Jesse Russell
The Catholic branch of the neoconservative movement has a very long genealogy. One could begin examining it by mentioning the heresy of Americanism among Irish Catholics living in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who wanted to assimilate into Anglo-American Protestant liberalism.1 One could also turn to the work of such moderately liberal early twentieth-century Catholic political thinkers as the American Father John Courtney Murray and the French Neo-Thomist philosophers Jacques Maritain and Yves R. Simon.2 But Catholic neoconservatism as a definable and coherent movement begins with the reaction to 1960s radicalism.
Before their entry into the Ronald Reagan regime, the Catholic neoconservatives were an amorphous bunch of thinkers adrift in the post–Vatican II, post-Kennedy era. In this period, some Catholics had made it to the heights of American political power but also began to lose their ethnic and religious cohesion. The story of Catholic neoconservatism is a “coming to America” immigrant story and shares some parallels with the Jewish neoconservative experience.3 Moreover, the Catholic neocons, in a similar fashion to Jewish neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, not only went from being leftists to moderate conservatives but also were able to bring along some of their coreligionists on their political journey.4
The Vietnam War was a catalyzing event for the Catholic neoconservatives. After a stint as a Holy Cross seminarian from whence he went on to become a reporter at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Michael Novak covered the Vietnam War for the National Catholic Reporter. He also served as the Catholic contributor to Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience5 and interpreted the North Vietnamese cause as “a struggle for independence” similar to the American Revolution. Novak then called for an immediate American withdrawal from Southeast Asia.6 Interestingly, however, the human rights credo that drove the young Novak to oppose the Vietnam War incorporated liberal ideas that the neoconservative Michael Novak would invoke to advocate wars in the Middle East for the sake of freedom and democracy. This transposition can be seen in onetime Lutheran pastor Richard John Neuhaus, who was once at the center of Christian radicalism. Neuhaus would form with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel the group Clergy Concerned about Vietnam (later renamed Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam), which advocated for rights and freedom as a form of revolutionary struggle. Ironically, this was the same posture that inspired the later Neuhaus to endorse the war on terror and to call for liberating the oppressed peoples of the Middle East.
The Vietnam War was just one of the outlets for the early Catholic neoconservative revolutionary ethos; the other was the civil rights movement, which attracted Michael Novak. Like many of his generation who became Reaganites and neoconservatives, Novak never abandoned the foundational principle of the civil rights movement: the implicit notion that membership in Western nations is predicated not on ethnicity, religion, or historical claims but rather on commitment to the ideal of equality. Richard John Neuhaus was even closer to the center of Christian civil rights radicalism. The Lutheran pastor attended the epochal March on Washington in August 1963 as well as the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Freedom March. Like the New Left, Novak and Neuhaus viewed history as a process that was furthered by marginalized ethnic groups.7 Catholic neoconservatives would maintain their civil rights ethos as they moved (slightly) to the Right.
They typically spoke about having had an epiphanic moment during which they embraced the neoconservative cause. In his memoirs, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II,8 the papal biographer and third member of the “Four Horseman” of the Catholic neoconservatives, George Weigel, although an early opponent of the Vietnam War, claims to have experienced a revelation during the lifting of Americans from the Saigon embassy in Operation Frequent Wind on April 29, 1975.9 Humiliated by America’s abandonment of the South Vietnamese, Weigel would thereafter become a convinced hawk who would provide the most vocal Catholic support for both Gulf Wars.
While Novak states in Writing Left to Right that he came out as a conservative with his April 20, 1976, Wall Street Journal article, “A Closet Conservative Confesses,” he had joined the neoconservative fold as early as 1972.10 Then he published an article in Commentary commemorating the life of Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most important early influences on the neoconservatives. This essay was fittingly titled “Needing Niebuhr Again.”11 This often forgotten piece is critical to understanding the Catholic neoconservative movement. Echoing his attack on the White Anglo Saxon Protestant establishment in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: The New Political Force of the 1970s,12 Novak’s “Needing Niebuhr Again” decries Anglo-Saxon “racial pride” and argues for “realism” as opposed to both the “old” and “new” moralism.
