the continued migration of a certain kind of religiously inclined person into catholicism and there's you know there's a certain mode of perish that you can sort of instantly recognize if you travel around the country um that's likely to be you know to have more than its share of converts and they're often um you know sort of very well educated um you know sort of professional class people i think the challenge for the church is you know i mean catholicism had a like if you compare catholicism and evangelicalism we've done really well at recruiting evangelical intellectuals to become catholic and evangelicalism has done really well at recruiting cradle catholics to become evangelicals and in the economy of salvation they're winning and we're losing you know meaning no disrespect to the intelligence yeah um so i think the challenge you know the challenge for the church of this dynamic continues is how do you translate a situation where you have you know a sort of surprising dynamism in new york city certain new york city parishes certain college towns these kind of places in certain parishes how do you translate that outward to um both sort of hispanic and to some extent asian filipino catholicism um in the south and southwest and this sort of decayed rust catholic heartland and i don't know exactly what the answer is but that that would be the challenge right like taking the energy of converts and directing it to something more than just sort of these sort of intellectual focused you know parishes run by dominicans or something just remember i want to make sure our students have a chance to ask a couple questions first and we'll take questions for everybody who is mister um besides the fact that populists who seem to like best lend themselves to coming down to earth how do you see we bring this these more post liberal ideas down to down to earth and up so that's a good question i mean i i think that the the the questions of how the ideas map onto the church's internal life and parish life are really important to to that process and in that sense i think the benedict teams are actually more down to earth than the populists right you know i mean the populists have a political theory um but the benedictines are more likely to be thinking about um you know actual questions of sort of yeah there's a sort of lived lived experience of catholicism so i think figuring out again yeah what is you know what does being an integralist mean for your participation in your parish and your diocese right and what does what does being a catholic socialist mean for the practice of your actual catholic faith i think is one is one way to think about it um the other way is to yeah is to sort of think about think more s think more seriously about about practical politics and the questions that i think everyone involved in these debates has been wrangling over mostly as they relate to the republican party a little bit as they relate to the left of the democratic party um where you know the the core question is how do you deliver some catholic politics without just getting co-opted and being being a client um and i think and it's okay i want to be clear it's okay to you know sort of accept things accept good things from politicians who you disagree with right on something else right so like if joe biden does something good on family policy i'm not going to say that's a bad thing even though you know i absorb joe biden's position on abortion right so i mean that that that is something i think for the catholic left especially to think about like how do you balance wanting a political party to do certain things that they might actually do even as you have to figure out how to maintain your witness as catholics in relation to them um but then on you know on on the catholic right where power is much more likely to be actually exercised it's it's a it's a version it's a version of the same question where there's more political responsibility the catholic socialists you know don't have a lot of political responsibility at the moment the catholic populists do and figuring out how to exercise that responsibly is you know it's a challenge so thank you for your lecture um it's it's my understanding that the church's teaching on the diversity of religious orders is that they really do work together to express the whole of catholicism so that there isn't this kind of faction type of relationship between them but as you're describing these different political views within the catholic world there's something of the air of faction or even contradiction and that you know these differing opinions don't see themselves as what the benedictines and the sisters maybe our brothers historians would disagree but um so that there uh there really does seem to be problems at the the basis of these political opinions that the different parties would see as contradictory that they're not working toward the whole so that um yeah different views of the human person or whatnot but do you see that as indicative of maybe a failure in the church's teaching to express maybe more clearly what things are possible within catholicism in terms of politics or is this just a failure in terms of the you know human weakness and and just seeing the other as enemy i mean it's it some of it is the latter right like people get into arguments and fight with each other because because we're human beings um but i think and i i mean i i guess i tried without your eloquence to sort of gesture a little bit of vision where these groups would sort of work together in the somewhat idealized way that theoretically franciscans dominicans and cistercians and so on are to work together and i think there there are ways in which the fact that these factions i'm describing do share a certain critique of the existing political order right there there is common ground between these groups in various ways which is why people move back and forth between these these factions that i've sort of arbitrarily constructed that i think in theory at least lends itself to the possibility of that kind of fruitful work now in practice you know there there are two problems one is that we have elections in the united states every two to four years where people choose sides and so you know you could literally see this happen where people who were sort of you know who were sort of left-cath integralists and right-cath integralists to use the horrible language of the internet were in friendly relations right up till the moment where it became clear that all of discourse was going to be dominated by a binary choice for against donald trump and then they became enemies i mean not always but that was you know so that that kind of thing is likely to happen