Alito and the Catholics

Joseph Bottum, writing for The Weekly Standard, notes that we are living in a time of decline for the Catholic Church as an institution at the same time that we are seeing its ideas come to the forefront:

ON THE MORNING PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Samuel Alito to become the fifth Catholic on the Supreme Court, I was sitting on an airplane next to a joke-teller, one of those people whose idea of travel is the chance to pass along to strangers all the latest gags. "So," he began, patting his jovial belly, "have you heard this one? A doctor, a lawyer, and a priest are on a ship when it hits a rock and begins to sink. 'What about the women and children?' the doctor worries as the three pile into the only lifeboat. 'Screw the women and children,' the lawyer replies. 'Do you think we have time?' asks the priest."

This may be the best time in American history to be a Catholic, and it may also be the worst: a moment of triumph after 200 years of outsiderness, and an occasion of mockery and shame. It is an era in which a surprisingly large portion of the nation's serious moral analysis seems to derive from Catholic sources. But it is also a day in which Monsignor Eugene Clark--an influential activist and Fulton J. Sheen's successor as rector of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral--can be named an adulterer in a divorce petition and photographed checking into a hotel with his hot-panted secretary, to the weeks-long titillation of New York's tabloids: "Beauty and the Priest," ran the headline in the Daily News. Catholicism is the most visible public philosophy in America, and the Catholic Church is a national joke.

That's not necessarily a contradiction. Indeed, there might even be a connection between the rising rhetorical influence of Catholicism and the declining political influence of the Church. Since its founding, the United States has always had a source of moral vocabulary and feeling that stands at least a little apart from the marketplace and the polling booth--from both the economics of capitalism and the politics of democracy that otherwise dominate the nation. For much of American history, that source was the moral sense shared by the various Protestant denominations, and it influenced everything from the Revolution to the civil-rights movement.

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"Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft," the New Republic claimed this month as it attempted to explain the Catholic ascendancy on the Supreme Court. That explanation is, as Christianity Today replied, mostly just a condescending update of the Washington Post's old insistence that evangelicals are "poor, uneducated, and easy to command." But the New Republic was at least right that the rhetorical resources of Catholicism--its ability to take a moral impulse born from religion and channel it into a more general public vocabulary and philosophical analysis--have come to dominate conservative discussions of everything from natural-law accounts of abortion to just-war theory.

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The 2004 presidential election saw endless talk about the malignant effect of the Catholic hierarchy's preaching against abortion: editorials in the New York Times, talk show after talk show on television, long analyses in opinion magazines. But the fact remains that the vote in the political district of every cardinal in the United States, from Los Angeles to Boston, was won by pro-abortion politicians, usually overwhelmingly. George W. Bush, as the candidate who opposed Roe v. Wade, may have captured the vote of Catholics as a whole, but John Kerry, the candidate in favor of legalized abortion, won all the cardinals' home towns.

The current fear about Catholics cannot be drawn from the Church's direct political effect, for that well has gone bone dry. In New York City politics, the rectory of St. Patrick's Cathedral was once called "the Powerhouse," but no one has used the name in a generation. Not a single prominent pro-abortion Catholic politician has been successfully brought to heel by the bishops in decades, and for two presidential election cycles, Catholic voters have been more or less indistinguishable from the general run of American voters.

And yet, in another way, everyone who seems so agitated--from the New York Times editorial page to Americans United for Separation of Church and State--is right to worry about the nomination of a fifth Catholic to the Supreme Court. Neither John Roberts nor Samuel Alito admitted in his Senate hearings a willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. That may have been merely good confirmation strategy, but it is also possible they will prove, as Anthony Kennedy did, unwilling in the end to pull the trigger. The fact that Alito's mother told a reporter her son opposes abortion is no more dispositive than the fact that John Roberts's wife once held a position in a pro-life organization.

But both Roberts and Alito are products of a Catholic intellectual life that has flowered in the years since the Court imposed legalized abortion on the nation. Compelled to moral seriousness by the urgency of the pro-life cause and granted a surprising public prominence by the collapse of the old Protestant mainline, post-ethnic Catholic thinkers have formed an exciting and powerful rhetoric in which to talk about public affairs in a modern democracy. You can see it among an increasing number of professors and journalists. You can see it, perhaps most of all, among lawyers and judges. You can even see it among nominees to the Supreme Court.

That is hardly the same thing as success for the Catholic Church. But it is success, of a sort, for Catholicism.

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My Comments:
An excellent piece. Please take the time to go read the whole thing. You won't be sorry.