George Weigel would recycle “Niebuhrian realism” in his foreign policy writings in the 1980s in which he argues for a realpolitik, pragmatic approach to politics. He calls for a view that favors “what works best” to prevail while at the same time holding individual Christians to a high personal moral standard. The old moralism that often conflicted with this realism would be the traditional Christian teachings regarding economic and social policy, which went back to the Middle Ages. Niebuhrian realism likewise rejected the new moralism of left-wing Christians who quoted the Gospels in support of socialism and pacifism. Novak rightly points out that the new moralism quickly degenerated into a hysterical emotivism that “used indignation, outrage, and feelings of guilt to energize reform.”13 Novak’s appeal to Niebuhr would ultimately be abandoned as Catholic neoconservatives went on to other mentors.
For Richard John Neuhaus, it was the abortion issue that moved him rightward. Neuhaus’s 1971 chronicle of his experience in Africa, In Defense of People: Ecology and the Seduction of Radicalism,14 which was a response to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb,15 represented his first explicit attempt to distance himself from “radicalism.” The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion in Roe v. Wade in 1972 precipitated a split among Christian activists of the Left and further solidified Neuhaus’s conviction that the Democrats had become the party of death. Neuhaus’s strong opposition to eugenics and population control and the practices of abortion, sterilization, and birth control would be issues over which the Catholic neoconservatives would not compromise, even if it meant serious division with other neoconservatives.16 Neuhaus would continue to court Catholics, and slowly during the Reagan era he created at least an informal alliance among neoconservative Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.
The 1980s saw the political ascendancy of the Catholic neoconservatives as “Mr. Conservative,” Ronald Reagan, successfully hoisted America out of the Vietnam era and jump-started the American economy while encouraging American optimism. At the same time, a Polish pope began to court the media and refurbished the public image of Catholicism that had languished under his predecessor Pope Paul VI (1963–1978). But the Catholic Left in the United States held sway over the American Church. This was in no small measure due to Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who pushed a radical reading of Vatican II. In addition to other public statements by liberal Catholic celebrities, two critical political documents came out of the Bernardin Church in the United States: the condemnation of the Reagan military buildup, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,17 and Economic Justice for All.18 The latter was a not too subtle critique of the Reagan administration’s policies that contained a number of economic ideas for those who were seeking a “third way” economic model.
Catholic neoconservatives worked to provide a political, economic, and military policy that would fit the needs of the Reagan Republican era. While the Catholic neoconservatives labored under the shadow of the American Catholic Left, dominated by Joseph Cardinal Bernardin and his acolytes, it was also essential for them to discredit the Catholic Old Right. Patrick Allitt documents in Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950–198519 that until the Second Vatican Council, Catholics in America celebrated three major figures: Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, and Senator Joseph McCarthy.20 Certainly, Pope Pius XII, the last pope representing the older tradition, deeply sympathized with monarchy and more generally the Right. Cardinal Spellman and Senator McCarthy were both patriotic Americans whose fierce opposition to Communism attracted the Right. It would be difficult to regard these figures as liberals or even “proto-neoconservatives.”21
The twentieth century, moreover, gave many examples of traditionally conservative Catholic parties such as Action Française in early twentieth-century France, which scorned democratic pluralism as well as Communism. Such parties and the regimes that they created were seen as obstacles to the neoconservative project because they offered an unwanted countermodel to the Left. It was therefore essential for the Catholic neoconservatives to craft a new conservatism that took its cue from a selective, post–World War II reading of Anglo-American liberalism.
Catholic social teaching from its modern inception with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum had been dominated by both reactionary and moderate left-wing critiques of capitalism and socialism. Not surprisingly, the first sphere in which the neoconservatives tried to make their weight felt in the 1980s was economic policy. In 1982, Michael Novak, who was then at the American Enterprise Institute, published The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.22 A dense and by no means felicitously written tome, Novak’s book hardly represents an original contribution to economic thought. Rather, like Weigel, Neuhaus, and later Robert George, Novak was able to market neoconservative ideas to American Catholics while claiming to be a learned Catholic theologian. Drawing selectively on Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and the political writing of John Locke, Novak argues that capitalism springs from the application of human reasoning. (For window dressing, he avails himself of the Aristotelian-Scholastic term “practical intellect.”) Capitalists imitate and complete God’s act of creation, “bringing forth the potentialities the Creator has hidden.”23 This unleashing of the power of capitalism in Western Europe during the Enlightenment, according to Novak, has released the “spirit of democratic capitalism,” which is “the spirit of development, risk, experiment, adventure.” Through their activity, capitalists have “introduced a novel pluralism into the very center of the social system.”24 Contrary to two hundred years of Catholic political teaching, Novak also maintained that liberal democracy, as practiced by the United States, offered humanity the noblest form of government. The alleged tolerance and pluralism of liberal democracy, in Novak’s view, prevented “grave dangers to the human spirit,” which “lurk in the subordination of the political system and the economic system to a single moral cultural vision.”25 In such passages Novak is at least indirectly attempting to overturn the traditional Catholic position that Catholic teachings should be the supreme moral authority of the state.