the other thing is that you know to the extent that there's a version of catholic politic a vision of catholic politics that would map onto the vision of how the different religious orders work together for that to really exist you'd have to have a more fully catholic society and i think where you could say you know at least in an idealized way maybe a way achieved for 10 years and you know 13th century france or something you have these groups that are that are not factions in the modern political sense but are sort of working in different tasks and from a distance look like factions but actually are the body of christ's work that would be the ideal in a situation where the church is internally divided but also confronting this incredibly fractured pluralistic society um where you know the the questions you know basic questions of not just the common good but god's existence are totally up for grabs i i don't think it's surprising at all at all that factions within the church would end up having you know furious arguments with each other and working in cross purposes because you're arguing about how to get to a point where you could have a more a healthier politics but in certain ways getting to that point is the precondition for certain forms of health in catholic politics arguably anyway this is the first time i've thought that through so i hope it seems i want to take one more from a student and i know some of our speakers have questions for our speakers [Music] i mean i think you could imagine a scenario where some of the commonalities between these groups that i've expressed like like they there are certain ways in which they're all closer together than a very conventional catholic republican and a very conventional catholic democrat so in the abstract you could say out of these different groups you could imagine yeah a sort of you know catholic a catholic center party right um like the one that was you know destroyed by the nazis um in and in practice though the american system for reasons that well you know i guess i wrote about it in the deccan society right but like there's all there are all kinds of forces external to the church sort of pushing us towards gridlock polarization stalemate and so on that are really hard to overcome right so you know a bunch of these different factions could find a home in something like the american solidarity party right which is you know a sort of startup third party that is in effect trying to be a kind of party of catholic social teaching um but how you get from found the american solidarity party to american solidarity party competes effectively in american elections is a mystery beyond my capacity as a pundit to achieve um i mean i think the in certain ways in our system the best case scenario would be to try and figure out how do you establish a catholic center that's like you know the way like what gets called neo-liberalism this which basically means the places that things that ronald reagan and bill clinton agreed about and tony blair right we're sort of a center for american politics for a while everyone was like yeah that's the center you're hawkish on foreign policy you're in favor of free market capitalism but a certain amount of welfare state like you know that's the center and trying to get to a place where the center is you know economic solidarity and social conservatism and you have republicans and democrats who are catholics who are working together across party lines that's also hard to imagine that may be more imaginable than a sort of explicit third party but i'm not sure thank you yeah thank you um you a great typology and you focus nicely on sort of ecclesial demographic winter and you know that that all might be the case and it might actually take us into some really practical questions about the church but the really practical questions here are about politics and the question of political realignment is sort of a missing piece of your presentation and i wonder if you might just reflect on that because as you know better than i do the political realignment has made us think differently about right life and uh if you take your benedictines and your tradinistas for all the hopes of david bentley heart aoc is not really going crazy's way she's not being informed by their political opinion she's not taking their advice uh is not coming to washington dc to counsel josh it's populous and integralists who actually have the years of real politicians who are really making policies maybe you would wrong such a few but out of your pool out of your typology there are actually those who correspond to political realities and those who actually don't respond to global realities and i wonder if you would reflect on that because in a sense the ideas actually map on to real so i'm going to argue with you a tiny bit um not argue so much as say yes to some extent but to an extent that maybe is a little bit more limited than the populists and integralists integralists and anyway um want want to think by and by this i just mean that basically yes okay so comparatively i completely agree well i think there's a just the reason i drew a distinction between populists and integralists even though they obviously overlap to some extent is that i think the sort of the fullest form of integralism is in the foreseeable future as unlikely a political prescription as david bentley hearts aoc in you know aoc aoc infusion um and that that the the deep protestantism of the united states makes presents for now you know maybe not in 75 years but in in the near term a sort of insuperable obstacle to a certain kind of a certain kind of really you know really catholic politics whereas the populists um i think you know as i said yeah have an action they have an actual group of politicians in a way that none of the other groups do so i i agree with that that said you know i think you can see the history of the republican party over the last 25 years as a party that constantly looks like it's consummating this sort of realignment towards a more you know sort of catholic oriented kind of conservative politics and it's always on the brink and it's on the brink with compassion and conservatism it's you know which and it's on you know it's on the brink with the populist side of trumpism um and then you know when when push comes to shove it's when the democrats are in power it's you know there's sort of these gestures right like marco rubio you know is going to support the the you know the union against amazon for this sort of very technical reason and josh hawley has a set of policy ideas about antitrust and and these are good things right like these are the these are these are things that i've spent my career as a