Catholic presidents, voters and social teaching

 The New York Times has an interesting article on its website by Elizabeth Bruenig about Catholics and politics.  Of course, its point of departure is the still-likely (although perhaps trending somewhat less-still-likely) election of Joe Biden in a couple of months.  Bruenig notes something which barely has registered with me: he'd be only the 2nd Catholic president in American history.

Having not been born until 1961, I missed the groundbreaking campaign and election of our first Catholic president, John F Kennedy.  For people like me, Bruenig provides some helpful background:

As Election Day approached 60 years ago, Catholics across the country followed the news with a nervous thrill of anticipation. For them, the final stage of a long struggle was at hand: An Irish Catholic was poised to become president of the United States, ending the historic Protestant monopoly on the White House — and on mainstream, middle-class respectability.

They knew that John F. Kennedy’s victory — and theirs — would not come easy. The Sept. 8, 1960, issue of The Catholic Transcript had reported a small portion of the widespread effort to undermine his chances on account of his faith: “In Missouri,” the paper warned, “Sunday sermons throughout the rugged ‘Bible Belt’ are being directed against Catholics,” while others circulated leaflets warning of a potential “Catholic militia” and the impending conversion of all public schools into Catholic schools.

Bruenig traces two threads of the anti-Catholicism which then prevailed.  One was intellectual: the Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke whose thought undergirded the nation's foundational documents distrusted Catholics, whom they viewed as essentially undemocratic.  The other was simple and ugly prejudice against the poor, dirty and, in some cases, brown-skinned immigrants who brought their Catholic faith to America.  She notes that, as a result of this prejudice, Protestants and Catholics existed in what amounted to two separate and parallel societies, some of the vestiges of which continue today (e.g. Catholic schools, the Knights of Columbus).

Bruenig attributes to Kennedy's 1960 electoral victory the breaking down of the walls that kept those two societies separate.  As a result, Catholics were able to join Protestants as full partners in the middle class.

But, she perceptively notes, if Catholics gained from that monumental event, it seems that it also was the beginning of a loss.  She is not talking here about strong Catholic identity per se, but rather the distinctive social thought of Catholicism and how it was expressed in practical ways in American politics.  It is often said that Catholic social teaching is the church's best-kept secret, but Bruenig makes the case that it was better-known in my grandfather's day than it is now:

“F.D.R. brought Catholics into the Democratic Party in large numbers,” Dr. [Peter] Cajka [assistant teaching professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame] said, referring to the stunning 70 percent to 81 percent of the Catholic vote Franklin Roosevelt won in 1936, “and they brought their social-justice, living-wage beliefs with them, and that was the high-water mark for Catholic-inflected policy that would really affect a redistribution of wealth. Since then, Catholicism has gone with the neoliberal drift.”

Bruenig cites a number of instances (Paul Ryan, the five members of the Supreme Court's conservative bloc) of prominent Catholic officials today who seem more immersed in conventional streams of American political thought than Catholic social teaching.

Provocatively, she includes Joe Biden on that list.  Of course, one reason is his position on abortion.  But she suggests that, even by the standards of Catholic social teaching as articulated by Pope Francis and his predecessors, Biden isn't exactly a stalwart:

Though he likes to compare himself with Roosevelt, Mr. Biden is loath to be associated with anything like the radicalism of the New Deal, once implying that even if Congress passed “Medicare for all,” he would veto it as president. Small vestiges of the sensibilities that created and sustained the intensely pro-poor, activist politics of early-20th-century Catholicism still exist, but the pro-labor, anticapitalist threat the Catholic left once posed to the political establishment has greatly waned.

Bruenig suggests that Biden is missing an opportunity, because Catholic social teaching actually is alive and well in pockets of American Catholicism today:

Mr. Biden could look to the example of Pope Francis as a model for a kind of Catholicity that is both pious and challenging to the powers that be — if he, or anyone else, were interested in that sort of thing. “Biden has the opportunity to really capture what a post-Vatican II Catholic identity looks like,” Dr. [Maria R] Mazzenga [curator of American Catholic History Collections at Catholic University’s library] observed. “He has an opportunity to talk to liberal Catholic groups fired up by anti-racism activism, anti-gun activism, environmental activism. But he’s not doing it.” Dr. Cajka agreed: “A good, Pope Francis Catholic should be posing a threat to the American ruling class,” he said. But Mr. Biden’s track record is anything but radical, even where it comes to labor unions, war and Social Security.