Novak’s magnum opus appeared at the onset of the Reagan revolution and became a best seller at least partly because of when it was published. It reached the book market as many were prospering in the later 1980s and during the Clinton boom of the 1990s. Among its uses to Catholic neoconservatives, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism provided a counterpoint to the Bernardin wing of the American Catholic Church. It also was cited against the socialist-tinged church in Europe that reflected the spirit of John Paul II’s social encyclicals.
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and its defense of American welfare state capitalism found an ideological companion in Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square, which appeared in 1984. Neuhaus’s work would serve as the political breviary of religious neoconservatives. The Naked Public Square is often interpreted as a manifesto of right-wing religious extremism, indeed as a call for theocracy.26 But contrary to Neuhaus’s left-wing critics who may not have read his work, The Naked Public Square was intended to launch a new religious Right. It would be different from the old one that was too weighed down with illiberal sentiments for neoconservative tastes. Neuhaus makes it clear in The Naked Public Square that the new religious Right would base its arguments not on the Bible but on natural reason. He condemned the “strictness and dogmatism of reactionary religious groups”27 and those who would call for “Constantinism,”28 a term used by the Left to attack the alliance between Christianity and state power that began during the reign of Constantine the Great. Shedding traditional American conservative Protestant antipathy to Catholicism and, to a lesser degree, Judaism, Neuhaus called for a public square defined by “biblical, Judeo-Christian religion”29 and led by “nonfundamentalist evangelicals.”30 In place of a Christian theocracy, Neuhaus hoped to weld his projected union of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism into a powerful political coalition. He laid out the qualities that define “the project we call America,” which included “a devotion to liberal democracy, a near obsession with civil liberties, a relatively open market economy, the aspiration toward equality of opportunity, a commitment to an institutionalized balancing of powers and countervailing forces, and a readiness to defend this kind of social experiment, if necessary, by military force.”31 Promoting liberalism if necessary by military means would come to characterize not only its Catholic formulation but all neoconservativism in the twenty-first century.
Meanwhile, George Weigel would tackle foreign policy from a neoconservative perspective laced with Catholic theological references. Like the economic and social argument in the Catholic Church in America, issues of war and peace concerned left-leaning bishops who made no bones about their contempt for Ronald Reagan’s increase in defense spending. In response to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, Weigel penned Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace.32 His work is neoconservatism’s first major attempt to recruit patristic and medieval Catholic theology for a defense of neoconservative politics. Weigel argues seemingly in accordance with Augustine’s conception of Tranquillitas Ordinis and other Christian sources that American global military hegemony conforms to the just war theory that marked the Catholic justification for military force. Weigel contends that Catholic thought, properly understood, can help “advance the international peace of political community, freedom, charity, justice, and truth.”33 Although Weigel is correct that the Catholic Left’s pacifist approach runs contrary to Catholic tradition, his insistence on an escalating military buildup for the sake of advancing “human rights” would probably seem alien to a traditional Catholic theologian.