pundit advocating for um but you know the but living i guess living through the bush era and then the tea party era down to trump has made me feel like the realignment is harder than some of the sort of optimistic populists of the trump era but doesn't that actually get to the question of the heat of the debates that we're having right now are really the heat of the direction of the gop between right liberal and more popular and that that's so much of the you know where there's heat there's not always like but some of the heat actually comes from the political reality yes no i think that's right um with with another caveat which is that the the heat of of you know let's say american compass against the cato institute right how that heat connects to how republican senators not named marco rubio vote is a very uncertain question and it's possible to have like i guess i'd put it this way one of the things that more conventional conservatives learned from the ascent of donald trump was how disconnected a lot of what goes on at the think tanks that patrick was talking about and critiquing earlier is from actual republican politics and i think there's a danger for the populist catholics to look at that and say well you know cato and aei were disconnected but we're going to be connected and i want that to be true but it hasn't been it hasn't been proven yet i guess other speakers the vast majority of americans almost a majority anyway are actually socially conservative and economically populous and yet for 50 years the two parties have been ignoring that and going through these other two directions and i wonder if that doesn't point the fact that ideas here couldn't really matter because the other side is a dominated world of ideas so that that third thing just is no option yep and this this ferment in the intellectual world might really practically mean i think the possibility of a real level you know you thought there was any hope of that yeah i mean i don't want to just stand here like swatting down hope so i'm just gonna say i'm just i'm just gonna i'm just gonna say i'm just gonna say yes with the one tiny caveat that what's getting measured right now as social conservatism i think increasingly means not necessarily against abortion certainly not for a traditional definition of marriage and more like i want the woke liberal scolds to leave me alone um which maybe is the beginnings of a common good conservatism but probably is not the end of it um but yes yes [Laughter] yeah how do you think the four groups or this process of these groups i guess making movement over the next 5 10 15 years is dependent upon what happens in the next conclude like do we have pope francis or we have some return back to john paul the third or we're going back to one of the pious right the young pope so how does that either accelerate our impact this dynamic because one comment i always had that was funny one time in rome there was a cardinal that a group of us were having a meeting with and his comments to us he was an african cardinal and said the problem with you americans you think everything's about you right and so we try to listen we're trying to take cues from rome or better for worse so what happens depending on the next chronicles um i i don't know um i've tried to steer myself away from having strong opinions on that for a little while as a spiritual discipline um i i i would say i began to argue a tiny bit with chad it was a tremendously good sport that that one reason to say that the tread and these i mean i said this and talk one reason to say that the traditions are not cannot be irrelevant right even though they don't have american politicians on their side is that to the extent that any of these schools seems to match up with pope francis's magisterium is that school i think there's no question that um you know both that again admittedly marginal school but also the sort of what seems i think like the sort of sunset glow of old-fashioned liberal catholicism with biden are informed and influenced by having a pope who seems to be sympathetic to to either radical catholicism or liberal catholicism in different ways um so in that sense you know i i would expect that if you get pope francis ii that you know just some to some extent there you know there there is some influence that flows from rome into into american catholicism certainly like well i mean we you know to to the extent that this stuff cashes out in the life of the church not in american politics right to the extent that like you have bishops who are being influenced by these ideas in how they think about the structure of the church and their responsibilities um yeah i mean having a pope who seems to be more on board with one faction than the other has to make some difference um but i i really am like deeply and deeply uncertain about i mean there are the the other thing the other thing that i very consciously did not bring into this conversation right is you know the divide between theologically conservative catholics independent of their political leanings that this pontificate has opened up where you've had i think real radicalization and the traditionalist wing of the church real uncertainty in the conservative wing and and it's created it you know divisions again that map a little bit onto these categories but not exactly that just really didn't exist under prior pontificates um so you know in that sense maybe pope francis ii means like maybe it means more integralists because you have a sort of further radicalization of the traditionalists but then the great tension in integralism which whose existence is occasionally denied by integralists is that you know their movement emphasizes the temporal power of rome at a time when i think at least arguably the roman pontiff is more hostile to their conception of catholic politics in the past and that tension seems to be like it could be exacerbated in us in a francis the second kind of era but i don't know some of these are questions you should hurl at some of the speakers tomorrow yes yeah of course i um i found myself with your demographic description leaning towards something pretty strongly that then you were counseling against and that was the combination of um the danger of just sort of aligning yourself with parties that co-opt uh or caught and what i can tell based on yesterday um is that what's likely to happen is the practicing more or less kind of practicing patterns are likely to shrink maybe five percent of the population and the problem with that is it's not small enough to be utterly irrelevant so it won't leave us alone um we are not yet we will not achieve amish sublimation we're likely to yeah be part of a somewhat larger