The Ghost of Sargent Shriver

Ross Douthat writes:

After my post yesterday contrasting the challenges the Francis era may offer to American Catholics who feel at home on the political right of center with the opportunities it may open up to their more liberal co-religionists, it’s only fair to also point out the implicit challenge that the new pope is offering to liberal Catholics as well — or at least to liberal Catholics who see their relationship to the church in terms of fidelity as well as criticism and dissent.

In my Sunday column, I had argued that the signal failure of post-1960s Catholic liberalism in the United States wasn’t a failure “to let the Vatican dictate every jot and tittle of its social agenda,” as conservative polemicists occasionally imply, but rather a failure “to articulate any kind of clear Catholic difference, within the bigger liberal tent, on issues like abortion, sex and marriage.”

There are liberal Catholics (many of whom hold high office in the Democratic Party) who would regard this as a foolish statement, because they believe straightforwardly that their church is wrong on those issues and American liberalism is entirely correct. But I know there are others in the liberal-Catholic orbit who would say something different in response. Something like this:

Yes, we concede that liberalism and the Democratic Party have become more hostile to religious ideas and more closed to pro-life sentiment than we would wish, but our church’s hierarchy has made things much worse by rushing into the arms of the Republicans and the religious right, rather than pushing the kind of “seamless garment” vision that would link abortion and family stability to social justice issues like poverty, war, the environment.

So give us more Joseph Cardinal Bernardins at the altar, more political evenhandedness from the bishops, and maybe we’d have more Sargent Shrivers in our politics, and the Bart Stupaks of the Democratic Party would be less lonely in their battles. 

Now I don’t really think this argument reads the history of either liberalism’s post-1960s trajectory or the bishops’ political positioning correctly. (For one thing, the big pro-choice swing on abortion among Catholic Democratic politicians like Joe Biden [when was that, exactly?] and Ted Kennedy occurred during precisely the era — the 1970s and 1980s — when the idea of “seamless garment” Catholicism was ascendant among the leaders of the American church.)

But the idea that the church’s “culture of life” ideals could yet find a place in a leftward-tilting, Bernardin-esque Catholic politics — as it did, till the end, for figures like Shriver and his wife — is a hope sincerely nurtured in some quarters.

And despite my skepticism, it’s one that I would dearly like to see fulfilled — for the sake of the pro-life movement, for the sake of unsettling our polarized politics, and for the sake of an American Christianity that needs to be something bigger than just the religious client of the G.O.P.

So this is the challenge of the Francis era for the political liberals in his flock: If you want a new (or a new-old) Catholic politics in the United States, if you don’t always like the Democratic Party’s approach to religion and social issues but can’t stomach voting Republican, and if you think the emphases of John Paul II and Benedict were often impediments to saving or reclaiming a genuinely Catholic liberalism, now’s the time to prove that something else is possible.

With a pope seemingly speaking their language and the secular media (perhaps temporarily) at his feet, this could just be a chance for Catholic Democrats to feel relaxed instead of embattled, smug instead of defensive.

Or it could be an opportunity to prove that a worldview that’s both liberal and distinctively Catholic actually has a future in our culture, and a chance — as it should be for Catholic Republicans — to ask more of their political leaders than a continued cold shoulder to their church’s vision of the common good.