The Catholic neoconservatives were able to ride the coattails of the Reagan revolution into the early 1990s. Still, they often appeared as outsiders in terms of their disconnectedness from the Catholic hierarchy. As they tried to enhance their specifically Catholic profile, they hitched themselves to John Paul II’s pontificate. The first effort in this direction came with their management of the American reception of John Paul II’s commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Centesimus Annus. John Paul had disappointed the neoconservatives with his encyclicals Laborem Exercens (1981) and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), which, like earlier Catholic social teachings, had focused on protecting labor over capital. Rumors out of the Vatican and from the neoconservative-friendly politician Rocco Buttiglione indicated that Centesimus Annus would be more sympathetic to capitalism than were previous papal pronouncements.34 With the euphoria of the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe washing over the West, it seemed especially critical for the Catholic neoconservatives to explain Catholic social teaching as neoconservative. It had to be shown to be a liberal counterweight to the church’s reactionary past while at the same time standing athwart the leftward drift of bishops in the West. Receiving a purloined copy of the encyclical, each of the neocons published an article the day before its official release on May 2, 1991. Novak released a piece in the Washington Post, Weigel in the Los Angeles Times, and Neuhaus in the Wall Street Journal.35 There is little question that John Paul II’s Centesimus contains some positive and cautious endorsements of “free market” economy “as the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to need.” That said, the encyclical also excoriates the “structures of sin” in Western capitalism, “which impede the full realization of those who are in any way oppressed.”36 Although Centesimus was not a full-throated affirmation of capitalism, as some have noted,37 the Catholic neoconservatives were able to argue with at least minimal credibility that a new era in Catholic social teaching had arrived.38
The 1990s also witnessed a battle on several fronts between the Catholic neoconservatives and both the Right and the Left. The neoconservatives gained a powerful platform for their ideas in what was to become the most pronounced voice of religious neoconservativism: First Things, which was born from the split between the neoconservatives and the paleoconservatives after the Cold War. First Things magazine became an influential publication throughout the 1990s and early twenty-first century as a platform for neoconservative ideology addressed to Jewish neoconservatives and self-described traditional Christians. The magazine soon adopted a specifically Catholic tone as its editor, Richard John Neuhuas, would be accepted into the Catholic Church on September 8, 1990. Neuhaus was then ordained as a priest a year later, after studying under the tutelage of Father Avery Dulles, son of President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.
Furthermore, despite losing elections to the charismatic William Jefferson Clinton in the 1990s, the Catholic neoconservatives were able to capture their own prize: molding the American view of Pope John Paul II. Despite his reactionary associations (John Paul’s birth name “Karol” was derived from the last Hapsburg emperor, Blessed Charles of Austria, for whom John Paul II’s father served as a Calvary officer) and his apparently left-leaning economic views, John Paul was, in many ways, the first American pope. As a cardinal, Karol Wojtyła developed a friendship and professional alliance with President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. (The future Polish pope would meet with Brzezinski on his visits to the United States.) But the American politician with whom John Paul developed the closest working relationship was Ronald Wilson Reagan, someone who happily listened to neoconservatives advisers.39
The Catholic neoconservatives also marketed themselves as leaders of conservative Catholic discourse. They did this at least partly in the context of presenting themselves as the authorized interpreters of John Paul II’s thought in the United States. George Weigel also positioned himself simultaneously with favorable coverage from the neoconservative media as an interpreter of Eastern European Catholic politics. He did this most successfully in The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism in 1992.40 The Final Revolution also drew the attention of those in the Vatican with pro-American sympathies such as Vatican press secretary Joaquin Navarro Valls and Bishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s personal secretary. Weigel admits in Lessons in Hope that he collaborated with Joaquin Navarro Valls to offset the effect of New York Times reporter Tad Szulc’s biography John Paul II: The Biography.41 In Szulc’s work, the Polish pontiff is depicted as theologically conservative but tending toward the Left on economic questions. Such a position went contrary to the neoconservative reading of John Paul. While the neoconservatives themselves had adopted the appellation “conservative,” it was essential for them to control what that term meant. This was especially the case in dealing with a two-thousand-year-old institution that was in cultural flux. In any case, Catholic neoconservatives needed to make it appear that John Paul II approved of their brand of American conservatism.
Weigel’s friend and Vatican public relations official Joaquin Navarro Valls tried to alter Tad Szulc’s depiction of John Paul II as someone who was theologically conservative but leaned toward the socialist Left in economic matters. He tried to do this in his own efforts to depict the pope. Then Weigel released Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II in 1999,42 which was followed by The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy.43 This latter work complimented the earlier God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church,44 a work that was ostensibly about Benedict XVI but that also dealt with John Paul II. (At least half of the last book was dedicated to the late Polish pontiff.) Weigel’s seminal biography, Witness to Hope, which was heavily quoted during John Paul’s canonization procedure, presents John Paul as a kind of Hegelian hero, who was fated to spread liberal and democratic capitalism. Weigel, in fact, reaches for the Hegelian term “world historical” in characterizing John Paul II in his biographies.45 This popular depiction of John Paul II marked a success for Catholic neoconservatives as they worked to achieve public recognition. It also ensured that Vatican pronouncements about certain political issues would be packaged in neoconservative dressing for American audiences.