shrinking minority of people that descend from this extra book and that and to a certain extent um we're not at least in by 2040 likely we persecuted over questions of the procession of the holy spirit or um the particular devotion to mary um i just so what's likely it's almost almost inevitable going to be the case that a shrinking minority that's big enough to have make a difference is going to vote for its liberties they're both to be left alone and it'll vote for whatever pagans will let them alone and um i suppose the only the only really problem with that would be that somebody keeps talking as if this still is a potentially catholic or christian country and so that the pagan we're voting for is an example of our vision of christian christians but you know maybe those black kids will just never get it but um if what you say is true i think i think actually these questions are going to resolve themselves in favor of a kind of semi-benedictine option and um uh a voting that is going to be look rather um a reliable but kind of weird contingent in a larger euler coalition yeah i mean i think you could tell a story where like if you think about orthodox jews right now right who are you know not the amish but you know more politically involved than the amish orthodox jews will vote for democratic politicians who are socially liberal if those politicians make sort of explicit you know sort of explicit accommodations for orthodox faith and then a lot of them voted for donald trump and you did not i agree you did not get think pieces about how orthodox jews were compromising their religion by voting for trump it was understood as a sort of cultural affinity with republican party slash transactionalism in a way that you do get think pieces and listening pieces right about whether catholic or more so evangelical conservatives are compromising their witness um so i think there might there might be a zone of shrinkage as it were where what you described comes to pass i think in the zone we're in now though the reason that you had those think pieces written was that you know set aside catholics in particular conservative christians in certain ways in the shrunken republican party are more influential right so there is at this moment maybe not in 2040 but in the trump era there was actual you know more evangelical than catholic but if you look at the personnel in the trump administration more catholic than evangelical responsibility direct responsibility for policies that were being made and there was a certain kind of of you know optimism again in some of the schools that i've suggested about the idea that this could be you know sort of a step back towards towards a christian commonwealth um so i guess it's a question of are you are you exercising power or not right which if you're not really exercising power um except as it pertains to your own liberties then yeah the danger of co-optation and and so on is is less substantial um but if you're staffing the administration you have to you you have to think more seriously about well what are you doing right like are you are you compromising your principles by by working in this administration are you you know are you witnessing fully to christian faith in your in your public role so i think yeah maybe that's the distinction as long as you're being as long as we'll put it this way as long as amy coney barrett can be confirmed to the supreme court religious conservatism in the united states is not a marginal force it is an influential force and if it is an influential force with that influence comes greater moral responsibility that yeah yeah this this front murderers row in the front row it's very it's very intimidating why we brought them all i know i know they're all yeah really interesting um you you know uh or gabriel wrote christ and culture does the taxonomy not only yours don't don't ask me that yeah transforming culture et cetera but it's all pretty clear that you kind of favor christ transforming culture you said you were above the fray i want to pull you into the parade like if i read this closely with oh oh yeah there's ross is really into the vanity it's like where are you sorry i have to i have to go an urgent call from romero you know and so on but not nonetheless i think of myself as devout you know and you know raising the family and and i imagine it'll be people like so well so i mean i know i mean i'll be yeah so i'm i mean i no i'm i'm i'm a populist who didn't support trump which is like a category of like six people but that's no but that's that's that's that's who i am i i think i think that i think that some form of catholic populism offers the most plausible path to serious catholic influence over us and western politics at large i think that socially conservative quadrant should have been where conservatism has been it should have been where it pivoted to around the year 2000 and tried to do it with compassion conservatism and it didn't work and tried to do it with trump that didn't work and maybe we'll try it again with ron desantis i don't know you know like but but that's that's that's what i want um and i didn't support trump for a variety of you know boring wimpy never trump reasons that i think have been partially vindicated by the way the trump presidency ended but that's a separate argument um but yeah that's that's my that's my basic take and i meant the things that i said about like i think that the the gift of integralist thought in the life of the church in the near term is likely to be one a sort of tug on the other factions towards a fuller catholicism because you've always got the integralist at your shoulder who's like you're not being catholic enough you're not being catholic enough right and two towards a syrian you know serious thinking about church governance thinking of the church as a self-governing entity which is manifestly failed failed to be i meant what i said about the benedictine the sort of benedictine modeling a kind of engagement with parish life that i don't achieve but you know and um maybe the people writing about it on the internet don't don't achieve either right but um but that is sort of you know necessary and and important um and you know and then i have i mean i i think um yeah i don't even need to get into the traditions but no but i'm i'm i'm but i am yeah i'm i'm i'm on the populist side i just i've been doing that thing for like 17 years and so i have some skepticism that it's as you could tell from our back and forth that it's that it's really going to happen um but i think that's the most that's the most promising form of catholic politics right now definitely thank you very much for the address i'm probably pushing the limited time