From the December 2024 New Oxford Review symposium Catholics and Political Life.

1. It is hard for me to understand how a nation can be an experiment. Such a notion presupposes that the United States is not actually a nation but an idea, something that underlies our many attempts, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, to impose our particular political and social structure on foreign nations. Those attempts have been disasters for those nations and for us.

Those attempts have been made in the name of liberalism, a liberalism that began with the rejection of the medieval Christian social and economic order and, at present, is busy pretending there is no such thing as the male or female sex. Sometimes the boundaries liberalism sought to overthrow were artificial and cried out to be destroyed, such as racial segregation, but liberalism does not and cannot distinguish between natural and artificial boundaries. Its mantra is simply “freedom,” whether the freedom to mutilate one’s body due to disordered desires or the freedom to destroy families and traditional communities in the name of globalization and free-market economics.

Our political community was founded on this liberalism, and our national discourse presupposes it. Hence, as a culture, we can only with great difficulty oppose it or even perceive its errors. Both of our major political parties represent it in different ways.

Insofar as we can speak of an American experiment, we can assert that what was implicit in it has become explicit, that the right to pursue happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence has become “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” as retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy expressed it in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Thus, we would need a profound spiritual and intellectual awakening in order to emerge from our present distress, an awakening only the Church can offer, although, at present, her light is mostly hidden under a bushel.

2. If electoral politics is downstream of culture, as has been rightly noted, then so long as the Church remains true to her God-given mission of proclaiming the whole Gospel, she will never entirely fit into any political order shaped by an ethos foreign to her own. She must either convert that society or remain at its margins. For some time, Catholics strove to fit into America, but that came at the cost of downplaying the hard edges of Catholic doctrine and pretending we could join in a continual common effort with those who are not of the faith. This was a mistake, which should now be clear to everyone.

Despite the obviousness of that mistake, multitudes of Catholics still appear to think that with a bit of touching up here and there, American society can be made into something to which Catholics can cozy up. As long as we keep thinking this, we will continue to be disappointed and never succeed in our divinely given mission of converting our country and the rest of the world to the faith.

3. Long before Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option, some of us associated with the magazine Caelum et Terra advocated the formation of Catholic intentional communities. Even in the 19th century there were a number of such communities formed by those who understood that Catholicism was more than a set of beliefs, that it was also a way of life that went beyond the individual and even the familial level. I certainly would support efforts of that kind, but only as one of various methods of dealing with a culture that’s becoming more and more openly anti-Catholic. At the same time, such intentional communities must remember Our Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations. Catholic intentional communities are simply a strategy, first to establish a more or less secure base for ourselves and our families, and then from which to go out to convert our neighbors. They must not be seen as akin to the communities of the Amish, who seem content to live their own lives and leave everyone else alone.

As for talk of “regime change” or integralism as a political movement, this is simply nonsense. I can label myself an integralist in that I accept the Church’s perennial teaching on the evangelization of the political and social order, but that doesn’t mean I want to impose it by force on an unwilling populace. If we want a Catholic social order, we had better begin by converting our non-Catholic neighbors — although it might be wiser to begin by converting ourselves first, as few American Catholics have any glimmer of what the Church teaches about the shaping and reshaping of public life.

4. For the past four years, we have had a president who is juridically a Catholic. For the next four years, we will have a vice president likewise juridically a Catholic. Both publicly disagree with more than one moral teaching of the Church. It is hard to think of any recent Catholic politician who made the faith and Catholic culture the foundation of his worldview. At best, recent Catholic politicians have uncomfortably yoked opposition to abortion and suchlike evils to an otherwise essentially liberal understanding of man and society. I cannot imagine an informed Catholic who holds to all the teachings of the Church making any headway in American politics. Perhaps at the local level, where such matters can often be ignored, a genuine Catholic could fulfill a limited political role, but it is difficult to see how that could be done at the national or even the state level. Too many compromises would be required for him even to get elected.

Thomas Storck, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, has written widely on Catholic social teaching, Catholic culture, and related topics for many years. He is the author, most recently, of Economics: An Alternative Introduction (Arouca Press, 2024) and host of The Open Door on WCAT Radio.

Uniparty. A matter of degrees and window dressing.

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