The 1990s also saw the entrance of a fourth member, Professor Robert George of Princeton University, of what would later be called the Four Horsemen. In a series of books, beginning with Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality46 and including The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis47 and In Defense of Natural Law48, George attempted to provide an academic pedigree for Richard John Neuhaus’s task of ensuring a strong Christian voice in the public square. George’s efforts focused on providing Natural Law arguments derived from Scholastic and Classical philosophy in support of defending human life and Christian marriage. Like the “Whig Thomism” (that presents St. Thomas Aquinas as one of the fathers of Anglo-American liberalism) identified with Michael Novak in This Hemisphere of Liberty, Robert George presented himself as a conservative Catholic philosopher influenced by both St. Thomas Aquinas and the American liberal tradition. Significantly George omitted Aquinas’s insistence that the church have supreme moral authority and that Divine Law direct human morality.49 The question is whether George would have gained his prominence as a neoconservative-promoted Catholic conservative if he had tried to expound such positions.
Like heroes in a Greek tragedy, the Catholic neoconservatives fell from power and influence after they reached the heights of their success. During the first term of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Catholic neoconservatives were able to score a series of crucial domestic and foreign policy victories. But with the advent of the second Gulf War in 2003 and the unmistakable opposition to the war coming from John Paul II’s Vatican, the Catholic neoconservatives lost their credibility as representatives of the papacy. Their association with George W. Bush became a liability since both the papacy and the American presidency in the twenty-first century changed in ways the neoconservatives had not foreseen.
The Catholic neoconservative support for the 2003 Iraq War found a precedent for the first Persian Gulf War in 1990. Already then Catholic neoconservatives were forced to combat American Catholic bishops who opposed President George H. W. Bush’s war. They were also forced to oppose John Paul II, who also specifically condemned the invasion of Iraq for “casting a shadow over the whole human community.”50 In response to the opposition from both Catholic and Protestant clergy to the Iraq War, George Weigel and Rutgers University’s James Turner Johnson wrote Just War and the Gulf War.51 Outside of Iraqi fatalities and the mysterious Gulf War syndrome that affected American troops, the war, according to these authors, was a smashing success. Later the split between the Catholic neoconservatives and the papacy over the 2003 Iraq War would further weaken the prestige of Catholic neoconservatives.
Like their non-Catholic colleagues, the Catholic neoconservatives had labored throughout the 1990s to push President Clinton into invading Iraq.52 While Saddam had been an American ally in the 1980s, he had also been in the crosshairs of the neoconservatives. A member of the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, George Weigel was one of the signatories of the neoconservative think tank’s “Statement of Principles,” which argued for expanded American global rule through “military strength.”53 According to PNAC’s statement of principles, one of the areas of the world in which American military strength was needed was the Middle East—especially Iraq, the destruction of which, it was argued, was necessary for peace in the Middle East. The events of September 11, 2001, famously gave the neoconservatives a blank check to remake the Islamic world, and, at least initially, they had the support of the American people in their efforts.
John Paul II and the Vatican, however, were adamant in their opposition to the Second Gulf War. Thus, in the lead-up to this invasion, the neoconservatives did everything in their power to convince the Vatican to support President George W. Bush’s decision to topple the Iraqi government. Along with neoconservative William Bennett and conservative gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan, Novak went to the Vatican in the winter of 2003 to persuade John Paul II to support the war. The Americans, however, were not given a papal audience, and the Catholic neoconservatives had to go it alone during the Iraq War. Then they were forced to break ranks with the pope on whom they had based their own reputations as Catholic spokesmen. The Catholic neoconservatives struck back with what ammunition they had. Weigel turns to mockery in Lessons in Hope, stating that there “was little serious just war thinking inside the Leonine Wall,” which was the result of “a conceptual vacuum” in Catholic thought.54 In God’s Choice, Weigel again blames the Vatican’s refusal to support the war on “poor coordination of the Vatican’s message.”55 Never does Weigel admit that John Paul II opposed both Iraq wars. But Michael Novak was more honest, writing in his autobiography that he experienced a “great struggle of conscience” when “the pope did all he could to avert the second war in Iraq.”56 The clear discord between John Paul II and then Benedict XVI, on the one side, and the Catholic neoconservatives, on the other, during the Iraq War caused irreparable damage in the relationship between the two.