here but i want to go back to the questions that professor wolf asked about converts but from a different point of view right the unconverted but potentially and a lot of what you have laid out and he seems quite dire and i think appropriately so previous quotes have talked quite a bit about the new evangelization um that's not one of the themes that you've touched on here but one one way that we might begin to think about that newsprint time would be reflecting upon what the common appeal is between these these four categories and what do you think that is what what what is it about catholicism that can appeal to uh particularly young americans today in a way that doesn't fit into normal well this is where i i was just saying like things i agree with about each school right um what i disagree with about or what i tend to disagree with the you know benedictines and my friend rodrigo about is the likelihood that sort of secular liberalism post-christian whatever is just going to carry all before it right because yeah i've been stressing division you know internal arguments within the church and basic institutional weaknesses of catholicism but i look at the alternatives in american culture and they don't look so hot either right um and you know there's a lot of conservative anxiety about wokeness and the new progressivism um and you know i work at a liberal institution so i'm not at all inclined to dismiss that anxiety um but when i look at that sort of school of thought i see something that's like you know a sort of a kind you know a kind of quasi-protestantism um is beset with its own internal tensions and contradictions has an incredibly strong religious moralism without a religious metaphysics and you know maybe it has a 10 or 15 year run that's the dominant influence in american life um i don't see it as like you know settling in for 100 years of progressive dominance i don't see any non-christian school of thought sort of settling in for that kind of dominance so as long as that's the case if yeah if you're living in a society where you know it's atomized people aren't forming families or having children people are depressed there's rampant drug abuse you know now we're getting a new crime wave that hopefully will recede once everyone stops wearing masks but you know american society is not in great shape and in that sense catholicism status as a sort of not fully american not comfortably american force is a selling point um that and the fact that it's true right um and so that that i think offers you know real possibilities um and i think the most you know what i said before about converts and you know the obligation to figure out you know how to be a mass faith not an elite faith that's really important and but but you know thinking about what catholicism offers to the elite is important too and i i spend a lot of my time thinking about what you know what would inspire readers of the new york times to become more religious in some in some way um and yeah i i don't think you can rule out any possibilities in that in that realm you have you know the reason i i like the idea of decadence and enough to have written a whole book about it that is not nearly as good as dan made it sound but you should still buy it at your local independent bookstore um you know what what decadence implies is this sort of it's sort of weak forces fighting each other weakened forces right that's you know a sort of the the progressivism of today you know it can seem pretty fierce when you're getting twitter mobbed but you know the jacobins cut off people's heads right like you know i mean that was real progressivism not this you know not this not this wimpy go after you and slack kind of kind of thing right but someone could say the same thing about us right like about about catholics and all our weirdness and complexity that you know and and that's i think what's part of what's promising about these schools is that they're trying to make catholicism vigorous in certain ways and you know in certain ways that the american future belongs to the institutions and ideas it can break out of this sort of like you know weakened fighters slugging it out for years and years to come and i don't know if that's going to be going to be the catholic church or christianity um but it could be and if it were i think some of the energies i've tried to describe here would would play would play some part i'm still in the last question yes in light of all the trends you've sketched here both intellectual and practical is there any particular advice for the faculty and administration of the catholic institution um a catholic university or the university of dallas because those seem those seem like those seem like somewhat separate questions um i don't know i think i think that would i think that would be a little presumptuous but i will steal ideas from um i will steal ideas from you mr burns because i believe you recently wrote a piece urging people to found schools to found not colleges but high schools and grammar schools so one little bit of data that i sort of glanced over this presentation is that you know as conservatives have this narrative that kids go off to college and lose their conservatism and if you're religious they lose their religious faith because of the atmosphere and you know the progressivism the sex and debauchery that i was promised did not appear um but as far as i can tell statistically where people actually lose their lose the practice of the faith in high school um the big the big fall off is catholics get confirmed and they go to high school and um by the time they get to college they are already on their way out the door so i think people catholics involved in education um and obviously you know i know that around here there are some pretty impressive catholic high schools that you know people i know keep moving back here and bragging about how they get to send their kids to them um but i think so so maybe things are in good shape here but i think in general thinking about the battle in terms of like how do you preserve the catholic college or how do you rebuild the catholic college maybe is not actually where the most important action is happening and if you have a catholic college that's doing a great job maybe what it needs to be doing is founding a catholic high school that's attached to it um so um that's you know that's a thought that requires more more development but it's one possible answer that you yourself have already supplied all right thank you i appreciate it

Channel: University of Dallas

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Id: kooamQGDA_Y

Length: 90min 44sec (5444 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021