The Catholic church in the US, where Pope Francis is visiting this week, has been in a state of cold civil war for decades. The liberals and conservatives hate one another over issues of sex, power and money. The hierarchy is horribly polarised and every appointment scrutinised to see which party gains an advantage from it. But one thing unites the two sides and always will: they are both convinced they know how to be Catholic much better than the pope and that America represents the future. What makes this visit interesting is not that the pope disagrees with the first of these propositions – that comes with the office – but that he has no time for the idea that America represents the future of humanity.
Ever since the Pilgrim Fathers, the idea of America has had a religious significance in American Christianity. This was originally profoundly anti-Catholic. In fact, the anti-Catholic bigotry of 19th-century America forms one of the templates for the present fear and suspicion of Muslims on the American far right. Nonetheless, the American Catholic church has absorbed some of this suspicion of European authority. John Kennedy become the first Catholic president only after proclaiming that his allegiance to American, constitutional values would always take precedence over his Catholicism if they clashed; this attitude is of course shared by almost all American Catholics. Since Kennedy’s election there have been no other Catholic presidents, but the church is extraordinarily well entrenched in the US power structure. Nearly a third of the members of Congress are Catholics, as are two-thirds of the justices of the supreme court.
This immense success has only widened the divisions within the hierarchy and the church. It can sometimes seem as if there are few creatures on Earth more pompous than a rightwing American Catholic. During the conservative papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Republican pundits preached papal authority at the liberals. Now they have pontificated themselves into a frenzy about how wrong Pope Francis is. He disagrees with them about climate change, capitalism, imperialism, immigration, the death penalty and other hardly trivial matters. All these papal convictions have produced pre-emptive splutterings of outrage from Republicans anxious to prove that the pope has entirely misunderstood the Catholic faith. Republicans are in deep trouble with their religious strategy. Since they oppose both women’s reproductive rights and immigration, they threaten both those Catholic women who choose not to have children and the ones who do, who are predominantly Hispanic immigrants.
The church’s apparent strength in the institutions is deceptive. The growing dechristianisation of the US, especially among the elites, is a problem for all churches but perhaps especially for the Roman Catholics. Child abuse scandals and widely disregarded bans on remarriage after divorce, artificial contraception and abortion have all made the church appear a hostile environment for women and children – and no religion can prosper when it is seen that way. The extreme detachment of Catholic sexual teaching from Catholic sexual practice, and the importance the hierarchy has attached to fighting this doomed battle, has produced a more extremely conservative (and increasingly gay) priesthood, which still further alienates the mainstream. Ex-Catholics form the second largest religious grouping in the US, even if many of them are still Christians.
Meanwhile, the rise of the Donald Trump phenomenon highlights a particular problem for the Catholic conservatives, because their church is kept entirely afloat by migration. The bursting Hispanic parishes of the south and west contrast with the echoing emptiness of the 20th-century Catholic heartlands in the north-east. It is profoundly symbolic that the pope arrived at the White House not in a stately limousine but in a Fiat 500, the sort of small car an immigrant might afford. It is a gesture that offers a glimpse of a more vital and exciting Christianity.
Pope Francis acts like a man who believes the future belongs to the immigrant and Spanish-speaking poor. As an Argentinian, he sees the US as no previous pope has seen it, from beneath. He stood on the White House lawn beside a black president and described himself as the son of immigrants. We can’t pretend he is a liberal, but his message and style is hugely damaging to the conservative Republicans. That puts him on the side of our common humanity.