As it became clear that the liberation of Iraq was by no means a “mission accomplished,” the Catholic neoconservatives crafted a series of books in support of George W. Bush and the war on terror. In 2005 George Weigel released The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God,57 a simplified but more theologically weighted version of the work by foreign policy strategist Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.58 The Cube and the Cathedral maintains that the European refusal to support American interventionist policy is rooted in Christian decline. In his book, Weigel points to declining birthrates and the omission of the mention of God in the European Constitution. Yet, as the war dragged on and hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women returned from the Middle East with what became popularly known as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), Weigel needed to craft a better-developed argument to convince Catholic readers that the war on terror was a necessary struggle, indeed a clash of civilizations.
The clash of civilization, in Weigel’s presentations, was not an ethnic or religious conflict. Rather, it was a Kulturkampf between liberalism and authoritarianism. In 2007 George Weigel released Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism59 at the height of the surge and immediately before John McCain’s loss to Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2008. Released in tandem with Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV: The Long Struggle against Islamofascism,60 The War against Jihadism is an attack against not only “jihadists” but also “postmodernists”61 and “xenophobes” such as Patrick J. Buchanan. Weigel sees the war on terror as a means of establishing “Enlightenment political theory” and, above all, “religious freedom” in the Islamic world.62 This point is especially critical for understanding the Catholic neoconservative vision of the war on terror. The Catholic neoconservatives tried to fold religious language and ideas into a largely liberal political argument aimed at garnering support for a liberal “crusade” against Arab authoritarianism. In the end, however, the Catholic neoconservative argument failed as Barack Hussein Obama became president, ushering in a leftist ascendancy.
The second major setback for the neoconservatives in managing the image of the pope was the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued an encyclical Summorum Pontificum, regularizing the ancient Latin Mass that had been supplanted by the Novus Ordo Missae in 1969. In this announcement the pontiff stated, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful.”63 Pope Benedict thus gave the lie to the neoconservative notion that the church was modernizing itself irreversibly. But Pope Benedict’s regularization of the Latin Mass was not enough to draw the ire of Catholic neoconservatives. Benedict’s overture to Catholic traditionalists, in the form of lifting the excommunications of four bishops of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), indicated a turning toward the Right on the part of Rome. The society was founded by the late French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a churchman who flaunted his reactionary political and religious views. For the sake of damage control, George Weigel wrote a commentary in Newsweek entitled “Did the Pope Heal or Deepen a Catholic Schism?” Here Weigel said the obvious when he linked the SSPX to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French reactionary thought.64
Pope Francis, the first pope from the New World, turned out to be even more radically different for the neoconservatives than the pope he replaced. The first shot fired across the neoconservative bow was the Apostolic Exhortation Gaudium Evangelii, in which the Holy Father condemned trickle-down economics. In Gaudium Evangelii, the pope argued that “some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”65 The impression that Catholic teaching on economics had forever changed with John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus began to crumble; and in response to Evangelii Gaudium, Michael Novak penned “Agreeing with Pope Francis,” which was printed in the National Review.66 Novak argued unconvincingly that Pope Francis was conditioned by his experience in Latin America and that in any case his words were mistranslated into English. As the Holy Father gave a host of sound bite statements and photo opportunities that declared his sympathy with Marxism, the neoconservative attempt to control Francis proved even more futile.
But this opposition to capitalism was not enough to complete the divorce between the neoconservatives and the papacy. Throughout a series of interviews and casual pronouncements, Pope Francis also revealed an at least tacit endorsement of homosexual relations, transgenderism, and the use of birth control. He has also remained relatively silent on the issue of abortion to the chagrin of traditional Catholics.67 Pope Francis also shocked the traditionalist camp when he appeared to endorse divorce and remarriage in his 2016 Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.68 The strong opposition of John Paul II and Benedict XVI to homosexuality and abortion and their defense of Christian marriage had been obviously more congenial to Catholic neoconservatives. John Paul II had, in fact, written an encyclical at the height of the Clinton era, Evangelium Vitae, or “The Gospel of life,” in which the pontiff strongly condemned abortion and argued for a “culture of life.”69 Moreover, the pro-life argument had been one of the most effective tools for recruiting Catholics into the Republican fold. As the Roman pontiff began sending mixed signals on abortion and marriage, the Catholic neoconservatives felt obliged to distance themselves.
Finally, even the old grand dame of Catholic neoconservatives, Father Richard John Neuhaus, gave his pet project, First Things, an illiberal cast in 2017 and 2018. The editors began questioning free market capitalism and published the strongly worded article “Mammon Ascendant: Why Global Capitalism Is Inimical to Christianity.”70 First Things drew further comment in 2018 when it published a positive review of the memoirs of Father Edgardo Mortara. This was the young Jewish boy who was clandestinely baptized as a sickly infant and then taken by Pope Pius IX and raised as a Catholic. (Mortara eventually became a Catholic priest.) The publication of this review prompted an angry and nervous rebuttal from the remaining Catholic neoconservatives. These Catholics hoped to preserve an alliance with neoconservative Jews as an essential element of their cultural capital (i.e., being allied with Jews created the impression that the Catholic Church had shed its reactionary cast).71 What was most noteworthy here is that a Catholic and supposedly neoconservative journal, First Things magazine, presented a “pre–Vatican II” or traditionalist argument in favor of a premodern church. With the Catholic neoconservative journal par excellence departing from the party line, the Catholic neoconservatives received another critical blow.72
The downfall of the Catholic neoconservatives was further accelerated by the election of Donald J. Trump, whom Robert George and George Weigel attacked in a May 2016 National Review piece, “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics.”73 In their diatribe, Weigel, George, and their fellow cosigners warned that Donald Trump would endanger the moderately socially conservative and small government coalition that the neoconservatives had built. They fretted that Trump’s “vulgarity” and “appeals to racial and ethnic fears” were contrary to “any genuinely Catholic sensibility.”74 While in the past the Catholic neoconservatives had been successful in promoting or damaging politicians, this time their rhetoric did not work. Trump earned the nomination, and a majority of white Catholics voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
Michael Novak’s signature was curiously missing from “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics.” After the 2016 election the veteran Catholic neoconservative wrote two pieces, one in First Things, “Silver Linings for Never Trumpers,”75 and the other, “What on Earth Happened on November 8?”76 in National Review. Both commentaries welcomed the populist uprising that Trump’s victory represented for the country. It is difficult to tell what Novak’s being out of step with his group indicated. Was he returning to his working-class origins that he celebrated in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, or was he switching to what he thought was a rising political force? One thing was certain, however: Novak’s comrades in arms in the neoconservative movement could no longer sway American Catholics.
Like the earlier generation of Jewish thinkers who influenced them, the Catholic neoconservatives appear to have made a political journey. While the course generally went from “left to right,” the Catholic neoconservatives still retained elements of their earlier positions. Like the Jewish neoconservatives, they repackaged with some change in the contents their older positions and called it “conservatism.” But it was always possible to discern in their later political and moral statements the progressive welfare state politics of an earlier generation, and this was true in their defenses of capitalism as well as in their other polemical activities. What Catholic neoconservatives wished to discourage was any lurch toward what they saw as the economic Left; and they were often at war with the Catholic hierarchy whom they scolded for pushing “democratic capitalism” in the direction of something un-American.
Likewise they remained faithful in their minds to the human rights ideology that had accompanied their youthful political crusades. In line with this apparent transformation, Catholic neoconservatives shaped or reshaped the image of Pope John Paul II as a “world historical” figure who was promoting democratic capitalism and liberal democracy. Whatever the media visibility of these figures, they remained dependent on a larger movement of which they were only a piece. Although their neoconservative sponsors used them for alliance-building purposes, the more powerful non-Catholic neoconservatives also viewed the Catholic neoconservatives as expendable. Not surprisingly, Catholic neoconservatism declined in importance as neoconservatism went from being the only visible or significant form of establishment conservatism to being its still dominant but no longer all-inclusive form.